New album pre-order and donation site

The album is now mastered and being given 'brilliant colors' by Simone Rubi!! I've decided to use RTI to press the vinyl - they're the best in the business (plus they have photos of every single employee on their website) - and since it's a little pricier than other options, I'm making the album available for pre-order on this IndieGogo platform to raise a little more green. Click on the photo to read all about it, and please spread the word!

Pre-order The Deer Convention:

(photo by Danielle Rubi, taken in Brittany, France)

And, you can even get a song written just for you!!

Mastering The Deer Convention

Mastering session yesterday. I'm listening on different sound systems now, it's so much better than the unmastered version!

the tape machine we ran all the tracks through, to give them that special flavor.

the yellow blurbs are sound waves. when they're magnified a lot they look like a bunch of little fish bones on a string!

Flying High

Happy New Year! I started the year by experimenting with protools, so here is the result: my cover of a Bridget St John song - to you, in the hopes that you may all fly high this year indeed! I also played around with it and made a little movie, using some images from trains and buses I traveled on this year. You can watch it here.

Fly High (Bridget St John) by wingeddeer

Unearthing

Sad as the breeze from Helene Renaut on Vimeo.

I don't play this song anymore so it was fun to hear it again, especially with Jessica and Miranda singing harmonies...if you go to the vimeo link there are more songs from the same concert (I just learned how to cut up videos, yay!)

*

And this one I wrote for my nephew (he turned 5 yesterday!...):

To Be A Child from Helene Renaut on Vimeo.

A perfect day to read

This weekend brings us rain and winds and even a storm, and the perfect excuse to curl up on the daybed with a book. A good book. 

I've been on somewhat of a reading rampage lately, currently enjoying Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies- which seems to be one of his best recent books, on par with the adventures in mankind of the early ones. So far, even more exciting than Invisible, of which I thought the same thing (and I wasn't disappointed) when I started reading it a few weeks back. 

Another book that kept me reading all day last weekend was Houellebecq's La Carte et le Territoire- which just won the Goncourt prize in France, to great controversy (but don't the French love controversy?). Despite all the bad rep he's garnered with the critics and the press in recent years- not being quite PC enough for Paris' liberal intelligentsia - I still think he wrote yet another great book, one with unexpected depths and layers. One only has to look at his brilliant passages on the nature of creation and art, the fascinating (and hilarious) use of himself and other public figures as characters, or his astute vision of his country only a few years ahead, with a countryside revitalized by tourism and the young eco-entrepreneurs. He's merciless in his analysis of the modern world, yet almost tender when it comes to humanity, but without any sentimentalism. And need I say, it's all extremely well written.

(Have you noticed, I'm actually reading male writers? it had been a while. But I still want another Pagano for Christmas, and a Hélène Bessette is next on my shelf.)

What have you been reading lately?

Expecting to fly

So ecstatic about the Kickstarter project being completed and successful! It was an epic last 24 hours but we made it. Thank you everybody! I feel a little bit like this woman, ready to take flight but still a little afraid:

(photo borrowed from an online friend, source unknown to me...)

She feeds you tea and oranges

While in New York I got to make music too, not just visit museums (or, ahem, shopping...).

Through a friend I made another one, Chris Carlone, who kindly offered to play some minimal drums and slide guitar on my songs. Chris is a cool guy, he used to live in San Francisco and is now in the Upper West Side with his family. He does a lot of different stuff - photo, video, music - see some of it here, and there for instance.

So there we were, a first rehearsal one day, a show that night. Then another gig a few days later. That one was at Building on Bond, a sweet restaurant in Brooklyn. They close one half of the room, and everybody gets very quiet. No mics, no tricks. It was wonderful. Even the bartender was careful to wait for the end of a song to use the foam machine...and Chris sounded as though we had had ten rehearsals, instead of that lone one - very tasteful. We had a nice crowd, of both friends and strangers, and oh so very attentive. I ended the set with Leonard Cohen's Suzanne, because for all the years I've been playing it, I always envisioned Suzanne walking to the East River, or maybe the Hudson - even though I'm pretty sure he wrote it in Montreal...

Chris also did a set of his own beforehand, played guitar but also the ukulele, and did a sweet rendition of Moon River on it - such a classic New York song to me: 

***

Another day  we ventured to Central Park to make some attempts at shooting something. Here I go walking to the shoot:

I thought I'd wear this black dress with the white collar to sort of give it a more Halloween feel, and match the Fall theme provided by the changing trees. At times it made me look like a little girl:

...not so great. But the leaves truly were magnificent, and I think I managed an ok rendition of Orpheus on that one.

Thank you New York City... see you next time, you always amaze me!