About Zach

Zach is a wandering minstrel (as opposed to a meandering wastrel) who believes in uniting diversity, social responsibility, and discovering as hard as he can. To those ends has he dedicated his life.

Pittsburgh, PA

The next stop was Pittsburgh. I promise not to make a single joke in this post about anything being “the pits.”

Coming all up on into Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh has terrible traffic/roads, a great feel, beautiful countryside, and a handful of these cool yellow bridges:

The bridges of Pittsburgh. If someone offered you a yellow bridge like this, I'm pretty sure you would take it.

We drove around downtown a little bit looking at stuff.

More tall things made by mankind.

We saw a huge amout of people hanging around, using public transport, smoking, etc. Pretty cool that a non-huge city would have such a high proportion of foot traffic.

Pittsburgh: A City

Wow, mankind!  Nice job!

By this point I was becoming accustomed to the hilliness of the terrain, narrowness of the roads, and speed of the traffic on this side of the US. To get to our host I had to experience a considerable bit of all of the above.

Speaking of our host, his name is Andy Lehmann and he’s pretty awesome. He put us up on short notice and let us commandeer his basement for a night. Thanks Andy!

Next morning bright and early (8:15!!!) I was off to record with another old college bud of mine, a multitalented bloke who goes by the name of David Santistevan (because that is really his name). He is working as a music director at a church, so we headed over there to record.

Multitalented bloke David Santistevan.

David plays all kinds of instruments with aplomb. I had him lay down some piano for me, then we set up for recording his guitar rig

Tuning: always important.

and recorded Dave’s awesome textural electric guitar playing on several tracks. Dave was pretty easy — I just kind of set him loose and he did his thing and it was good.

If you look up rock star in the dictionary, there would be a concise description of this picture.

Awesome!

It was even more awesome than this bridge!

NEXT: Something else awesome!

Columbus, OH

Christopher Columbus! That intrepid explorer of yore had absolutely nothing to do with the wonderful day I spent in Columbus with some old college pals of mine.

“Who are these pals?” asks AG perfunctorily.

Haha, you’re so cute when you do things perfunctorily, AG. To answer your question, these pals were Nathan and Rachel Laing. Nathan and I were in a healthy smattering of music classes together back at NCU. He enjoys large words (such as “penultimate” and even “perfunctorily”), spelling with z’s (as in, “wazzup friendz?”), and music.

“Is that it?”

I’m sure he also has many other hobbies. I would also like to mention that he got a piano that had been in a fire for dirt cheap just because it had been in a fire, even though it was not damaged at all.

Nathan's $1000 smoked Baldwin.

Nice. So Nathan and his hilarious wife Rachel (seriously, she’s great) and JH and I had a delightful dinner (Nathan grilled up some delectable chicken with an equally delectable butter basil sauce), during which we shot many large holes in the breeze, and caught up to the best of our ability.

After that, it was time to record! Nathan is a pianist and guitarist with very clean playing. Seriously, I have always admired the cleanliness of his playing. So I had him lay down some nice guitar parts for several tunes.

Nathan rockin' the pop.

One time, he played a wrong note and I had to show him the correct note.

It's this one.  This one right here.

Nathan generously stayed up late to finish up another song, and then it was late. Too late. So, we were done. I was happy and Nathan was really angry because he was tired. Look how angry he is:

Doesn't he look angry?  Well, he is.

And that was my stay in Columbus. Delightfulness all around.

NEXT: The Burgh of Pitts!

Louisville, KY

Louisville! Contrary to popular opinion, it is not named after King Louis XIV of France, but rather King Louis XVI. One must also avoid pronouncing it Frenchly. The first (and last) time I said LOO-ee-vil resulted in yours truly being scorned and derided by the otherwise kind people of Louisville.

“How should I then pronounce it?” asks Francis Schaeffer, who happens to be passing.

Nice, Francis. Well, the correct pronunciation happens to be ˈluːǝvǝl.

“Ah.”

We arrived fairly late and spent the evening with our ascerbically-witted host, Josh Mather. He was great — a skilled metalworker with a well-trained Australian cattle dog (a relative rarity).

Our "couches" in Loovull.

We had a rollicking good night hitting up a local, and I got to meet many of Josh’s friends and acquaintances, setting up a session for the next day in the process.

The Next Day

You work at a nationally famous restaurant famous for tacky lamps. Your restaurant is having a jingle contest among the employees, with sweet prizes and stuff. You have written a sweet jingle, but you have no idea how to record it so you can enter it in the contest. One night, you’re out at the bar and you meet a dude who is traveling the country with thousands of dollars worth of recording equipment in his trunk.

This story really happened, but in a non-RPG-dialogue kind of way (i.e. to someone else who is not you). So what do you think was the upshot?

The upshot

This is Isaac Bowman. He wrote a fun little jingle about Lynn’s Paradise Cafe, the restaurant where he works. So, lacking any instruments, we started recording a snappy acapella rendition of his jingle. Singing is not his bag, or at least not one of his major bags, so it was mostly up to me to sing in all the parts to fit with his melody. Together we worked up a pretty sweet arrangement for it. I had a lot of fun.

Then, we were off to West Virginia. On our way there, we saw a lot of horses. Sorry Melissa, I didn’t get any shots of them.

But oh my goodness! This really exists!

Subscribe to Horse!  Read Horse!

You can sate your desire for horse pictures for a mere $10! Also, the word HORSE starts to look really funny after you’ve been googling it for a bit. Also, it kind of looks like if you subscribe they will actually give you a horse.

NEXT: Buddies of olde.

Cincinnati, OH / Covington, KY

En route to Cincinnati, I saw this great sign:

WATCH FOR BOTKINS NEXT 5 MILES

Also en that same route, my host called and said she was going to a drum circle / tribal dancing something-or-other, could I meet her there?

“So wait, you want me to meet you at a place where a bunch of people are drumming together?”
“Yes.”

So that was a done deal. It was actually across the river from Cincinnati in Covington, Kentucky. I went there, met a bunch of drummers and dancers, told them a bit about the project, and set up my microphones.

Microphones set up: check.

The drumming went on for several hours. I was even able to drum with them. Good times were had by all.

Good times being had by all. More good times being had by all. They are rolling, these good times. No seriously, they were pretty good times. Closeup of good times being had by just me. Good Times and the Case of the Three Drummers You don't even want to know how good these times were.

Several of the dancers could wield swords using their heads.

Dancer, With Sword Poise! Grace! Swords!

After the good times were over (or rather, that particular type of good time was over), I met up with my host (who was also hosting another Couchsurfer named Gary that night in addition to JH and myself), Frances. She was fun and a gracious host. We went to some dude’s house with a crazy cat and then went to her place and called it a night.

It's a night!

Next morning, we played with random wind instruments

What time is it?  Random woodwind time.

before finally saying goodbye.

Other Couchsurfer Gary, host Frances, and cool dude me.

And again.

Excuse me serviceman, can you tell me how to operate this Korean's backpack?

So I went to leave, only to find that my car had been parked in by

BAT BUG!

Bat Bug (with its loyal owner) is the scourge of the roads!

Anyone who a) knows me , b) knows their Calvin and Hobbes, or 3) was a member of my clan in the Storm Knights can easily guess that that made my day.

NEXT: Horses! Jingles! Frommage!

Detroit, MI

Motown!

The Motown peeps were strangely silent, despite my advertisements. But I did manage to get in touch with some peeps in the Detroit area: Dan Martin in Belleville and Allie Habhab in Dearborn Heights.

Let’s start with Dan, a multitalented musician and our kind host for a night.

Dan Martin, multimath!

Dan contacted me and mentioned that he could play piano, guitar, harmonica, sing, and do various character voices. He actually called me as Jimmy Stewart. It was pretty cool. Except, thinking about it, I should have asked him, “didn’t you die in 1998?”

Anyway, JH and I had a good time hanging out with Dan in his comfy mobile home. It turns out that he does even more than what he said in his email. He writes books, makes a Christian radio program, drives cab, writes songs, all kinds of things. He played and sang one of his own tunes for me which was nice.

I had just been thinking that Dan’s voice reminded me a lot of Rich Mullins when he asked me, “Are you familiar with Rich Mullins?” Awesome. Anyway, he had a very nice voice, and his music had a healthy dose of the emotive etherealness going on. It was my hope to be able to capture some of that for my project. So we had a few improvisations on some “floaty” kind of music.

A little jammin' goin' on.

Dan also put down some harmonica and piano for me.

Bustin' out some mad harmonica and piano action.

After dinner, we recorded a bit more (I had him do a piano improv), watched a movie, and hit the sack.

Next morning, I was off bright and early to meet with Allie Habhab, a vocalist who had contacted me about recording. He showed me some of the stuff he had already recorded, which was some very groovy R&B stuff, the kind of stuff where you can say you like “the beats.” In particular, his half-falsetto voice sounded fantastic and I immediately started looking for which songs that could fit in, and we started recording.

Then, it came up in conversation that his family is Labanese and he speaks Arabic fluently. Hmmmmmm.

Sing, sing, sing the Arabic!

So we spent a while coming up with some complementary Arabic lyrics for one of my songs, and added them in. Definitely a little Desert Rose action going on with that track now. I was super happy after recording with Allie. Another language! Another culture! Diversity unified! Anytime that happens I get pretty happy.

After lunch with Allie at an excellent subs/kebobs place, we were off to the next stop, which, as it happens, ended up being a lot of driving for minimal payoff. But at least the driving was scenic.

NEXT: A Tale of Scenic Driving (Minus Any Actual Scenes)