My first AirBnB booking ever was on a songwriting trip to LA bought with Southwest points and a little bit of sync money.
For four days, I lived on a narrow cul-de-sac up in the 90210, a house I endearingly called a "decaying Hollywood mansion," but wasn't really a mansion nor was it in Hollywood.
"We live in the ghetto of Beverly Hills," my host said. I'd seen worse ghettos. His was a vision of the 80s, with mirrored paneling and a color palette in nine shades of brown. Every day around six, music would play through whole house speakers. A breathless instrumental thing like Yanni that I could never identify, but assumed might be for housecleaning vibes or karaoke.
When I wasn't driving around the 405 meeting up with other struggling songwriters doing the same grind, I worked and slept in a boxy little room on the second floor. It was a bit of a trope, really. An artist holed up in a Beverly Hills bedroom filled with scribbled lyric sheets, a couple of wine bottles and a guitar. I just needed Graham Parsons to drop by with a supply of party favors...
The neighbor on one side was actress Jaime King, whom I never saw but could hear taking calls on the patio with her agent. She lived in a blindingly white mid-century house built for Walt Disney's daughter with a bright red door. The house on the other side was the type of Tuscan-inspired Falcon Crest mini-mansion you’d expect a retired TV-Land celebrity like Robert Goulet or James Garner to live in, except it was neither.
In the listing, the first floor kitchen was supposedly for my exclusive use, but the host and his wife came down daily to pay bills, have low-level arguments and eat snacks. Their energy was a bit intense, and I avoided it when I could.
"When do you leave again?" the wife asked at one point. I never figured out how she didn't know how many days I'd booked on an app where it could be so easily referenced. It felt like the final days of touring when we'd sleep on a floor we'd slept on a few times too many and the homeowners seemed to say "aren't you guys a little old for this?" without using the words.
I left with a few more songs in the bank captured in Garageband, and I don't even remember what they were. But the important thing is that I brought my space along - a microphone and an Mbox wrapped in pajama pants. The studio, as it were, in a checked bag.
And this quiet lane between the star of Sin City and the star of Rockford Files (probably) marked the beginning of a key component of my process.
The writing retreat.
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