It's September 22... The Hanslick Rebellion's 13th anniversary. YAY us!
So ya know what this means...
The Rebellion's new reggaetonrock single is finally here. Wow. It's been ready for a while - we got tired of sitting on it months ago, but we needed to wait until the Eschatone store was up to snuff before we could let it loose, because it is something new: a t-shirt single. Here's the deal:
You click right here. This will transport you to the magical land of Eschatone, where the dew drops cry and the cats meow. You buy The Rebellion's glorious three-song single, download it instantly, and a couple days later, you get the "packaging" - an amazing five-color American Apparel t-shirt designed by the great Arturo Vega himself - in the mail. That's the album cover; it's just printed on fabric instead of paper.
It's digital, it's physical, it's musical and it's wearable. If the format works out for Eschatone, it's something that will enable the label to put out more music by more artists more often. We've all got our fingers crossed.
(Waaaaaay back when I was a copywriter, I had to cook up an ad for a product called The Musical Sweater. It was a "wool-like" red sweater - we had to use keywords like "comfy" and "toasty warm" to describe the thing - with this hideous Atari 2600-lookin holiday scene embroidered on it, and a chip sewn in that played "Jingle Bells" when pushed. In fact, I think the chip was in the torso area so you actually had to press a boob to hear the music. Did it still work after washing? How the fuck should I know? I'm a copywriter, not a fucking scientist. Point is, The Musical Sweater sucked but our t-shirt single is awesome.)
The three tracks, "Let's Get To The Fucking", "Magnetic North" and "Ground The Paper Planes", were among a handful of The Rebellion's "unfinished business" tunes - songs we began writing back in the day (we even played "Magnetic North" out once or twice) but never recorded because the band had imploded.
Alex and I are huge Mets fans, and we began getting into reggaeton a couple years ago when we noticed that it was every Met's intro music. I love that loping beat, and it struck me as odd that it wasn't being used in rock music. We had used a calypso variation of the Dem Bow rhythm in our song "Leave Your Boyfriend" way back when, so it didn't seem like much of a stretch to inject a bit of reggaeton into the Rebellion's game.
I could write a book on this recording... it was both the most difficult and dense thing we've tried, and the most fun (well.. second most. Nothing can top the recording of the rebellion is here.). Maybe more in another post... for now, I'll leave you to listen to the tunes.
As with all the other multi-tracked songs, Hastings to London contains a lot of cut and pastes etc. Though the song tends to sound a lot like a recording of a live band, if you concentrate, you can hear where things are more complex. For instance, in the break, you can hear that John (the drummer) momentarily grows an extra set of arms, a different snare and a couple of brushes. He's not part starfish. That's multi-tracking. Silly-head.
The rhythm guitar line is actually a construct of a couple of guitars. One is my Taylor steel-string acoustic. The other is a Ibenez hollow body guitar loaned to me by a friend (Paul Swooger-Ruston). The electric was run through my Music Man amp (Reverb 65) and a Gallien Kruger 112 cabinet (normally used for a bass). If I recall correctly, we used and EV RE27 to mic the amp, but it might have been a Shure 57. I don't recall... Anyway...
Kevin Saunders played bass (stand-up). John Blakey played kit drums. Maja Bugge supplies the cello. The only odd part about the recording of the bass and cello has to do with mics. If I recall correctly, we used a Neumann U87 (normally used for vocals). It makes sense in terms of the cello, but I was surprised at this choice for the bass. David suggested it. I think it worked amazingly well, as the bass sound on the track is very true to Kevin's acoustic sound (and that's a fantastic sound).
I also played some solo stuff on the Taylor, Tim Oram's nylon string acoustic and Paul's hollow-body. These solos are used as a kind of call and response to the piano in parts of the track, and accent the vocals here and there.
David came up with and played a nice piano part. The recording of the piano introduced the only guest vocal on the record. David has a very nice piano in his house. It has a peculiarly warm sound and he wanted to use it on the recording. He took a rhythm track of the guitar back to his house, threw a mic in the piano and recorded the piano parts you hear on the recording. In the midst of David's session, a seagull that lives on his rooftop decided it was good to have a squawk! Ta dah! Instant guest vocals...
This was not Johnathan Livingston-Seagull. I think it was Johnathan's drunken, bar-fighting, lunch-stealing cousin Jake Two-Toe, General-Bad-Attitude Seagull. I'm wondering if any of you can find where he's delivered his part on Hastings to London. How about this? I'll say where the guest vocalist comes in where I discuss the lyric for Hastings. You've got until I post that blog to write and tell me where the seagull delivers it's part. If you get it right, I'll bake you a cake.[1] No kidding. Not that it'll be a good cake, but I'll bake you a cake.
Ok, next time I'll talk about mixing the stuff...
Hope you're well,
Michael b
[1] Heh... I'll bake one of you a cake... One person. The first of you to find Jake the Seagull.
The version of Ten Days on the record begins with my friend Tim Oram playing nylon string guitar. I join in with the steel string acoustic guitar after two bars. So you've got the two of us playing together for the entire song. The two guitars were recorded together at the same time in the same room.
The other instruments and players for Ten Days are Maja Bugge on cello, David Prior on piano and I added some tracks of electric guitar.
As I recall, Maja's cello performances were left as is. What she played is what you get. The same with the vocal (oh yeah, I did that too). We might have added some verb and EQed things and used multiple takes, but mainly those tracks were recorded and used as they stood.
Electric guitar and piano received different treatment. Though much of what David plays is straight-forward, you can hear where various effects were added and/or parts were reversed. As with Exchange and 9.8, I took a bunch of solos on the electric guitar for Ten Days, then did some reversing and carving of parts up, putting them in where I felt they served the lyric and structure of the recording.
Generally, this recording of the song is very sparse and ambient. I like it. Hope you do too.
Every year, I like to at least attempt recording some kind of "holiday greeting CD". That's a greeting card for friends, and a CD. (Cue Janitor from Scrubs: "Drill-fork! You can drill and fork!") Some people mail out photos of their kids at Christmas; my songs are my kids so I share them thusly.
I've done two holiday CDs so far, both with the same format: one Christmas-themed original song, and nine cover tunes. I try to arrange the covers so that they sound like they were recorded by a third party who is neither the original artist nor me. For example: Randy Newman's "Political Science" as performed by Cheap Trick; Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy" as performed by Peter Gabriel; Herman's Hermits' "No Milk Today" as performed by The Shins; Sparks' "When I'm With You" as performed by Crescent and Frost (that one was easiest - I recorded it with Crescent and Frost). I named the "series" In The Presence Of Presents, after a typically hilarious Chris Radtke ad-lib.
The process can be time-consuming and costly. Sometimes I don't finish in time and have to put the recording aside for the following year (sending out a holiday card in mid-January is like wearing a Hallowe'en costume at Thanksgiving, in my opinion). Last year I was too deep into other projects to do one at all. I've learned that if I'm gonna make a holiday CD, this is the time of year that I need to get cookin on it.
I hate not sending something out. Facebook and MySpace are really only good for reminding people that they know each other in a bullshitty, networky sort of way. Though loosely tethered to my far-flung friends via online social sites, I feel like a tangible token of love and good will is important, even if I can only make and send one of these a year.
I'm fairly determined to get something together for this Christmas, but I have so many projects in front of me right now that I can't possibly start another. The only thing I can think to do is make a sampler of all of 'em... one finished track from each of these: The Cutting-Room Floor, Band Of The Week 15th Anniversary remix, Failing Upwards, Shoot The Piano Player, Zetacarnosa, Rise And Shine, and three other records-in-progress. Is that cheating? I'd be flipping the script a little - nine originals and one holiday cover. See, there's this Oscar the Grouch song I'd like to try...
The best rap song of all times is "Chocolate Strawberry".
Take it from me - a guy who knows. Back in the day, I spent good lawnmowing money on UTFO's "Roxanne, Roxanne", ALL of the rebuttal raps from women named Roxanne (i.e. "The Real Roxanne"), ALL of the rebuttals to the rebuttals (including "Roxanne's Doctor (The Real Man)"), and ALL of the Roxannes' rebuttals to the rebuttals of their rebuttals (such as "Roxanne's Revenge"). I was trading boombox mixtapes when the rest of you were listening to Debby Boone. When I say the best rap song, it's the best and that's so for real.
I even ran a fantasy baseball team called Chocolate Strawberry a couple seasons ago. While I did not win, I did take home the award for KVP (Koolest Valuable Player).
Don't even watch the video when you play it... just close your eyes and let the music take control!
Hello Eschavites.
Got those "end of summer blues"? Well Eschatone's got a prescription for you. How about a nice dose of 'shut the fuck up' cause the new Rebellion album is gonna blow you right into next summer.
There isn't a band alive who could've have made this album. Oh wait. There is. US.
And somebody at Eschatone HQ hook the Drinks up please. For fucks sake. We need 'em.
For Exchange on this record, I had a very particular dynamic shape in mind. I think we achieved it nicely. In basic terms, I intended to create two dynamic peaks in the song (the second more intense than the first). The first peak occurs in the instrumental break after the third verse (where I sing the words "You're playing with..." and hold the note over an explosion of various other insturments). The second peak was meant to be at the end of the song (where I'm launching into vocal improv and the drums really open up, etc). The pattern is meant to follow the development of the lyric toward the apex. More on the lyric later... For now we're just looking at the recording.
Once I tracked my guitar part to a click, we started laying other material; drum kit, hand percussion, double bass, string section, piano and some cello.
From my blog last entry, you're able to see that the recording of Exchange included a string section (well, actually, a string duo which was multi-tracked into a string trio). The string parts were arranged by Bob Gilmore. After discussing what I was hoping for in the parts, I gave Bob notation of the main guitar line. Bob went away with the my notation and came back with a full string arrangement (which was recorded in the session I blogged about previously). Much of the string arrangement splits off into six (basically doubling the three in the bass of the guitar).
The arrangement and recording was built around the acoustic guitar. My guitar part for the song contains a simple split between the lower and higher voicing. It's something I've been working on in my playing and song-writing, and this appears in various ways in the songs composing Soft Verges. I'm hoping to establish two separate musical figures at one time. If done well, a single player appears to be generating the sensation of multiple performers at once. The trick is articulating time differently in each voice. In the main guitar part for Exchange, the lower voicing is a pattern of three. The higher voicing is in two. It's simple, but effective.
When I first played the recording of the bare-bones guitar track for Kevin Bartlett, he asked who was playing the double bass. KB thought there were two players (guitar and bass). It was gratifying for me. Kevin has extremely good ears. If I'm playing the lines independently enough so as to give Kevin the impression of two players, I have to be doing something right.
In terms of the acoustic guitar track on the recording, it's largely solo till about the last minute. During the end of the song, I've doubled the guitar part to make it thicker (two tracks of me playing the same part).
For Exchange (as with 9.8) I laid down numerous tracks of improvised electric guitar solos, which became sound material to carve up. In fact, in the end, David and I processed and carved up elements of electric guitar, cello, piano, backing vocals, and even the string section. We used everything possible to generate sound material - hardware and software (from an Eventide to granular synthesis). I also improvised about four tracks of harmony vocals and whispers for the track. These multiple Michael voices peak through in various places in the song. I also reversed and carved up the vocal tracks, which appear in various moments as well. More or less, this was the approach we took with all of the instruments. Sometimes you're hearing a straight recording of a performance. Other times, you're hearing stuff we mangled in various ways. We weren't concerned with creating the impression of a performance. We were going for a studio construct (again, like 9.8, a collage approach). The Chicago recordings are a different story, and a great contrast (more on these songs later).
Ok, up next, Ten Days...
Michael b :)
PS. Hey, how about that creationist on the republican ticket? Fucking great, huh? What next? Bleeding with leeches? Punching holes in our skulls to let the "demons" out?
@%^£^%$*&*^%$$£&(_)!
I know I shouldn't do this kind of speculating in public. This will probably sound ridiculous, considering that every day the combination of Internet-based communication/entertainment and rising oil prices seems to be forcing Westerners deeper into a chrysalis state where it is easiest and cheapest to never, ever leave the house. But... I'm fairly convinced that in the next five years, three unrelated things will pull our society in exactly the opposite direction:
- Telecommunications companies will cap Internet use (this has already begun, and it's not going to un-happen), rendering it more expensive to acquire large entertainment files electronically than to simply acquire physical copies, because...
- The West will become less dependent on oil (probably not because of any American breakthroughs - but someone will figure out a way to pitch sustainable energy to oil companies on terms they can monetize), lowering the price of transporting goods. People will be able to travel more cheaply as well, and they won't mind not being at home in front of the computer/TV because...
- Personal entertainment/communications devices like the iPhone will only improve.
The result: people will spend MORE time out of the house and spend more of their money on physical objects and experiences as opposed to passive digital content.
That's the very short version, and I'm not particularly interested in defending it, as it's only speculation and I'm no expert. I will take full credit for being awesome if it actually happens, though!
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Failing Upwards is much further along than I thought it would be by now. I just sent two of the last three songs to Anton Fig, and demoed up the final one. With all the songs now in process, I was able to piece together the running order.
I puzzled it out in terms of a vinyl record, with a side 1 and a side 2, and was pleasantly surprised at the narrative that developed. Every song on side 1 has a counterpart on side 2 - a lyrical sentiment from one song might repeat in another, or a musical concept might reappear - except side 1 is downbeat and side 2 is hopeful. It's like the narrator (uh, me, I guess) goes through the same motions on each side of the record... except on side 1, he does things because he has to, and side 2 he does the same things because he wants to, and that small difference makes for a 180-degree emotional flip. Like turning over a record. I'm thrilled with it, and I'm actually revisiting some of the arrangements to pull this together even more.
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New Hanslick Rebellion for ya in just three weeks. It's not what you're expecting, I promise.
CART
