Behind the Kit: Model Child at Alphaville

An SPD Adventure!

Almost every drum teacher I’ve studied with told me to record myself playing and watch back with close attention. Now that I own a discreet and better-than-decent camera, I’ve started taking their advice. I’ve built a small library of footage from behind the kit at my shows. Now, I’d like to share some of these recorded sets (along with my commentary & memories of the gig), with you, my paying subscribers. If you aren’t a paying subscriber, sorry, you’ll have to catch me live and in person instead.

Model Child, Live at Alphaville in Brooklyn, NY (11/4/2023)

I met Danny Parker, aka Model Child, in July 2023. Danny had recently moved to New York from Los Angeles, where he was working as a professional songwriter, with the intention of focusing on his solo music. On the recommendation of Adelyn Strei, who long-time subscribers may remember for her brief appearance in the Minnesota stretch of my 2022 tour diary, Parker reached out to me. One sweltering July morning the two of us met up at Variety Coffee in Park Slope to suss each other out and see if I fit for the project. Normally I find these kinds of vibe checks a little stressful, but my ego got a nice boost when, arriving early, I was rockagnized as a member of Bellows by some of the dudes from Market. Thanks for the gas-up, guys!

Still, I had no reason to be stressed out. Danny and I hit it off immediately. He had watched the clips from my Drumming Upstream covers on Instagram and was impressed by my stylistic range, which is a gratifying realization of at least one of my goals with the project. It turned out that the two of us had also spent our childhood summers in the same small town in Maine for years, which blew both of our minds. Coffee finished and friendship confirmed, we quickly made plans to start rehearsing.

We met up again later that week at my practice space during an awful stretch when the building’s air conditioning was busted. Even over the sound of three buzzing floor fans, I thought the two of us sounded pretty good! Danny bounced a few songs from his vault of unreleased material at me, some of which sat comfortably in my indie rock wheelhouse and others that called for a more straight-ahead dance pop approach. By the end of the practice we both felt confidant that we had the blueprint for a solid live band, and made tentative plans to rehearse again soon. Those plans ran into a number of complications. First, we had trouble nailing down a third member to play bass and synth. Second, the first few shows that Danny booked for a two-piece version of the band were on nights where I was already booked to play with another band. Finally, Danny got hit with an especially nasty case of COVID that kept him out of commission for two months. Once he’d recovered he snagged a gig at Alphaville opening for Walter Etc and Suzie True, both on tour from California. We had only a week to prepare, so we quickly got to work.

Since we’d be playing the set as a duo, our plan was to load up my Roland SPD-SX sampler with backing tracks for each song which I’d trigger and then play along with while Danny sang and occasionally played guitar. This wasn’t my first time at the backing track rodeo. Both Bellows and Humeysha required me to play along with tracks loaded into Ableton, and Humeysha and Shalom also asked me to trigger some tracks myself on the SPD. But no previous gig had placed the responsibility for every sample in my hands. The songs Danny picked for the set aren’t particularly challenging, they usually stick to a single groove and have variations that are pretty easy to map out once you have a hold on the form, but both of us were antsy about nailing the technical aspect of the performance. After a couple of successful practices playing along to the tracks on Danny’s computer, we met up early on the day of the show to sort out the SPD situation.

You ever see Zoolander? You know that scene where Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are trying to get the files out of the computer? I’m not saying that either of us are male model dim about music gear, despite the band name, but neither of us are SPD experts either. We tried and failed to import the backing tracks straight from Danny’s computer, spent an hour furiously googling until I got fed up and left the space to rage-devour a burrito, sent many confused/confusing texts to my more tech savy Bellows bandmates, before finally using my laptop to successfully import the files. Whew. Crisis averted, we loaded up all of our gear and high-tailed it to Alphaville!

If you’d like to read about the show itself and watch my footage of our performance, consider subscribing to this newsletter for only $5 a month!