The RAW Impressions Mini-Music-Monday Skull episode is up NOW. Listen on Spotify and Apple! I play Adelle an early 4-track version of Skull and a lost song originally written in 1984 (and re-recorded in 1993). These individual tracks (plus one more) can be listened to and downloaded below!
I unearthed this tape for the purpose of examining the 4-track recording of my song High School and re-creating it for my live shows. It worked well! I was able to simplify it enough to fit that profane nugget into my set. I adopted it to the DCGD tuning I use for songs like Soul and Fire.
High School signaled a transition in the way I wanted to go forward. I was becoming frustrated by the limitations of the machine, I was ‘bouncing’ and layering the guitar and vocals many times and the songs were sounding thinner as a result. In retrospect I think it sounds amazing and could have schemed to compensate for what I was losing in other homespun ways but I was getting frustrated. Sebadoh had some successful studio work under our belts (the Bubble and Scrape L.P.), the live shows going O.K. and it seemed like the band and bigger tape machines were the way forward.
After I remixed High School for RAW Impressions , I went further into the cassette and found this early version of Skull, the song that became the centerpiece of my contributions to Sebadoh’s Bakesale L.P.. It surprised me that the song originally started with the chorus, a pretty sophisticated move! Why the fuck didn’t I do that on the studio recording? That’s classic stuff! I guess I thought it was too long that way. I guess I thought that catering to standard song structures harmed my integrity.
That, and the way I edited 45 seconds out of the released version of High School, makes no sense to me now. Why did I undermine myself with arbitrary decisions based on loyalty to a vague aesthetic?
I hadn’t quite nailed down the lyrics for Skull at the time this was recorded. It’s similar to High School, me hammering away on a 6-string, layering everything into a fog. I can see why I thought I needed to upgrade it to the band and seek the clarity of a studio. Unlike High School there’s no logic to the track seperation and there’s a gnarly hum coming through everything. Listening now it seems obvious that I should have followed my instincts to slather the song in reverb and keep it long. It would have reflected the music I was listening to at the time, Shoegaze. I was in love with bands on the Creation and Too Pure labels from the U.K. but felt Sebadoh should stick the dry, spare sound that seemed to typify American indie-rock. In any case The Folk Implosion was on the horizon and would indulge my sweet tooth for more produced, experimental music with John Davis.
During this cassette dive I also discovered and re-recorded a version of a song I wrote in high school: Saw My Girl. The song is about a time I saw my crush in the wild, outside high school walls, and “shook so hard I could hardly drive my car”. It’s from 1984, the latter part of my senior year of high school.
Early Easy is the instrumental beginnings of the song Easy from the New Folk Implosion L.P.. I finished it for that L.P.. 10 years later. As Saw My Girl was a tune I recorded 9 years after I wrote it, Easy finished itself in 2003.
I’m disappointed that I gave up on the guitar hook/tag that figures prominently in this . When I finally got the final version of Easy, I sobbed at the mixing desk. I thought I’d never get it right. Hearing that riff now I’m thinking I never did! Like Skull, I feel like I lost some crucial element in my revisions of the original idea. Dang.+