Recording - February 2021 - 30

Crafting Sonic
Stories in The Room
On the vignette, 'We'll Be Home Soon', the vocals
remind me of Tinkerbell on LSD...

[laughs] That's brilliant. That's more me as a producer. I
mixed it and arranged it a little, but the album was 94% finished, and I needed a transitional moment in the middle. Biloba had sent me a folder full of random little demos, and I was
like, dude, I need to feature this on the album. Can I just lop the
end off and give it a mix, and let it serve as this moment on the
album where I can introduce your voice to a new audience? He
loved the idea, and it's just a light mix and curation.

The other track that really stands out is the last song,
'No Stone'. It's a very stripped-down, folk-jazz guitar in
a room, dry and unaffected vocals, very real, but then it
blooms into these rich, beautifully processed harmony
vocals-kind of a surprising ending to the album.

Photo by Ricky Reed

My favorite song on the album is 'Fav Boy'. I'm a
percussionist who makes ambient world beat music, and
it resonated with me-the way it starts off and then builds
and builds with cool percussive loops and textures.
The opening guitar loop on that song is made by a person
named Knobs. He demos pedals on YouTube, but he demos
the strangest of the strange, and the music he creates in these
little vignettes is just so beautiful. I met him at the Chase-Bliss
audio booth at NAMM a couple of years ago, and I was like,
dude, you gotta send me some stuff, and one of those was the
opening guitar part to 'Fav Boy'. For the percussive ear candy,
I asked producer/programmer Zack Sekoff for some glitchy,
almost Squarepusher/Aphex Twin-type feeling.

No wonder I liked that.

I then came in to ruin it with the Elektron, with the big bonehead beat. One thing I want to mention about the Elektron AR
MKII is that it has an analog gain circuit that you can drive.
It's the sound of the album. There's this ethereal, ambient ear
candy, all these moody hints of melodies, and then you have
a drum machine being pushed to eleven on every song. The
juxtaposition of those things is what I'm most proud of from an
engineering and mix standpoint.
30 RECORDING February 2021

This one was one of the most fun of all. I've been a diehard
fan of Dirty Projectors since like 2005-ish. When I started working on this album, I had heard through the grapevine that Dave
Longstreth was interested in doing some collaborations during
quarantine. He sent me this little guitar melody, and I was like,
this is the closing song of the album. I just knew it from the
feeling of the guitar playing, even the recording, the sound he
got tracking it in his room. I built out the second half, bringing
in Ayoni and adding some keyboard and bass parts, but the
meat of working on this song was, I spent three weeks writing
the lyrics with Dave. I really heard a story of hope that I wanted
to end the album with. Once we got the lyrics right, the production was easy. Getting the lyrics really right is usually the most
challenging thing, but it's also the most rewarding.

This album is very much a modern pop album
production-wise, but on the other hand, the lyrical
content is more in-depth and poetically beautiful than
the norm. It's a journey, and from the first song and
then all the way through, it takes you places, tells
stories and conveys emotion.
Man, thank you for that. You know, there's an international story that we're all in the middle of right now. On this album, I wanted everybody to tell their story or their chapter of this story that
we're all living. Whether you're talking about some of the darker
moments on the album, like 'No Future', or a love song to a lost
lover, friend, or to humanity, or like the song 'Us',-a George
Floyd-spawned social progress movement theme addressed in
'Shipwreck'. But then on 'Fav Boy', you still have young kids
falling in and out of love even at this moment. Everybody's story
is different, but we're all living in this moment together, and empathy is not finite. I didn't want it to be a 'pandemic album' or a
quarantine album or to have any 'on the nose' shit-I wanted it
to be something that everybody could use to help process 2020.
Hopefully, listeners will get some of that.

Great album and great talking with you, Ricky.
Likewise, I'll talk to you soon.

Recording - February 2021

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