On Sunday Feb 6 I’ll play through the 2014 album Blood Test and share whatever stories or reminiscences come to mind. Please join me on my YouTube or Facebook if you’re into it! That’s the actual news of this post; anyone interested in a little more story of the making of this album, read on…
In 2008, I released the album Shotgun Singer, toured the US & Europe from February til May, had a baby in June, and transitioned abruptly from a chapter of intense work and frenetic activity to the disorienting, strangely suspended, peaceful/exhuasting state that is life with a newborn. I didn’t sleep a full night for about a year and a half, and I didn’t write anything resembling a song either. In the best of times, after I’ve finished a record I usually have sneaking suspicions that I’ll never write anything again, and in this case it seemed like it was finally coming true. I was mostly too distracted and/or exhausted to worry about it, but when I did I’d get dull distant glimmers of panic. Still, I was overall pretty happy, and I figured if that was it for songwriting, I’d had a decent run.
At a certain point, though, the kid started sleeping, and then so did I, and then the songs started to show up again. It took a few years to grow a full crop, and some schedule wrangling as the Spouse was in a flurry of recording and releasing side projects, but eventually I had an album’s worth of songs and a patch of clear calendar to work with. I called my friend Anders Parker, a fellow Swede and songwriter whose work I love, and asked if he’d be willing to lend my songs some of his sensibilities. He signed on to produce and be in the band, and we were off.
Every album begins with making up a set of rules. The extent to which you end up following and/or breaking your own rules is what frames out the shape of the final result. For this one the main rules were that Anders would pick the band, which would consist of just four people including the two of us, and that all the sounds on the album would be made by these four people, no additional players. I was both excited and terrified to have someone beside me choose the personnel, after three projects in a row where I’d orchestrated every last detail. Anders brought in Konrad Meissner on drums, who had played with the Silos for a long time and was at the time the drummer for Brandi Carlile. Our fourth member was Mark Spencer, guitar/pedal steel/keys/bass player and producer, who is usually in Son Volt and has worked a lot with Laura Cantrell, Lisa Loeb, too many to mention. Mark and Anders would take turns playing bass on the basic tracks and overdubbing guitar, keys, and pedal steel.
Originally I’d intended to make this a residential session at a studio where we could all hole up together, but it turned out people had tight windows of availability between tours, and everyone but me was living at least part-time in Brooklyn, so it ended up making sense to bring the session to the band. Anders steered us to Brooklyn Recording, a great studio in Cobble Hill-ish/Red Hook-ish, run by engineer Andy Taub, who’s worked on too many great records to count. The studio is within walking distance from the apartment building I grew up in, and I got to stay with family friends and walk to work every morning stopping for a bagel at the same deli I frequented in high school, which created a dizzying feeling of time looping in on itself.
We set up with the band together in the live room and me in a booth so I could play and sing live without getting the band in my vocals. I could see Konrad enough to communicate visually, but everyone else was out of sight. We tracked in September of 2013, four long working days. It turned out to be the first record I made where no one in the band smoked, and I noticed after a while that the whole work rhythm was different without someone’s internal nicotine timer forcing regular pauses. I’m also a little bad about remembering to eat while I’m recording, and the morning after this four-day session Mark announced that he had lost 8 pounds, which definitely made me feel like a bad boss for underfeeding everyone! That said, we did at least eat dinner every night from the neighborhood’s infinite takeout options, and laughed our way through the whole project, which was mostly thanks to/the fault of Mark. We stuck to our rules mostly (although Andy snuck in a 5th-man role with a note or two of bowed vibraphone) and worked to the common purpose of creating something new out of sound and time; a mystical process that never, ever, ever gets old.
I enjoyed singing these songs in the studio so much. The situation in my vocal booth was ideal; I could hear the band perfectly but felt safe and more or less invisible tucked in my low-lit lair with a vintage RCA44 ribbon mic, and singing felt incredibly free. I was overcome with emotion many times during this session, partly because the songs themselves have some heavy freight for me, but also because, after three projects in a row where I was in charge of directing all the details, on this one I could just disappear into the song and devote myself completely to inhabiting the moment. Andy (with the help of assistant engineer/great songwriter Don Piper) got such beautiful sounds, and the chemistry of the band was magic, going from polite strangers to deeply-trusted friends over the course of the first 24 hours or so. The skills, care, energy that everyone brought to this project were all above and beyond the call of duty and for me it was an amazing process of returning myself as a musician for the first time after five or six years of being first & foremost a mom.
This record was a joy to make and I’ll always be grateful to the people who made it with me. A bunch of these songs are also still my favorite ones to play; I’m looking forward to singing my way through them this Sunday. Hope to see some of you there!
Studio photos (the good ones) are by Ted Barron, others are a mishmash
