van session

~ Adam Johnston ~ 1 Comment

We get to play this Friday in the monthly Van Session series, a short set to go along with First Friday arts in Ogden. We’re hosted at The Monarch, and The Banyan Collective provides the podcasting and amplification. We play at 8:00, after Michelle Moonshine at 7:00. It’s a good chance to play some music and talk to the Van Sessions folks about … well, who knows what: Our music? How we work together? Our feelings? We’re excited, come what may.

Details are here, but something to anticipate is that we’ll be outside under tents while The Monarch continues to get its finishing touches as a hub for artistry. So it will be cold. Also, it will be dark. But, maybe it will snow, too. We’re looking forward to it. We’ll wear coats and play loud to help everyone keep warm.

having fun

~ Adam Johnston ~ Leave a comment

Since getting ready for the big public show at the Station and then getting our stuff recorded and out as demos, we’ve been looking forward to getting into a rehearsal that didn’t have any expectations, where we could just kick back and have fun. When you have a catalog of material that’s well rehearsed, it feels good to just enjoy it. This is the difference between “playing” and “practicing,” I suppose.

And yet, this morning when we got together for three hours we worked on all completely new stuff that we’d never played before.

This qualifies as real work. We picked through a few standards, some classic soul and blues tunes, a couple of obscure covers, and one that just came up in conversation and suddenly became part of an upcoming set list. One, a Bob Dylan cover, evolved through versions ranging from a straight torch song (too boring) to an uptempo bossa nova (fun to play, off-putting to listen to) to a twangy country romp (hilarious, but we respect our audience too much) to a smooth swing that Tony Bennett could sing in front of a big band–or, if you’re lucky, Caryn in front of our ensemble.

At my last count, I think we have nine new songs–pretty good for a Saturday morning. So much for taking it easy, but like everything else we’ve been doing lately, it turned out to be a lot of fun.

we made a thing

~ Adam Johnston ~ 2 Comments

It’s not as though this has been a secret, but we’ve been keeping it to ourselves until everything was ready.

And now, it’s ready.

We spent an afternoon in the studio and recorded stuff worthy of your favorite speakers or headphones. Either way, turn it up to 11 and listen.

You can go to the dedicated samples page (substandards.band/samples) where there’s a description of each track (plus one bonus demo track!), or push the play button on the player in the side bar (often pushed to the bottom if you’re reading this on a smaller device), or let us know if you’d like these in another format and we’ll be delighted to share them with you.

While you’re listening, here’s a few snapshots from The Proper Way studios on a Saturday afternoon. When we look back on this, we were clearly having a good time playing through the live takes to get each track just like we wanted it. It was also intimidating and stressful. But you’d never know now. We’re proud of these, and grateful that we got to do this. We hope you enjoy it, too.

For gigs, Caryn’s usually in heels. This should be our album cover.
Ian with 4 microphones and a room all to himself
Tim and his fretless bass.
Tim and Caryn getting situated.
Adam warms up and figures out headphones.
Caryn listening to one of our takes.
Hanging up the headphones and listening to tracks in the studio.
Caryn, Caryn’s microphone, and Caryn’s headset all getting a break.
Caryn with Scott Rogers, our recording guru who puts all the sounds through the cables and into the boxes.

get ready

~ Adam Johnston ~ 1 Comment

Remember that time we got to play Jazz at the Station? We’re still tickled about that. Being up on a stage in that giant hall where the sound hangs in space, all in front of old friends and new friends — this all makes for a really fun gig.

People Get Ready
We’re using the train station theme. Listen to the end when Caryn gets the audience on board.

Since then, we’ve been keeping to ourselves but busy working. In the next couple of days we should have something new to share!

Edit: A few days later in the studio, we’d record a demo of the same song while we were checking microphones. It’s fun to play with the variation the song affords.

People Get Ready demo