Over the course of my career as a singer/songwriter/musician/producer I estimate i’ve written recorded and produced three hundreds plus songs. I often get asked questions about different songs. I sometimes enjoy answering them but most of the time i don’t do a very good job of answering. i’m really pretty anti-social. I can’t really help it. I think I was just born this way. So i came up with this idea to randomly select a hundred or so songs and write a few comments about each of the songs. like: with whom i recorded, what the song is about, Or simply something funny or interesting that happened in the session. Nothing too in depth. Sometimes i’ll also provide the lyrics and basic guitar chords for the fan’s who like that sort of thing.
The first randomly* selected track is something i produced with Lauren Hoffman and John Morand (Engineer). It’s called “The Chemist Said it Would be Allright”. It was supposed to be on a Lauren Hoffman Album of the same title but it was never released. This track was created using an interesting process. My recollection was that John and Lauren had gotten pretty high and were listening to a previously recorded track backwards at half speed. John had accidentally put the real on backwards, and the muse led them to begin to make a dub mix of the half speed backwards track. When i came into the studio i thought it was the coolest shit we had recorded all month. So we started dropping the dub mix onto the master tape. we cut up and re-arranged sections to make the music flow in a more musical way. We also recorded a bunch of string sections onto a microcassette recorder and started randomly playing and rewinding sections over top of the mixes. Eventually Lauren stumbled across a copy of the “the wasteland” by t.s. elliot. she began to rephrase and sing sections of the poem. There were still a few holes left. Since this process was simply a much wilder and abstract version of some of the techniques we had used on the first Sparklehorse record we decided to call Mark Linkous to see if he wanted to contribute anything. We played it to him over the phone. A little while later we got was a fax back that said “lyrics: you snuck me a coke when i was on dialysis. everywhere an oink oink”.
06 the chemist said it would be alright
*I’ve made an itunes playlist with every recording released or unreleased that fits my criteria. I am then then using the decimals of π to “randomly”select tracks. If i don’t feel like i wanna write about the track i skip it. So it’s not really that random.
