Posted by KB on January 19, 2010
Dear Diary:
The first week in New York was a multi-sensory experience that was not unlike making love for the first time in a tub of candyfloss and synthesizers, with fireworks spraying out of the lighting above. It was just surreal and incredibly fast paced, but all good things.
Initially it was pretty daunting, but once we settled in, it felt like we were working with long lost Danimals.
We had to get used to the whole ‘studio drop in’ thing. Albert Hammond Jr rocked up with Sean Lennon, I nearly lost my cool, seeing as we are all Strokes heads. He was pretty quiet during the sessions, but he would play some lines that were incredibly Albert-like, and you definitely felt like you were in the room with someone amazing. Robbie Furze from the Big Pink also showed up which was pretty cool.
The most surreal experience we had was writing a song about a marmoset at Sean’s amazing home studio whilst drinking the best lemon ginger tea I’ve ever had.
We were all very psyched to work with Santigold, she is so ridiculously creative, the melodies that she pulled out were like nothing I’ve ever heard, but completely hers.
Santi picked up on a jam structure that we had created on Tuesday with John Taylor & Alex Greenwald. Pretty much immediately, she had pulled out an astonishing melody from the song that only Santigold could have possibly have heard. Really unique & individual - it was so exciting to hear her voice played back over the structure of our demos.
After the session, we ducked out to the East Village where Ronson has a regular Friday-night radio show, on East Village Radio. He literally DJs in a funny little glass booth right on Avenue A, so it's weird to see pedestrians walking past on Friday night going out, and there's Mark Ronson DJing on the pavement. He ended up playing two Danimals tracks - Koi Moon's Daughter and Firework Spraying Moon - right near the close of his set. A first! Danimals on NYC Radio.
After dinner, Ronson invited us to go out to see his DJ set at Santos Party House, which is a big party house on Lafayette (and co-owned by Andrew WK). He was going back-to-back with one of our heroes, Q-Tip. We arrived to stand in the queue for the club, and after trying to explain to the door guy who we were, Q-Tip himself walked in and nodded us through the line. After a while, Ronson arrived with his records and the two were playing a mad hip hop party set, cumulating in a the announcement of our dreams - Q-Tip emceeing over one break: 'Shout out to the Danimals!'... NUTS!!
danimals