Week 57: The Ballad of Stayed and Gone 6

It’s been 17 weeks since my last post on this recording project. During these past weeks, we’ve been focusing on rehearsing the music, playing a few live shows, and vacationing, and last Sunday we officially started production of the record.

But before that, over the past few months, we played a few gigs in order to rehearse the songs we would be recording. However, not all the songs we are planning to record easily translate to a live stage. Many of the tracks for the record already have parts that have already been recorded, what we might call musique concrete parts. Some of the tracks are composed almost entirely of these pre-recorded bits. But using tape effects or laptops on stage is too complicated for us, so any tracks that relied on these pre-recorded sounds were either not played, or the pre-recorded sounds were substituted with other stuff that could be played live.

The opening song, Walk, for example, is a song we wanted to play live, but to do that, we had to come up with a different way of doing the pre-recorded intro. The intro, you might remember, started with a long series of sounds from door opening and closing, lighting a cigarette, footsteps in gravel, etc, in a crescendo that led to the beginning of the song. On stage the pre-recorded sounds were substituted with some spoken word describing the sounds, backed by some snare, pedal steel and guitar washes that built up to the start of the song. The spoken word described the pre-recorded sounds in a non-specific kind of way. You hear the sound of home, then the sound of leaving home, then the sound of the longest walk, then looking back, even the fading is gone, the longest night, etc etc… Stuff like this reinforces my opinion that, although a record can be a document of a live performance, generally speaking recording and playing live are two completely different animals. Which is why there are so many bands that excel at one and not the other, and why, to me, the ones that are able to excel at both, clearly treat them as the two different animals that they are.

We have a plan for the recording, but the extended process of recording one or two instruments at a time makes it so that the plan can be adjusted as we move forward. The plan includes voice, guitar, bass, drums, pedal steel, cuatro, various keys, trumpet, percussion, and pre-recorded sounds loosely organized into various arrangements. However, the live shows were all done with voice, guitar, pedal steel and drums, because that’s who was available for the shows. Following are a couple of tracks from the show at the Local 506. This show was recorded from the back of the room with a digital recorder, so keep that in mind. The purpose of recording the show was to have a reference for the studio work ahead.

Here’s Stayed and Gone, the third song, which you might also remember as the song that had the cheesy Garageband horns and that ripped off some Neil Young lyrics. I post this one, because it’s probably the one that has changed the most since it’s original Garageband sketch. The lyrics have changed, the arrangement has changed, the structure has changed… I post it here starting from the very end of Sometimes Mariana, because I like the transition.

The other song I’m going to post from the 506 show is Season of the Grape which has remained pretty much the same in structure, and vocals, but I want you to hear Nathan Golub’s pedal steel and Nathan Logan’s drumming on the arrangement, a far cry from anything Garageband can do, even when recorded from the audience with a handheld recorder.

So we played a few lives shows, way less than would make me comfortable before going into the studio, but there was no way to get around that. It's a different rock and roll world with a one year old baby. So last Sunday, we jumped in the recording waters and officially started production of the record. Luckily we are working with a crack team of musicians that are used to jumping into the fray and getting it right. For me, however, this will be a very different recording experience in many ways and as such, a little daunting but also exciting and educational.

Almost everything I’ve ever recorded has been recorded the same way, practice the songs and play them live for months and months, go into the studio for a couple of days and pretty much lay down the songs live with a few overdubs on top. On this record, however, we have not had the opportunity to play the songs live for months, so the recording process will be a little more organic and integrated into the creative process, instead of trying to document and reproduce an already existing musical experience. So instead of starting with a canvas that already includes guitar, bass, and drums, we are starting with a blank canvas, and building from there, one instrument at a time.

In the past all my recordings have also been based around one studio. Go into studio X for Y number of days and come out with the tracks that make the record. This time we are working with microphone and sound effects master, Jesse Olley, and we will be recording wherever best suits the music being recorded, studios, train tracks, festivals, small rooms at home, etc. For the first session, however, we went into the very professional Track and Field Studios, and recorded a bunch of drum tracks with Nathan Logan. In preparation, Jesse suggested we listened to the drums in the Beatles’ Rubber Soul. In Rubber Soul, the drums seem to be miked from above with just one mike, so the cymbals come in very clear while the kick drum is a little more distant. I liked the idea since the sound we're looking for on this record is fairly light and I’ve been concerned with getting too much kick drum into it. So for the recording Jesse and engineer Nick Petersen, tried a bunch of mikes placing them overhead in various ways. But they also miked the kick, snare and toms, as they might end up being useful in the end.

We then spent twelve hours running through tracks that would have drums in them, some times whole tracks, sometimes partial tracks. Per the recording plan, less than half the tracks on the record have drums, but getting the drums right for those tracks was crucial since those are the tracks that are also songs in the more traditional way. Well, it was a painful experience, I won’t deny it, recording just drums with some scratch vocals and guitars on top is not very rewarding at all. It’s a lot of work and when you play it back it just sounds like drums playing by themselves, which is what it is. I had to focus on my faith in Jesse and in the final product in order to get through it.

But we did. And a few days later Jesse gave me a CD of the drum tracks so I could meet with Stu Cole and start working on bass parts, and it was a beautiful thing, the hard work that Jesse and Nick put into picking and placing mikes to get the drums just right, paid off.

So off I go to start working with Stu. So far the process feels somewhat like making puzzle pieces, and trying to get each individual puzzle piece right, without loosing sight of the bigger picture they are supposed to be making, but without being able to put them altogether to see if indeed that is the picture they are making.