studio day 3, 4, and 5, and 5.5, etc. [vocal bonanza]
This is Luke playing Livers’ blog catch-up. Scot couldn’t make it today. He had to hang out with his lover.
Here we reach the fun part of our studio journey…the vocals.
The trick with doing vocals in the studio is maintaining a complex balance between two incompatible necessities: being able to sing and being able to drink. As we are pros at the latter, we decided to knock out the former with a kind of conveyor belt efficiency.
First, we divide our songs up into the songs where the vocals require clarity, pronunciation, consciousness, etc.; and the songs that require gross, guttural explitives, no sense of key and/or rhythm, and a tenacity only attained while doing the “potty dance” or fighting back a recoiling jet of hot Jack Daniels and Doritos. I couldn’t even tell you which song we started with.
Second, we test our mics and hit record. After about ten seconds of beautiful sonorific glory, our voices are shot so we can go ahead and start drinking heavily-er. At this point, you can get out about 2 measures worth of lyrics before the music in your headphones abruptly halts followed by a disembodied voice quipping, “I think the first syllable was pretty solid.” This house of rock we’re building is made out of a lot of broken bricks…that are drunk…and smoke too much.
Third, we cough and sputter our intensely deep and meaningful lyrics in a never-before-fathomed plateau of musical genius. Both Scot and I have very profound moments of whimpering about girls. Pulitzer Prize officials have been trying to get copies of our lyrics so they can show aspiring novelists and poets where the bar is set from now on.
Finally, we listen to our masterpiece, heads nodding, brows furrowed, taking in the pitch and timbre of each of our voices and how they meld with the whirlwind of instrumentation below, noting the small, serendipitous surprises peppered throughout each song, and then, after much(no) deliberation, deciding that we “can do it better”, scrap the entire take and sing it again…after a shot and a cigarette. And of course, any take will be better if you’re not wearing any pants.
Lather. Rinse. Drink. Repeat.
And so, song after song was relentlessly beaten into being very fucking good! They were asking for it, and they got what they deserved.
Danielle came by Saturday night (interrupting the nap I was taking to squander our studio time) and took an underwear walk up to 7-11 with us to buy some booze. Thanks, Danielle.
Everything is better in your underwear! Except for maybe defecating. Actually, there’s probably a few things that aren’t better now that I consider it more. Listening to our rough mixes on the bus ride to work is definitely better.
All in all, our week of studio time was an exhausting, drunken, wallet-emptying success. Now we just gotta mix this divinity which, of course, will be the difference between a double- or a triple-platinum album.
[L]
