Jeremy Larson

Sucré Album Teaser

 

I'm so excited to share with you the first album teaser for the new Sucré album!  If you like it, please embed it on your blogs and Facebook.  Thank you so much!

Jeremy

Flashback...

This was almost exactly two years ago and it might have been the first time Stacy, Darren and I sat down and worked on something together.

This whole video was kind of a spur of the moment impromptu thing, but it was in many ways the beginning of Sucré.  Brandon Goodwin filmed it.  

Have a great weekend!

Jeremy

Sucre In Photos

Happy Thursday!

    I thought I'd share a few photos from the shoot we did last week.  Elsie did all of them, and we couldn't be more pleased.

We've been really overwhelmed by the response from all of you, and we can't thank you enough.  We've already started talking about shows and what to do with the rest of this year.  Anyone want to cast their vote for where we do our album release show?  

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

Over Achiever

What a week.  As I mentioned in the previous post, we have finished the Sucre album!  What I didn't tell you is that Darren is an over-achiever and decided today that we should add one more bit of music to end the album...  So I'm gonna get to work on that tomorrow.

This week we did several photo shoots, a music video, and talked a lot about the future.  I have a feeling this is going to be one of the best years of my life.  I just have to mention that none of the progress we made this week would have been possible without the help of my AMAZINGLY talented wife Elsie.  It's a dream to get to work on a project together.  

And thanks to the very talented Brook Linder for helping us with the video shoot!  Brook, the video wouldn't have been the same without you and Clay.  Thanks a ton!

Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

PS.  If you're coming here for the first time from the Sucre blog and are curious about my other music, click here:

http://jeremylarson.bandcamp.com/

Super Duper Special Announcement!

I can't believe this day has finally come!  I'm proud to announce that my collaboration with Stacy and Darren King is complete.  And we have a release date!  Read all of the details at our blog here:

Sucré Diaries

Thanks for reading!

Jeremy

Encouraged

Elsie, Stacy, Darren and I all did a little Skype chat last night about a game plan for releasing our album.  We also started talking about how this project began.  It appears that this all began on January 5th of 2010; that was the first night I started working on our first song.  Oddly enough, that song will now be the opening track to the album.  It feels like we've been working on this album for a decade, so I was surprised to see that it hadn't quite been two years yet.  

While searching for our early emails to eachother, I found an email I sent to Darren about six months before we started working together.  I was severely depressed about where my career was going, and was looking for an encouraging word.  I talked in depth about what I wanted to do with my life/music, but didn't know how to get there.  I won't go into detail here, but I will say that this email was a great reminder of how many of my goals and dreams have come true since then.  The resume that I've built up, is almost exactly the resume I dreamed of having just two and a half years ago.  I'm feeling very thankful today.  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

What Did We Learn Here Today?

Stacy, Darren and I did our best yesterday to completely wreck a great song.  But despite our best efforts, the song was still alive and well by the end of the day.  Today we will try a different approach: leaving it alone.  It can make for a very long day when your main accomplishment is learning that the song was pretty great, and didn't need A, B, and C added to it.  However, this may be part of the path to finding that you are done.  

Despite our uphill battle yesterday, I must mention that I just can't believe how incredibly lucky I am to create music with these two.  You may never hear a voice more beautiful than Stacy's,  and Darren is not only my favorite drummer, but he has great ideas- and a seemingly infinite stream of them.  I really, truly am thankful.  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

Diffusion

I want to talk about my struggles and break-throughs from tonight, even though it may mean very little to you at this point.  I am working on some strings for a song that is tentatively called "Persuasion".  I am convinced that this is the start of the greatest string arrangement I've written to date.  But it hasn't come without a struggle.  

A friend directed me to  Mike Verta's website, and there was a podcast that has become very important to me.  He was talking about the struggle to "realize" or bring to life the ideas in your head.  When you are a young composer, many times you hear the music in your head first.  You hear a symphonic sound that is full, and brilliant, but you have a blank slate in front of you on your computer.  How does the idea get from your head to the computer?  Unfortunately, I don't have the software to simply record string sections through a keyboard as a way to try out ideas.  I have to record 12 tracks of cello, 12 tracks of viola, 12 tracks of 2nd violin, and 12 tracks of first violin to try out that idea.  And more often than not, what comes out is not what was in my head.  This is a weakness I have, and identifying that weakness is of monumental importance to me overcoming it.

I would suggest that this may be of great importance to many of you as well.  If you are a painter, graphic designer, or a writer, the struggle is the same.  We are taking something magical and intangible from our imagination, and trying to pull it out into this world with little or no diffusion.  This is not easy, and I wish that I had concrete solutions to offer.  I will say, however, that the biggest obstacle to bringing these ideas to life for me, is lack of patience.  When I've spent three hours recording an idea for a chorus, and the end result is not what I hoped for, it's easy to tell myself "the idea just wasn't that great", and I move on to something different.  But you have to fight for the idea if you truly love it!  And that's what I did tonight.  Someday soon, you will hear the result of this persistence, and I hope you love it as much as I do.  Perhaps I will talk more about this later, when I'm not so tired.  I'm feeling a little delirious at the moment, and I hope some of this made sense.  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy

99%

Sorry about the sparse blogging this week.  Darren and Stacy and I had an AMAZING week!  It's safe to say that we probably have 99% of the album complete- though I believe we are going to try to write a few more tunes just so we have options.  Did I mention we have a name for the project?  I think I did.

We learned a lot this week.  When you are this close to finishing an album, everything is slightly elevated.  Our breakthroughs seemed bigger than usual, and our frustrations seemed more insurmountable than usual.  One thing all three of us learned about ourselves, was that we all care way more about this album than we even knew.  We also found that all three of us depended on each other more than we knew.

We spend Halloween working at Nick Sibley's studio here in Springfield.  What a place!!  I was a little worried that we would have a hard time keeping focus with all of the exotic instruments laying around, but I think we did ok.  We replaced all of our fake MIDI timpani with real timpani, wrote a new song, and added some harpsichord and vibraphone to a few songs.  I will upload some pictures to this post in the next day or so.  Thanks for reading!

Jeremy

Unconventional

Darren refuses to get sounds in a conventional way.  Most of the sounds that you hear on the album, will have come from a process of trial and error.  He may bring in 10 objects that he found in storage, and audition them all as percussive instruments.  Anyone could do this, but bringing in a catering tray and turning it into something musical- that's a rare talent.  Well done Darren.

We are trying to work at a different studio tonight.  This studio has timpanis, a harpsichord, and pretty much any instrument you could ask for.  I'm going to have Elsie come along and take real pictures so I can stop posting cell phone pics.  Thanks for reading.

Jeremy