what are you doing today cam?
I’m putting out a single!
a single! has your album been reduced to one song?
no silly. The album is still on it’s way. The single is a little snack before dinner…
that’s fantastic. how many songs do we get to eat?
three. Salad not Sod, which was going to be for dinner, and then a fun version of horsetails, and also a little demo I made for city hall.
cooool. So tell us about salad not sod. I can tell from the track lengths that salad will be the bulk of the meal…. I mean snack.
Well, I’ve been playing this song alot lately; it has definitely morphed from this version here, but this one is cool; I think we can call it the grunge version. Tom and I recorded it back in March when I first put chords to the song. This was the first recording we worked on actually…. we played a bunch of songs with the mics on, and then we went back and worked on salad not sod, adding bass, guitar, extra vocals… we did all that in a night. The version of horsetails I’m putting on the single is from that session too, but we didn’t add anything to it, so it’s raw.
gross.
….horsetails is actually going to be on the forthcoming record, but it sounds nothing like this version here – this was the very first time I ever played it with Tom… in the first verse there is a sharp turn that throws one off one’s horse. Tom managed to grab the horse by it’s tail and climb back on and continue riding. It makes for an exciting minute and a half…. On the forthcoming record we know whats going on a little more and it’s played with quite a different groove, there’s piano, and sexy ethnic bass…. that verison makes you want to shake your booty, whereas this version makes you want to take cover…
in the horsetail patch?
in the garden… but any good garden has it’s share of horsetails. Don’t weed them out, harvest them and make tea and tootbrushes with them.
and that’s what you’re yelling about in the song?
yup.
ok, whats up with the city hall demo.
very hokey, low quality, four track recording I made to communicate with the trumpet player what I wanted her to do for the record. It’s kind of what my old records sound like.
And city hall will be on the forthcoming record as well?
yeah, again it’s totally different tom ended up playing romantic piano for it… the album version will destroy this version completely. It’s going to be the make-out song of the summer.
wow.
but this demo was important, it helped us see the song, for sure. I knew city hall was going to be on the record long before I knew how to play it. I’ve been carrying the lyrics around for a year and I didn’t know what to do with them till I was shown the I – IV- minor IV progression, and then the words had a home, but beyond that the song was kind of a mess, but I still knew I wanted it on the record…
….this demo was actually recorded after the drums were recorded, and it changed the feel of the song, we did keep the drums, but we ditched the guitar and added the piano. -And of course the trumpet, which ended up being way more sparse than the synth trumpet I play here. recording is kind of wild like that. It’s like a painting where you still have control over the colours after you put them on the canvas… and the paintbrushes need to be tuned all the time.
So when’s dinner?
you mean when is the real record coming out?
yeah man, you told us it was coming out like two weeks ago. WTF?
well…. That’s what the snack is for. you are supposed to be distracted by these songs for a little while…. when you are hungry again the album will be ready.
grrrrrrr.
