When we pulled into our driveway at 5:42 AM yesterday, it had just hit me how intense the previous two days were. We tracked an entire song, did the basics, overdubs, and vocals, all in one caffeine and adrenaline fueled day, and then drove the 2.5 hours straight back to Edwardsville. Wow. We have to do a few group vocal parts in our kitchen, and then it's all out of our hands.
Nerd note: this was the first time since When I Explode that we recorded exclusively to 2" tape. My biggest regret about When I Explode: i wish we would have done it digitally.
We leave for a six week tour in 6 days. I'm not in the least bit prepared. Maybe I should bring a sleeping bag this time around.
Things we have to do before we leave:
-get shirts made
-work up more new songs for the record to be playable live
-obtain a synthesizer
Things i personally have to do before we leave:
-have a birthday/go out for my lady's birthday
-figure out how to run a guitar and a keyboard into the same amplifier without using an A/B switch or mixer
-mix the Say Panther record i've been working on for 4 months
-get a haircut (additional option: get a real job)
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Menomena got robbed at the Grammys, for real.
I'm sitting at a computer caddy-corner to the console at Great Western Record Recorders in Tolono, IL (15 minutes south of Champaign). Aaron is performing vocals for the 10th song on our record and Chris Walla is recording said vocals. Matt Talbot, studio owner and former member of Hum, is in the corner soldering some shit or something. Norm and Griffin are in the apartment that lives above the studio, probably drinking coffee and watching Barack Obama tear it up in the primaries.
It's the end of day two, which is the last day we have here. We spent all of yesterday working on sounds and rehearsing. The live tracking was done early this afternoon, keyboard and bass overdubs a bit later, vocals being done as I type and guitar fixes/overdubs in the late night/early morning hours I assume. Then we drive back to Edwardsville tonight, for Norm has a 6 AM blood draw at Gateway Medical Research.
Matt and Chris keep talking about gear, and while I'm a budding recording engineer, I haven't known what the hell they're talking about for about 3 hours.
I'm pretty proud of this song, very very glad we threw out the bastard track that ruined our lives 3 months ago. This is the longest song we've ever done, clocking in at 6 and a half minutes long (our longest to date was "let's move mountains", the last track on Flashlights, which was really just 2 songs put together into one track). I guess it's inspired by Beck, Yes, and Weezer. Nerd stuff: mic under snare drum near kick drum beater running through Whammy pedal set to an octave down. Floor tom mic running into an amp with a ton of reverb facing the kick drum mic. Casio sampling keyboard using a string glissando patch that's turned backwards.
Selective words from this song:
The fault line slipped
The fault line slipped
The fault line slipped
And my knees keep shaking
The seismic waves
The seismic waves
Are crashing into
The surface breaking
The plates collide
The plates collide
And we're all just
Fossils in the making
The Arch collapsed
The Arch collapsed
But I still see its shadow
Cast over the river
It's the end of day two, which is the last day we have here. We spent all of yesterday working on sounds and rehearsing. The live tracking was done early this afternoon, keyboard and bass overdubs a bit later, vocals being done as I type and guitar fixes/overdubs in the late night/early morning hours I assume. Then we drive back to Edwardsville tonight, for Norm has a 6 AM blood draw at Gateway Medical Research.
Matt and Chris keep talking about gear, and while I'm a budding recording engineer, I haven't known what the hell they're talking about for about 3 hours.
I'm pretty proud of this song, very very glad we threw out the bastard track that ruined our lives 3 months ago. This is the longest song we've ever done, clocking in at 6 and a half minutes long (our longest to date was "let's move mountains", the last track on Flashlights, which was really just 2 songs put together into one track). I guess it's inspired by Beck, Yes, and Weezer. Nerd stuff: mic under snare drum near kick drum beater running through Whammy pedal set to an octave down. Floor tom mic running into an amp with a ton of reverb facing the kick drum mic. Casio sampling keyboard using a string glissando patch that's turned backwards.
Selective words from this song:
The fault line slipped
The fault line slipped
The fault line slipped
And my knees keep shaking
The seismic waves
The seismic waves
Are crashing into
The surface breaking
The plates collide
The plates collide
And we're all just
Fossils in the making
The Arch collapsed
The Arch collapsed
But I still see its shadow
Cast over the river
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
6 songs that remind me of "Low Rider"
Alphabetically:
Battles - Tonto
Beck - Devil's Haircut
Broken Social Scene: Cause = Time
Modest Mouse - Tiny Cities Made of Ashes
Of Montreal - Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse
Radiohead - Bodysnatchers
Anyway, in less than a week we're meeting Chris Walla at Great Western Record Recorders in Champaign, IL to record that pesky 10th track for our record. It's 6 and a half minutes long.
Battles - Tonto
Beck - Devil's Haircut
Broken Social Scene: Cause = Time
Modest Mouse - Tiny Cities Made of Ashes
Of Montreal - Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse
Radiohead - Bodysnatchers
Anyway, in less than a week we're meeting Chris Walla at Great Western Record Recorders in Champaign, IL to record that pesky 10th track for our record. It's 6 and a half minutes long.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Week's show reviews plus ANECDOTE 1
So Many Dynamos played 3 shows this week. Here's how they went:
Friday, Jan 26 @ Billiken Club, St. Louis, MO
Awesome, awesome, awesome. It was one of the best lineups we could ever play. Say Panther opened. I've been recording them in my basement studio and have fallen deeply in love with their songs, so it was great to see them played live again. Maps and Atlases played second, and they're probably the best band in the universe. We headlined, which is quite a difficult task to do after Maps, but it went well. We're in that awkward stage where our record isn't out yet but we're playing new songs from it, and luckily the crowd seemed interested enough for it to not be weird. Everytime we go a while without playing a show in St. Louis, i assume everybody forgot about us and doesn't care anymore and, thankfully, this show proved me wrong.
Thursday, Jan 31 @ Stagger Inn, Edwardsville, IL
Our dirty secret is that we don't live in St. Louis, we live in Edwardsville, IL. It's a college town 30 minutes from downtown STL where the cost of living is cheap and we've been living there for 3 years. For some reason, this was the first time we've ever played in Edwardsville. We played at Stagger Inn, the bar Griffin works at, with the Red Light Runners, who are fellow employees there. Our dear friend Steven Colbert (pronounced Coal-burt) played inbetween bands. There was a storm all day and all night which detracted from the draw, but we made the best of it and Steven certainly enjoyed the free Stag pitchers.
Friday, Feb 1 @ Black Sheep Cafe, Springfield, IL
It's been about 2 years since we played Springfield, and Red Light Runners invited us to come up with them for this show. We didn't really have any reason not to! We played with 3 ska bands. Ska is alive and well in Springfield, IL. Mustard Plug played there earlier in the week! The show was great, no complaints.
I've decided, in an attempt to add interest to this blog when we're not active, to post stories about things that happened to us a while ago that are still entertaining. Here goes nothing:
Anecdote 1: The Most Uncomfortable Stay
Last year, we spent 2 months on tour with HORSE the band. They are great friends of ours, and I think they brought us on tour as sort of a science project; they like our band, so will people that like their band like us as well? It's almost musical Reaganomics.
The first show was in Dallas, TX. We were really nervous, and we fumbled through our set with minimal heckling and even more minimal responses from us. By the end of the tour we were experts at verbally destroying hecklers, but we were still new then.
When the show was over, we realized that we had no place to stay. The crowd had dwindled and we had lost any chance to publically announce our current homelessness via a sign or stage announcement. We went around to everybody that was still around and asked them if we could stay with them.
16 year old kid: "You can totally stay with me!"
Us: "Are you sure? Do you live with your folks?"
16 YOK: "Yeah, i live with my dad."
Us: "Are you sure it's cool with him"
16 YOK: "Oh, yeah, it's totally fine"
Us: "Oh, thank you, thank you"
16 YOK: "Oh man, you're totally going to make my spring break"
We followed the kid to his house, got our sleeping bags out and walked up to the house. The house was dark when we walked in, and the first thing I saw when I peered in was the mounted head of a lion. His dad is a hunter, and had gone on trips to other countries and illegally hunted some endagered species. He had a prize lion and a giant zebra rug hanging from the wall. Yes, a fucking zebra, head included. He also had the Texas state record for longest hunted alligator, which was stuffed and hanging out like a tacky coffee table. We ate wild boar sausage, which was actually the highlight of the evening. It's pretty great with some ketchup on it.
The house was gigantic, but we were quarantined to one hang out room which contained a pool table, a drum set, a couch, a TV, and a mounted lion head. All night the kid was very hesitant to let us out of the room and kept telling us to be quiet. It was a pretty small room, and I personally slept inbetween the couch and the drum set with my legs under the floor tom. They left the TV on all night, Jay Leno and then infomercials.
We were woken up at 8:45. "Dude, you guys have to leave. My dad is going to be up soon". It all made sense. We have a rule of never staying anywhere we're not wanted and we'd unintentionally broken it. The kid lied to us, he had never told his dad that we'd be over. We asked if we could take a shower. No. We asked if we could use the computer to get directions to our show. No. We couldn't leave the room except to get out of his house, right now.
We were groggy and sore from an unsatisfying night of sleep, and the kid stood there with arms crossed, tough guy style, watching us roll up our sleeping bags. We got into the van and drove off, shocked at this kid's complete lack of tact, and drowned our sorrows at the Cracker Barrel.
Friday, Jan 26 @ Billiken Club, St. Louis, MO
Awesome, awesome, awesome. It was one of the best lineups we could ever play. Say Panther opened. I've been recording them in my basement studio and have fallen deeply in love with their songs, so it was great to see them played live again. Maps and Atlases played second, and they're probably the best band in the universe. We headlined, which is quite a difficult task to do after Maps, but it went well. We're in that awkward stage where our record isn't out yet but we're playing new songs from it, and luckily the crowd seemed interested enough for it to not be weird. Everytime we go a while without playing a show in St. Louis, i assume everybody forgot about us and doesn't care anymore and, thankfully, this show proved me wrong.
Thursday, Jan 31 @ Stagger Inn, Edwardsville, IL
Our dirty secret is that we don't live in St. Louis, we live in Edwardsville, IL. It's a college town 30 minutes from downtown STL where the cost of living is cheap and we've been living there for 3 years. For some reason, this was the first time we've ever played in Edwardsville. We played at Stagger Inn, the bar Griffin works at, with the Red Light Runners, who are fellow employees there. Our dear friend Steven Colbert (pronounced Coal-burt) played inbetween bands. There was a storm all day and all night which detracted from the draw, but we made the best of it and Steven certainly enjoyed the free Stag pitchers.
Friday, Feb 1 @ Black Sheep Cafe, Springfield, IL
It's been about 2 years since we played Springfield, and Red Light Runners invited us to come up with them for this show. We didn't really have any reason not to! We played with 3 ska bands. Ska is alive and well in Springfield, IL. Mustard Plug played there earlier in the week! The show was great, no complaints.
I've decided, in an attempt to add interest to this blog when we're not active, to post stories about things that happened to us a while ago that are still entertaining. Here goes nothing:
Anecdote 1: The Most Uncomfortable Stay
Last year, we spent 2 months on tour with HORSE the band. They are great friends of ours, and I think they brought us on tour as sort of a science project; they like our band, so will people that like their band like us as well? It's almost musical Reaganomics.
The first show was in Dallas, TX. We were really nervous, and we fumbled through our set with minimal heckling and even more minimal responses from us. By the end of the tour we were experts at verbally destroying hecklers, but we were still new then.
When the show was over, we realized that we had no place to stay. The crowd had dwindled and we had lost any chance to publically announce our current homelessness via a sign or stage announcement. We went around to everybody that was still around and asked them if we could stay with them.
16 year old kid: "You can totally stay with me!"
Us: "Are you sure? Do you live with your folks?"
16 YOK: "Yeah, i live with my dad."
Us: "Are you sure it's cool with him"
16 YOK: "Oh, yeah, it's totally fine"
Us: "Oh, thank you, thank you"
16 YOK: "Oh man, you're totally going to make my spring break"
We followed the kid to his house, got our sleeping bags out and walked up to the house. The house was dark when we walked in, and the first thing I saw when I peered in was the mounted head of a lion. His dad is a hunter, and had gone on trips to other countries and illegally hunted some endagered species. He had a prize lion and a giant zebra rug hanging from the wall. Yes, a fucking zebra, head included. He also had the Texas state record for longest hunted alligator, which was stuffed and hanging out like a tacky coffee table. We ate wild boar sausage, which was actually the highlight of the evening. It's pretty great with some ketchup on it.
The house was gigantic, but we were quarantined to one hang out room which contained a pool table, a drum set, a couch, a TV, and a mounted lion head. All night the kid was very hesitant to let us out of the room and kept telling us to be quiet. It was a pretty small room, and I personally slept inbetween the couch and the drum set with my legs under the floor tom. They left the TV on all night, Jay Leno and then infomercials.
We were woken up at 8:45. "Dude, you guys have to leave. My dad is going to be up soon". It all made sense. We have a rule of never staying anywhere we're not wanted and we'd unintentionally broken it. The kid lied to us, he had never told his dad that we'd be over. We asked if we could take a shower. No. We asked if we could use the computer to get directions to our show. No. We couldn't leave the room except to get out of his house, right now.
We were groggy and sore from an unsatisfying night of sleep, and the kid stood there with arms crossed, tough guy style, watching us roll up our sleeping bags. We got into the van and drove off, shocked at this kid's complete lack of tact, and drowned our sorrows at the Cracker Barrel.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
While on tour in October our friend Alan came along with us a for a few days. He took a lot of pictures and put together a multimedia slide show.
Check it out
We've got a show with Maps & Atlases and Say Panther on Friday at the Billiken Club (St. Louis University) .
This is going to be a great show.
It's all ages but there is a bar for those of age.
It's also free!
Friday, January 11, 2008
I get up, I get down
In the past five months making a record has gone from something that we worked on for 10 to 12 hours a day to more of a weird abstract, some distant idea that will come to fruition eventually but is still far off and totally intangible. After deciding to cut a song and write another this sense of disconnect only increased (especially since I heard about it from a friend and later got the details from the f-ing internet. WTF, I know, right?).
But that's boring and old news. This week has brought us significantly closer to the completion of our record.
On Wednesday we finished writing what will be our 10th and final song on the record. With Close to the Edge by Yes in mind, we churned out our longest song yet (ever?).On Thursday the disc containing the 9 mastered songs arrived in the mail. Although nothing is confirmed, plans are being made to record this last track. Once it is recorded, mixed, and mastered our record will be D-O-N-E!
Of course there is much more to it (artwork, finding someone to release it, etc....) and there are surely more stalls and road blocks ahead, but for the first time the idea of our record being complete seems very real and very close.
In the meantime I've got plenty of things to keep me occupied:
- Barak Obama's presidential campaign
- upcoming Spring tour
- In Rainbows discbox
- Boss PS-5 Super Shifter
- an enormous stack of books that's been piling up for about a year and a half.
I am pretty excited.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Best bands So Many Dynamos played with in 2007 that we didn't know were going to be awesome before we played with them
So i guess the Beatle Bob rant was a lot of negativity, so I felt like making up for it by doing something positive on here. We didn't play a TON of shows in 2007, I think our final count was 75, but we had some really great ones and made some new friends and blah blah blah. Here's a list of the best bands we played with last year that we didn't know were going to be awesome, but were. This doesn't include bands that we played with that we KNEW were going to be awesome and were. That list is (in order of performance): Ad Astra Per Aspera, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, HORSE the band, Russian Circles, Maps and Atlases, We Versus the Shark, Cinemechanica, Octopus Project, Ho-Ag, Enon, and Bring Back the Guns
The New Trust
We drove straight to San Francisco to play the Noise Pop Festival in February, and immediately afterwards almost all of our shows fell through on the west coast. Luckily, we got added to 2 shows with these dudes (technically a 2 dude, 2 dudette hybrid). Unfortunately, one of them was in Salt Lake City, UT. There's nothing like playing the most miserable place in America to make 2 bands bond. Musically, they play straight ahead indie rock with no bullshit and they have a song called "You've Got to be Fucking Shitting Me". That's awesome.
Pattern Is Movement
This has to be one of the weirdest bands in the universe. We officially met PiM this year, and wound up playing with them 4 times with 3 different lineups. It sounds like somebody turned Kid A up too loudly and sang opera-style over it. They played a house show in Pittsburgh with us and 6 hardcore bands and tore the house down when they covered "Everything in its Right Place". Wow.
Heavy Heavy Low Low
I didn't know what it meant to not give a shit about anything until i met these dudes. They're some of the sweetest, weirdest guys in the universe, and I would have never appreciated them musically if we hadn't toured with them and heard 50 bands try to do what they do but not nearly as well. Seeing 300 kids in North Carolina jump over each other to chant "Oh Shit Fuck" along with this band brought a tear to my eye.
Light This City
When HHLL dropped off our tour with HORSE the band, this band picked up. I never thought i'd love a metal band the way that i love Light this City. Megadeth style riffs, Iron Maiden style solos, and vocals by a girl that sounds like a really tough dude. The breakdown to "Exile" was in our heads for about 2 months.
Powers
Powers is to Athens what Thor Axe tries to be to St. Louis (or at least Edwardsville), but they're a lot less ironic more conceptually righteous. It's 4 guitarists (including Bryant from Cinemechanica and Luke from We Versus the Shark) and one drummer (Mike from Cinemechanica), and they set up the amps in the corners of the club, throw the drums in the middle and play quadrophonic math rock. Seriously.
The Bronzed Chorus
These dudes from North Carolina do what Explosions in the Sky do, but better than Explosions in the Sky and with half of the people. It's 2 people sounding like 8, and they're one of the most intense live acts i've ever seen.
We'll be touring again soon and i can't wait to see what sweet bands we get to play with this year.
The New Trust
We drove straight to San Francisco to play the Noise Pop Festival in February, and immediately afterwards almost all of our shows fell through on the west coast. Luckily, we got added to 2 shows with these dudes (technically a 2 dude, 2 dudette hybrid). Unfortunately, one of them was in Salt Lake City, UT. There's nothing like playing the most miserable place in America to make 2 bands bond. Musically, they play straight ahead indie rock with no bullshit and they have a song called "You've Got to be Fucking Shitting Me". That's awesome.
Pattern Is Movement
This has to be one of the weirdest bands in the universe. We officially met PiM this year, and wound up playing with them 4 times with 3 different lineups. It sounds like somebody turned Kid A up too loudly and sang opera-style over it. They played a house show in Pittsburgh with us and 6 hardcore bands and tore the house down when they covered "Everything in its Right Place". Wow.
Heavy Heavy Low Low
I didn't know what it meant to not give a shit about anything until i met these dudes. They're some of the sweetest, weirdest guys in the universe, and I would have never appreciated them musically if we hadn't toured with them and heard 50 bands try to do what they do but not nearly as well. Seeing 300 kids in North Carolina jump over each other to chant "Oh Shit Fuck" along with this band brought a tear to my eye.
Light This City
When HHLL dropped off our tour with HORSE the band, this band picked up. I never thought i'd love a metal band the way that i love Light this City. Megadeth style riffs, Iron Maiden style solos, and vocals by a girl that sounds like a really tough dude. The breakdown to "Exile" was in our heads for about 2 months.
Powers
Powers is to Athens what Thor Axe tries to be to St. Louis (or at least Edwardsville), but they're a lot less ironic more conceptually righteous. It's 4 guitarists (including Bryant from Cinemechanica and Luke from We Versus the Shark) and one drummer (Mike from Cinemechanica), and they set up the amps in the corners of the club, throw the drums in the middle and play quadrophonic math rock. Seriously.
The Bronzed Chorus
These dudes from North Carolina do what Explosions in the Sky do, but better than Explosions in the Sky and with half of the people. It's 2 people sounding like 8, and they're one of the most intense live acts i've ever seen.
We'll be touring again soon and i can't wait to see what sweet bands we get to play with this year.
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