Current mood:	chipper
Current music:	Devils Nachos - Fool's Banquet

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at Fool's Banquet...
Yeah, so, I know like... 98% of you either hate or couldn't give a crap about those three blonde brothers who sing MMMBop. But if you like music, you still might find this interesting.

Every year, Hanson host a song writing "retreat" in Oklahoma. It's called "Fool's Banquet", it lasts for about a week and it involves them inviting about a dozen of their singer/song writer buddies to spend the week with them, and every day they break off into groups of 3 and each group writes and records a song. Every day. People who've never met before or who don't usually even perform the same genres of music. And I just think that's frickin' fantastic. lol

Last week was "Fool's Banquet 2008", which included: Hanson, Chris Sligh, Pat McGee, Keaton Simons, Jesse Laz-Hirsch and Kai Kennedy (Locksley), Stephen Kellogg, Zac Maloy, Andrew Ripp, Kate Voegele and Jason f-ing Mraz! *composes self*

(Past invitees include: John Crobsy (Vast), Bleu, Shannon Curfman, Andrew WK, Chris Holmes, Sandra McCraken, Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne), Derek Webb, Mike Viola, Stephen Trask, Miles Zuniga (Fastball *squees*) and Eisley).

Because I'm a bad fan, I'm not entirely sure when it all started. I'm seeing mentions going back to '04, but it could've been even before that. I actually wonder if it was partly inspired by their trip to Miles Copeland's "songwriting boot camp" in France, which also looks like it'd be kick ass to be a fly on the wall for. I don't know if these were the only artists there that year, but just from the clips of them jamming and recording in SETB, they worked with Carole King(!), Mark Hudson, Miles Zuniga, Ed Robertson (BNL *squees some more*)... seriously! *head esplodey*

Aaaaaaanyway, I just think it sounds like a great idea and I wish someone would make a documentary of it! I think Chris Sligh mentioned on his blog that it was going to be filmed for something on A&E this summer, but I don't know, maybe I got it mixed up with something else he was doing. That would be AWESOME though.

The whole reason I'm even mentioning any of this now and haven't before, is Chris Sligh's blog post. I think, other than the very few short clips of "Fool's Banquet '06" in the Taking The Walk podcast, his account of his time in Tulsa was the most detailed description anyone has ever given about their time there!

More (much, much) about "Fool's Banquet" (this year and in general), including songs and a piccie under the cut for anyone interested.



Back Row: Keaton Simons, Kai Kennedy, Andrew Ripp, Taylor Hanson, Chris Sligh, Zac Hanson, Jesse Laz-Hirsch, Stephen Kellogg, Pat McGee.
Front Row: Kate Voegele, Jason Mraz, Isaac Hanson.

Talking about making music better, you guys host a songwriting workshop.

Zac: I think that’s the way we should start saying it. Workshop.

Tay: It’s a retreat. It’s more like a retreat.

Ike: It’s like a spa.

Zac: It’s a place where we give people free food and free beer and free studio time.

Tay: And they bring their own ‘other products.’

Zac: …In order that they will make music. It’s something we do every year and we just bring…it’s generally what, 15 people?

Tay: It’s one of the most fun things we do. It came from the inspiration that it’s just hard to get artists together. A lot of your friends become musicians but everybody’s lifestyle is like, “I’m on a train,” or “I’m on a bus.” Everybody’s life is ships in the night.

Zac: “I’m in Europe.” “I’m in Asia.”

Tay: It’s so awesome to get to collaborate with people you respect or you have relationships with but it’s so hard to get it together.

Ike: As small as the music business is, it’s still increasingly large enough that it becomes difficult to keep the community strong. The way that the business evolves is that the managers tend to manage the bands or labels tend to market bands there’s this thing where it’s like, “Oh, you can’t work with that band because it doesn’t fit your image.” Everyone became so image conscious that they forgot that the music was the thing that is important. So what you get is the heavy rock guy and the folk guy and the in between guy together and you write songs and it just so happens that it kind of kicks ass.

Tay: It’s basically five days of big rural space and a major main studio set up and secondary and third room in the house with rehearsal space. We have so much gear it’s like guitars and vintage keyboards and people basically spend the day living in the house together and every day we wake up and we’re like, “Get in pairs of three.”

Zac: “You three, you three, and you three.” Most of the time it’s people that don’t even know each other.

Tay: We’re the ones that know everybody there and people are meeting each other so each day you wake up and record a song. By the end of the day, you recorded a song.

Ike: We actually created some really cool friendships because of it. You know, for us but also an after effect of it is that people who didn’t know each other before have gone on to work with each other after.

Tay: Some good people came to it. Vast is a good one. John Crosby is a great one. Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne.

I know you guys had Eisley there.

Tay: Eisley was there, they were awesome. They’re all amazing but especially Chantelle, who doesn’t do as much singing. She came out of her shell… everybody was like, “Oh my god.”

Zac: That song, it kills me. Her voice is so goodcreepy. In the sense that it’s haunting. Hearing her sing that song, I was just like, “Oh. So awesome!”

Tay: It’s a great combination because John Crobsy from Vast, Zac, and her… the style. Those are the kinds of things that make that cool. Stuff happens and you could never put it in a petri dish and have that come out. By the end of five days, there’s not a lot of sleeping going on and it’s ends up being twenty songs.

Ike: By the end of five days, your voice is trashed.

Zac: And you start writing songs called “Devils Nachos” and things like that. It’s about music, it’s about building a community of artists and that’s something that we feel passionate about—the idea of not being confined into boxes and saying, “For everyone who wants to call us this, we’re going to show you, we just blew your mind and did the exact opposite.” Not just us, but the artists. Music is so much bigger than you’re able to think that we’re going to put a folk artist and a rap artist. Andrew WK and Sandra McCraken…

Tay: Our friend Sandra who’s this amazing country-folk singer and Stephen Trask, well they didn’t actually do one together. But our friend Stephen Trask who wrote, among other things, “Hedwig and the Angry Itch.”

- Source: absolutepunk.net


"Soon after I had started co-writing with various people for various different songs, Hanson invited me to participate in their song writing project called “Fool’s Banquet”. I loved the name right out of the gate, as I had been feeling very foolish about an assortment of absurdities. The Banquet invited me and about 6 other songwriters to their estate in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They matched up different people into groups of two or three and each group was to write and record a song in one day. Then the groups would switch and we’d write another song. I loved how intense the focus was - all the lyrics had to be finished, all the instrumentation, and then they had two top-of-the-line studios set up for recording. So by the end of it, there were 17 well recorded brand new songs. I co-wrote on 5 of them. By doing these types of collaborations, a songwriter develops a collection of songs that can be recorded by other performers. This catalogue of course can also be recorded by the writer personally. I enjoyed this experience very much." - Andrew WK

- Source: cornmo.com


"Well, it's about a week, and we bring about fifteen of our friends and people we know, sometimes it's friends of friends, and just different artists, different people who kind of have the same state of mind, of really wanting to build a community of music, and just enjoy what it is we do. You know, we have such a privilege to be musicians and make this our lives, and speak our minds, and have a voice with our opinion and what we think. And I think getting together for this, it's just so enjoyable to just sit down and make music and sometimes write songs you'd never think you'd write. You know, three of the songs on our album ended up being from that get together over the last couple years—on the new album. So for us it's just about building a community of artists, and sometimes the community that really is not what people think it would be based on the boxes." - Zac Hanson

- Source: tays_ex_gf @ hanson.net


"Every year, the Hanson guys bring out several songwriters varying from popular indie artists to established mainstream artists to up and comers. For 5 days, they split the singers up into groups of 2 or 3 and they write songs together. The songs then can go on the artists' records or can be used to pitch directly to film/tv or can be pitched to other artists. It's a very cool concept that happens to work extremely well.

I got to Tulsa on Wednesday night. Because of my schedule I could only work out going for 2 full days of the 6 (they started on Monday). I got picked up by Hanson's assistant Rebecca. We had a nice trip out into "the boonies" as Rebecca referred to it, talking about how she got a ticket driving out there the night before. We finally got to the house/studio and the guys were working on recording the songs they wrote that day. Hanson has a 2 studio recording complex that is part of a ranch-style house. They have room A and room B. Room A is an actual studio, Room B is really part of the house, but they have converted in nicely into a very nice live room.

When I walked in, the studios were in a frenzy because both of their engineers had falled down with the flu. So, no pros recording, and some of the audio setups within Pro Tools are pretty complex, so everyone was doing acoustic demos. The songs that I heard seem to lend themselves to acoustic demos anyway. I walked into studio B where Jason Mraz and Pat McGee were working on recording 2 songs they wrote that day. Jason sat down and played and sang the song in one take. It was amazing. The song was great and Jason sang every freaking note in tune. Amazing. Then Pat sang some bgv's and threw down another guitar part.

Several other songs were recorded, but the first night was a blur. I was just meeting everyone and trying to process everyone's name. Kate Voegel who is an artist on myspace records was there on Wednesday but left Thursday morning bright and early, so my time meeting her was short-lived. People kept on working until about 1am when I finally headed up to my bedroom and got some sleep.

I woke up the next morning about 10am and went down, got some breakfast and started working on a couple of ideas I had on my own (everyone else was either not up yet or eating breakfast. Then they broke us up into groups and I was put with Pat McGee and a guy named Kai Kennedy from a band called Locksley. I'll give more info on everybody later. We got to working and worked through 3-4 different ideas before settling on a Counting Crows-like alt-country song. It took us a long time to perfect it, but it turned out very good. It's called "Wait for Me"...the basic premise is a guy who's going out on the road and he and his woman are struggling in their relationship, so as he leaves to hit the road, he says, "I wouldn't wait for me...I'm done making promises I know I can't keep...I wouldn't wait for me...but for once I'm hoping that you don't agree." It was a nice little lyrical turnaround.

When we finished the song, we headed over to the studio, but someone was already working on their song, so I went over to Studio A where Isaac Hanson, Jason Mraz and a guy named Zac Malloy were recording the song they wrote. It was a song called "The Story of Your Life"...cheesy title (but I don't know that another title would work) but seriously one of the most genius songs I've heard in a long time.

This is a little side note...I've never really bought into the whole idea that certain great songwriters are on higher level than other great songwriters. I think once you reach a certain level as a songwriter, it's tough to be consistently better...you know, you might throw out the occasional "incredible" song - we all do at some point - but it's touch to be consistently better. Well, with Jason Mraz I saw my first instance of a writer being incredibly greater than me on a consistent basis. It's so fluid for him. Not to take away from the guys writing with him because Isaac and Zac are incredible in their own right, but I heard 5 songs that he wrote and all of them were "next level" songs, especially from a lyrical standpoint. Incredible.

Another side note is this: people are stupid who diss the Hansons. Seriously these guys are some of the smartest, savviest, most incredible musicians I've met. They are serious about their craft and they have serious skills. Don't diss Hanson.

Anyway, we laid down our song. Pat played some acoustic guitar and tambourine, Kai played electric and bass and Zac Hanson played drums. And then I sang the song. It ended up really cool.

We all hung out talking and listening to each other's songs...it was this great communal atmosphere of just everyone cheering each other on.

Finally, about 1:30am I went to bed. I again woke up about 10 and ate some breakfast. Apparently several people were up till 4:30 so we didn't get started until about noon. This day, I got to write with Isaac Hanson and Jesse Laz-Hirsch, the lead singer of the band Locksley (Kai was the guitar player for the band). Isaac had taken Jason to the airport and crashed back at his house, so he was a bit late, so Jesse and I started working on a song. It started off with me just playing a wurly and it slowly morphed into a Justin Timberlake-type song. We wrote the song really quickly. By the time Isaac got there, the song was basically complete, as far as form and basic lyric content. So, we headed down to record.

I played a wurly loop and then Isaac went over and recorded a drum loop with live drums. We basically found a couple of measures that worked for the loop and them looped it over and over again. Jesse had a very clear vision of where he wanted the song to go, so he kind of drove the boat on the production side of things. I laid down a guide vocal. After that, we began working on recording the instruments. I wasn't feeling well - I think everyone out there was fighting off the flu - so I took about an hour nap. When I woke up I felt much better and went back down to the studio where the song was almost done. It sounded great! Isaac did some cool guitar stuff and Jesse had layered acoustic and bass and piano on top of the track, as well as some bgv's. To end up, I laid down the final vocal as well as some bgv's. It really turned out cool...just a vibey, jammy track that starts off kind of Timberlake-y but ends up kind of funky pop/rock.

After we finished I again went to check out other guy's stuff. Zac Malloy, Taylor Hanson and Andrew Finn wrote this great song that was somewhere between Gavin DeGraw (it's a rhodes-based song) and Marc Broussard. They worked on that for a long while and it sounded great! In the other studio, Pat was working on the song he wrote with Stephen Kellogg and Keaton Simons. Another great song...very Counting Crows-like. Very cool.

While they were working on that, I went down to one of the writer's room and heard Zac Hanson messing around. I went in and we just jammed for a little bit and then really started writing a song. We took this idea of a train ride being a metaphor for love and wrote this beautiful, hooky song based on the idea. It ended up being my favorite song from the week. We finished the song about 12:45am and waited a while to see if we could record it. Finally at 1:30, I decided that sleep was vital, and Zac said he would get some of the guys to help him record the song the next day." - Chris Sligh

- Source: frommymindtoyoureyes.blogspot.com

Songs:

A lot of songs from "Fool's Banquet 07" have apparently been leaked, but I only know of 5 on youtube and I don't know where to get the others.

Devil's Nachos - http://youtube.com/watch?v=DSyrE-qLV-c (Zac Hanson on Lead Vocals)
You're Enough - http://youtube.com/watch?v=1s5O_cJWvM8 (Zac Hanson on Lead Vocals)
Bad Solution - http://youtube.com/watch?v=0E3dSCa0-qE (Taylor Hanson on Lead Vocals)
Even When You're Gone (Live) - http://youtube.com/watch?v=hKoJwElinQ8 (Zac Hanson on Lead Vocals)
I Can't Wait - http://youtube.com/watch?v=PV8Tj9QUJmE (Taylor Hanson on Lead Vocals)



Also, anyone familiar with any of the artists mentioned? Obviously, I know the big name ones (like Jason, Miles, Carole, Mark, Ed and John, and I'm familiar with Bleu and Locksley and I know of Chris Sligh, even if I don't know anything specific by him), if anyone had any tidbits to share, that'd be appreciated! :)