Travelogue #4: Singapore

I swear, if I have to watch 27 dresses on another airplane, somebody is going to get kicked in the face. Bad movie. Bad, bad movie.

In other news...just got into my dad's apartment in singapore this morning at 3 am...it felt a little strange to be back alone at first, but more than anything I felt something which I haven't felt for any place other than ann arbor for a long time...that feeling of home. Coming back to a place that knows you, seems to welcome you and go, hey, good to see you. It was a good feeling. I love this apartment and Singapore and I'm really excited to hit the town with my dad today and have some really fucking good Chinese food.

I am SO excited bcause my friend Darren Criss is coming back to the States today (not that I'll be there to welcome him...but nevertheless!!) He's the one who sang all the male harmonies on the record, and when he gets back in the fall - and I may be jumping the gun here - but aside from my solo stuff we're going to start a little side project together, just me and him, called Ladies and Gentlemen in the inspiration of other male/female duos in the past (She & Him, the Weepies, the Mill Stone, etc.) So look out for that in september...I'm so excited!!

Also exciting in the music world of Charlene Kaye is the fact that my sister just did the most beautiful vocal/guitar arrangement of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be nice" I have ever heard in my life. I'm talking full-throttle Brian Wilson harmonies (do you have any idea how hard it is to figure out every note in those trillion-part beach boys harmonies?), I'm talking oohs and bop bops, I'm talking soul. She's the real deal, people. The kitchen sink. The kit and kaboodle. I can only hope to embody the same kind of free, untainted joy and love for a song that she manifests in everything she sings and plays. So go check it out on her MYSPACE right now. And if you like that, which you will, then check out her other covers and her own amazing songs, "Writer's block" and "syllables.

And just because I can, I'm going to post this...makes me so happy. Thanks to Bryan, who I met that night, for volunteering to capture the magic!!


Okay, so nothing exotic and foreign and exciting yet...my head's still in ann arbor. But gimme a break, I just got here. More soon.

Signing off from Singapore,
C DollaZ

Travelogue #3: Tokyo

Jet Lag is a pain in the arse. Sitting here at 3:10 am for the 3rd night in a row hoping to facebook chat and catch up with people from home and just generally having my mind being overwhelmingly tired and groggy but my body restless and wide awake. Today's our last day in Tokyo before we fly down to Singapore tonight. 7 hour flight!! In my western ignorance I guess I assumed all Asian countries were just a hop, skip and a jump away from each other, but nope. It's like Cher's dad said in Clueless about L.A. : "Everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes!!!" Funny how that's stuck with me after all these years. Although to be fair, Clueless did define my adolescence (or early adolescence, anyway).

Last night my dad and I went to eat some sushi (surprise!) and while I was sitting there in the booth waiting for our food I kind of zoned out and started looking all around the restaurant, noticing that the Japanese businessmen all sitting at the bar didn't seem to be talking at all. And if some of them were, it was nothing more than a murmur, or a faint whisper. That's the custom over here in these collectivist cultures - the overwhelming desire for unobtrusiveness, modesty, not trying to attract too much attention to yourself. Even when we were riding the subway I looked around and everyone was either immersed in a book, looking directly down into their laps, or sleeping. It was totally silent. Anyway, as I was sitting there thinking about all this, Lady Irony decided to pull a fast one on me and I dropped the cup of tea I was holding so it made a huge crashing sound on the table and caused all the tea to pour into my lap, through my white dress, scalding my thighs. I let out a sort of animalistic scream of pain and the ENTIRE RESTAURANT went silent, if it was possible for it to be more silent than it already was. But it was a different kind of silence - this was a LOUD silence. Every murmur stopped, every single head turned, the waitress flipped and started running around like a chicken with her head cut off, shouting, "Serimasen!! Serimasen!!" (which means I'm sorry). I kept going "it's okay, it's okay!" But she ran to get me some towels anyway and when she came back, started frantically dabbing at my wet dress, yammering away in Japanese, then actually lifted up my skirt and started dabbing my bare legs with the towel!!! (At this point everyone quickly turned back around.) The whole thing was just absurd and silly and hilarious to me, and so I just started laughing, and once I started I couldn't stopped. This appeared to be a bigger scandal than the whole spilling tea debacle, which made me laugh even harder. I'm such a lady, huh?!

Travelogue #2: Tokyo

While I've had a ton of time in my hotel room by myself I've been trying to do some exercises in a genre I dub "place songwriting." Just kind of soaking in the general atmosphere of a place, soaking in the sounds, the people, the feel of it all, and trying to come up with an aural component for that experience...I was inspired by songs like Rufus's "Barcelona," Sufjan's "Chicago," (fuck, all of Sufjan's songs about places), Sinatra's "New York, New York," Mason Jennings' "California"...the list goes on. It's been such a unique and mindblowing experience even after only 2 days in this crazy city. People who have never been out of the U.S need to experience coming to a place where finding a soul who speaks your language is like trying to find the message in a Will Ferrell movie, where making eye contact with someone rarely ever happens, where eating goose liver for breakfast is as ordinary and routine as brushing your teeth in the morning. My taste buds are still getting acclimated to all the interesting foods I've come across...so much raw fish...always raw fish!! For breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Unagi, maguro, ahi, among many other forgettable pronunciations and names. American arrogance aside, I'm actually really surprised that hardly anybody speaks English, because I thought Tokyo was one of the international business hubs of the world and I guess I thought more American businessmen frequented this place. Even the subway signs are all english-free...my dad spent 10 minutes trying to get the guy in the ticket booth to give him an English map. "Map," he said frantically, making a square in the air with his index finger. "Map." And all this time the guy was just smiling and nodding at him pleasantly as if he were telling a nice joke before finally realizing what my dad was miming. Sheesh.



We did eventually get to our destination thanks to this ^ ...went to the Western museum of art and I used my knowledge from my art history classes to educate my dad about Impressionism and Modernism and what the little dots in the Signac painting meant...it was great. We're about to tackle the craziness of the subway station yet again. It's raining outside and looking down from my window I see masses of umbrellas, moving along the sidewalk like little colorful dots. It made me miss America already. More to come soon.

Travelogue #1: Tokyo.

Hooray! I'm alive. I'm sitting at the tiniest desk in the tiniest hotel room I have ever seen in my life at the Shinjuku Washington Hotel in Tokyo. My head and whole body aches because I haven't slept in 18 hours (13 hour plane ride!) and I'm horribly jet lagged. It's 9 pm here but I'm trying to keep myself awake long enough to go to bed at a semi-normal hour so I can wake up at a semi-normal time tomorrow. So if this blog trails off mid-sentence, know that it's because my head drooped over the keyboard in a failed attempt to stay conscious.

I just went into the little hotel drug store downstairs to try and buy some face wash, as I had forgotten mine, but since everything was in Japanese, I couldn't tell which bottle was which and got a little worried at the possibility of lathering foot cream onto my face if I chose the wrong bottle...I combed the racks and found a couple bottles which may or may not have been what I was looking for, with no english description except for this written under the huge japanese block letters: "menthol and ginger gives pleasant tingle sensation when applied." Hmm. Nice, but a little vague. The only other thing that i saw was "Men's face wash." Men's? What about the women's? I took the bottle and brought it up to the lady at the register, dumbly asking in English whether they had WOMEN'S face wash, because this was men's. She looked at me and went, "Men-zu?" I said yeah, Men's. She went to go browse the rack herself, coming back a minute later with a white bottle labeled FACIAL WASH - presumably for both sexes - and exclaimed, "Men-zu!", thrusting the bottle at me, having obviously thought that Men-zu meant "face wash" in English and looking like she had just split the atom. for a moment I felt pretty arrogant and ashamed for wondering why she didn't speak English, feeling that American egocentrism kick in; the belief that the whole world should be able to speak English because we do. I thanked her, and after struggling a little with the Yen to pay her, went on my merry way.

In my 3 hours of being here the most noticeable thing for me is that the Japanese have an overwhelming penchant for all things small. Tiny pillows, tiny TV, tiny trash can and desk, tiny toothbrush and toothpaste. Everything is very neat and clean and orderly, not a wrinkle to be found in the sheets, not a thing out of place. The young people around here are all trendy as hell...all the girls are impossibly skinny and all wear loose, baggy shirts with tight black capris and high heels, and the boys all seem to favor a kind of spiky, sideswept rockstar 'do with popped collars, wide-rim glasses, dog tags, and skinny jeans.

i'm exuberant at the thought of seeing the city tomorrow. My dad and I are going to see a sumo match at some point this week, which i'm really excited about. And I've definitely hit that wall of tiredness, so I'm giving in...until next time...kjdsghfnDL?EWv

making of the album

So, i think i owe it to you to show you what it is exactly that I've been up to these past 9 months. I finally compiled all the footage jim, ross, myself and mike had gotten on tape, and made a little mini-documentary of it. There's definitely a lot that wasn't caught on tape, this is mostly drums and background vocals...but it's still pretty funny and endearing (to me, anyway). An intimate behind-the-scenes sneak peek, if you will. Enjoy.

Things I Will Need in the Past

was mixing in the studio for 8 hours today. Two songs - "Seasons" and "Strike a Chord - that are like, 85% mixed....are up on my myspace - briefly!!! So have a sneak peak for good things to come and take a listen HERE. I'm so happy and proud of them and I hope you like them as much as I do.

Oh, and there's officially a title: The record will be called "Things I Will Need in the Past." Separate post on that to come. Release date will be September 2008. I'm really excited.

i chopped off my hair.

why? because my dear mother's most current obsession is Posh Spice's haircut and because she wants to live vicariously through me, BRIBED me with cold, hard cash to cut my hair just like her. Now ordinarily, I wouldn't dream of selling my self-respect for a couple measly benjamins, especially because haircut advice from mom has never brought anything but dreadful results. The little angel on my shoulder was yelping: I make decisions for myself! I do what I want to do, not what my wallet says I should do! But the little guy on my other shoulder was saying, you are gonna be an unpaid intern this summer, you have a record to finish and an engineer to pay, and you don't have anybody to impress anyway. Well, all right, I thought. So I caved, and marched into the salon today with my eyes clamped shut, expecting the worst. I boldly told the lady to do her thing, and when it was over, I opened one eye, took a deep breath.......and went, oh. really? It wasn't even bad after all - in fact, I really like it! So the moral of the story is, even though I did it for money, above that I did it in the name of art, and that in itself retains some nobility, right? Man. I still don't really know how it happened - one minute I was sitting around, living off the fat of the land, and the next I was sitting in a salon chair and POOF! 7 inches of hair was gone.



but i'm pretty happy with it.

side note: I swear I've paid for this record in the most unusual ways. The other day I gave Jim $277 in old gift cards that I found in my wallet and room which spanned various birthdays and christmases (Target, Borders, and Joe's Crab Shack) over who knows how many years. I'm not even mad about it.