NEW RELEASE FRIDAY!!
In association with BOURBON FRIDAY!
Every week we’ll showcase a NEW RELEASE from one of the Artists we work with! We’ll leave them all on this page for you to check out. Also check out the rest of the site for Artists Music and EVERYTHING else that we do!
Have a Pour and Listen More!!
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Stella on a number of songs now. Some I’ve done a lot of instrumentation for, and others I added parts to enhance tracks that already existed. On Background Noise, I ended up doing all the instruments: drums, bass, cello, and a pile of guitar parts. Stella had a sound in mind—namely, she wanted it to have a Beabadoobee vibe, who is an artist that mixes really dirty sounds with often pretty melodies (I hear influences like the Breeders, Pixies, and a lot of stuff I grew up on). Since the melody is quite pretty, and since the demo had a very different ‘groove’ to it (the demo was just her singing with her acoustic guitar), Stella and I spent a good deal of time trying to solve the ‘getting it dirty and thrashy sounding enough’ problem. The groove of her acoustic guitar in the original demo had a more syncopated thing going on, and so the initial drum part incorporated that ‘skip’ in the rhythm which made it a bit too ‘cheery’. After some discussions, I finally started to realize that the beat needed to be much more straight—just more a chunky eighth note kind of thing. Of course, the dirty bass and guitar sound were also part of it, as were the more naive indie type of repetitious melodies in the guitar parts. I sent the session over to Steve Glaze at Tone Freq (with my panning and levels about where I thought were best), then Stella added her vocals and Steve mixed and mastered it.
Working on ‘I’m So Sweet’ for Julie was a lot of fun. When I got it from her, it was piano, her vocal, and drums by Mike Freitas. Mike had played on an electronic kit, so I got midi, which was great, as I have an extensive library of drum sounds, so I was able to choose a kit that was really stylistically and period specific to this old time-y genre. My main task was to come up with horn parts. I started with clarinet, and that really gave it the right flavor. I added in tenor sax to get the harmonies started, and put in some temporary note ideas on alto sax that I sent to Vinnie Ciesielski, a local trumpet player. One of the main things we really wanted for this song was tuba to hold down the bass. I composed a midi tuba part, and Vinnie had a friend, Scott Hearn, who played tuba and also added trombone. Julie’s husband Joe Simpson played guitar on this as well. It came out like one big party, and it was just the right medicine for me personally, as it was just fun in a time that often feels heavy. Julie is always writing in so many different styles that I never know what she’s going to send me next. Cover by Sabine.
As with all the Modern Dynamics songs, the feature is always BethAnne’s vocal and story. This recent collection of songs was fun in that there were some songs with a bit more of a ‘punk-y’ vibe… that individualistic stand for something better and more honest. This one is sort of in the middle, as it’s not as aggressive as some of the others that will be released in the near future, but it gave me a bit of that late 70’s/early 80’s post-punk/pop feel, harkening back to bands like Elvis Costello, XTC, The Jam, etc. There was an upbeat quality that made me think of those early XTC albums and Costello, so I used a transistor organ—a sound I don’t use to often, but I just kept hearing it on this one. Randy’s melodic guitar solos also helped inspire that vibe. As we were near done, Beth Anne wondered if maybe the choruses didn’t quite have enough angst, so that prompted me to add some crunchy octave guitar parts on the choruses and a few little lead fills to give it a bit more of that angsty energy. I did more back up vocals on this album I think, as we have found my voice blends well with BethAnne’s, and of course, I’m always a sucker for harmonies… 🙂
Raffy’s new song ‘Dance for the People’ has a reference to a snake charmer, so I wanted to get some of that ‘vibe’ in this song. The song itself has fairly traditional singer songwriter type chord changes, and the music played by snake charmers is played on an instrument called the Pungi, which is a reed instrument that only has 7 holes usually, and then a drone note… so it’s in a single key… not a chromatic instrument. The scale is called a Punnagavarali raga, and it has I guess what we would call a sort of minor sound to it. I tried using some virtual instruments similar to it which would allow me to use notes not on the original instrument to fit the song, but I wasn’t loving it. I thought I’d try a clarinet, and that wasn’t quite it, but it did feel more human and organic, played with some inflections that one might hear in that music. I ended up getting it more ‘grating’ by putting it through a distortion pedal and echo. So that was a fun adventure! I read that public snake charming was made illegal in 1991. Anyway… enjoy the song, which to me is about recognizing and sharing your own unique talents. Cover art and video by Sabine.
