Oklahoma’s native rocker, Tyson Meade of Defenestration and Chainsaw Kittens fame is recording a new album.
Meade has spent the last five years running a boarding school in Shanghai, China.
Tyson has been home, in Oklahoma, the last couple of months. While in Oklahoma he has been performing in order to raise money for his upcoming recording project. Tyson recently played to a packed house at The Chouse in Norman, VZD’s in Oklahoma City, as well as Dwelling Spaces in Tulsa and brought back lots of early 1990’s memories to his friends and fans alike.
The last time his band, the Chainsaw Kittens performed was in 2009 at the first annual Norman Music Festival. The band stopped performing full-time in 1996.
From Tyson’s Kickstarter page for the project:
Meade walked away from a full-time career in the music business in 1996 (just briefly popping up here and there since that time) after feeling like his creative well had run dry. “I had lost my inspiration to write songs,” he explains. “Maybe the fire was gone. Maybe I no longer thought of the process as being inventive or mysterious. Maybe I thought I was no longer doing this for the purity of music. For whatever reason, I stopped writing music.”
For a complete change of focus and pace, Meade began teaching grammar to international students at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Shortly thereafter, Meade relocated to China, a country whose culture had always fascinated him. He settled in to a college prep position teaching at a boarding school and was eventually appointed Dean of Students there. He was incredibly moved by his experience as a teacher and slowly the desire to play and write music returned. One of his students in particular, a boy called Haffijy who played violin, was especially impressed with his teacher’s musical past. “I played Haffijy some of my songs from my music days and he quickly wrote parts for them,” Meade recalls. “Not only did he write parts, he played with such love and honesty that I was touched immeasurably. Birds chirped in some sort of Far East Disney way.”
Meade was eager to explore a further musical collaboration with Haffijy. “I became very curious as to how he might score a song still in development, one that I had no preconceived notions about, one that I had just written — though I had not written any songs in some years at that point,” Meade says. “I was now driven to write a song.”
The result was “Stay Alone” (listen here: http://tysonmeade.bandcamp.com/), which became the catalyst for the entire China project. Meade played the song for some of his Western music friends, including fellow Norman-based, alt-rockers the Flaming Lips (who covered the Chainsaw Kittens’ “She’s Gone Mad”), Jimmy Chamberlain of Smashing Pumpkins, Maria McKee, and Other Lives (Meade has previously collaborated with Other Lives’ Jesse Tabish and the Flaming Lips’ Derek Brown on a project called Winter Boys). After hearing “Stay Alone,” these friends became interested in being a part of this unique, cross-cultural project and have agreed to contribute to this record as well.
Tyson Meade’s Kickstarter page (please help fund this project): http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tysonmeade/tyson-meade-records-an-album-in-china?ref=live
All About Travel has teamed up with Tyson to share with you his progress while recording the new album. We hope to share with you some video and photos as the process is underway.
We will be flying him from Seattle to Hong Kong next month to start his project.
Tyson Meade @ Dwelling Spaces in Tulsa – July 19th
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