10 years ago, 200 miles away in Asheville, NC, on a night almost exactly like tonight (muggy and almost kind of cool at night but too humid to really feel it) Forrest Jameson and I sat down with a bottle of Ciclon and recorded a call-and-answer Halloween themed narrative song called "Haunted Hell." In it we describe ourselves getting lost from the rest of the "40PF crew" inside a haunted house full of your typical haunted house cliches. Only in our haunted hell there's the ghost that looks like Goldie Hawn (who we dance with!?), and then of course the zombie who apparently used to pitch for a Dodgers farm team ("zombie threw a baseball, hit Wyatt in the balls"). It's a pretty standard haunted house story but there's a sort of odd humor to it that keeps you from dismissing it completely. But that's not why I like it.
"Haunted Hell" to me is great because it recalls the reckless experimentation of our early years. Forrest starting writing, then I started writing a continuation of his verse and it suddenly became a single storyline told by two people, which at that time hadn't been done by us before. Granted we were still pretty new to things back then but it still shows a level of innovation that I admire about us at that time. We didn't second guess it, ever, we just did it. There was a nervous, excited energy that just came from the idea alone where we would be writing and would get anxious to hear what the other person wrote. It was electric and impulsive. It came out of nowhere.
After 10 years that giddy, almost childish impulse to follow your gut and say "fuck it!" goes away because it has to. We force ourselves to re-think our first thoughts because, unless you're a genius, you find out very quickly that your first idea isn't always the best. Like the Milton Glaser etching reads, "Art is work". You have to write a thousand drafts, paint a trillion strokes (sometimes) before you can achieve a meaningful piece of work. Over time you lose the balance between instincts and intellect--between feeling and thinking--and sometimes the work suffers. "Haunted Hell" is refreshing because it worked in spite of this imbalance of head and heart. It was impetuous and succeeded, however mildly, as a result. Having hindsight can damage your opinion of early works, but for me, I never have a negative thought about "Haunted Hell". It's stupid, and silly and fun and I'm glad we made it.
Every Halloween I play this song and every year it makes me smile, and makes me grateful. Forrest has gone on to use the call/answer device we attempted in this song on other songs he has written and performed on and they have resulted in some of the best work any of us has ever produced. Selfishly I can't help but think that this song we wrote and recorded that "halloween night 2003" had something to do with it. Even if it didn't I'm still glad we made something special.
Please enjoy "Haunted Hell" found on our wiki page using the link below.
"Haunted Hell"
Happy Halloween!
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Tweet Of The Year
Regis is wearing his Wu Tang shirt home. @Raekwon @GhostfaceKillah pic.twitter.com/3RnK23shey
— Crowd Goes Wild (@CGW) October 22, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
New Album Production Journal - Day 529
(Let's skip the 1000 words where I apologize profusely and lament about how I haven't kept up with this like I should, and how not posting more defeats the purpose of this blog. Okay?)
Writing for this album has always been a problem for me and now that most--maybe all?--the beats are done I've been putting a lot more energy into it, and so far it's worked out great. Early on I realized that I wanted to go really hard at this project with everything I had, and I think I've done that with the beats, or as least as good as I could. But it wasn't until about six months ago where I felt like I could finally put that same energy into lyrics. Now that I'm here thinking about words rather than song strucutres it's great and I'm seeing things totally different than I ever did in 220.
That change in perception, how there's this newfound clarity at looking at lyrics, and even music, instrumentation, beats, makes me think that in a lot of ways I hope that this album will fucking destroy everything we've done before it because I feel like those past experiences have held us back in making this album. And not that that's our fault either. When we started this we really didn't know what to do, exactly. We knew what needed to be done--record these vocals to this beat, edit them, etc.--but we had no process for doing. We still don't have the process down, probably won't have it down by the time we finish and I think that's directly a result from having never done this before. In 220 we would get the urge, find the beat, write, record, listen and that was it. It was quick and it was self-contained, which is the exact opposite of making this album. There has to be a constant dialogue. There has to be a firm, steady, easily accessible organization system. There has to be honesty. Everything needs to be readily available at all times and everything has to be done in a timely manner. Everything has a "need by" date, even if that date is a long way away. These are things that are hard for any band or group so I don't think by any means that we have failed ourselves. I just think we have learned a lot, possibly at the expense of inexperience, which okay.
I don't want you to think I regret our times in Baird, or 220, or in mobile studios, or The Rail or Georgia or Asheville or anywhere else because I don't. Nothing can take away the best and worst of times we had 10 years ago. I don't regret anything from the past, and I never will, but that doesn't mean I don't want the future to be better. We didn't know how to do this--we're still figuring out! But I think we're having a great time and I think the payoff when we release the album (FINALLY) will be more rewarding than we could imagine. I hope it's that way at least.
Here is where I would describe where we're at, except that things are still too discombobulated to properly articulate. Besides that it would be boring to read, much less write. If I had to sum up our current progress I would stay it's "slowly but surely coming along" or some other contrite cliche that bands always give magazines when they're a year away from releasing a new album . That does NOT imply that we're a year away from final release, although full disclosure, we still don't have a final release date. That's just where we're at.
I can tell you that you should be on the lookout in mid-November for #RW4 hashtags. This is for our big semi-annual/annual get-together which we call Reclamation Weekend. During that time we'll try to post vauge, confusing, mostly uninteresting news from it on twitter. So yay for that!
Rather than showing off things we've finished recently and giving you, the reader, dare I say the fan?, something substantial to consume relating to this album, please take a look at the "Money In The Bank" video, or listen to the "Blood In Your Throat" song again, won't you?
Writing for this album has always been a problem for me and now that most--maybe all?--the beats are done I've been putting a lot more energy into it, and so far it's worked out great. Early on I realized that I wanted to go really hard at this project with everything I had, and I think I've done that with the beats, or as least as good as I could. But it wasn't until about six months ago where I felt like I could finally put that same energy into lyrics. Now that I'm here thinking about words rather than song strucutres it's great and I'm seeing things totally different than I ever did in 220.
That change in perception, how there's this newfound clarity at looking at lyrics, and even music, instrumentation, beats, makes me think that in a lot of ways I hope that this album will fucking destroy everything we've done before it because I feel like those past experiences have held us back in making this album. And not that that's our fault either. When we started this we really didn't know what to do, exactly. We knew what needed to be done--record these vocals to this beat, edit them, etc.--but we had no process for doing. We still don't have the process down, probably won't have it down by the time we finish and I think that's directly a result from having never done this before. In 220 we would get the urge, find the beat, write, record, listen and that was it. It was quick and it was self-contained, which is the exact opposite of making this album. There has to be a constant dialogue. There has to be a firm, steady, easily accessible organization system. There has to be honesty. Everything needs to be readily available at all times and everything has to be done in a timely manner. Everything has a "need by" date, even if that date is a long way away. These are things that are hard for any band or group so I don't think by any means that we have failed ourselves. I just think we have learned a lot, possibly at the expense of inexperience, which okay.
I don't want you to think I regret our times in Baird, or 220, or in mobile studios, or The Rail or Georgia or Asheville or anywhere else because I don't. Nothing can take away the best and worst of times we had 10 years ago. I don't regret anything from the past, and I never will, but that doesn't mean I don't want the future to be better. We didn't know how to do this--we're still figuring out! But I think we're having a great time and I think the payoff when we release the album (FINALLY) will be more rewarding than we could imagine. I hope it's that way at least.
Here is where I would describe where we're at, except that things are still too discombobulated to properly articulate. Besides that it would be boring to read, much less write. If I had to sum up our current progress I would stay it's "slowly but surely coming along" or some other contrite cliche that bands always give magazines when they're a year away from releasing a new album . That does NOT imply that we're a year away from final release, although full disclosure, we still don't have a final release date. That's just where we're at.
I can tell you that you should be on the lookout in mid-November for #RW4 hashtags. This is for our big semi-annual/annual get-together which we call Reclamation Weekend. During that time we'll try to post vauge, confusing, mostly uninteresting news from it on twitter. So yay for that!
Rather than showing off things we've finished recently and giving you, the reader, dare I say the fan?, something substantial to consume relating to this album, please take a look at the "Money In The Bank" video, or listen to the "Blood In Your Throat" song again, won't you?
Friday, October 04, 2013
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