07. UNWRITING OUR SONGS

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I initially wrote this as a counterpart to "Our Holy Ghosts" as the main chord progressions for the songs are actually the same, but having the songs back to back on the album didn't quite seem right. We knew that we wanted to have "Ghosts" towards the front of the album, thus "Songs" was moved more towards the center. You can actually hear the main guitar hook from "Ghosts" from :55 seconds to 1:24.

The bulk of this song was composed in GarageBand on my MacBook Pro (Apple, you can feel free to send any endorsement offers to band@thefelixculpa.com), and a lot of those sounds are on the final track. We retracked all of the guitars and vocals in the studio and Jeffro added a ton of auxiliary noises -tapping on glass with a spoon, breathing into a broken microphone, backmasking a zil bell hit, and most importantly the heavier drum loop that kicks off the song. To get those sounds, Jeffro sampled hits from Joel's kit from other songs and worked his magic on them to create that taught, compressed sound. I wanted to try and emulate the drum pattern at the end of "New Home Life", as sort of a call out to that song, but it sort of took on a life of it's own.

The ending disintegration of the song was actually achieved by taking a finished bounce of the song and using a Reamp interface to play it back through a Peavy 5150 head and Marshall cab attached to all of our guitar pedals. I then turned on and off as many different distortion pedals, reverb pedals, compressors and stomp boxes as I could to make it just explode. We actually did this twice, one for the right channel and one for the left, so that it would completely disintegrate in true stereo, different on each side. It was one of the more fun things we did in the studio.

This was one of the few vocals on the CD that I tracked in an isolation booth rather than the live room. The lead vocal was recorded using a pair of headphones as a microphone and we also did a couple of tracks with what we called the "salt & pepper mic", which was a little crappy mic that looked like a salt & pepper shaker on a stand. It creaked and distorted and generally sounded terrible, unless that was what you were going for. On this song it was perfect. We also caught a ghost on tape singing a long with me. There's one vocal track in particular that, when isolated, you can hear a separate voice from mine chime in for a second... which is weird because I was in a 6' x 6' iso booth with the door closed, and Jeffro was the only other person in the building at that time. Needless to say, we kept that track.

I wrote the lyrics to this song on Christmas day of 2007.



DEMO - Recorded by Marky into GarageBand.