LA Land

We're in Los Angeles!! Hooray!! But I've been somewhat super lazy writing blogs recently so I'll do a really quick catchup on stuff we've been doing before getting to LA.

Last time I posted it was like a month ago. Around about that time it started to become pretty real that we were going to LA to produce a record. Before that it seemed a little far away and something that wasn't quite real. But when that four week period hit, for me anyway, the idea of doing a record in LA turned from nervous excitement to an increasing level of terror. The terror part mostly had to do with the fact that Andrew decided it would be fun to make up stories about our producer being a psycho (he's not by the way, the opposite in fact) which led me to have really weird dreams about my head being ripped off in the studio. But despite his best attempts to see me end myself I continued to write tunes for the new record. And we rehearsed a lot. Actually we rehearsed heaps. I guess we spent so much time rehearsing that we kind of forgot about all the other stuff that needed to be done before we left. You know, like visas and flights and insurance and accommodation and stuff like that.

The weekend before LA we had shows booked in Melbourne. Virgin Blue are awesome by the way. We had way too much baggage but they didn't really seem to care. On the way down they didn't charge us anything extra for our gear and we got given the emergency exit row as well. And on the way back, no charge once again and we got upgraded to premium economy. They're cool. We played a show at The Espy on the Friday night and then somewhere in Fitzroy on Saturday. Both were really cool shows. There's a lot more to say about Melbourne but that should have been done in a separate post and, well, I haven't done that have I?

Very shortly after that (very shortly as in like five days later) we found ourselves back at Brisbane Airport, but Brisbane International this time. No one had really slept because the night before we decided we'd run out of money and couldn't really afford to stay in our rehearsal room while we were away and not using it. So we spent a stack of time packing our room up. It was somewhat of a nostalgic moment really. We'd spent quite a while at that studio and there's some serious history there. Anyway, after our recent awesome experiences with Virgin Blue we thought V Australia would be just as awesome when it came to excess baggage. Wrong! The girl on the counter was really nice and I swear she was going to let us through for free but she had to check with her supervisor and her supervisor was hating life that Friday morning. So we got burned with baggage charges. So we started budgeting and realised we had to cut down to two meals a day for a while.

I love planes and airports. Some people are just weird at airports though. And weird was out in force. You know how swine flu hit and everyone freaked out but then it turned out it wasn't really that bad and while heaps of people were getting it it wasn't actually much worse than normal flu. Well some people forgot that last part and were wearing those masks that make it look like the end of the world is nigh. I think we got them on film. The flight was good though. Except that Greg had two kids behind him who decided it would be fun to kick his chair all the time and hit him in the face with socks. Yeah socks!! And then we were in LA.

I'm not sure whether it's just me but I expected California this time of year to be sunny and, you know, summer-like. We stepped out of the plane to weather that was pretty much identical to what we'd left in Brisbane in winter. Turns out we were experiencing what was known as "May Grey" which moved into something else called "June Gloom". And apparently summer doesn't actually start until June 21 which is pretty much when we leave. Anyway, I won't complain. Los Angeles is somewhat of an epic city. It's huge!! But the time difference is shit. We left Brisbane at 11am on Friday and after a 12 hour flight arrived in LA at 7am on Friday. Go figure. We then spent the rest of the day trying to stay awake in order to avoid jetlag which involved drinking about 6 coffees and going to meetings where people would ask "Are you guys alright?" Everything seemed to get a little delirious at some point there but we finally arrived at our accommodation at about 6pm. Get this, our landlady is an Aussie, her husband is a Brit and they're both paparazzi photographers!! How good is that! So we had some beers with them and then decided to go to sleep but realised we'd moved out of the ridiculously tired stage to the "way too tired to go to sleep" stage. So no one slept. But then at 10am the next morning we got tired and accidentally fell asleep, woke up at 4pm and realised our plans to avoid jetlag were officially screwed. We explored LA a bit for the next couple of days. Well I'm using the word "day" a bit loosely here. It was more like evening by the time we woke up.

And then it was time to meet our producer and go into the studio.