Thoughts as I Begin to Wrap Up This Yet to be Titled (For Certain) Record
I’m sitting here listening to The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Live at Barrowland and trying to put all the pieces of the last week together in my mind in some kind of cohesive way. I don’t want to go into details about the accident, mostly because, what I can’t wrap my head around is why it happened. I have some educated guesses, but I don’t have any proof. I’m a truth seeker. I need to know and until I do, it’s going to drive me bonkers.
On the drive, both to and from, I spent a lot of time listening to David Lynch’s memoir, which is both incredible and inspiring. His work always puts me deep in thought and I spent a lot of time both examining the trip and my current work through that sort of lens.
Recording, as always, went great. Paul was very complimentary about my writing, arrangement and tone choices, as well as the quality of my recordings. I owe a lot of that to him (and others as well), but he’s always been willing to get on the phone and talk me through things. It was also at his suggestion that I bought a Warm Audio WA-251, and not only did it do a great job with the acoustic guitar tracks (I used it at the 12th fret with a Shure SM-57 behind the bridge), but we ended up liking the sound of it better than his vocal mic which I’ve used in the past, so I used the WA-251 on all my vocals.
Before I go any further, let me be clear, I both wrote these songs with my vocals in mind and I worked my ass off on the vocals before I went to Indiana to record. We did six songs with doubles and background vocals in four hours on Monday and then six songs with doubles and backgrounds in four hours again on Tuesday. Wednesday, we decided to change a vocal melody on the verses of “She is There” and re-did those with doubles and then recorded my parts for a duet, “The Proposal”, a “Sometimes Always” (Jesus and Mary Chain) style song about a couple who need to go their separate ways. Each day I had a song I nailed in one take (“It’s a Strange World, Isn’t It?” and “The World That We Made”) and I’d come close to doing that before (“Ray” and “Easter Morning”) but had never actually done it. This being my third record working with Paul, and knowing his history of recording Vicious Circle, I did my best to rehearse everything to the point of just being able to go in and do it old school style.
There’s 13 songs in contention for this record (they will all come out, but there might be one or two that end up as B-sides), and out of those, I wrote 8 of them on the bass and one of them on the harpsichord. So, this record is still me, but it very much has a particular vibe to it and hopefully it’ll allow you to tap your foot, or dare I say, shake your rear-end to it. There’s a lot of 80s and 90s alternative, mostly British, influences as well as some 60s influences. “She is There” was influenced by the documentary on The Zombies. There’s a lot of B3 organ and I used the Vox Continental electric piano a lot in addition to mixing clean and dirty electric guitars. I’m sponsored by Westminster Effects and I used their Exegete Overdrive/Fuzz and Chik-Del-A Delay pedals a lot. I did use my 1979 Peavey T-60 on some tracks, but overwhelmingly, the electric guitars were all done on my Epiphone Les Paul Gold Top with the P90s.
Lyrically, I both looked inward and outward. There are stories that are more or less autobiographical (“She is There” and “A Portrait of the Artist”), songs based on depression and anxiety (“Someone Get Me Out of Here” and “Marine Layer Burns”), songs influenced by the work of David Lynch and Angelo Badalementi (“Enemy Inside the Mirror”, “It’s a Strange World, Isn’t It?” and “David Lynch’s Cigarettes”) and my own stories taking from a number of different literary influences (pretty much all the others). What’s different about this record lyrically is that I didn’t labor over the words like I normally do. Not saying they all came out in one moment, but “Curvature of the Earth” and “David Lynch’s Cigarettes” did. I barely changed a word from the five minutes it took me to write each of those. Normally, I work at them like a carpenter would make a table and chairs.
All in all, I’ve completely put myself into these songs. It won’t crush me if I don’t get an external response, these songs were written for me first and foremost, but I certainly think and hope that people will connect to them. Like always, it’s dark, but not without hope. Sin might taint all of creation, but all of creation was beautiful before sin came into it, so everything might be tainted with sin, but there’s beauty to be found in everything as well. That’s the world I inhabit and it’s what I see when I look at things. I want to see things as they are, not how I wish them to be. Looking at what you wish would be doesn’t do you any good at coping with what actually is. This is how I cope. It helps me, hopefully it’ll help others too.
Enough for now, there will be more later. Drums are going on and then female vocals on the duet (at least, if not more) and then mix and master with an eye on an early 2027 release. I am working on at least one proper music video to accompany the first single ahead of the album (“She is There”), so you’ll see that sooner than later.