So years upon years ago, we swore to a pointlessly bold dare that if we ever got on the Tonight Show or Letterman, we would have to make up a song on the spot – no rehearsal, no cheating, no pre-air band huddle.
This is back when Carson still hosted (Johnny not Daly) and for some reason, was our measure at the time for having ‘made it’.
As if Johnny would have waved us over to the couch to sit next to George Gobel and be congratulated on our gumption.
Cut to almost twenty years later, we’re invited to perform a few songs for something called the WorldSpace Sessions at Abbey Road.
Now, not to impugn your worldliness or hip musical knowledge (which almost certainly dwarfs ours), but Abbey Road is the studio where the Beatles made all of their records…Pink Floyd made Dark Side of the Moon, Al Stewart made “Year of the Cat”. The list goes on and on.
And to us true disciples (the Fab Forties), it’s pretty much the inner sanctum.
So we’re there, setting up, preparing to play a four-song selection of the same tired Meadowlands chestnuts we’ve been coasting on for five years now, [“…chestnuuuuuts coasting on an open fire] and it begins to sink in that we’re about to perform live on satellite radio, recording direct-to-multitrack, in front of a small studio audience...in Abbey Road.
This would clearly be the perfect time to take a page out of our old playbook and make up something new on the spot. That this would make it the first official new music in 10 years to be worked on by the four of us together, in one room (no matter how slapdash & last-minute), only clinched it.
So Kev wrote down the chords for one of his demo songs (which was just recently released as ‘In Turkish Waters’ for the Fake Bookshelf issue of the nifty Australian magazine, the Lifted Brow ), and what you hear on the single is the first run-through of a song the rest of us hadn’t heard before with guitars made up on the spot, drums, piano, singing and lyrics, all sort of improvised.
That it came out as well as it did is in large part creditable to the folks at Abbey Road, particularly Alex Scannell, who engineered, and later mixed, the track.
That it came out better than many of the songs we’ve spent months on in the past is either A. an encouraging sign of things to come this year or B. a discouraging sign we’ve squandered a lot of time & effort up to this point.
You can buy it & judge for yourself either directly from us through the built-in digital-store-widget-y thing at the bottom of this page or via the new digital upstarts itunes or Amazon.
Either way, we’ve also made up a shirt to go along with our whole Abbey-centric kick-off/we’re back theme. We make these ourselves and since this one’s 4-color and our time is worth nearly minimum wage, it’s a limited run and we’ve priced it a little more than the others. You can find that here in our store.
And here are a bunch of photos from the session. Again, not a big deal, just a big deal for us.