even if nothing came of it

this one was about things that slip away from you, and learning to accept what is rather than mourn what could have been.

the choral sample is from a song by secos e molhados, an amazing funk band from brazil in the 70s that you should check out.

B. Patient With Me

This was one of the first things where I got the chance to work with Sena. Sena’s a farmer, a singer-songwriter, and an amazing person. The first time I ever heard her sing for real was in the shoebox basement apartment I lived in on Jefferson. There are some great recordings of that session—you can hear Wilsher being a dork on “The Basement Sesh,” from the same night. “You’re guitarin’…you guitar…” is him trying to get Sena to play so he could freestyle (?!?!) over it. Instead, she sang us some amazing songs, and from there we just got going.

I had the beat for this song already, and I wrote the lyrics on post-it notes and sang it for her. We tweaked it a little, recorded it on the crappy iPod mic, then had her do some of her own backup vocals, then I took it into the lab for a few days and incorporated some of her piano playing on it as well. The piano parts at the end are all samples of her playing that I mangled and reshaped.

And yes, it’s a hokey love song written for the woman I’m going to marry, so suck it, love is love.

Prolonging The Golden Moment

“The Golden Moment” is that state when you are drinking when you really are as funny as you think you are, as good of a dancer as you can be, full of incredible ideas, and up for EVEN MORE FUN. 

“Pocket the quotes I wrote…” is from a recording session in the Charm School. Josiah was back in town visiting, I had him sit down with his rhyme book and a crappy mic and just sorta flow along with a bunch of stuff. The rhyme he was spitting here was actually recorded over an early version of “Civilian Life” but I took this little bit and put it on this beat. You can hear Ben Yoder laughing, and Hart declaiming Iowa City’s post-2am lameness.

That Got It Going

Not a whole lot of depth here. Mostly just a song about partyin’ down with the posse. Stuart starts it off with a quote about “You’re at a party too long…” and then I dropped some arp-by-numbers and we’re off to the races. A few things:

1) That’s my favorite break ever. I used it 2 times on this album. See “B. Patient” for example 2. 

2) I didn’t bother to really sync the arp-by-numbers bit to the rest of the song, which is why I do the cheesy wind-down trick at :16 and :23

3) The party noises are all from the same kegger, but chopped so that all the cuts happen when there are drum sounds happening, so it sounds like one continuous take. Party noises also determined exactly how long the song would be, because I cut it JUST RIGHT BEFORE the dialogue got incredibly, hilariously embarrassing.

Talking Mad Smack

This is a song about talkin’ shit, pure and simple. All samples were recorded at The Charm School. The guitar partwas played by Steve, the same kid who played guitar on (duh) Steve’s Thing. It was a cover of a numetal band originally, but I obvs chopped the shit out of it. The WOO-ooh, WOO-ooh singing is anonymous, from a night I left the iPod mic running at a party. I THINK it might be Forrest, but I’m not sure.

Blackout Baby

So a few years back, a roommate came back from a trip overseas to a country with really, really lax prescription drug laws. She had gone into a pharmacy and explained that she was having trouble sleeping. The pharmacist gave her some meds, she took them, slept like a rock the rest of the trip. She gets back, and we’re talking about it, and she shows me the drug they gave her: rohypnol! That’s right, the girl had been roofie’ing herself every night, which explains the deep, untroubled sleep she was getting.

Well, long story short, I was writing a detective novel in which the main character gets roofied, she gave me a couple to experience it for myself, I let everyone I was partying with at The Charm School know what was up, and I dosed. As part of the project, I kept my little iPod recorder at hand, and kept an audio journal to document the experience. It’s pretty much like being kind of drunk, except for the part where you are guaranteed to black out and not remember anything after about an hour. So the audio journals are nice and lucid for about an hour, and then I don’t remember recording them, and I just sound very placid and happy to be there.

So how did this become a song? Well, the next day I woke up to discover 1) the boys at The Charm School had taken some hilarious, embarrassing photos of me. and 2) I had a bunch of audio that I didn’t recall recording, at all. It was my voice on there, but there was absolutely no memory in my head of those words emerging from my mouth, which is a really strange feeling. So I cut it up and made this song out of it. The guitar is from some random bros who were hanging out with my roommate that night. Same roommate is the one doing the AYO AYO singing part. The “I really enjoy the way things are going…” sample is Forest, one of the Charm School boys, apparently talking about his life and gearhead obsessions. The girl talking at the beginning (“Have you ever heard this song?”) and the end (“Can I borrow your horn-rims? For shits and giggles”) was named Miranda, and this was a first/last time I met her scenario. All of the samples, drums included, were recorded while I was in my fugue state. Well, I think I wrote the bassline as I was assembling all the bits. So almost all the samples.

The term “Blackout Baby” was a way of warning a friend who used to get blackout drunk a lot that some day he would wake up in an unfamiliar with a newly-impregnated stranger next to him, and a life-changing evening he could not remember haunting him for the next 18 or so years.