Four Man Splunge - Power Outage

Attendees: Sal, Nick, Jason, and myself. We lost power at the house before the session even started. Not good for an electric band! Sal made it to the session about 45 minutes late due to bad weather and traffic. So we got everybody set up and went out to an early dinner. It was good to have a little time to talk about nothing in particular.

So once we got started, the guitars were noticably more powerful this time between Sal's return and Nick's new amp. Vocals were still nicely clear and audible, and I'd made sure I'd taken my allergy meds this week, so it was one of my better sessions in terms of vocal performance. Nobody had a time limit, so in spite of the late start, we played every song on our list including a stab at "Losing My Religion", except for "Science Fiction Double Feature" and "Peaceful Easy Feeling", more because the majority of the group wasn't in the mood for them than for lack of time.

Highlights: I was happy with my own vocals for a change. "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" with the group guitar riff in full force sounded good and came together well, for the most part. Jason still needs to sort out a drum bit toward the end, but this song is much stronger than it was two sessions ago. The second time through "Psycho Killer" was one of our best performances of that song. Harmonies on "The Kids are Alright" were good. "Dani California" still isn't stageworthy, but keeps tightening up just a little bit each time.

Lowlights: Everybody else still seems to tire out before I do, resulting in a lot of sloppy playing and general testiness after a certain point in the session. "Sherry Darling" doesn't seem to work, and we'll probably drop it in favor of another Springsteen song. I've gotten it down fairly well, but nobody else does, partially because the only recorded versions of it are live, and it's hard to hear instrument specific details well enough for the others to pick them up.

I tried constructing our song list a bit differently this time, with most of the songs that needed serious work scheduled for the beginning of the session and the stuff we know cold bunched together at the end. This didn't work out well, as it seemed to destroy morale at the beginning of the session. It took longer to reach the point where we got sloppy, and we weren't as sloppy as usual once we got there, but I had the feeling that everybody enjoyed the session less because of the damage to their confidence. I'll have to try something different again next time.

Nick will be trying to pick up the lead vocals for "Losing My Religion" and "Orange Crush", both by REM, for the next session. That would get him up to 7 songs out of 25. Not bad, but I'd really like to get him up to singing lead on about a third of the material.