Iron & Wine just played two killer shows at the Wiltern Theater in LA (and KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic, Conan, an AOL session and an impossible [turns out, actually possible] Amoeba in store with the 11 piece band, all in three days.  Tiring?  Yes.  Feeling good about who I work for this year?  Quite.

Woke up early on day four to fly to NYC and conquer the east coast.  Soho Apple store tomorrow and then Radio City Music Hall on Saturday night!  The only problem is that New York City is covered in snow.  Again.  Stuck in LAX waiting at Baja Fresh (is this the only place to eat in LAX?) until our flight can leave.  After a few hours and more than one beer at the Karl Strauss Brewery we get our announcement that we actually will make it to New York today.  The tour manager is running around trying to see if the gear will make it in time for the Soho Apple Store gig.  (It probably won’t.)  Then I hear my name over the PA.  Why are they calling me?  I walk up to the counter and the attendant hands me a ticket.  Seat 5B?  That’s great!  LA to NYC is a long flight and now I can stretch out and have a nice dinner! (and maybe write this blog post?)

But then, I start to think…  There are 14 of us flying to NYC…  Should I be the only one to get upgraded?  What about, ahem, the singer?  The manager is on the flight with us too?  All Coach.  The poor horn players are carrying on saxophones!  Can you even transfer a ticket like that?  Should I just keep my mouth shut?  Out of the 14 of us, I have certainly flown the most in the past year.  Most band members only get to be in one band, but I can travel with three different ones in a year.  Should I just put my head down and accept the little comfort allotted to me and my frequent flyer status?  If the manager or the singer really wanted to be in business class shouldn’t they have just paid for it?  I board the plane with a carry on mandolin, I figured it was the least I could do.  I’m seat 5B, so I’m the seat right in front of the door where everyone boards the plane.  This means that EVERY band member and roadie can give me shit as they pass by.  Is it worth it?

I took a flight home with Stephen Malkmus once and I got upgraded and he didn’t.  We walked on the plane together and as I peeled off and sat in the front, he gave me a little jab an I thought “the guy headlining a stage at Coachella is in the back of the plane and I get in the front?”  I felt so dumb, I told myself I would never do that again.

But I did.  And the vegetarian chili in a bread bowl was really good.  And the hot fudge sunday bar was pretty killer too…

Oh man, when they read this I’ll never hear the end of it.

The next year we picked up a KSM9 for the Swell Season, and I really loved the sound of it.  So much more of a studio vocal tone than a “live” sound.  Glenn sings very loud so the issue of bleed never came up.  When Pavement asked me to do monitors for them, I jumped at the chance to try the KSM9 now that I could be on the other side of the snake.  This microphone made my job so easy all year, I couldn’t believe it.  If you use the KSM9 with any “modern”* wedge you will have an easy time getting loud and clear vocals.  Our Belgian tech described the KSM9 as “a microphone for a woman”, but I think you could only say that after a lifetime of only hearing dynamic vocal mics. Though it is the only vocal mic where I’ve had feedback at 12k!

If you need a new mic for your singer, give this a try and I’d be surprised if you didn’t love it after your first sound check.

* The D&B M2’s needed almost no EQing and were very, very loud.  (Not “proprietary wedges”, the phrase on any tech rider that gives me chills.  Most of the time they work out, but 1 out of 10 times the “proprietary wedges” are so weird and unwieldy you could get fired no matter what mic you use.)