John Vanderslice dialling in a phaser sound for me

So I finally got around to purchasing herriotrow.com and will be phasing out whatshisname.com over the next 12 months, or years. I recently returned from recording the debut Herriot Row record in San Francisco at Tiny Telephone Studios. The wonderful John Vanderslice engineered and produced. Rob Shelton played keyboards. Andrew Maguire played percussion and vibes. Both the experience and the end result completely exceeded my expectations, and they were some high expectations to exceed let me tell you. I can’t wait for you all to hear it. Hopefully sooner rather than later. Till then, here’s an interview with Emma Smith I did before heading over, replete with acoustic performances of two tracks from the new record, and  a podcast about the recording process that I made with Anthonie Tonnon upon my return. Before heading overseas to make the new record I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the wonderful books of Martin Edmond, one of New Zealand’s finest prose writers. I wrote a piece on his work for the refreshingly long-form friendly arts and culture website The Pantograph Punch, and interviewed Edmond too. It was a rewarding process working really hard on something other than music for a change and I hope to write more in the future. Sometimes I feel torn between writing songs and writing prose pieces. So far I refuse to choose one over the other. So far. Given how often I have to put my guitar in different tunings at shows, it might sound rich coming from me, but: stay tuned.