Three Years, One Month, 24 Days and Counting

Thoughts from Eric...
Have you ever had a favourite band post an announcement stating that they have finished recording and the album should be available in say, 6 months? In the past when I saw that I thought, "What is taking them so long? Why are they stalling?" I now think, "Wow! How are they getting it done so fast?"

I was curious to know what was our earlist recording that ended up on the album, so I shuffled through our early tracks, checking the dates. The earliest I could find are the guitars for Eastern Sky, recorded on Sunday October 5, 2008. We started recording in general before that date but nothing from earlier remains. What a process. What a learning experience. The guitars on that song have more noise than any other track, (which was intentional of course to give it that "in the midst of a great wasteland" feel). At that time we would only work on it for a few hours Sunday afternoon or during the holidays. From there we continued to get it wrong more often than we got it right but each time learning a little bit.

This last 6 months I have been working on it most days of the week, and Caleb whenever he could find time, and it is not done yet. I thought with the release on November 19 that it was finished, but we are continuing through the process of getting the physical cds and making the album available on other music distribution sites. Maybe when the cds arrive in mid-December we will be able to say emphatically, "We are finished!" I will not be surprised though if something else were to pop up, adding to our day counter.

Defining Us

Hannah-Lee...
Over the past several weeks I've been buried in paperwork, filling out applications for provincial and national arts grants, and entering some of our songs in songwriting contests and awards contests.  All of this involves carefully crafting words in answer to probing questions and making decisions about which songs in our repertoire could possibly merit an award.  We're hoping to fund some of our projects this way, and to promote our music in the listening community.  There are a lot of opportunities out there for the independent musician these days, so it is worth the effort.

One of the things I have found to be most difficult in this process is describing our sound.  We don't fit cleanly into any one genre of music.  This is generally a good thing for us; we like the idea of being unique, however when it comes to having to check off a box labelled with a specific genre, it's very frustrating.  Who are we?  We are definitely not pure folk and we are certainly not rock, though our music leans toward an edgier sound at times.  Folk-rock?  Um...okay...sort of.  Most forms for funding and songwriting contests don't offer that description as a category, and most of the time there isn't an "other" box to tick off.  

One contest, the International Songwriting Competition, came through for us, in that it had a category called "AAA", or "Adult Album Alternative".  When I listened to the winners in that category from last year, their sound most closely matched ours; folksy-ecclectic with some edge.  Brilliant!  If only all the forms I have had to fill out could have been that easy.

Hopefully our music will speak louder than my words in all of these endeavours.  After all, labels don't really matter.  Thankfully, in the end, it's the music that is under scrutiny.  We want it to be heard, noticed and appreciated for what it is.

What do you think?  Who are we?  How would you define our sound?  Help us out friends and fans!       

Capturing the Moment

Reflections by Eric...

Last night I received a call from my 8 year old niece in which she proceeded to tell me about her broken arm. The mixture of joy and disappointment, the words she used, the tone of voice, etc., made me smile the whole way through the conversation (which is strange for me because I do not like talking on the telephone). 

After I hung up I tried to recreate those moments for Hannah-Lee but failed. Later that night as I lay awake I tried to recreate it in my mind. I smiled and chuckled but definitely failed. The moment is a pleasant memory but will never be again. 

That started me thinking about why we create music. Each of us has these moments, and we try and capture them with video, pictures, writing, or recording. Writing and performing music can be about the sharing of those moments, or sometimes a song is a moment. A good song will hit you at some point, maybe the first listen, maybe the 5th or 12th, but at some point it will be a moment that you want to experience again. Maybe it just so happens that this is the time that it matched your mood. Some songs you will listen to again just as a memory of that moment, but others are written in such a way that it can hit you again in a different way creating another 'moment'. Those are the songs that become a part of our long-term playlists.

When Be Lyrebirds create a song, it usually comes from a jam session. We hit on something that strikes a chord, then we spend hours, days, months, sometimes years trying to write a song that captures and reflects what had moved us. The rare times that we are able to complete the song within a day or two the song is a stronger reflection of that original moment; others though, change and reflect different moments in time as we continue through the process of completing it. 

For example, because of recording issues, when it came time to mix Cold October Sky we had to re-record the second half, and in the process ended up changing the song to reflect what we were feeling at the moment of the second recording. 

So...something to consider: when you listen to a song and it moves you, part of that is because it is in response to the songwriter's real emotion and state of mind at the very time he/she wrote it; it is a snapshot of a specific and personal moment in time.

Album Burnout

After a lot of really late nights working on the mixes for Dayenu, the guys are both feeling drained and numb.  Listening to pieces of tracks hundreds and even thousands of times and tweaking them each time to try and get them to that illusive, "perfect" sound is mentally exhausting.  It gets to the point that you lose perspective and aren't sure what you are even hearing anymore.  It's hard enough to be objective when you're mixing your own music, but when the process has been going on for such a long time, it's necessary to step back, take a breath and put some distance between yourself and the project.  This is part of the reason we're giving ourselves an extension on the deadline for completion.  We want to be really satistfied with the end product, and that's not going to happen if we are feeling rushed, stressed and tired during the final push.  

12 days and counting down; we're comfortable with that!

Setting the Record Straight

I have a serious problem with counting, because when I last updated our blog, I said that there was only nine days until Dayenu.  That was over a week ago, when the planned release date was November 5th, so I was off by about a week.  Anyway, we are going to buy ourselves ANOTHER week, and set the new date for Saturday, November 12th.  So let's see if I can get the countdown right this time; as of today, THIRTEEN days until Dayenu!  We have a lot to do to reach that goal, but it's all in a day's work, and it's a process that brings much satisfaction in the end.

Drumming, Claps, and Accordion Tracks

Be Lyrebirds are together this weekend in Desbarats, Ontario, so we've been spending concentrated hours in "the studio", which happens to be at Eric and Hannah-Lee's house. The guys put in a late night on Friday tweaking mixes, and despite the tempting weather, today has been devoted to recording.

Caleb completed a brilliant new drum track for Scream, Hannah-Lee added an accordion part to Chapstick, and the three of us, after several takes, clapped our way to a syncopated finish of Driving Me Crazy. It is surprisingly difficult for three people to clap a rhythm, in unison, accurately! Good for a laugh anyway.

There is still a lot to do and only so many hours left in the day, so on we go. 9 days 'til Dayenu...

Oh Happy Day!

Yesterday was an exciting day for the band. We finally released our free, four-song sampler for the upcoming album Dayenu. When I say finally, I mean FINALLY! Countless hours, days, months, and years of work have gone into this project. Eric has worked on it full-time since we returned to Canada in January.

Along with our sampler, we launched our new website, www.belyrebirds.com. We want our listeners to have the opportunity to get to know who we are as people and musicians, and hope that the website will be a venue for that.

The feeback on our social networks has been very positive so far, and we aim to reach out to an even wider group of listeners with the full album at the end of the month. You can help us out by sharing a link to our website with your friends.

Caleb is coming up tomorrow to record some new drum tracks and work with Eric on the mixes. There is still a lot to do, but the end is in sight! 11 days left to the completion of Dayenu. Count down with us!

How it All Began

We are Caleb Bilgen, Eric Lawrence and Hannah-Lee Lawrence. Our band is called Be Lyrebirds. The three of us are all-out passionate about song-writing, and sharing our music.

It all started a few years back when the three of us still lived in Turkey. Those were the formative years. Caleb and Eric got together most Sunday afternoons to mess around on their guitars and write songs together. Artistically something just clicked, and gradually they started recording their vocal and guitar parts and mixing them. Over time various pieces of recording equipment and a digital drum kit made their way back to Turkey in our summer luggage and things progressed further. Other friends added their voices and instruments to some of the mixes.

Up until this point, it was just a hobby. Then something significant happened. The summer that we all moved back to North America a new song called End Up Here With You was born. There was something magical about this song that made the guys want to just drop everything else and create music for a living.

At this point Caleb had to head off to college, and we were planning a mission trip to Papua New Guinea. We decided to leave our 14 songs in the hands of a friend who would work on mixing them professionally in his studio.

Something began to brew in me as well. Eric and I travelled to Papua New Guinea in April as planned, and during our months there we were inspired to write music together for the first time. I began to write lyrics for some of the songs that Eric had never finished. I had no piano to play, so I started singing and experimenting with harmonies instead. Eric began the painstaking process of studying the craft of music mixing, by reading everything he could get his hands on. Together, we felt compelled to continue this process and see where it took us when we were reunited with Caleb in January.

When we returned to Canada and got together with Caleb again, it was like we had never been apart. The old songs just clicked and new songs poured out of us. We were eager to hear the finished mix of our old songs so that we could compile them into an album and get it out there to the public. Unfortunately our mixer, Tony, had been dealing with a lot of personal issues over the months we'd been away, so had struggled to get much done. It looked like this may continue for a while, so Eric and Caleb started working on mixing the songs on their own with the equipment they had.

In the mean time, we entered a bandspotting contest, played a gig at a fundraiser, and attended a music festival called "Festival of Faith and Music", all down at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, where Caleb goes to school. We've had a small taste of the band life, but it has all just been a teaser. Without an album to promote on our social networks, we don't have much on which to build a fan-base, which will hopefully lead to a tour and many many chances to perform.

These days, the guys are working like crazy to finish up a four-song sampler to put out there, and to complete the mixes for Dayenu, our debut album. It seems like it's never going to happen, and it's hard to be a band when you live six hours apart on opposite sides of the border, but we are very determined! When you love what you do, it drives you to persevere.

Watch out for our free, four-song sampler, coming in mid-October, and the complete album at the end of October.