Postcards From The Studio...
Postcards from the studio...
(excerpts from Sam's journal)
Sept. 29th, 2022 (pre-production)
"The new album begins…We’ll see what working title emerges from the work of being in the studio, but these songs have certainly been born at least partly through some tears and ink. And some perseverance, and doubt, and celebration, and defiance, and hope. And a two-year pause while the world went inside and distant, and we grew with this music in our living room.
Today was devoted to trying out a couple of different ways to approach recording these songs. Essentially, do we try and strip the songs down to their basic parts and build each piece from the ground up, or do we get our basic tracks (guitar, bass and drums) live in the studio and then build off of that? There are pros and cons to each approach, but no matter which way (or ways) we go, no matter what we add to the songs in terms of instrumentation, we want to make sure that the essential nature of what the duo does as a unit is at the heart of it all: the energy, the synchronicity and dynamics, and especially the blend of the two voices, which is where everything is centered...
Because drums will have a bigger presence on this album than on our previous records [...] but we also want to be open to discoveries in the studio, and open to letting the songs grow naturally in ways that still feel connected to their heart. After all, we’re not here to make a live album. We’ve always imagined these songs to be fuller than we what can do with only our two instruments and voices, and so we want give them space to expand and breathe and grow into themselves, in a way.
November 10th, 2022
First official day in the studio, a day later than planned because we needed to say goodbye to good ol’ Arv [Sam’s family’s sweet old lovable dog]…but we carried all that love into the studio with us as we launched this new project. I’m too tired to go into all the details of the day, but here are the broad strokes:
— Started with basic tracks for Threadbare, Anthem, and then Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind.
— We played through the songs in separate rooms, Megan on bass in the bigger room, Sam in the smaller room on guitars. We decided to record the instruments first, in isolation, so that we have separation and therefore the ability to adjust/replace/fix each part in different ways if we want. It’s no easy trick to play the songs with the same drive and vitality and dynamics without singing at the same time. The connection between playing and singing at the same time is hard to duplicate, so that is the main challenge in building the instrumental tracks. It’s easy to lose your place when you’re not singing, so mouthing the words was really helpful in keeping the same energy in the playing, so that that would transfer to the vocals once we overdubbed them.
— Once we got the basic instruments down to our satisfaction we did the same thing with vocals: Megan in the vocal booth and Sam in the bigger room, singing at the same time to the instrumental tracks we laid down earlier. One of the benefits of doing the vocals separately is that we can concentrate fully on singing, and because we could make eye contact through the glass we could stay much more connected to each other and to all the nuances of each song.
— After dinner we got back into Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind. During the vocal takes we felt like we weren’t quite capturing the feel. They sounded pretty good, but somehow the song just wasn’t lifting off. Bruce asked us to pause and went into the house, reappearing with some incense for each of our rooms, and then dimmed the lights. Something about the shift of mood sparked some life into the takes after that change, and we suddenly felt more connected to the song. The contrast between the later takes and the earlier ones was clear, and we finally found the vocals we were looking for.
— Called it a day after listening back to the songs we’d done so far and felt really good about this approach to capturing the basic tracks that we’ll hand off to the drummer. We’re really excited that even though we’ve broken the songs down into separate pieces to build them back up again, they still sound like the songs as we play them live—just incredibly well miked and recorded with a clarity that is impossible to capture anywhere but in the studio.