Radio Free Silver Lake

How We Made Our Record with The Damselles & The TC4

How We Made Our Record is a feature on Radio Free Silver Lake. Each week we interview bands about the different aspects of how an album comes together: generating creative ideas, writing, financing and production (recording, engineering mastering). We talk about the creative side of choosing a studio, a producer,  a sound, and  sounding good with limited resources. Many of our readers--musicians, recording engineers, and music fans--wanted to know the back story of how albums are made. We return this week with The Damselles & The TC4.  Three sassy singers and four guys to back them, The Damselles & The TC4 don’t walk so much as strut onto a stage like a wall of sound, choreographed dance moves and outfits on point. Today vamping more Pam Grier than Ronnie Spector, The Damselles & The TC4 drop their new album, Know How To Party (Otik Records) with all the explosive fission of an atom bomb. -K.P.

By The Damselles & The TC4
Photos by Sterling Andrews

The Creative
What was the creative concept, or a point of departure for the album when you started? Did you have a unifying concept or just start writing songs? When did you write the songs: before you went into the studio, or did the tracks come together as you recorded?

The concept revolved around how many times we can get away with saying "Hey" on the songs. Most of the band had written songs specifically for the group and once we had enough material for a full-length record, we decided to go record. The songs were pretty much 100% done when we went in. It only took us two days to track all the songs. Lickety split. 

(side note - a FREE download to the person that can tell us how many times we say "Hey" on the album. )

Interview: Composer Clint Mansell

By Jane McCarthy

Clint Mansell seems more shark than human.  It’s unclear when he sleeps. Over the past couple decades, he’s scored a slew of films for Darren Aronofsky including Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and Black Swan. On top of the Aronofsky collaborations, he’s scored music for Moon, The Wrestler, and most recently Stoker among others. Mansell was kind enough to answer a few questions about dark films, Emily Wells, and who has stopped by to say hello. He’s got a show tonight at the Orpheum, which should be a real treat.

Jane McCarthy: You've worked on a number of pretty dark films.  How do you get into that headspace? And then, do you tend to live in that realm for the entirety of a project or do you pull yourself out of it, taking breaks (e.g. going to see stand-up or something)? 

Clint Mansell: People who know me would probably argue that I'm in that headspace all the time. I'm quite an internal person. I spent a lot of time alone as a kid and I think that forced my imagination to grow...It’s where I feel comfortable and, happily, it seems to help me when writing music.

I don't see the films I work on as dark- they have something to say. So many films these days are only concerned with being successful, with likeable characters that we can all 'relate' to…that’s horseshit in my opinion, and I'm not going to spend any part of my life working on something that really doesn't matter or that I don't care about. I understand film is about entertainment-but there’s many different ways to be entertained.

When I'm happy I write and I'm happy when I'm writing well- but my definition of happiness is, perhaps, quite different to other peoples take on it.

JM: I was thrilled to see Emily Wells on the soundtrack for Stoker. What was it like collaborating with her?

CM: I love Emily. She's totally unique and self-motivated. She's quite the inspiration. I knew her 'Symphonies' record and when I saw a rough cut of Stoker I recognized her work immediately. She has a very distinct sound which, in a world of very non-distinct sounds, is awesome! Her track totally encapsulates the film and, particularly, India Stoker.

JM: You've worked with great directors.  Is there anyone you haven't had a chance to work with yet who you'd really like to?

CM: I never think along those lines. I know there’s a line of thought that says 'build it and they will come' but I tend to drift along in my own world and I'm perfectly happy seeing who wants to stop by and say hello...I've been incredibly fortunate- Darren Aronofsky, Park Chan-Wook, Duncan Jones, Massy Tadjedin, Bart Freundlic...I've worked with Leonard Cohen, Biffy Clyro…I really would be being greedy if I wanted more...I'll see what comes along.

---

Clint Mansell plays tonight, 8pm at the Orpheum Theater, 842 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90014. 

Interview and Show Spotlight: Pony Village at the Silverlake Lounge Thursday 3/28/13 with Saint Sea Hat, KG Bird,The Shadow Principle and Peg

By Kathryn Pinto

The absolute best thing about writing for this site and going to shows in Los Angeles is that on any night you might hear an incredible, mind-blowing set by a band you’ve never heard of and know nothing about. Pony Village was one of those bands. Maybe you’re out at a show to see a favorite band, or maybe you just go out to get out and see what’s what. One night close to two years ago Pony Village were a last-minute special guest on the bill with Seasons. I thought I’d listen to a couple of songs and then head to the back room of the Satellite for a beer to wait for the headliners. As soon as Pony Village  started playing it was clear they were something special, and once I started listening I couldn’t turn away from the stage. The Portland five piece has a warm sound and songwriting that evokes Elliot Smith sweetened with vocal harmonies and lead guitar offset by carefully crafted synth lines. Radio Free Silver Lake caught up with front man Ryan Barber and talked vegan tacos, driving tips and their upcoming album via email as they were getting ready to play the Treefort Music Festival in Boise, Idaho this weekend as part of a tour that takes them down the West Coast. Pony Village returns to LA Thursday night to play the Silverlake Lounge.

Kathryn Pinto (Radio Free Silver Lake): What has Pony Village been up to lately? I see you have a new single out "Wildwood Drive" on Soundcloud. Have you been writing? Recording? Touring?

Ryan Barber (Pony Village): We are touring the west coast, then when we get home we are going into the studio with Beau Sorenson (Death Cab, Sparklehorse, Superchunk) to record our first proper full length. 

RFSL: What is your new material like? Similar to previous stuff or a new direction? What are you listening to?

PV: The new stuff is way more of a collaborative effort. We've had a hard time with line up changes etc., but now we have a solid band, writing songs together, and it's the strongest stuff I think we've done yet. I wouldn't say there's a new direction, but we are starting to explore a few different places our sound can go. As far as what we've been listening to, it's pretty all over the place. Valentine's Day we did a set of 50's and 60's love songs, so for months we were in Phil Spector mode.

Interview: Many Embers

 

by Joe Fielder

Many Embers, the new project from Rob (Death to Anders) Danson, is about the struggles of many musicians currently living and playing in LA. (Or, as he describes himself and his kin, “A family of rejects plagued by modern America.”)

"I have so many brilliant and artistically inspirational friends," says Danson, "who, throughout the years of playing their music in Los Angeles, have been beaten down psychologically. They fear playing live. They fear releasing albums. And they’re afraid to follow their passion as strongly and personally as they once did. The flame has died within their souls and they’re giving up."

But, as Danson explains, it's not just about the challenges they face, it's about perserving and overcoming them.

"There are times when I feel like a beaten dog who cowers at the most simplest thought of moving forward.. when all I want to do is get the fuck out of Los Angeles and go back to Colorado. Go back to my college buddies who now have nice houses, nice cars, and a nest egg. Go back to a world of security and 401k plans, insurance, babies – a family. But... I can't go back. I gave up before – for a brief period – and it killed me. There’s no escaping this world in which I, and so many of my friends, live."

Listen for  yourself, by streaming the group's recently-released EP, and read the full interview below.

Who are you working with?

Many Embers originated as a bi-coastal recording project between a few LA based musicians (myself, Nick Ceglio and Kaitlin Wolberg)  and a Brooklyn-based drummer Anders Griffen.  

Me: Vox, Piano, Bass, Guitar

Nick Ceglio:  Background Vox, Bass, Guitar

Kaitlin Wolberg - Violin

Anders Griffen - Drums

All the songs were written and recorded in LA, then sent via USB stick to Brooklyn, where Anders Griffen recorded the drums through Danielle DePalma at Seaside Lounge Recordings.

I produced and engineered the album. Andrew Lynch mixed, and Mark Chalecki mastered. All in all, I couldn't be happier with the team of talented people that came together for this wonderful project.

How did it come together?

After Death to Anders broke up, Nick Ceglio and I decided to get together every week and just record. We really didn't have a specific plan except to just create an experiment and see what happened. Once we recorded six songs, we then brought in Anders Griffen and Kaitlin Wolberg to record drums and violin.  

Where can people find the EP?

People can stream and download the E.P on our bandcamp page. You can stream the songs for free or download the album on a "pay what you want" basis.  

How would you say it's different from Death to Anders?  

Many Embers is a very personal album. In fact, it’s probably the most personal album I’ve ever written. It isn't just another attempt at playing music. Instead, it’s a byproduct of how living as a musician for nine years in Los Angeles has affected me psychologically. This isn’t based exclusively on my own experiences, but also through my observations of the majority of my friends who are all musicians and are being affected in the same manner as me. I journal almost every day and pour out my deep, personal thoughts into spiral notebooks. I talk to my closest friends about their experiences as musicians and I’ve began to notice a pattern.

Interview: Haunted Summer (John Seasons and Bridgette Moody)

By Kathryn Pinto
Photos by Amanda Glover

Here’s the story. You grow up with these guys, start a band, toil in obscurity for years playing tiny venues for nothing, and then something starts to click. People come out to the shows. Things start to happen. Better gigs, tours, little deals that mean you can buy studio time, make the record you want to make. But just when everything starts to come together, everything unravels. You just can’t get along with your bandmates, can’t make it work. It’s like putting on your favorite jeans, but they just don’t fit anymore.

In a most unlikely twist to this story, the two people who tell it very nearly this very same way found each other. Romance lead to collaboration and a new project called Haunted Summer. Bridgette Moody left Torches about the same time John Seasons left Seasons. Together they are heading in directions they couldn’t pursue in their former bands, making an eerie psychedelic orchestral pop. Radio Free Silver Lake caught up with the two recently at Lot 1 and sat down to hear about their new music as well as their departures from their previous bands.

Kathryn Pinto (Radio Free Silver Lake): Tell me about Haunted Summer, who’s in the band, what’s the sound, how’d it start?

Johnny Seasons: The band is me and Bridgette and we’re making all the music. Our live bad I is a band, with a string quartet, a harp player and drums and a bass player. The strings are going to be composed by Kaitlin [Wolfberg] who’s still in Seasons. She’s going to compose the strings, do a string quartet and we’re going o to co-compose with her on some songs, but it’s going to be a different sound from either of the bands we were in. And Bridgette, it’s her first time singing lead.

RFSL (to Bridgette): What’s your take?

Bridgette Moody: We’re both in a similar situation, just kind of working this whole thing on our own. We’re really excited, the response so far with just our really basic demos has been really positive and it’s been really exciting.

The Deadly Syndrome on All in Time

by Joe Fielder

One of our favorite LA-based indie rock/pop acts, The Deadly Syndrome recently released their third album, All in Time.

That made us happy, since we've still been listening to Nolens Volens, their excellent sophmore release, pretty regularly.

We liked this album, so asked the group to write a bit about the making of a few songs on it. And Mike Hughes -- band member, multi-instrumentalist, and producer -- agreed.

Here's Mike on four tracks off of All in Time, along with streams of the songs in question:

"It's a Mess"

Sometimes you can write a complete song in 15 minutes, sometimes it takes 4 years. This one took 4 years, which seems absurd to me in retrospect, because musically its really simple, 2 chords, no changes. It started as a little guitar sketch, then I added the big bass and drum part, and forgot about it for a long time. When we were figuring out which demos to pursue for All in Time, I remembered that little idea, and thought it might make sense amongst the other songs we were leaning towards. It was passed around, and its completion is a testament to the collective writing process. This song proved really hard for me to mix, and didn't really sound right to me until I handed it over for mixing to Dan Long, and he absolutely crushed it.

"Joseph Porter"

As a demo, this song was really pretty, and almost entirely acoustic. Will also had the lyrics done, and it came to the rest of us as a pretty complete thought. After we started working on the other songs, I dove back into this one, to sort of inject some of the aesthetic that the record had begun to take on. In practice, this meant adding ethereal electric guitar layers, vocal effects, and the glitchy drum beats. The main percussive element is actually based around a random sample I made. In a totally goofy exercise, I was trying to record a really nice creaking sound the bathroom door in my house was making, and while I was recording, I dropped a bunch of cable slack on the wooden floor, and it made this really great noise. After a bunch of processing, it became the glue that held the rhythm section together.

"All in Time"

This song was one of Chris' demos. The first half of the song was complete, but didn't have an ending. I really liked the repetition of the words "all in time", and thought it would be cool to zero in on that sort of meditative, hypnotic side of it. I took his demo, and programmed the extended looping second half, while we were still in the demo building phase of pre production. When it came time to record, we tracked the basics, guitars, and drums, and then re-did vocals. For whatever reason, we couldn't recreate the vocal magic that happened on the original demo, so I lifted the vocal right out of the demo, and that became the lead vocal track on the finished version. It was recorded with the onboard microphone of Chris' macbook!

"Whatever comes our Way"

I always saw this song as sort of a microcosm for the record as a whole. This was another instance where I took a demo of Will's, that was a complete song in its own right, and sort of dismantled it, and gave it that start stop feel, and tried to inject more of a "hypnotic" vibe with the addition of the extended outro, and glitchy drums and synths. The most fun part of altering this one, was taking out the steady beat that ran throughout the original demo, and adding those heavily compressed and overdriven drum fills. We were also very lucky to have our friend Angela Correa (Correatown) lend her voice to the transitional section in the middle. It was feeling a little spare, and she really made if feel finished. This song has all of the elements you find spread across the rest of the album, there are pretty, acoustic sections, great lyrics and vocals, big acoustic drums and overdriven guitars, ambient parts, as well as programmed glitchy electronics and drum machines.

Last in Class on the Songs of Last in Class

by Joe Fielder

We caught up recently with The Movies-alum Jessica Gelt about her new band Last in Class, who have the Monday night free residency at The Satellite through October.

Here's Jessica on the background of her bandmates and seven of the group's songs:

I'm super-excited about the band, which features singer/songwriter Emily Wilder on vox and guitar (Wet & Reckless), Charlie Wadhams on drums (Rex Aquarium, Sweet Hearts, The Movies) and Chris Watson on lead guitar (Russian Bones, Juliette and The Licks). The music has been compared to Gun Club and Bleached, but I like to think it's got its own thing going. Part punk, part pop, all heart.

The caveat for all these songs is that they are all written by Emily Wilder who is the best lyricist I've met since Timothy James of The Movies. She refuses to use cliche twists of phrase in her songs and the result is a certain freshness that you don't often come across.

"Stop"

This song thrives on a stop-and-start rhythm. It's a playful song. Like most Last in Class songs, this is a love song of sorts. And just because it's a love song doesn't mean that it's about the love of a person. It can be about love of a sound, or of a combination of notes, or of a particular frame of mind. We had difficulty making this song come together in a cohesive way because of all the weird changes. But now that we have it down it's one of our favorite songs to play.

"Tied to the Moon"

Emily wrote this last fall after we both got a little too excited during a full moon party. Sometimes life can just get you so riled up that you feel like you're going to float away. Or maybe that's not life, maybe it's just whiskey.

"Drug Song"

A great musician and friend named Laura Jordan co-wrote this song with Emily a long time ago. The two were living together in a little post-heartbreak shack in Silver Lake, if I remember the story correctly. (Em tells me so many stories--and I, her. We are each others' diaries, but we don't always keep our facts straight.) This song is now called "Cigarettes" because that's really the only vice the whole band keeps trying to kick. That and, whiskey.

"Broken Backs" I can't say too much about this song because it's pretty personal. Let's just say that there were tears involved, and a lot of steps. Someone might have carried someone else down some steps and a back was possibly hurt. Not broken, mind you, just hurt. There was probably a broken heart in there somewhere, though. Broken hearts hide in most of these songs. It's what makes them sing.

"Untie Me"

Have you ever been so in love that you just want to smash the other person's face in? In a good way, of course. Well, that's kind of what this song is getting at. It's a "I'm really into you" anthem. So much so that I want to put your head in a blender and drink it--kind of thing. C'mon, we've all been there, right?

"Walk Me Home"

The title of this song says it all, "Walk me home!" Sometimes a girl has got to be walked home. Sometimes she shouldn't be out on the streets scraping up her knees (that's a lyrical paraphrase, too). Emily and I live in Echo Park, just a few blocks away from one another, and we walk each other home. A lot. Other people walk us home, too. We have relied on the kindness of strangers.

"Don't Settle"

Searching for the perfect someone is a universal in music, and that's what this is about. Except that it's a plea to not accept anything less than the very best. Don't settle. The right love--the real love is out there. And that's true for everyone. For Last In Class, at the moment, that love is each other and our music.

Interview: Joey Siara of the Henry Clay People

By Kathryn Pinto

The Henry Clay People at the Echo, Record Store Day 2012

Back in June, on the eve of the release of their latest album Twenty Five For the Rest of Our Lives, I sat down with the Henry Clay People’s front man Joey Siara for nearly an hour. We talked about the new record, economics, keeping it real, Pitchfork and debated whether New York or LA has more poseurs per capita, Siara banging his juice bottle Khrushchevlike for emphasis. As the Clays wrap up their  tour and play a homecoming show tonight at the Eagle Rock Music Festival we finally have the full interview for you.
Tonight the Henry Clay People play the final set of the Eagle Rock Music Festival on the The Ship Studios Stage at 10:00pm.

Kathryn Pinto: Tell me about the new record. What’s the general creative idea of it?

Joey Siara: In all honesty, I think it comes from being burnt on playing music and being burnt with my life and saying ‘Why go out and make anything that doesn’t say anything.” I felt like our last record there were some good tunes on it, but the songs I really liked were the ones that had a clear, angry point and voice.

KP: For example…

JS: On that last record my favorite song was--

KP: You’re talking about the last EP or the last full-length?

JS: The last full-length [Somewhere on the Golden Coast], the EP I consider a transition  …taking the bull by the horns and saying “This is how we’re gonna do it.” But on the last full length some of my favorite songs were the first song [“Nobody Taught Us To Quit”] and the last song [“Two Lives at the End of the Night”] and those were the ones that [had] the most heart in them. So in this record Andy [Siara, Joey’s brother and HCP guitar player] and I almost made a pact: “We make an honest record about who we are and the things that go on in our brain, what we think about, what we want and [we] don’t compromise. And if this is the last record we ever make then make it something we can stand by and be proud of.” And that was the creative backbone of the record,  “Don’t stop, don’t settle for anything.”

We Miss Death to Anders Already...

by Joe Fielder w/ photo by Zoe Ruth Erwin 

A few weeks back, we regetfully reported that one of our favorite LA acts, the iconoclastic "gregorian punk" group Death to Anders had decided to call it quits.

Since then, we asked a few members of the LA music community to share their thoughts on losing the group, favorite memories, and that sort of thing.

Here's a stream of the group's posthumously-released FREE final album, followed by said commentar -- which we like to think of less of a eulogy and more of a drunken Irish wake in a brawl with a goddamn Viking funeral pyre....

 

 

SARAH NEGAHDARI - THE HAPPY HOLLOWS

Death to Anders will always hold the most important place of any local band in my heart. Rob and Nick have been longtime friends, and it was their collaboration in Death to Anders, that so many years ago, inspired me to play music.

They wrote some of the most important and favorite songs of my whole life. Songs like, "Africa", "the Fall", "Heavyweight", and "Camera Lens", are better, and more genius, than almost any song I've heard come out in the world in the last decade.Why they were not world famous from their early days on, I just don't know.

Maybe it's Los Angeles, maybe because they didn't have the urban outfitters hipster "look" enough for people to really hear. I will tell you that it is not because of their music. The songs they made were pure genius, and that band deserved to be plucked out of this city and placed on the world's stage.

I am sad that Death to Anders is no more, but I feel good in the knowing that the songs they recorded are forever. Also, Im looking forward to everything they are doing in new projects to come! Thank you for sharing and expressing your genius guys. What a gift to my life. What a gift your music is to so many lives. Love, Sarah

BEN "MOUSE" MCSHANE - CLASSICAL GEEK THEATRE

I first saw Death to Anders at a Radio Free Silver Lake show at Bordello. My face melted. I got to know Rob, Nick, Pete, and John some over the years. Eventually I became Rob's roommate in Echo Park. We got drunk at Pehrspace. A lot. We put-on a show at Spaceland with D2A and The Mae Shi, and it was one of the best local shows I ever attended. (Rob's hands are in the promo video.) Rob was always bringing bands together, trying to put-on shows, pushing is music and passionately carrying on, even after his Collective imploded and not many people really cared about Death to Anders anymore. (Admittedly, myself included.) He was and is a great guy. I still play poker with Nick sometimes. He texts me about my Colts and I text him about his 49ers. Pete's daughter is adorable. I haven't seen John in years. I never met the new guys in the band.

Death to Anders was usually better than most bands, if not great, but they were always Doing A Good Thing. They were loud. Their music was weird. You could jump around to it. No goddamned facepaint or stupid fey nostalgia. I really liked that one song about the horse.

ANDREW SPITSER - RADARS TO THE SKY

At the beginning of the song, "Two Chords," the first track on the Don't Give Up e.p. Death to Anders put out last fall, Rob sings, "What'cha gonna do when you make it fall apart? / What'cha gonna do when it makes its way this far?" It's a question many artists of many kinds through many iterations have faced -- what do I do when I get here, when I've gotten this far into this thing that I love doing, and yet it seems on the verge of falling apart?

And truly, there is no perfect answer. Even the greats struggle with exits. Willie Mays, perhaps one of the greatest five baseball players of all time, famously held on too long, a paunchy 40-something spilling out of a strange-looking Mets uniform and struggling just to hold his spot on the team. Robert DeNiro has taken to playing the father in "comedies" whose major gag is that one of the characters has a last name that sounds like a swear word. Bill Clinton now seems like that dad in the stands at a Little League game clinging desperately to his old glories while yelling a little too vociferously about the umpire's bad calls. On the other hand, there's Hemingway who shoots himself when he can't muster another Nick Adams story he's happy with.

But, then again, those decisions of the greats are fraught with less implications than the question of when to pick up your chips and walk away a loser. Michael Jordan's Washington Wizards career may have sullied the outlines of his career, but nothing can destroy his greaness at his peak. You can't un-write The Sun Also Rises or erase the memory of Taxi Driver. But what about the kid drafted Jordan's rookie year who didn't even make the team and spent the next six years bouncing from one team in Spain to another in Israel. When is he ready to hang it up and go deliver the mail? How does he give up the dream? When does the young painter realize she's never going to get that Soho gallery show? And what does she do when she does -- does she keep painting; or take that job as a paralegal?

Thrillhouse Productions released the movie Pass the Music last year. Perhaps more than anything, it chronicled a moment in time, when a bunch of people who were friendly and supportive of each other came together to play shows and write blog posts and film videos and do Sunday night shows on famous music stations that all centered around the idea that all of those people had channeled something, some zeitgeist, some tidal wave of community that would lift all boats. And watching that movie projected on the side of a wall to a packed room in the back of the Bootleg Theatre a few months ago, the feeling that stuck out above all of the laughs and the claps and the knowing chuckles at one Siara brother putting another in a headlock, was -- for me, at least, and, I suspect, quite a few of the other people who were chroicled as having been part of that fleeting moment -- a feeling of having lost something. It was the ghost of Christmas past.

Because the fact is, that moment passed.

So what do you do? What do you when it's made its way this far? Do you have the strength to let it fall apart? Can you do that with dignity, before everyone has stopped even caring?

Interview: Light FM on matchsticksuicidecamouflagedisaster

by Joe Fielder

LA super-pop act Light FM recently released matchsticksuicidecamouflagedisaster -- a collection of b-sides and rarities -- for FREE on Bandcamp.

They're one of the good ones, both recorded and live. Always. If you've never heard them before, take this opportunity to check them out. (If you have heard them, you should also take this opportunity...)

And then read band lead Josiah Mazzaschi's recounting of the making or recording of each of the tracks on this release below.

 

Here's Josiah:

matchsticksuicidecamouflagedisaster was the name of what was supposed to be Light FM's second album. We recorded a lot of it just before I moved to Los Angeles in June of 2005. We never released it because the Chicago band wasn't able to tour to promote it (nor did we have the money to manufacture it). The drummer Mark Ruggiero just had a son and Chris Frantisak had just bought a house. It reaffirmed my decision to move to LA as domesticity was slowly caving in on me. Brian Barbier the bass player moved to Los Angeles a year later and we played together in Light FM for a couple of years in LA after that.

"In a Dreamscape" -- Recorded in my apartment in Chicago. It was our psychedelic intro to our album.

"Shadowdrifter" -- This was also on our Save the Drama EP but didn't have the crazy intro on it. Shadow drifter was written about a guy I had met who called himself the Wolf. He was a street musician that took acid and recorded a lot of his songs on the sidewalk or camping in Wisconsin. He was very strange!! He had all these recordings on cassette so I transferred them all to CD for him. Some of the cassettes were from the 70s and were like Kmart brand tapes. I was very nervous inviting him into my home but he ended up being a gentle giant acid casualty. He offered me a can of mango juice in return for doing him a favor. I politely declined.

"Cool Winner" -- I wrote this song around the same time (2004)but recorded it here in LA in 2006. I guess I was writing a lot about manhood at that time. Society sets us dudes up to not talk about our feelings and being a sensitive man artist I kinda have problems with that. Cool Winner was about a jock kinda looking back at his high school trophies and saying "let me tell you what a real man is". It's a joke song really. Ariana Murray from Earlimart played the piano solo and Jason Borger wrote the string arrangement. Daphne Chen from the Section Quartet played Violin and Viola and Matt Fish played Cello. Dave Trumfio mixed the song.

"Rise and Fall" -- This was tracked at the same studio and by the same producer (Ken Sluiter) who recorded This is the Beginning of My Golden Age. It sounds very Smashing Pumpkins/ Radiohead. It seemed relevant to release it as we just toured with the Smashing Pumpkins last year and Nicole Fiorentino ( SP's bass player) used to play bass in Light FM.

"Man Boy" -- Speaking of manhood. I paint sometimes and I was painting circus freaks. I painted Pig Boys, Claw Hand man, Bearded Ladies, etc. It got me thinking, "what kind of a circus freak would I be?" A Man Boy. A guy who is perpetually stuck in between being a boy and a man. Perma-puberty? I have a high voice and a lot of people confuse me on the phone as a woman. I am also one of those dudes you can't really tell how old I am. I could be in my 20's although I'm well in my 30's, etc. this wasn't meant to be a homo-erotic song. Although, I'm sure it could be a NAMBLA theme song?

"Wedding Song" -- I know it's cheesy but I wrote this song for my wife. I love her and sang it to her at our wedding reception. Side of the Road... We recorded this at Butch Vigs Smart Studios in Madison, WI. Some of Nirvana's " Nevermind" was recorded there as well as the Smashing Pumpkins, " Gish" and Garbage recorded there also. Butch walked in on me doing vocals there. Mike Zirkel engineered and mixed it. It was an amazing experience.

"Tell It To My Heart" -- This is a cover of Taylor Dayne's. It's originally a weird dance song from the 80's. I wanted to make it into a more meaningful Pink Floyd-esque version. I was working at Kingsize Sound Labs as an engineer and the studio manager Harry Trumfio of The Pulsars fame also played drums. He brought in his Chicago buddy Eric Heywood (Pretenders, Jayhawks) to play lap steel. He pretty much made the song. Such a great musician!!

"Part of the Problem" -- I guess I was feeling guilty for not being environmentally or politically active. I feel like people are much lazier and less socially and politically active than they were in the 60's. Maybe, because of the Internet? Or, maybe it's just a California thing? Everyone is just high? I don't know.

"Never Forget" -- True story. I woke up one morning crying thinking about all my friends that had died and I felt encouraged to get out and live. It's my duty to live as hard as I possibly can because you never know when it's your turn to die. It's my cheerleader anthem. Go get em tiger!!