Will is home for the holidays and I have him for half a down studio sessions. We are late getting started today thank to New England weather. We had 8 or 10 inches of snow last night and we’re stuck in the house until the landscapers come and plow us out… What was planned as a 10 hr day eventually ends up more like 7 or 8…
We start on Opposite’s Day – the song I’ve deliberately not revisited because I think Will will naturally bring the right feel to it…
The day doesn’t start well – Will’s SG is making horrible intermittent noises and we have to give up on it. I text the Luthier – amazingly he can help (see later). I suggest my 330 instead. It works.
Will works with sounds much louder and more distorted than I’m used to or comfortable with but he knows what he’s doing. Much more so than I did at 23 or 24 and he’s only 20… Once we agree on the tone it’s down to him come up with a part… The song seems quite simple but it isn’t and it takes a while to figure a plan and then when we have one Mark has to get a haircut. I’m left recording Will, which is fine, but I cannot edit on Mark’s system so I just record and as the part evolves I keep almost everything. When we’re done we take the SG to Trevor (the luthier) and get lunch. We return and assemble the track with Mark. It takes a while as it’s down to me to make decisions – do we want part A or part B after chorus 2? It takes a while and it certainly is quite tedious, but this is how the record is being made. We know that. Had I made demos things would have been different, but I chose not to and Will would not have been available to play on them anyway…
We end up with a pretty great rhythm part which plays off my part.
The lead part is next. The SG is working again. The tone he gets is perfect, distorted enough to make single notes sing, but not sound ‘dirty’ but chords will break up… I let W play for an hour or so, playing his ideas and commenting and suggesting refinements. Almost all areas of the song are sounding promising but nothing he is doing in the chorus is doing it for me. I remember I’d made a note of a chorus idea in LA. I show it to Will. Then I try to record it so he can play off it. His sound is too distorted, he suggests we take the fuzz pedal out and I play the J Mascis Squire Jazzmaster that the studio owns. The sound is great and my part, after a little while, is working well, maybe through the whole song (like the What’s Wrong With This Picture part)… but my playing is crap. I show Will the part and after 10 minutes he has it. He plays two passes through the track and it’s clear we have decisions to make – we could go this way, or that… it’s after 9 already. We decide to sleep on it.
Another one of those days when one could come away thinking that little was achieved, but much was. Will is playing well and this song will be completed tomorrow, It certainly won’t need any mono synths if the guitars all work out.