This is one of my favourite songs from when I was 16 and it's also a track I find myself listening to every so often even today.
The idea came about after I played a show back in August where I covered a Pedro the Lion song, one of my friends asked if I could do something we used to listen to when we were in school - almost 10 years ago, eek. At first I was thinking about doing a Lagwagon song or maybe something from Blue Skies Ataris era, but nothing really sat into my head. To be honest I don't remember how I came to pick this song, but I remember jamming it out on my acoustic guitar in the living room, trying to remember the chords and it just kind of felt right - I instantly knew what I would like to do with the song if I had the resources. Luckily, I have wonderful friends willing to be the Wolf Choir for this session, but these friends are in constant high demand.
Pat and
Spencer play in the Deadstring Brothers and Eileen Rose amongst others, Tom was at uni and Steve is constantly engineering around the world when he's not working on his own material.
I roughed up a quick demo in my room, guitar, bass, drum machine and some vocals and showed it to the guys. It was raw but they liked the general vibe. The good thing was that only Tom had heard the original before, Spencer and Pat were into different things growing up so this way we could cover this song and make a complete honest interpretation from just the basic structure of it instead of mimicking the original.
It took up until January for us all to find the time to get this down with Steve in the studio. We didn't rehearse other than Tom and I spending an hour in his drum room a few days before making sure we have the general vibe for the drums sorted. I was silently freaking out during the whole session, I had never conducted a full band before, you have ideas in your head, sounds and textures constantly flowing, but I never know how to articulate them, so I would wait until they hit the sounds I was hearing and ask them to concentrate on those notes more. They’re all professionals though, Spencer laid down some fat bass and some float-y pedal steel whilst Tom held the drums and percussion down solidly as Pat thick’d out the song with some Hammond and electric keys. We spent close to 12 hours recording and doing a rough mix of this and then I finished this mix off with Steve in March. I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished. We all are.
So here, for you, is a song which I’ve grown up with over the past 10 or so years, a song I’m proud to pay homage to and happy to do in a slightly different take with some of the influences I’ve grown to love today.
Please check it out, download it if you like it and pass it around to your friends if you think they might dig it too.
The Wolf Choir for this session was:
Pan Kenneally - Hammon, Keys
Spencer Cullam - Pedal Steel, Bass
Tom Maxwell - Drums, Shaker, Tambourine
-Russ
xo