08. MUTINY

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The beginning of this song is one of my favorite moments on the CD. At the Exchange, where we recorded Sever Your Roots, there is an absolutely amazing antique pump organ that just sounds hauntingly beautiful. It creaks in all the right ways under these huge, velvety chords that I swear you can actually reach out and touch when it's being played next to you. It resides in the studio's massive foyer where we tracked quite a few things due to the inherent, almost echo-like roominess that you can get there.

The first minute and a half of this song was initially tracked with the standard electric guitar, bass & drums (and that version can be heard in the Terror Swamp demo), but I always wanted to do more with this song. One day in the studio, Dustin and I were just messing around with an acoustic guitar and that pump organ playing through a few things for fun, one of them being "Mutiny". It sounded so texturally appropriate that we immediately knew that we had to retrack the beginning of the song. After convincing the other guys to go along with it, we set up a couple of room mics in the foyer, grabbed a box full of random stuff from the studio for percussion, set up a mic for vocals and tracked it 100% live. There were only two takes needed, as the second one is what's on the album. It's still one of my proudest moments in the recording process, and one of my favorite spots texturally on Sever Your Roots, and to know that we did it all live with just the sounds of the room make it all the better.

If you listen with headphones to the vamp at the end of the song, you can hear Tristan's bass making some pretty incredible noises. This was done by having him play his bass part while I crouched around an array of pedals switching them on and off in between the individual notes. Totally a lot of fun. Also, Dustin's ebow line in that part of the song always gives me chills. I did these vocals on a day when Tristan couldn't make it to the studio, and so I had to cover his harmony part in the chorus, only to find out that I actually sang it wrong, or differently than how he sings it live. We never went back and corrected it.

I think that this song has some incredible production value and Jeffro really knocked the mix out of the park. This song is a behemoth in terms of mixing all of the different elements that are going on together, and we all agree that he created a masterpiece. There is so much texture and instrumentation for your average rock song and he made sure that it all found it's place.



DEMO - Recorded by Jarod Wheat at Terror Swamp Studios, Rockford, IL.