Brad Spurgeon's Blog

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia – This post has nothing to do with my location of sitting in a hotel room high above hot and humid Kuala Lumpur, where I will be working and playing music for the next week…except perhaps that high in the air (although not high in the head) is also where I was when I edited this music video of the first of my songs from the Melodium recording sessions last month in Montreuil.

In fact, yes, this post is all about a chain of events that started at the Melodium Studio in Montreuil outside Paris last month, that continued in the streets of Paris’s Latin Quarter over the weekend and that I finalized on my flight to Kuala Lumpur from Paris last night. I’m talking about the video that I put together for my song “When You’re Gone Away,” the music of which I recorded in Montreuil last month, and that I filmed in Paris over the weekend and that I edited on the flight and uploaded in my hotel room in Kuala Lumpur.

That actually seems a fitting chain of events for my song called, “When You’re Gone Away,” that I recorded along with my favorite lead player, Félix Beguin and drummer, Jeremy Norris – both of whom are in two excellent Paris bands, The Burnin’ Jacks and the Velvet Veins – and also with Scott Bricklin – a Paris expat musician originally from Philadelphia – on bass. Together, as I mentioned in a blog item about my session at Melodium Studios, we recorded five songs, of which “When You’re Gone Away,” is one.

In the coming weeks I plan to continue making videos of these songs and releasing them, and then I plan to put out a CD of the whole, as well as others of my songs (and a wicked cover song). The videos will all be quite different; this one was fun, as I did it walking around Paris and being filmed by Raphaëlle, and adding two bits of “mystery footage” from the past and from elsewhere in the world that I took – see if you can spot it!

The beauty of doing these recording sessions was the incredible cohesion and talent I was surrounded with in Félix, Jeremy and Scott and their wonderful arrangements and Félix’s mixing. All three have worked together extensively, and often at the incredible Melodium Studios, and of course, I have gigged with Félix regularly in the last five years. So it was all just so together.

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