So who exactly is Adam Lasher ? Well Adam has enjoyed a little bit of notoriety in a number of ways: let me explain. First off, what everyone should know is that Adam is an extremely talented musician in his own right. He has been featured several times on the popular TV show “The Voice” and “American Idol” and has even had Jimmy Fallon impersonate him. When we signed a deal with KVCR / PBS television to broadcast Musicology Season One, we contacted Adam to see if he would be interested in coming on the show. Although Adam is a renowned singer-songwriter, he also surrounds himself with a bunch of talented session musicians so we knew whoever Adam brought with him for the show will be exceptional. And, we were right!
To this point in filming, we had been focusing on the actual filming rather than the the live musical performance itself. In other words, in good old-fashioned UK style “Top of the Pops” we had been having the bands lip-synch. We naturally Expected Adam to do the same. “Absolutely NOT” exclaimed Adam….”I’m only going to do this if it’s recorded live !”
Gulp… the problem was that we had only come prepared with the equipment to do lip-synch (ie. simple PA system for playback). Rather fraught with the ‘surprise’ imposed upon us by Adam, I scrambled around in the back of my truck and found a 12 channel analog mixer. Between Enrique the drummer and myself we were miraculously able to cobble together enough equipment to get a stereo mix out of the board to a handheld Zoom recording device. Everything actually sounded pretty good through the headphones so we decided to roll and start the recording process and basically hope for the best. I hadn’t realized up to that point, how much of a perfectionist Adam Lasher was! The normal three or four takes the track turned into a cool 16 for Adam.
See Musicology Season 1 Episode 2 Featuring Adam Lasher
It was however worth the pain. Several trips to 7-11 later (to rectify Adam’s blood sugar as he’s a type 1 diabetic) we had a result! “These Shoes” , a track written quite appropriately by Adam tells the story of how he strove to find musical success in his own right. Oh, in case you are wondering what I mean by that, Adam Lasher‘s uncle is the legendary Carlos Santana whom Adam has toured with and of course learned from during his guitar playing career.
The recordings turned out perfectly. Enriquez was definitely a whiz on an analog board and him and I mustered up a mean mix that required very little post production mix down. After all, we had to honor Adams phenomenal guitar playing and vocals, Daniel Watson from 70s legends Kool and the Gang keyboard playing, and a kick-ass rhythm section comprising Al Kim on the bass guitar and Enriquez (aka sound engineer)on the drums.
We remained in close contact with Adam and invited him to host our Season 1 closing show. He was an absolute natural and made it a very easy decision to hire him to host Musicology Season 2 .
