18. Future Islands "Walking Through That Door"

Last year I recorded just over 1,000 songs live to 2-track tape for the music website Daytrotter.com. I'm running through a list of 25 of my favorites, the most memorable, etc etc etc of the 500 or so songs that were posted to the website in 2011.

Click here to download Walking Through That Door from Daytrotter

Here's a weird one. 

The recording practices I observe--using tape, eschewing computers--are esoteric, arcane, and time-consuming. The reasons behind this way of working are varied and might take several boring pages to explain, so in the interest of saving time I'll just say that I like the way it sounds. 

But it will probably still seem odd to some people that I included Future Islands, a three-piece from Baltimore (by way of North Carolina) in this list. Why should this come as a surprise?

For starters, they used a laptop in their live set. Secondly, the laptop was basically just there to play backing tracks out of Ableton, over which the guys in the band--bass, synth, and vocals--performed. 

Granted, this was all blasting through a huge, clunked-up P.A. that took the guys four or five trips back and forth from their raw-looking van to lug in. 

Additionally, the okay- or not-okay-ness of playing along with pre-recorded tracks is outside of the purview of this blog. 

But I will say that in my own touring apparatus, we have a few unspoken rules: the drums should always be live, the guitars should be played through no more than one effects pedal at a time, and if a keyboard is to be employed, it should be at least 40-years old and have the unmanageable weight and awkward bulk appropriate to an item of its vintage. Again, I just like the way this stuff sounds.

All that said, who cares? As long as the songs are great and the performances are compelling then any use of tracks, Ableton loops, samples, and/or Nord's is forgiven.

The songs that Future Islands' played for me on the day of their taping hinted at some of the late-70's Bowie stuff, early OMD, and New Order, but like most original music it defies easy categorization, to the extent that the trio have self-applied a hazy, catch-all descriptor: "post-wave." That's probably as apt a description as anyone else's that's floating around out there.

And as it turned out, Future Islands used their P.A. in the same way as, say, Coxsone Dodd would have used a sound system; I got the impression that they played a lot of weird warehouses and DIY spaces, and having a huge, bass-heavy P.A. with them at all times was a matter of logistical convenience.

After their P.A. was lugged in and set up, the band's keyboard player, Gerritt Welmers, was really the only one with anything left to do; Welmers set up the Ableton rig and two keyboards while William Cashion just plugged his bass into one of my amps. 

The singer, Sam Herring, paced around the live room in a white t-shirt, white pants, and Chuck Taylors. His sideburns were shaved all the way up to the ear line. He would have made a good extra in Blade Runner.

The musical core of the song I'm featuring here is comprised of a stomping kick-hat-snare beat, Cashion's melodic eighth-note bass part, and Welmers searing, warbly synth lead, with the true pathos of the song carried through Herring's crazy-sounding delivery. 

When Herring began to sing I was genuinely surprised. His voice was a coruscating growl that could modulate from plaintive whispering to theatrical belting in a matter of just a few syllables. It's Herring's voice more than anything that will keep you transfixed.

If I could have changed one thing about the way the signals were routed to tape, I would have tried to separate the beat from the rest of the track so I could have made it have more impact, but Welmers was pretty adamant about leaving the mix the way he had it pre-configured. I'm still pretty proud of the way it all came out, Ableton or no.

--January 22, 2012

To download the Future Islands' Daytrotter session mp3's, click here

19. Carl Broemel "All Birds Say/Carried Away"

Last year I recorded just over 1,000 songs live to 2-track tape for the music website Daytrotter.com. I'm running through a list of the 25 of my favorites, the most memorable, etc etc etc of the 500 or so songs that were posted to the website in 2011.


Click here to download All Birds Say/Carried Away from Daytrotter.

My Morning Jacket are bona fide rock stars with massive sales and important hair. I only know their music in a sketchy, playing-in-the-next-room kind of way. It's not that I dislike the band, it's just that I honestly haven't paid attention. 

My only direct experience with one of their records came in 2001. I was working as a fry cook at the Dog and Duck Pub, playing in a band and plagiarizing my way toward a bachelor's degree at UT. The back door of the kitchen opened onto the dishpit, which is where I was, arms-deep in a stainless steel sink, dunking red plastic baskets in suds-y water, when a co-worker walked into the kitchen and put a My Morning Jacket CD into the gunk-covered Sony boombox that hung by a chain over the mop sink. 

I couldn't really make much out over all the kitchen noise. There was was singing, there was some inoffensive guitar-ing, there was a lot of reverb: it was background music. The Damned and Paul Ray's Twine Time made much better music to fry fish and flip burgers to, and that was that.

Carl Broemel plays lead guitar and pedal steel in MMJ, but he was promoting his solo record, All Birds Say, when he came into my world in the spring of 2011.


On the day of his taping at Big Orange, Broemel set up a huge spread of effects pedals and a pedal steel rig. Carl sang into a looping pedal which he used to create shimmering, layered harmonies with himself, on the fly. I know a few guitarists who can actually pull this off, but generally I think guitarists' use of looping pedals is self-indulgent and obvious. But Carl employed the effect musically, and in a way that was integrated into the structure of the songs. He was accompanied on the session by his MMJ bandmates Bo Koster and Two-Tone Tommy Blankenship, on piano and bass respectively.


With a group of spoiled stadium rockers who all live in different cities you might expect drippy, sloppy, or undisciplined playing. Not so. Carl's guitar playing was expressive and efficient, and the unspoken musical sympathy between Broemel, Koster, and Blankenship was immediately apparent. Broemel is a tenor, which meant Koster had to sing the accompaniments with him in an assured falsetto, which is tough. I was really impressed.


The song itself has a simple, wistful charm: "Don't get carried away/In the past it's not there." The weird, Clare de Lune-esque chord voicings in the intro from 00:44 to 0:144 morph strangely into one another and the time signature is unpredictable, and Koster knew the song well enough having played it with Broemel at a show the night before, I don't think that Blankenship had ever heard it before. 


It's a nice song with enough unscripted moments to reward repeated listens, but there were plenty of those. So as far as the reason it's included here: Out of all the songs I recorded last year, this one was just a song I found I could return to again and again, even if it was just to have playing in the next room.

Click here to download All Birds Say/Carried Away from Daytrotter.


--January 10, 2012

20. Black Lips "Time"

Last year I recorded just over 1,000 songs live to 2-track tape for the music website Daytrotter.com. I'm running through a list of the 25 most memorable, etc (of the 500 or so songs that were posted to the website) in 2011.


Click here to download Time from Daytrotter

I'm not bogus enough to claim that I've remained completely abreast of Black Lips from day one, but I will admit to being a big fan now. The music is intentionally sloppy and they play up the whole GG Allin thing to ensure that everybody has a good time and they get written about, but I admire these guys on a number of levels. I think it's mainly because they are so great at unapologetically being themselves. 


One thing you hear if you hang around with musical types a lot is that so-and-so sold out the scene once they appear to enjoy some modicum of success, however pitiful or craven that success might actually be. The feeling transmitted when faced with the superior achievements of someone who's supposed to be one of our equals is one of anxiety and resentment. 


These guys have endured the deaths of friends and bandmates and trawled through deeper troughs of skum than you or I will ever have to, all the while drenching people's pysches with wild, brawling abandon. And though the guys may be legitimate fuck-ups, Black Lips are, in actual fact, some of the hardest working people I have ever met. Whatever success comes their way is hard-fought and well-deserved. 


On the day this session took place in March, Jared Swilley appeared to be on the coming-down end of a harrowing night on LSD; he laid on the piano bench with his arms covering his face and asked no one in particular, "Will I ever feel normal again?" He was wearing shorts, nearly destroyed penny loafers, a pair of Clubmasters, and one of those red-striped French Navy/Picasso shirts. I tried to imagine what normal feels like to Swilley.


The first time I met Cole Younger, on a previous session at Big Orange, he'd been playing a hot pink Stratocaster knock-off that kept breaking strings midway through every song. Bradford Cox had given it to him. This time Cole had his own guitar, which I believe was a Teisco, and was set up in the live room facing the drum riser and playing through my Champ, with Swilley on bass and Joe Bradley on drums. Ian St. Pe was playing some kind of off-brand guitar through a fuzz pedal someone had just given him. It sounded ragged and buzzy and cheap. He had a black eye and gold teeth and wore a black Braves cap.


In the control room, I patched my 4-track cassette recorder into the recording chain, after the 2-track machine; my thinking was that at the end of the session we'd have a standard 1/2-inch 2-track version as well as a lower-fidelity cassette-version. Recording to cassette has its advantages: the low bandwidth and less accurate frequency response of the narrower tape achieves the effect of compressing the entire stereo mix in a gooey, cake-y way. I use the 4-track in conjunction with 24-track 2-inch machine a lot.


To monitor what was coming off the 4-track, I patched the outputs back into the console (and, by default, back into the 2-track machine inputs), and, once I hit record on the 4-track, I'd inadvertently created an echo loop. The second I began recording the first tune it was like the deepest King Tubby dub possible. Of course the band heard the echo in their headphones and it fell apart after about a minute, but I still kept the echo-y count-in and spliced it onto the keeper take of the song. You can hear the count in, and download the whole session, here.


--January 8, 2012

To download the Black Lips Daytrotter session mp3's click here

21. Mike Watt "The Glory of Man"

Last year I recorded just over 1,000 songs live to 2-track tape for the music website Daytrotter.com. I've compiled a list of the 25 most memorable (of the 500 or so songs that were posted to the website) in 2011, to recap and examine this part of my year's work.


Click here to download The Glory of Man from Daytrotter

Mike Watt is a bass player from California whose interests include making important rock albums, helping to invent post-punk, and being a Genius of America. He's also into Hieronymous Bosch.

I am a big Bosch nerd. Relatives are always bummed when I give little Bosch books out to them as Christmas gifts. I made a Bosch Facebook page. So the fact that Watt's new record The Hyphenated-man is all about figures that Watt saw in Bosch paintings is ripe for exploitation.


Can't do it though. This blog is about 25 songs (culled from around 500 of the roughly 1,000 that I recorded last year) and why I chose to write about them, and I didn't know about the Bosch connection until after I'd begun to compile my list. The songs we taped from Hyphenated-man are great, but square-pegging one into the round hole here based on that coincidence would be cheating.

I recorded this in March, during the SXSW festival. That's a busy time of year. In addition to the 9 shows I was scheduled to perform with my band, the people who run Daytrotter had about 40 back-to-back sessions booked at Big Orange during the 5-day spell, something like eight or nine a day. My studio is situated on East 4th St., a few short blocks from the epicenter of the whole thing, inside a corrugated metal fence, and the outdoor compound was crawling with people in bands, publicists, managers, agents, the odd exec in loafers with no socks, magazine photographers, and various other wannabes and hangers-on swilling PBR. The European vice-president of a multi-national corporation sipped moonshine from a mason jar while PA's blasted music into the city air from every ordinal direction.


Meanwhile inside the studio, moments after I'd finished a session with a next-big-thing-type band, I spooled the reel of tape off the tape machine, walked out of the control room, and immediately threw myself into the mindless, physical work of getting the band out. There were already a few grizzled roadies loading the band's ATA-approved road cases, amps and guitars, and entourage out of the studio, and with no need for the kids in the band to lift a finger, they all rambled out, eager for the next party. As I speedily got set for the next session--coiling up mic cables, situating a guitar amp here, baffling off a bass amp there, repositioning a mic--a few members of Watt's camp began trickling in.


When Watt himself hobbled through the studio door, out of a cloud of dust with a bass guitar strung over his shoulder with what appeared to be fraying yarn, there wasn't time for me to process the enormity of his arrival into my humble space. I was a baby in diapers when the early-SST records were released. But like thousands of other people, Our Band Could Be Your Life gave my bandmates and I the (deluded?) courage to light out for the territory and try to make a go of it in our own scrappy, misshapen outfits.


You don't need anyone's permission: Watt and D. Boon didn't lay this bedrock foundation truth for doing music or making art. But they certainly lived and personified that principle, and because of that, they were like gods to me.


None of which I had any time to think about in the 3 minutes or so between the previous session and this one. Watt himself cut an imposing figure. He was wearing jeans, work-boots and a red-check flannel jacket (no shirt) un-buttoned to the chest, as if he'd *just* been found shirtless on the street and this was the garment he'd been handed. A small necklace with a pendant in the shape of a ship's anchor hung around his neck, and his knee was a in a brace. His right eyeball was either about to start (had already been in the process of???) bleeding.


Watt shambled from the doorway in my direction with a sense of purpose as I awkwardly fumbled with a tangled mic cable, a pair of headphones in one hand and a DI-box in the other, trying to balance all in the crook of my left elbow to shake hands, and he grabbed my hand, pulled me in close to him, and gave me a very soulful, warm hand-shake/half-bear-hug. Embracing me as an old friend, he spoke in a low sandpaper-y, growl-y, kind of mildly strangulated run-on sentence, and said something like "Huzzahbuzzahmuzzah this gowmuh fin shan, you know we do, HA HA!" He cackled jollily, tilting over across the room, as if on the pitching deck of a ship at sea, toward the bass amp set up for him near the south-wall of the space.


I hadn't even gotten the levels set when Watt's drummer Raul Morales counted the band in and they began performing the songs from Hyphenated-man; there was just time to hit record on the third stick click and to make adjustments on the fly while taping. The songs Watt and the three-piece played together were start-stop-sub-2-minute bursts of funk punk with jazz chords that rolled out with only 1 or 2 seconds between each, one from the other, as one continuously presented idea.


The recording of The Glory of Man, the song I'm linking to here, came at the tail end of the session. From an engineering standpoint, it's definitely not my best work. The drums in particular sound kind of crappy; I had to set up so fast, I don't even remember if I had a mic on the kick drum. Tom Watson, the guitar player, took the vocal on this one, and he did an admirable job filling in for the fallen Boon. I'm sure people are overjoyed to hear it (and anything else from Double Nickels on the Dime) when they play it live. I know I was.


I don't romanticize the early-SST-era. I'm not nostalgic for heady days I didn't experience. I believe that there are still honorable people in the music business, but indie doesn't equal honest; just because a label boss is an independent maverick doesn't mean he's not going to try to rip you off. (I think it's important to recall that Thurston Moore famously called SST a "cheap-jack mafioso outfit.") It's easy to be cynical these days, and if you, the reader, are cynical then this will sound trite, but the spirit with which these bands threw themselves into their work at a time when the template for doing so did not exist continues to inspire me. That's something I think I lost sight of for a while; this session was a good reminder.


--January 5, 2012

22. Robert Ellis "What's In It For Me?"

Last year I recorded just over 1,000 songs live to 2-track tape for the music website Daytrotter.com. I've compiled a list of the 25 most memorable (of the 500 or so songs that were posted to the website) in 2011, to recap and examine this part of my year's work.


Click here to download What's In It For Me? from Daytrotter.

Popular American country music today is all about songwriting-by-committee, corporate-sponsored arena tours, and singing into headset mics. Everyone knows this. The Countryness of one music vs. another--traditional, gospel, bluegrass, Old time, contemporary, rockabilly, alt-, etc--is too huge for me to try to think about, let alone write coherently about. Luckily, I am a musician, and not a writer, so I'm exempted from both. Let's just say that country has been country-in-name-only for a long time. 


I doubt that the country singer Robert Ellis thinks too much about Countryness either. On the surface at least, What's In It For Me? treads familiar thematic ground (girls, bars). It's a song that knows what it's supposed to do and what it's for--dancing slowly with a partner, or in the lack of a partner, drinking alone--and Ellis' band, utterly committed, doesn't stray from that single-mindedness of purpose. The template is there, and Ellis and his crew have used it efficiently.

As a writer however Ellis is too disciplined to stay confined to a template--too easy. Before the pedal-steel solo Ellis does one of those chromatic walk-up things and delivers the line "Time has changed and things are not what they used to be/sometimes it gets so hard to see/what's in it for me?" Accessible, but open-ended: Ellis is allowing the listener's mood to dictate how the lyric gets interpreted.

In June, when the session took place, Ellis was touring with a five-piece band. The bass player was the first to arrive. He plugged his bass in to an Ampeg B-15 and began playing Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. The rest of the guys--Telecaster player, pedal steel player, drummer, and Ellis--showed up a few minutes later with some girlfriends and a few record label people in tow and I started getting them all set up in the live room.

The band's stage set up called for Ellis' acoustic guitar to be recorded with a DI, but the sound of an acoustic guitar through a DI is something I absolutely cannot stand. I understand their purpose, but I'll avoid them if I can. So I set Ellis up in the control room facing the live room window, with a headphone feed of the band playing, and pointed a microphone at the guitar. Robert was using the control-room stereo headphone feed to listen to the band out in the live room, and there was no way for me to listen through headphones while we were tracking. So to avoid feedback I turned the studio monitors down to a whisper.

After I'd carefully set all the microphone gains and EQ, and checked the levels going to tape as well as I could, and the band was set, I turned the monitors all the way down and pressed record. The only thing I could hear was Ellis a few feet away. But it turned out that that was just enough.

--January 4, 2012

To download the mp3's from this session, click here.

23. The Futureheads "Heartbeat Song"

Last year I recorded just over 1,000 songs live to 2-track tape for the music website Daytrotter.com. I've compiled a list of 25 of the 500 or so songs that were posted to the website in 2011 to recap and examine this part of my year's work.

Click here to download Heartbeat Song from Daytrotter.

I've never heard any of this band's records, but in theory, it may be physiologically impossible for me not to like The Futureheads. They play fast and hard and everybody sings in 4-part harmony. They're kind of like a post-punk version of the savage young Beatles.  They got a raw deal in 2006 but managed to get out and go it alone, which is something I can relate to.

Whatever their experience in show-biz had been, they hadn't let it embitter them on the day they walked into the studio in the middle of a big U.S. tour. The bandmembers exuded genuine likeability without being phonies about it; they were cool, but they weren't too cool to show up. They arrived at the session ready to work and to blow it out as necessary.

Being from Sunderland, in the far North of England, these guys spoke in thick, unintelligible Northern brogues. At one point Ross Millard, one of the band's singer-guitarists, asked, "Could ah get bit more drooms?" Most of the time I had no idea what they were saying.

A lot of bands claim to do harmonies, but few do it as well as this, and even fewer do it as well as this live. Check into it at 00:48 heading into the first chorus. That's Barry Hyde, front guy, singing the lead. Millard, other front guy, is singing the third. The bass player "Jaff" Craig, appropriately, is singing a baritone part, just an octave below Hyde. And that high part panned slightly left is the drummer, Hyde's brother, Dave Hyde. This kind of control comes from hours of drills. In fact, they warmed up with the best vocal warm-up drill I have ever heard in my life. It was truly astounding. I managed to record just the tail end of the warm up on the sly, and I slipped it in with the masters I delivered, hoping they'd include it in their Daytrotter session for the people to download. Alas, no dice.

The recording is ragged. The bass--distorted, trashy--reminds me of the direct injection bass-sound they'd get at Maida Vale 4, where they did the BBC broadcast recordings in the late-70s. Which would be appropriate. I don't own any super-high-dollar tube mics, and even if I did, I wouldn't use them on a band like this. 57s, all the way. The guitar in the left channel was one of those Les Paul Specials, running through a cranked amp full up. The guys were all out in the live room so all the blasting amps and bashed cymbals were bleeding like crazy into the vocal mics. This thing sounds fucked up and blown out, but I love it.

Heart is something that the band's leader Barry Hyde and his crew obviously have got a lot of. And heart--as well as a good lawyer and a dry hat, as the saying goes--is something you have to have in this line of work.

--January 3, 2012

To download the Daytrotter session mp3's from this session, click here .

24. R. Stevie Moore "Sort of Way"

Last year I recorded just over 1,000 songs live to 2-track tape for the music website Daytrotter.com. I've compiled a list of 25 of the 500 or so songs that were posted to the website in 2011 to recap and examine this part of my year's work.

Click here to download Sort of Way from Daytrotter.

R. Stevie Moore (son of Bob Moore, Elvis' bass player) has self-released more music than anyone, ever. A mere glimpse at his Bandcamp page is enough to send spasms through the body. In the late 70s the guy moved from Nashville to Jersey and he basically stayed cooped up in an apartment, recording genius-level, commercially unviable songs that he hand-dubbed for his own cassette mail-order cottage industry, ROIR-style. In 2005, there was a really excellent short profile of Moore in the New York Times.  Finally, in 2010, Moore began to tour more regularly, which brought him to me, for a Daytrotter taping before his show at Emo's in Austin that night.

When Stevie arrived at Big Orange, he was un-ironically wearing a fanny pack and velcro shoes. He had huge, limpid eyes that bulged a bit further than natural behind coke-bottle glasses, thin lips that turned slightly downward, bulldog jowls covered by a scraggly beard growth, and a wild shock of white hair that shot out, corona-like, in every direction from his head. I liked him immediately.

Moore was traveling with a band of Brooklyn-ites who called themselves Tropical Ooze backing him, a four-piece comprised of a bassist, drums, a lead guitarist/singer, and a keyboardist. Stevie plays bass, so their bassist was sitting the session out. Everybody in the band had a Whole Foods bag with them. (If you've ever been on tour, you may know that the way to avoid eating garbage and to save some cash is to get to a grocery store and buy stuff you'd never eat at home like dried fruit, nuts, apples, things like that.) I wasn't terribly optimistic about Tropical Ooze, to tell you the truth. 

I set Stevie up in the control room with me, behind the console looking out a window with a headphone feed of the band playing together in the live room. This is something some people try to do to avoid signal spill, to retain some definition on the drums, and to keep the vocal audible, otherwise it can all just turn into a big, soup-y mess. I think it all depends on what you want to do, and I don't mind bleed, but I'd made a snap judgment about the Tropical Ooze guys and thought that this--getting Stevie out of the live room so his vocal remained clear and well-defined--was probably the best tack to take.

Throughout the session, I was struck by Moore's kind of anti-rationalist sense of humour; he would toss off these little puns and stream-of-consciousness phrases, as if there were a running comedic monologue that occasionally got voiced. I believe that you do have to have a sense of humor with all the rejection you face doing your own thing, and Moore has been doing his own thing for a very long time now. At one point he asked, "What's the R stand for?" I don't know if he expected me to guess, but I didn't feel like taking a stab at it. I just kept quiet and tried to do my best.

As it turned out, Tropical Ooze was indeed pretty loud, but they could really play too. If you listen to the track I've included here, you'll hear some great ensemble playing. The guitar player's name escapes me, but he was playing a Stratocaster, and at a nod from Stevie, he would take off on these really nice, Verlaine-esque runs up the neck, but once the verse kicked back in he was always right back on top of the beat holding the rhythm down. Listen to "Sort of Way" at 3:48 for an example; he transitions from chunky rhythm playing to an incendiary lead and immediately back again without batting an eye. You could tell why Moore had chosen these guys.

Stevie played a beginner's level bass with a sticker on the headstock that said "$1", which he wielded with absolute mastery.

On a final note, you might notice that half-way through the song the home-made spring reverb I was using on the vocal cuts out and doesn't return. After I fixed the problem, we ran an alternate take of "Sort of Way," but it didn't feel as good as this take, so we chose this one. The effect may be a bit jarring, but I don't think Stevie minded at all.

--January 2, 2012

To download the Daytrotter session mp3's from this session, click here .