Week 22, The Road

This week’s song is called The RoadYouTube link for iPhone

My two-year-old son is partially responsible for this song. It started with this Christmas, or actually, it goes all the way back to the holidays of my childhood. As a kid I spent hours pouring over J.C. Penny and BEST catalogs, dreaming of the ultimate gift, a drum set. I must have asked for one every year, probably starting with with the Mickey Mouse variety and moving on to more serious kits as I got older. But it was never to be. I’m sure that the drums were always a relatively high priced item for our family and knowing me, it would’ve made life seriously louder within our household. To this day I’ve never properly owned my own drum set. The one I’ve used for all of these recordings belongs to my friend Dale. It’s a Premier kit (80s-90s vintage is my best guess), and Dale insists that he’s just glad that it’s being used. For what it’s worth, I’m grateful. Anyway, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that at the first opportunity, I bought my son the drum set that I’d always wanted. It’s pretty nice too. He doesn’t play it all that often yet, but the other day he and I were jamming in the living room and for the first time he was more or less playing a steady beat. Sort of. I started playing a super simple riff that fit with his beat. My son grew tired of playing with me pretty quickly and moved on to something else, but the riff stuck, and I worked it into this little ditty.

It wasn’t until after I’d recorded the drums and everything else started coming together that I realized that this song was starting to have the feel of a Cars song. Either you fight something like that or you go with it. So I went with it, and threw in the synth parts. I love The Cars. I think they were masters of writing tight, interesting pop rock songs. I think their songs sound so great, and it’s not just their hits. All of the albums are great front to back. Take their first record, The Cars, which opens up with “Good Times Roll”, “Best Friends Girl”, and “Just What I Needed”. The album closes with one of my favorites, “All Mixed Up”, which by happens to be covered brilliantly by another of my favorite bands, The Red House Painters on their album Songs for a Blue Guitar. Production-wise, I tried to capture a bit of The Cars’ spirit. I confidently added synth, and I cloned the main vocal track on the verse with boosted low frequencies while cutting the low-end completely out of the original track. It creates the huge sound of the vocals on the verse, and you can hear the difference in the chorus. I didn’t come close to matching the production on the drums, and really most of the production on my track is pretty wide open comparatively, and of course I used an iPhone and a laptop where they were using AIR studios in London. I guess that the song doesn’t sound all that similar to a real Cars song, but hopefully I captured enough of the spirit of it all to make Ric Ocasek proud. So what do you think Ric?

The drums were recorded using the same five-mic setup as last week into Reaper, and the synths were added using Reason. Everything else was recorded into MultiTrack on my iPhone. The guitars and bass were tracked in my dining room with a dynamic mic using the custom break-out cable, and the vocals were recorded right into the iPhone’s mic. I’ve been experimenting with purposefully clipping the iPhone mic just enough to get some distortion and limiting. I think I’m getting the hang of it.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been experimenting with listening and adding my music to new types of music Web sites. I like the idea that anyone from anywhere can subject their art to a neutral marketplace, and it’s up to the masses to find what they like for better or worse. It doesn’t appear to always work and can be frustrating to sift through music that you have no interest in, but I have been able to find some great bands and songwriters that I would’ve never come across otherwise. Still I feel like it’s nowhere close to an ideal system. I’d love to take the best from the heyday of indie labels – they went out and found the best music in a scene (and were a big part of making the scenes), you knew you could go to them for new bands that you would love eight or nine times out of ten, and that they would put together a great product – and combine all of that with this new technology, ease of distribution, music is free stuff. It’s something I know that most indie labels from Merge and Sub Pop to new labels just starting up are struggling with these questions. There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer yet. Oh well, food for thought I guess.

The two sites that I’m currently messing around with are www.thesixtyone.com and www.uvumi.com. Uvumi is pretty new, and The 61 just changed their interface around and some people haven’t been thrilled with it. Please stop by these sites and check them out. Look me up and say hi. If you’re already on them, hit me up.

Tags: bandcamp, Cockos, Corey Layman, developer, Harmonicdog, hovland, indie, indie rock, iPhone, Karl Hendricks Trio, lo-fi, MultiTrack, phone-fi, Pittsburgh, podcast, Project 52, Reaper, Red House Painters, Ric Ocasek, t61, The Cars, the sixtyone, thesixtyone.com, Uvumi, uvumi.com, Woolslayer and Main