It’s a song from our new record, 33 1/3 (03.06.15)… only available thru this link.
This was one of the last songs we wrote and worked up to record for 33.1/3, so unlike most of the songs on the record, we didn’t play it out live before the recording process. More often than not, we give songs a good working out on stage before we commit them to tape. Oddly, we didn’t get around to working it back up as a live song until several months later.
I probably came up with most of the song, but Susan and Chris had a big hand in the arrangement. We spent a good deal of time on that, figuring out the rhythmic feel, the transition into the bridge, all of that kind of stuff.
In the studio, we took a pretty straightforward approach, tracking the bass, drums, and rhythm guitar live before going back and adding better vocal takes from Susan and I, a second guitar track, and some percussion. Our friend, Christina Horn from the band Hudson K, was hanging out with us in Tucson, so we drafted her to add some textural synthesizer to the track. We picked out an early-’70s Elka String Machine from WaveLab’s massive vintage keyboard arsenal, which gave it what I jokingly called “the Moby sound.” (Yeah, I’m a closet fan.)
For this, the last sessions for the album, we stuck with the 16-track two-inch tape format, which limited the number of overdubs we could do without bouncing tracks. It was a conscious decision, and one that I feel served the process quite well.
In some ways, this last-minute addition to the proceedings turned out to be one of my favorite songs on the album.
Hope you dig it too.
— TL