Studio Diary Part 10

Week 8 maybe? But's who's keeping track

Monday, October 9

And just like that, summer has ended. One last heady flush of warm and summer of 2023 is floating away. It’s drear and dolor from here on out. There’s a regular quilter’s circle of dudes around the studio lounge table when I walk in; Chris, John, and Tucker are having coffee and gabbing. I join in. We’re thirty minutes like this. The studio clock may be ticking (and ticking) but this is worthwhile time spent. Finally, we are moved to get to work.

There’s a quick check-in with our labors of the week before — namely, “Joan 3” — since the bass is still there, plugged in to its various devices with their knobs turned to the appropriate places. But we decide the bass is in good shape and the rest of the work on this song can wait. We banged our heads against it enough last week; time to move on.

There are two songs remaining on the Big Board that have yet to be touched: “Born to the Morning” and “The Reapers.” I’d anticipated diving into the latter and had come prepared; earlier that morning I’d rewritten a particularly clunky verse that had been nagging at me. Everyone agrees this is time well spent, so we all get to our stations — John at his drums, Nate at his upright bass, and me in my corner grotto. No one’s played this song together before — it’s only been around for a handful of months — so it takes some time to find the right feel and tempo. When we do finally get it right, we’re not clicking, not quite. There’s some rubbing between the drums and the guitar. We decide it might be better if we tracked this one separately, so I get a passable guitar and vocal track down before installing myself on the control couch to listen and spectate. Drums are next, then bass. We listened to Donovan’s “Get Thy Bearings” as a kind of blueprint for this one, though everything about the song is different than the one we’re working on. We’re playing with a tape echo on the drums, as a kind of nod to the Donovan song, and Nate starts out on the upright bass. For whatever reason, this isn’t working, so Nate switches to a fretless bass in the control room. Initially he dials up a fuzz/synth thing on some pedals, but then switches to a cleaner sound. The fretless bass is soon abandoned and someone suggests he try synth bass on a Moog. That’s not happening either. While this is all occurring, I find myself on the couch in the lounge; I take a short power nap. When I wake, Nate is back on an electric bass with a kind of wah-wah thing happening. It’s working!

We break for lunch and then return to the task at hand. We listen to the track a few times, trying to understand it better, get extra perspective. What if Jenny played piano? That sounds promising and Jenny heads into the piano room to track a pass. The names Dave Brubeck and Nina Simone are lobbed around (somewhat carelessly) and Jenny arrives somewhere inbetween and around that seems to light up the room. I recorded this song at home with guitar, bass, and a drum machine — the piano is an altogether different color and it adds a shine to the song that wasn’t there before.

We quit while we’re ahead — Jenny having laid down a great scratch track to mull over during the evening. Tomorrow and tomorrow!

Tuesday, October 10

Nate Fasold has returned to pick up the twelve string electrics he loaned us. We spend some time in the live room, catching up. Nate (aka Natron) and I shared our first show in Portland together — at the Laurelthirst in December of 1999. His shop, Blackbook, is seriously one of the best vintage/used gear shops in the country.

Then it’s back to work with these layabouts — we head into the control room to listen to yesterday’s stabs at “The Reapers.” Jenny, with a night of sleep under her belt, feels confident she can beat yesterday’s piano pass. She winds her way into the piano room and does just that! We listen, rapt, in the control room. There’s a lot of talk about busyness, about the volume disparities between left and right hand. Chris, so far, doesn’t have a place on the song — but maybe that’s okay? We don’t *all* need to be on *every* Decemberists song, guys. Tucker has an idea, though. He sends Chris back into the live room to track a e-bow acoustic guitar part and we all think it’s keen.

My zone

Lunch is from the burrito cart down the street. Christ, we’re eating too much. It takes some rallying to get myself together for a pass on the only song that’s so far been untouched, a little psychedelic romp called “Born to the Morning.”

The demo is just me on guitar and vocals; nothing else. It’s live in my demo drawer for several years now — I might’ve written it in the midst of the pandemic. Tucker is getting Dukes of Stratosphear vibes and I can see that, sure. I had this idea that it could exist as a kind of duet between acoustic guitar and drums and we try that out — me on the archtop and John on the drum kit. Something good is happening, though it’s often so hard to tell early on in the process. I end up recording a guitar and vocal pass myself, something that John can play to in subsequent takes.

I join the rest of the gang in the control room and listen while John tracks drum passes — some of them infused with a almost Grohlesque energy, some of them tumbling along in a very Ringo-like fashion. I elect to upgrade the vocal track while Jenny familiarizes herself with a very space age-looking theremin. I have to mute her while I do my tracks, but something very strange is happening in that distant piano booth. It’s not until I’ve done my bit and I get back to the control room that I see what all the excitement is. Things are getting very kaleidoscopic and fast.

The end of the day finds us tracking Chris on guitar, providing the instrumental hook in the between verse bits. It’s wild and wooly and is just the sort of thing one might want to hear at the very end of the day, when one is walking out into the leave-strewn October evening, readying themselves for a long drive home.

Wednesday, October 11

As usual, morning finds us scrutinizing the thing we left off with the night before — this hazed-out psych-folk song about waking up in the morning — and we are in agreement that it’s hanging together pretty well. Some fixes are made and parts are tweaked and added before we decide we should maybe move on to another song.

All of the songs on the Big Board now have a footprint — each of them, an identity and file of their own. Now begins the finishing. Some of these songs will need more finishing than others — some of them have not been touched at all by the rest of the band. We elect to try out “Won’t You Come Home,” which, devoted Machine Shop readers will remember, was one of the first tracks Tucker and I cracked open back in the halcyon days of August.

Right now, it’s a lithe little pop song which owes more to New Order than anything else. We follow its lead and put on our New Wave hats. John tries out a drum pattern with a sixteenth note hi-hat pattern; Jenny manually hammers out a synch arpeggio on the studio’s wizened Juno. With every take, our hats are getting more red and plastic; our ties skinnier. I find myself in my iso booth tracking some electric guitar bits, channeling, alternately, my inner Johnny Marr and my inner Bernie Sumner — my inner Electronic, I suppose, would be the shorthand here. I come back into the control room; there’s a kind of malaise that’s descended on the gang. We’ve got a real dancey tune here, sure, that seems to be nodding both at New Order and Fleetwood Mac — and that’s about it. It’s not doing anything for anyone.

Suddenly, I’m in a bit of a crisis. I think the song, the foundation of this whole thing, is good. It’s got a nice sentiment and some nice words. The melody is hooky and memorable. The vocal take, Lizzy singing harmony over me, sounds really nice. I liked the song at home when I wrote it; I liked it even better once I’d demoed it. Why don’t I like it now?

There is a moment that comes for some songs, that moment when you’ve done all you can for the patient but there’s just nothing anyone can do to salvage them. Whatever enthusiasm it inspired in its listeners has seeped out through its open veins and it now lies motionless on its gurney. Let’s call it. Someone read out the time of death, etc. Has that time come for poor “Won’t You Come Home?”

It’s 5:30. The day is almost over. One last ditch attempt: we convince John to head back into the live room to try a radically different drum beat — let’s forget the new wave thing altogether; let’s just find what the song wants to do, not what we want it to do. He finds his way to a galloping snare beat — a la the Talking Heads’ “Thank You For Sending Me an Angel” — and suddenly there is a flicker on the EKG. Redemption! We leave it there, hoping that tomorrow, with clear eyes, we can find our way back to the light.