Wrong Side of Dawn – Page 4 – A new morning in rock

2009-05-062017-05-27

Photoshoot in Atlantic City

A couple months ago we went to Atlantic City with the amazing Rob Scheuerman as our photographer to do a photoshoot for the upcoming “Stay Awake” album, hoping to get some cover art. I don’t think we were successful, unfortunately, but we did get a lot of pretty pictures.

This stupid sign vanished less than two weeks before we wanted to take a picture of it

We had a very specific vision for our cover art, involving a road sign on the Atlantic City Expressway. Along the sleep zone where drivers tend to drift off with fatal results, sometime in the late 80s highway officials placed a series of signs reading “Stay alert”, “stay awake”, “stay alive”. We wanted to take a picture under the “stay awake” sign and make that the title of our album. Now, keep in mind that the signs have been there for decades. Two weeks before the photoshoot, Brian drove by them to check that they were still there, and they were in fact still there. He programmed the location into his GPS to make sure that we couldn’t miss it, and we intended to return to that spot just as dawn was breaking so that we could get a sunrise. However, the day of the photoshoot when we arrived at the spot, the signs were gone, leaving only the posts that they had been standing on. It was pretty ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense. Or perhaps just unfortunate, as Ed Byrne would call it.

Here we are looking rather annoyed, sitting on the guardrail near where the signs used to be

Since we couldn’t take the picture we wanted for the cover art, the secondary objective of just taking cool photos around Atlantic City for publicity purposes became the main point of the day. One goal was to take some pictures that vaguely corresponded to the various songs on the album, such as a picture of us playing poker for “The Grinder’s Tale”.

"Oh man, this is so bad-ass. We should be in Rounders or something there. It's like Nelson is making a very serious comment to me, and I'm studying someone for tells. Or something cool like that."

Check. Another important goal was to get a picture of us with a sunrise or sunset behind us. Since we spent sunrise in a futile search for the missing road signs, we had to make do with sunset. However, the sky was becoming overcast and we were concerned that we would not be able to see the sunset from where we were in Atlantic City. We checked the weather forecast for the area, and it appeared that there might be a break in the clouds over Philadelphia. So we drove hell for leather to the west to get to Philadelphia in time for sunset, in hopes that we would actually be able to see the sun. I think it paid off.

This isn't a sunrise, which is obvious if you know that we're taking this picture from Camden with Philadelphia behind us to the west. But maybe people won't notice.

If you want to see the rest of the photos, they’re up on Flickr, just click the picture below:

And here is a beautiful animated gif that is too large for the front page:

2009-04-302017-05-27

Recording acoustic guitar with Nelson Pavlosky

Choosing a guitar

Unfortunately, choosing which guitar to record with wasn’t as easy as I hoped. All of our acoustic guitars developed problems during the record sessions, but fortunately they were different problems so we could choose which guitar to use based on which problem would affect the album the least. Now I understand why professional musicians own so many instruments: redundancy! Sure, having a selection of guitars with different properties allows you to produce a wider range of sounds, and having multiple guitars lets you quickly switch tunings while playing live, but I think the most important reason to have a lot of instruments is so you can switch when one instrument breaks down or starts sounding funny.

Kermit the guitar I am in love with my green Takamine acoustic-electric, named “Kermit”, and I would generally want to use it in any situation. However, recently Kermit has started going out of tune if I play high on the fretboard, and unfortunately many of our songs require me to do that. I didn’t have a chance to get Kermit’s problems checked out at the guitar store before recording started, so I had to use other guitars that were more in tune.

We used Brian’s black Martin acoustic-electric for a couple tracks, most notably “Running Scared”, but for some reason the low E string was sounding much louder and rattle-y than the other strings, which sounded strange. Much of “Running Scared” doesn’t use the low E string and we thought the guitar sounded fine with the parts that do, but this problem mostly eliminated the Martin from the album.

We ultimately used Brian’s Ovation acoustic-electric for most of the tracks, even though something was very wrong with the line out. I thought the line out would be important, but it turned out it wasn’t, we were able to record great-sounding acoustic guitars without it.

Recording acoustic-electric guitars without line-out

For our EP we had two tracks for each acoustic/electric guitar: a microphone in front of the sound hole, and directly plugging it into the guitar’s line out, and that delivered a decent sound. By having multiple tracks for the acoustic guitars, we can mix them together and better control the sound. For example, if the line out has more bass, and the mike over the sound hole has more treble, you can turn up the volume on the line out if you want a more bassy sound. For this album we were hoping to have three tracks for the acoustic/electrics, by adding a third track from a microphone over the fretboard. However, since the line out on the Ovation was oddly quiet and full of static, we didn’t end up using that track, so we just had two tracks, the fretboard mike and the sound hole mike. I think this gave us a deep, rich, and very acoustic sound… the line out would have made the acoustic guitars sound a bit more electric, and I’m not sure I miss it.

Surviving without heat

We could not use the central air in the building while recording anything with microphones, because the fans made noise. It was the middle of winter in New Jersey, it was pretty darn cold outside and, without heat, inside. This problem affected recording the drums, acoustic guitars, and vocals. This may have been less of a problem for Santoro because drumming is a very physically intense activity, but playing guitar really was only exercising one or maybe two arms, there was no way I would break a sweat recording guitar. I compensated by wearing lots of layers, sometimes even wearing my winter coat indoors, and bringing a thermos of hot tea and a thermos of hot rice with me to the studio. It would have been hopeless without space heaters such as the one pictured to the left, and the little faux fireplace in the drum room, which we used to warm our fingers and maintain manual dexterity. It was still pretty miserable, but that’s the cost of the pursuing your musical dreams. If I ever get to build my own studio, I will do my best to make sure it has silent heating and cooling, so that we can keep the studio at a comfortable temperature no matter what we are recording.

My Interview

Transcript:
Brian: Um, this is the end of acoustic day… being our primary acoustic guitarist and our primary interviewer, would you like to ask yourself some questions?
Nelson: [laughter] Well, Nelson, how do you feel about being done with acoustic guitar? Well, me, I feel pretty frickin’ good. I’m sad that Kermit didn’t make it onto this album because I never got him tuned up at the shop, so Kermit is unfortunately absent. But I did enjoy the Ovation and the Martin guitars, they were good.
Brian: Did you enjoy freezing your ass off in that room over there?
Nelson: I did not enjoy freezing my ass off! Funny you should ask. But I had some hot tea and stuff, and I’m all good. I wore my orange hoodie over my headphones, so I was nice and cozy. It’s an accomplishment! I am happy.
Brian: One of your standard questions has been your favorite and least favorite songs to record.
Nelson: I think that Flight III / Flight I came out really good, I’m really proud of that. I am not proud of how I couldn’t play the finger-picking to “Out of Time” despite having practiced it for like years on end. But Brian hit it so it’s all good. And you know, I’ll practice it more and someday we’ll play it live, so… I am satisfied.
Brian: Alright, to be continued.
Nelson: Thank me for the interview 😉

2009-04-052017-05-27

Recording bass with Andrew Angelin

Choosing a bass player for “Stay Awake” was easy. Andrew Angelin is the most talented bass guitarist I know, and I am honored to play with him under any circumstances. He also joined us in the studio the last time we attempted to record this album, which meant that he was very familiar with our songs, and he had had plenty of time to polish and improve his basslines. I think it shows, in cuts like this slap bass riff from “Flight III”:

Technical skill

Andrew does some very technically interesting things with his bass, and I learn something from him whenever I watch him play. I once saw Andrew slide a harmonic, which I didn’t even think was possible. (He had a hard time replicating it consistently, but maybe I can convince him to pull that trick out on a future album.) I think that Andrew’s bass adds a lot of depth to our songs, and that it makes our songs interesting to listen to over and over because you hear something new every time.

Sometimes Andrew plays chords on his bass, which is something I think most bass players never consider doing. You’ll be able to hear this during one of his bass solos at the end of “Where is Bobby McGee?” and at the beginning of “Crossing the Bar” for example, and I think it’s a really nice effect during quiet parts of a song. It’s an effect that may be hard to hear over a full band, so it is only useful in some cases, but it is a technique I rarely hear in rock music and I’m glad to be able to bring it to our listeners. I also don’t usually hear harmonics on bass guitars very often, outside of the records of Jaco Pastorius and other virtuoso bass players, but you’ll be able hear those after the bridge on “Break Free” and once again in the outro to “Where is Bobby McGee?”. The trick to using any technically difficult technique on an instrument is to only use it when appropriate of course, otherwise it becomes a gimmick or just showing off, which some people accuse bands like Dream Theater of doing. Like a spice, you just want to add enough to taste, and I think Andrew has done a good job of moderating his technical chops and only bringing them out for punctuation. (Is that a mixed metaphor?)

Choosing the bass

Andrew decided not to use his own electric bass in the studio this time around… last time he recorded with it he heard some rattling that he thought was undesirable. When Andrew tried out Brian’s bass during rehearsal, he liked it a lot and so that’s what we went with.

When Brian bought his bass in the music store, he didn’t have any reason to expect it to sound particularly good, it’s just an inexpensive Specter bass. However, everyone who hears that bass agrees that it sounds particularly good, and when he brought it in for servicing once, the store guy offered to buy the bass off of Brian. This bass just hit a sweet spot for some reason. It’s somewhat comforting to know that in this world of assembly lines and mass manufacturing that some of the mass produced items come out special, despite all attempts at standardization.

We considered using Andrew’s upright bass for “Contained”, but Andrew decided that track’s jazz-rock sound worked better with an electric bass. He also doubted that he could pull off the ridiculously fast bass fill at the end of the bridge with an upright 🙂 We do try to avoid making our musicians’ lives harder than necessary.

Song charts

This may come as no surprise, but one important thing we accomplished during rehearsal for this album was creating/finalizing song charts for everyone to work from. I felt bad about not creating song charts for our musicians ahead of time before rehearsal, but at least with the musicians writing song charts for themselves at rehearsal the song charts were personalized for each of them. I think next time we would try to write out song charts ahead of time, however, so that we could spend more time playing music at rehearsal and less time writing down the basic chords and song structure. It’s quicker to add embellishments/edits to a basic song chart than to write one from scratch.

The aftermath

After each musician recorded their tracks, we interviewed them about their experiences in the studio. For Andrew’s interview, see the video below:

Transcript:
Nelson: Andrew, you just recorded all your bass for this album, how does it feel to be done?
Brian: All your bass are belong to us now!
Andrew: Ha ha ha, um, I feel great man, you know, I’m surprised it all got done on time in one day. That never happens. Brian’s bass was definitely the right tool to use, I’m glad he brought it. I had a blast! I’m surprised that we still have like 40 minutes.
Nelson: What was your favorite song that you did today?
Andrew: I could say “Last Warning” because there is a very funky bass solo… I dunno, that’s a tough one. I mean, I really enjoyed doing Flight II, because I think that bass line really, you know, it does a lot for me, I don’t know why, it’s a groove thing. Maybe “Break Free”, because that one goes way back, you know, that one goes back to early high school.
Nelson: Nostalgia, right?
Andrew: Exactly, yeah.
Andrew: My least favorite song might have been… well, “The Grinder’s Tale” had a tricky bass line, because it just involves a really strange finger stretch, getting those octaves and whatnot. “Vulture” [now “My Private Asylum”], I don’t know why, I feel like I’ve played it before, and I couldn’t come up with any good ideas for it.
Nelson: Not enough new stuff this time around?
Andrew: Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to make it more interesting for myself. I feel like I just did the meat and potatoes.
Andrew: You know, we’re ahead of time. Santoro was a great choice for the drums, Portrait was the best choice, I’m glad we’re here and not with Mr. Nuzzo’s place.
Nelson: Ha ha ha
Andrew: The scratch tracks really really helped, so I think you guys should be pretty set. Let’s make this thing a killer album.

2009-02-042017-05-27

Recording drums with Anthony Santoro

Finding a drummer

When Wrong Side of Dawn was searching for a drummer for the “Stay Awake” album, we started with our friends from high school, old bandmates with whom we used to play music. While we were wasting our time attending a liberal arts college and then law school, our friends went to music school and then become professional musicians. If we wanted to pack as much technical skill and quality into this album as we could, those full-time musicians were the obvious people to talk to. The first drummer we asked to record with us was my friend Camille Olivier, who is currently playing with TV/TV, but his time was already booked up recording a couple albums and touring the world with his full time band. (Big surprise, professional musicians are frequently busy, playing music.) I’m still glad we talked to him because his advice has been invaluable in helping us choose Portrait Studios and make other decisions while recording this album.

The next person we talked to was Anthony Santoro, who had been the drummer in Brian’s high school band Ohm. Santoro is now a sound engineer in Boston, handling the sound for live shows at the Hard Rock Cafe, and when he’s not engineering sound he plays drums with singer/songwriter Evan Michael. Thankfully he was available over winter break and he agreed to join us in the studio. Brian was slightly disconcerted by the fact that Santoro agreed to record with us before he even heard the music that was destined to be on “Stay Awake”. What if our music sucked? I guess Santoro just had that much faith in Brian’s musicianship after playing with him in Ohm!

Starting the recording process

Before Santoro or anyone else recorded a thing, Brian and I laid down some “scratch tracks” of guitar and vocals. Scratch tracks were recommended by The Indie Band Survival Guide to serve as a guide for the people recording so that they would know the basic song structure without having to memorize e.g. exactly how many times the chorus progression repeats and concentrate instead on playing great music. These scratch tracks were recorded quickly and were only a temporary framework or skeleton for the songs, to be replaced with real guitars and vocals once the rhythm section was recorded, and frequently they contained instructions to the musicians such as “Here comes the chorus! One, two, three, go…” instead of (or in addition to) actual singing. Sometimes our recorded instructions were inadequate, and we supplemented it live in the studio with instructions shouted into a microphone and piped into the musicians’ headsets, as Brian does in the video clip below.

We only got one full day of rehearsal in with Santoro and the full band, but everyone’s musical instincts seemed to serve them well and the songs were rocking hard by the end of a very long Sunday. Song charts were prepared, song parts were polished, and we were all on the same page. Recording started the very next day, Monday night, with Santoro being the first to step up to the plate. Santoro and Tom seemed to hit it off right away since they were both sound engineers and drummers, and together they got Santoro’s drums set up and miked very quickly. I helped hand Santoro things from the gig bag but my usefulness was rather limited in this phase. Later Santoro would record individual drum “samples”, hitting each drum and cymbal separately rather than as part of a song, so that Tom can drop in copies of Santoro’s drum sounds into our recordings to make them sound more awesome.

Tracking the drums

Santoro has a knack for making a track rock, but he seems to have a different philosophy of drumming than other drummers I’ve played with in the past. Whereas a drummer like Camille has no doubt that his drums are playing a leading role in a song and follows in the tradition of flamboyant drummers like Travis Barker from Blink-182, Santoro has more of a humble attitude and is always very concerned about stepping on other players’ parts, considering himself to be more of a background instrument, perhaps like Roger Taylor from Queen. This philosophy generally served him well, but when we wanted him to pull out all the stops and take the drums over the top it sometimes took cajoling and convincing. I’m happy to report, however, that once he understood that we *really* wanted him to demolish his drumset, he delivered some of the most intense drum solos it’s been my pleasure to experience. There were also some communication problems when we had very specific visions for the drum parts because Brian and I don’t really play drums, so the best we could do was make noises with our mouths and vague gestures with our hands, or sometimes refer to similar drum parts in classic songs (e.g. “Think the opening in Give It Away!”). Santoro was fortunately very talented at turning our incoherent instructions into real drum parts, and for that I must give him mad props.

Tracking snare and tambourine

I think it’s important to not always use a standard drumset, and while we didn’t experiment with more unusual percussion on this album we did depart from Santoro’s drumset on a couple of occasions. Rather using Santoro’s standard snare on some songs, we got a genuine marching band snare for the more march-y parts, which if I recall correctly includes the opening and end of “Out of Time”. We also used a lot of tambourine on the outro to “Where is Bobby McGee?”, a part which Santoro was initially reluctant to play, claiming he was no tambourine expert. I don’t think any of us could have played the tambourine better / more accurately than he did, and I’m glad we encouraged him to add “percussion” to his credits on the album rather than just drums.

The end result

Ultimately, I think that everyone involved was quite pleased with what we had accomplished. If you want to know what Santoro himself thought, just watch the video interview below!

Transcript:
Nelson: Here we have Anthony Santoro. Anthony, you have just finished tracking all the drums for this album, how does it feel?
Santoro: It feels awesome! … My voice is going out, it’s been a long grueling two days. I’m getting sick, battling the elements, I’m probably going to go get myself some delicious and satisfying McDonalds. I think most people after a big thing they usually go to Disneyland. I’m probably just going to go hit up McDonalds and Wendy’s, get myself some dinner… It’s quarter after 12 in the morning, got an hour and a half drive ahead of me… it’s good times.
Nelson: How are you feeling about the album so far?
Santoro: I think it sounds great! I don’t know who played drums on it, that guy was awful, everything else sounds great though on the album.
Brian: Too bad there’s nothing else [yet] on the album…
Nelson: What’s your favorite song so far, Anthony?
Brian: Or did they all just blend together at this point?
Santoro: I think Flight III was my favorite to track, Flight III was pretty awesome. It’s intense, it’s emotional… If you get the feeling that I wanted to throw my sticks through the window at the songwriter… I didn’t want to do that, you’re great guys.
Nelson: What was your least favorite song?
Santoro: Uhhh… Flight III! Not throwing my sticks through the window at the… Nooo, all the songs I think are great 🙂

2009-01-23

Recording a full-length album in a professional studio

I’m happy to announce that Wrong Side of Dawn is recording a full-length album at Portrait Recording Studios in Lincoln Park, NJ. The album is tentatively titled “Stay Awake” and will feature about 12 songs which we attempted to record previously in the Nuzzo sessions but have been polished and updated for this release. We expect this album to be AMAZING once it is finished, Tom Suhey has done a very professional job as studio engineer and we’ve been working with musicians of the highest caliber.

We are almost finished with the recording phase, after having spent most of winter break in the studio. The main thing left to record is some of Brian’s vocals, which should be finished in the next couple of weeks, and then we will move on to mixing. If you want to follow our progress, you can read our microblog on Identica or Twitter, and see photos of WSD on Flickr. We’ve been trying to document the recording process as well as we can, and I think we’ve done a decent job, except for keeping this blog updated. I hope to fix that over the next couple of weeks, by posting accounts of our past recording sessions over winter break and then ideally continuing to post about things as they happen. Stay tuned!

2008-12-09

Our EP has officially been released!

You can now buy our 5-song EP from CD Baby! Within the next few months we expect to have the EP available on iTunes, Amazon, and every other digital retailer that works with CD Baby (pretty much all of them). Karen made some beautiful cover art for us:

Incidentally, you can buy both digital downloads and physical CDs from CD Baby, but due to the expense of manufacturing and shipping physical CDs they cost more than digital downloads and we make less money from them, so we encourage you to purchase the digital downloads from CD Baby. They are high quality 200kbps VBR mp3 files, no DRM, and you can get instant gratification 🙂 If you would like a physical CD but don’t want to pay for shipping, just find either Brian or myself in person and we will happily sell them to you at $5 each.

Every song or album that you purchase from us directly funds our music… for the foreseeable future, all of our money from our music will be going into paying for studio time to record a full length album this winter break. We don’t have a label, so all of our money is coming out of our own pockets. So please buy some of our stuff and help fund more great independent music from Wrong Side of Dawn!

2008-05-26

Rough Mixes

It has been almost a year since we last posted, so I’d like to note that Wrong Side of Dawn is not dead, we have actually been making progress on the album. Sadly, since both Brian and myself (Nelson) are in law school, we’ve only been able to work on the album on vacations and odd weekends. Also, Mr. Nuzzo has frequently been unable to make time for us in his studio, since running a recording studio is not his full-time job (he’s still a high school music teacher). Regardless of the reasons for the delay, today I have an important update for you: the rough mixes of every song we originally intended to have on the album, with the exception of “The Grinder’s Tale” which did not record well. You can listen to the rough mixes in the flash widget below:

[Mixwit is dead]

Once again, these are *rough* mixes, which means that they have not been polished much at all, these songs sound almost exactly the way they did when we recorded them. Before bands publish their music, they generally edit their songs to make them sound better, cutting out mistakes, putting effects on their instruments and voices, making sure the volume levels are all even, etc. We have not done that here, so these songs all sound worse than the finished product will, but I thought it would be best to “release early, release often” and make these songs available in their unfinished state now so that you can see what we’ve been up to all this time. Note that track 5 “Vulture” is not intended to be an instrumental, we just haven’t gotten around to recording the vocals for it yet.

At this point, we may not actually do final mixes of all of the songs that we recorded. Our current plan calls for doing final mixes of 5 of our favorite songs and officially releasing those as an EP. Then we want to go back into the recording studio with a new lineup and re-recording the songs we were less happy with, as well as some new songs that we’ve been writing. Stay tuned and hopefully we’ll have some more interesting news for you later this summer.

UPDATE: Mixwit is dead and so is the flash widget we were using. You didn’t want to hear the rough mixes anyway, the songs will be much better on our upcoming full-length album.

2007-05-30

“Out of Time” analysis/Finding My Marbles

Nelson and I recently got back in the studio for the first time in 3 months. Work on the Wrong Side of Dawn album has been suspended for a while, due to a lack of money, time and manpower. Though we’d hoped to be finished back in January or February, Nelson and I are happy to be back to work and hope to have things wrapped up, uh, someday.

The first song we worked on was the same song I had been working on when I was last in the studio, a song that will be titled either “Out of Time” or “Running Out of Time.” As we finished up with it, Michael Nuzzo, the owner of the studio, made a passing comment about the fact that the song “has something to it,” which is big for me because it’s one of the few times in my long history as an amateur songwriter that anyone outside of my own band has ever suggested to me that one of my songs has any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

“Running Out of Time” original demo:
Running Out of Time, mp3
Running Out of Time, lyrics

I wrote the rhythm guitar parts and chorus melody to the song more than four years ago, but never got around to writing some decent lyrics until about one year ago. I could say that sort of thing about a lot of songs, because lyrics are so goddamn hard to write. Strangely, these lyrics might be inspired by the song’s own guitar solo.

Last June, I was trying to record demos of some of my songs. I had three verses written for “Running Out of Time.” I had a chorus with some “whoa whoa” nonsense singing that still remains part of the song. I had one guitar solo in the middle. The song was supposed to end with the chorus being repeated over and over as everything faded out.

After recording bass and acoustic guitar, I took out my electric guitar to record the short solo in the middle of the song. After I finished, I started improvising just for fun, playing over the part at the end where I had recorded the chorus chord progression over and over in order to facilitate the fade-out. After playing around a little bit, I decided that this sounded pretty good, so I pressed record. On my first take I ran out of space. I hadn’t played through the chord progression enough times to accommodate all of my improvised ideas. After a couple more takes, the solo was condensed down to fit the space I had unintentionally allotted myself, and the solo I recorded then is basically the same solo I play now.

As I listened back to what I played, I decided that the song would have to end with this guitar solo, rather than the vocal chorus that I had planned. I also started to have second thoughts about my lyrics. A song with a guitar solo this good would need better lyrics than this.

I closed my eyes and listened back over the solo. Strangely, a memory popped into my head, a memory of playing in my yard when I was four.

Yeah, I remember when I was four. I guess some people don’t remember that far back, but I remember being two. My oldest memory is of my mother trying to explain to me what a birthday was, because the next day was going to be my third birthday. Since I didn’t know how to count, I don’t think I actually realized that I was two. I just knew that I was about to be three.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the guitar solo. I figured that something was nostalgic and backward-looking about the sound of the guitar. From that jumping-off point, I fashioned some lyrics that worked sort of in reverse chronological order. The first verse starts in the present, watching the sun rise (on the wrong side of dawn, in fact). The second verse recalls an old friend. The last verse looks back to childhood, when you did stuff just because it was there to be done. Then the last line says there’s no more time for that, but hey…. GUITAR SOLO!!!!!!!

On another subject, recording the “Out of Time” vocals in the studio provided me with an early moment of panic, when it initially turned out that I couldn’t hit the lower harmony on the intro of the song. Since I’d recorded the demo, my voice had apparently gotten… higher?!?!?!? Let’s go back and figure this out…

My senior year at Swat, I joined the chorus because I needed one year of participation in a performance ensemble to graduate with my music minor. Not confident that I could work my violin chops back up in time to join the orchestra, I approached John Alston about the possibility of joining the chorus. He asked me when was the last time I’d sung classical music. I said, “Eighth grade.” John seemed pretty concerned about my ability to keep up with his chorus. Good thing I didn’t tell him the truth: “Never, John. I barely listen to any classical music. But sing it? Never.”

I remember the first day that I showed up for chorus rehearsal. Some of my friends were in the chorus, and as I walked towards the men’s side of the room, clear confusion on my face as I tried to find a seat, they asked me, “Are you a bass or a tenor?” I didn’t know. I thought I could figure out a way to sing whatever I had to. The bass section was about three times the size of the tenor section, and the tenors seemed pretty desperate for some more support, so I sat down next to my friend Misha in the tenor section. This didn’t last. A shocked John Alston spotted me and had me move into the already overcrowded bass section. “What are you doing over there? You’re a baritone.” John had yet to actually hear me sing. It wasn’t until after that rehearsal that I would sing and barely pass my overdue audition. John had apparently gleaned my range just from talking to me.

He seemed to be right about me not being a tenor. I definitely got less comfortable as the notes got above middle C. Some of the lowest notes were also a problem too at first, but I was eventually pretty comfortable getting down to an E below the bass staff.

Fast forward to this year in Nuzzo’s studio: I’m trying to record the two-part harmony from the “Out of Time” intro. The lower half of the harmony goes down to a G, the one on the bottom line of the bass staff. Back in June when I made the demo? Piece of cake. Clearly within my range. Now, I’m doing take after take and I can’t quite get there. I’m getting a little panicked, since the clock is ticking by on my studio time, and Nelson and I have already spent more money on this than we planned.

Ever since graduation from Swarthmore, I do most of my singing while driving, singing along to the songs on my iPod. Most rock singers sing in the tenor range. Tough for me at first, but I got used to it. I thought my range was expanding. Apparently it wasn’t; it was just shifting. I never realized your voice could actually get HIGHER as you got older.

Nuzzo, the owner/producer/engineer/everything of the studio, is a school choir director. I expressed my frustrations at not being able to reach notes that were so easy less than a year ago. Not too long after John Alston was so surprised to see me sit down next to Misha in the tenor section, it was Nuzzo’s turn to be shocked. “You’re not a bass,” he said. “If you were in my choir I’d use you as a tenor.”

David Hume says we have no way of knowing that the future will be anything like the past, so for all I know I may wake up tomorrow making sounds that only dogs can hear. But this still seemed pretty weird to me. Anyways, Nuzzo managed to coach me through my own goddamn music until I got the G, and “(Running) Out of Time” is now recorded and ready to be mixed.

P.S. So when guys are stretching to sing higher, they joke around by pretending to squeeze their testicles. What is the equivalent when you’re trying to sing lower? Do you hold your hands down by your knees, palms up, like Tanaka talking to Pedro Cerrano (a.k.a. President Palmer/the “you’re in good hands with All State” dude/Dennis Haysbert) in Major League II? “You have no… you have no… …. MARBLES!! You have no marbles!”

“Marbles? Huevos?”

2007-04-262017-05-27

The origins of “Where is Bobby McGee?”

This is an abridged version of a note I (Brian) posted on my facebook profile some weeks ago, explaining how the lyrics to the song “Where Is Bobby McGee?” came about. Some of my lyrics were written in such a roundabout way that not even I know what they mean anymore, but “Where Is Bobby McGee?” might be the easiest one to explain. And the one most in need of explanation. I have to admit, it’s probably the least favorite WSD song of every other person in the band due to its musical repetitiveness. Nelson reminds me all the time. But I meant it as a lyrically driven song, so whatever.

[Note: After I originally wrote this, Nelson corrected me to say that “Where Is Bobby” is actually not at all boring to listen to, just painfully boring to record.]

Here’s my demo:
Where is Bobby McGee? mp3
Where is Bobby McGee? lyrics
UPDATE: Now that our studio album is out, we took down the old demos, but you can listen to the final studio version of Where Is Bobby McGee? instead.

The lyrics don’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense if you’ve never heard “Me and Bobby McGee,” originally by Kris Kristofferson (you can find lyrics here) and made famous by Janis Joplin. The song was originally about a girl named “Bobby.” Janis Joplin switched the genders of the characters, and it’s her version that I’m working with in my take on Bobby McGee. Most people think of Bobby as a boy, and that version works better for me anyway.

The inspiration for “Where Is Bobby McGee?” can be traced back to Prof. Rick Schuldenfrei of Swarthmore’s philosophy department. When I first went away to school, my dad had only one request: “Just don’t major in philosophy.” I think this is because my dad wanted me to get a job when I graduated. Dad didn’t realize that Brian Rose could have majored in anything at any college, and in no case would he have graduated with a job waiting for him. So I never really considered majoring in philosophy, but I did take a couple of classes with Schuldenfrei. Contrary to my dad’s ideas about the subject, Schuldenfrei doesn’t seem to think that philosophy is about thinking deep thoughts while you beg for change on the street. Or while you sit in your ivory tower, whichever stereotype you prefer. The man seems to think that the study of philosophy can change lives and predict the future. While I give the guy credit for that, I have to say that what I really like is his tendency to make fun of people and to pound his fist on his desk when he gets frustrated

In Schuldenfrei’s class we read John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty.” Mill is a big fan of freedom, apparently. Sounds like a good guy then, eh? Surprisingly enough, Schuldenfrei is not a big fan of Mill. In “On Liberty,” Mill explains all about how freedom of speech and freedom of action will lead to an enlightened society, where individuality will lead people to develop all their abilities to the fullest: “It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either; nor would a Pericles, if we had one in these days, be without anything good which belonged to John Knox.”

Holy shit, do I have to unpack that entire goddamn sentence? Screw that. That’s an essay on its own. Let’s just say Pericles was a smart guy and leave it at that. And Mill says more freedom = more Periclesesses.

Schuldenfrei disagreed with Mill, and he let the class know. According to Schuldenfrei, empirical evidence tells us that freedom often leads to a society filled with people who don’t want to be Pericles. They just want to feel good. Schuldenfrei pounded his fist on the desk while trying to remember a song that he couldn’t quite put his finger on… “Bobby McGee,” he said. “I don’t think this sort of freedom turns people into Pericles. It turns them into Bobby McGee. Feelin’ good is good enough for me.”

While turning this idea over in my head during class, I came across the phrase “Bobby McGee can have his freedom,” (the original working title of the song) and tucked it away in the back of my mind because I thought it sounded cool. That night I took out my acoustic guitar and started playing a riff I’d written in about 5 minutes the day before. With the original “Me and Bobby McGee” lyrics sitting in front of me on the computer, I wrote my lyrics, not including the fourth verse, in about 15 minutes. A combined 20 minutes to write the song. Quickest song I ever wrote. (Usually writing a song takes several hours spread out over the course of weeks, or in some cases, spread out over a few years). I included a ton of references back to Janis’s Bobby McGee, right down to the “la la” part at the end. The song is based off of one of Schuldenfrei’s signature themes: Americans love to talk about our rights and freedoms, but what happens when freedom becomes the biggest priority in your life?

Rather than say more, I’ll just let the song speak for itself, outside of a couple of clarifications. In my first draft, the song was all about a single character, Bobby McGee. But then I realized that I’d created a sort of paradox in chronology. The speaker in the first verse seems to be at least as old, probably older than the girl, and by implication older than Bobby. In the second verse of my first draft, Bobby is a memory from childhood, a memory of an older guy. I didn’t know if Bobby should be older or younger than the speaker, whether the song should take place in 2007 or 1967… so I got Bobby out of the song all together in my final draft. He’s just a concept and not a character. The guy in the second verse is now the same age as the speaker. He’s not the ex-boyfriend from the first verse. And neither of them are THE Bobby McGee, though they may be analogous to him. I also started thinking the song sounded a little preachy, especially coming from a guy who might not always follow his own advice. So I added the fourth verse to say, “I’d like to avoid being Bobby McGee, but what the hell, I can’t say.” So four decades after the story was born, I guess I’d like to know… where is Bobby McGee these days?

2007-02-24

Wrapping up the recording phase, moving on to mixing

Recording an album has taken a lot more time and money than we anticipated when we first started out… even though we are using a friend’s recording studio (my high school music teacher, Mr. Nuzzo), and we’ve been relatively efficient in using our studio time, we still haven’t quite finished recording the album, and the bills are mounting. Fortunately, we are almost done with the recording phase, with only a few guitars and vocals and other finishing touches left to record. The next step will be mixing all of our tracks.

First comes the “rough mix”, where we select which of the takes of each track on each song that we have recorded will be used for the final product. This is not as straightforward as it sounds: sometimes we will take the best part of each take and cut and paste them together to form one impossibly good take. The idea is to make sure that you record each section correctly at least once, rather than trying to get the entire song perfect in one take. This method doesn’t work very well if you don’t have the same rhythm track under each take, which is why ideally you want to lay down the rhythm tracks first (drums, bass etc.) and then record everything else later. Naturally, the more times you play the song through to add new instruments, the more studio time you use and the more money you burn. You can also lose some “feeling” when the entire band isn’t recording in the studio together. It’s hard walking the line between recording each instrument separately to approach perfection, and recording everything at once to try to save money and add “soul”. I think we struck a decent compromise with this album, but only time will tell.

There was also the issue of having too many takes of each track, making it difficult to decide which takes to keep and which to throw away. Brian solved this problem for his guitar solos on this album by wiping and re-recording each guitar solo until he got it exactly the way he wanted it, leaving us with only one take for each solo by the time we got to mixing. That saves us a lot of time when we go to mix, but he may have burned some extra time in recording using that method. For my vocals and Karen’s backup vocals, we laid down a handful of takes and moved on even if no single take was satisfactory, saving time in recording but burning more time in mixing. Ultimately, you have to decide which method is easiest / most efficient for you, it’s not something you can generalize about. (Of course, if you have oodles of money and time, it doesn’t matter which is more efficient, but we’re not at that level.)

Next we’ll move deeper into mixing, trying to tweak each track and use various effects to get each song to sound precisely the way we want it to, and editing out slight imperfections. The trick with this stage is not to be absurdly perfectionist, setting time limits and knowing when to walk away from a song that is “good enough”, otherwise the album will never get done. We’ll do our best 🙂

After that, if we think it’s worth cleaning up the album to top-40 radio quality, we’ll have to get someone to master the album, polishing our sound to a shiny finish. We’ll see how the album is sounding by then, and how much that process will cost…

I (Nelson) have relocated to southern California for the rest of the semester, so progress on the album will be slow until I return in May, but we’ll start seriously mixing in May, and we hope to release the album to you wonderful people sometime this summer.