Meadowlands-20th-Anniversary-Stuff-You-Prob.-Didn't-Know #6: She Sends Kissesoterica

1. Exemplifies sabotaged-first-chorus and non-repeating-chorus principle (see last week's meadowlands-stuff-you-didn't-know-or-honestly-,-care-about post #5)

2. The chorus, geekily and non-interestingly, prob. my only that modulates to harmonic minor (D harm. min. in this case, relative to the F maj. the song's mostly in (see Bridge below))

3. The title is derived from a typo of the orig. title, She IS Kisses, by one of the other band geeks, when we were making an early version of it & other songs for a demo cassette for various labels, in the year or two preceding starting the meadowlands (so c. '97/'98). I preferred the 'Sends' to the "Is" and so wrote the final lyrics more around that.

4. Relatedly, I was also more than happy to change that orig. working title because it came too close to giving away what I modeled the chorus on (have I mentioned how I hate choruses yet)..."she is...as sweet as Tupelo Honey..". There, now like me, you'll never be able to not hear that when the chorus goes by.

5. The 'accordion' sound on intro & early v's is actually a dated-even-then guitar synth. Ok, technically it was actually my regular guitar with a late-'80s/early-'90s guitar synth set-up, a Roland GM-70 if I remember right, that a friend had perma-leant me. It had a hex pickup (so basically a pickup w/ a separate readable output for each of the six stings, hence 'hex') that mounted iffily under the strings by the bridge; that connected to an equally awkwardly-guitar-mounted rectangular interface thing that had four knobs to enable controlling four main assignable parameters per poorly-chosen patch.

That in turn ran a separate cable (so in addtion to one's regular guitar cable going to pedals/amp) to a large & archaic single-standard-19"-rack-size voltage-to-midi converter box thing. And that in turn could be patched into a synth, in this case, one of Kevin's also-even-dated-then '80s synth modules.  You can see that here: https://www.joness.com/gr300/GM-70.htm

In hindsight, I wish I hadn't tried to get the Springsteen 2nd album effect (not only my favorite of his, my favorite period) and instead had gone for a different, weirder more unique sound that took it out of the nostalgic trap but gave it the same effect.

6. Similarly, the harp sound that takes over for the first (inst.) chorus is the same guitar-synth set-up, this time driving a dated '80s harp patch, which again, if I remember right, is the sound I wrote that arpeggio part on. Possibly easily played on an actual harp (I wouldn't know), more fiendishly problematic on a guitar, especially while singing, especially if you're me.

7. The Bridge, like some of my other dumb bespoke bridges, is an unlikely 20 measures long (it's really that it's sorta three times around the 8-chord block, the 2nd/middle time it's cut in half to 4 measures ("I fired replies back gun by gun"). With a crap-load of chords & couple modulations. You know, just like how the Beatles are always talking about how some song or another "then goes to the middle twenty" - ha. It also modulates first to the IV key (so Bb Maj.), then to G Maj. (basically the old parallel, as opposed to 'relative', major/minor chestnut), then sorta sneakily back to Bb major although it's intentional vague, finally borrowing a V chord (C) to get us back to F Maj. and the way home.

8. Speaking of, there's lyrical sorta near-palindrome in the bridge that I had a twinge of misplaced pride every time I sang (ha) - "our shore-town knockdown sure / was fun"

9. The very last two-part harmony was me trying to Bowie, prob. Five Years specifically, which I don't think people spot but I do a lot (ha).

10. Speaking of Springsteen & his 2nd album esp., while this, like most of the songs on the meadowlands is 'not' autobiographical (another geeked up topic for me), it was my first try to reconcile writing a song based in/near the south Jersey shore town I grew up in, Ocean City in this case, w/ a feeling that had prevented me from doing that previously - chiefly, that Springsteen had done it first & almost certainly better. My liberation finally to do so came from hearing the pre-Hold-Steady Lifter Puller album and thinking, 'oh yeah, one CAN write about this stuff..'

Serves one. Enjoy.

Meadowlands-20th-Anniversary-Stuff-You-Prob.-Didn't-Know #5: the avoidance of choruses

Have I mentioned how I hate choruses or at least hate writing them? Or really, it's that, with the way the band worked since the '90s - i.e. finishing songs after they're recorded rather than assembling in-person beforehand and then recording 'that' - I guess I came to hate hearing the same dumb section go by hundreds upon hundreds of times (song depending) while I worked on it. So as with these other posts, it probably didn't register that most songs have either no chorus, or at least no first chorus...almost...

Also, I'm sorta defining a Chorus (abbr. 'C') as being:

A. that section of the song that the verses build to (way to define something by what it's not, charles);

A-and-a-half: since the '60s is almost never the first section in a song (so as opposed to "[brrrrnnnnnng]....it's been a Hard Day's Night..."

B. tends to repeat at least a few times in the song, i.e. is the same mel. & chord progression & use the same lyrics every time

C. tends to use/shout out the song title

1. Gilt House: technically DOES have a chorus ("and i'm nowhere near" etc.), or at least a second section - we'll count it

2. Happy: it is one enormous verse over & over, chorus finally enters (with only the orig. chorus' back-up voc. now serving as main melody) at 4:09, then done.

3. Kisses: 1st C. is instrumental, 2ndx I put the ld. vocal waaay in the background sorta to the L. None of the remaining C's have the same words, my standard m.o.

4. Exhausted: breaks my own dumb rule A-and-a-half above, opening with the C but it's essentially instrumental with just the b.u. voc. On the remaining C's I replaced the vocal melody on the main 1st lines with a baritone guitar just playing it, in part 'cause I hated the words to that line: "[but]..I-I'll never give up [this boy is exhausted]" etc.

5. Hopeless:  the C to this one, for better and worse, is my writing/doing and I was so psyched at the time of having done those guitar parts, esp. the constantly-cycling '3 quarter note against 4/4 time' hemiola one on the R, that I just wanted to hear them by themselves. So..1st C is instrumental.

6. Pastor/Nun: C. presented properly, per recording tradition

7. Thirteen Grand: this one also has proper 1st C but Greg, after the fact, chose to title this one Thirteen Grand, diff. than what he's singing &naming after a line in another song, which I continue to applaud.

8. Boys, Who Will: 'will' that is play the C first (unlike my defining rule A-and-a-half above) but it is instrumental, so we're right on course/chorus. Goes a step further in that C2 is ALSO instrumental (keeping 'em wanting more. Or even any...ha)

9. Ex-Grrrr: this has choruses and first C is intact but follows the breaking-of-rule-B rule, i.e. words are different every C

10. Per Second squared: even setting aside all the variations on this, at one time the whole thing was sung, with a proper (if terrible) melody etc., in the end I asked Greg to sing the C mel. which is reverbed and pushed to the back as essentially the back-ups now. But it still sounds 'chorus-y' to me, so..

11. Choose Sides: none of the C's have the same words

12. 13 Million Months of Work: none of the C's have the same words

13. Not What You Planned: as in the opener, there's a chorus, two of them in fact even given the song's brevity, so we go out of this world as we came in, with tradition.

Meadowlands-20th-Anniversary-Crap-You-Didn't-Know #4: the release date: wasn't Sept. 9th

[pasting this in from my reply to someone 'cause I gotta run out to a doctor's appt.]

It's essentially hair-splitting and meaningless re: the release date for a record for which we initially only pressed a thousand or two copies (?) w/ Absolutely Kosher, and even those, only on cd (it was 2003 after all, the iTunes store was only a couple months old, streaming was nearly a decade away and vinyl was still pre-resurrection). And I'd have to look back at a 20-year-old calendar, but in short, back then, for whatever reason (prob. some hold-over from industry-marketing of 78's or something), release dates were always on Tuesdays. But I wanted it to be on a Friday in part because at that time, if you were lucky enough to get a 'news' mention, on say a pitchfork etc., on a Friday, the piece would often hang around on the front page through that weekend, earning bonus miles.

And because we were initially talking just a few thousand copies, Cory/AbKosh, didn't especially care, but he did need to officially follow the then-standard protocol of a Tuesday release date, at least on paper, if only to draw a clear commonly-followed line in the sand that no one would be able to make it available for sale it early, in theory effectively pitting one retailer against another.

So it was actually the friday before or after that, I think after, which makes it..the 12th? Happy anniversary!

The other way of counting the release date is from the record release party/show, which I can't find online looking quickly, but was weeks later, at the Mercury Lounge with Palomar.

Meadowlands-20th-Anniversary-Crap-You-Didn't-Know #3: the twelfth-and-a-half song.

Coming out of 13 Months In 6 Minutes, there's this other song that briefly pops up, settles in & immediately begins fading out. It doesn't have a name and there's obv. no start ID/track number. And sorta like the accidental radio-preacher recording (yesterday's story) at the start of Per Second Second, the drums that come in to seemingly play along with this song were what was actually already there, on the tape almost a minute after the end of the basic tracks of 13 Months, the remnant of some other song's take that was tried and (mostly) discarded. Listening now, it sounds like it might've been an alt. take of Ex-Grille Confection.

When I'd have this one up on blocks to work on, & I'd be writing/recording guitars or bass or whatever, the ADAT tape would reach the end of the song, sometimes I'd continue playing, working out whatever part I was doing at the time & this orphaned drum track would come in and start playing. Over time, I began to play along with it & eventually gravitated to playing the chorus to an older song I'd never recorded along with it each time it came around.

Eventually having decided to create a new 'song' by adding this old chorus over the drums, the difficulty was in connecting them (the 13 Months song end & this drums-only 'song' w/ the new/old chorus). They're almost a minute apart & are at different tempos. And because this was ADAT not computer (see meadowlands trivia post #1 from the other day if you're feeling too awake & non-drowsy), there's no click track, no way to visually see the pending orphaned drum-entry on a screen or to cut/paste/move it earlier.

So I spent a good amount of time moving between writing a 2nd section (that comes first, the two oblique guitar parts (the one goes up, the other down & the eventual vocals double those)) & figuring out an arrangement that worked connecting the two songs, while navigating the tempo difference. That was actually the hard part. Recording one guitar straight through to act as the breadcrumbs took a LOT of tries (ha) but at least it was closed-ended work, i.e. it was clear when it finally lined up & worked. The whole thing, as I remember took me a week. Jesus.

The post-mortem: so listening just now, you hear the two-part guitar come in at 5:39, play its figure 1x in tempo w/ the 13 Months song, then play it a 2nd time (at 5:46) but beginning to speed up to meet the oncoming faster train of the eventual drums-only song. At 5:50 there's a third time through, now w/ a later-added rhythm guitar fading in to create the illusion that this was all 'supposed' to happen, joined by tambourine (I also added after to patch the hole to the drums-only, furthering the dumb illusion).

That's one verse down (ha...are you filled again with regret that you've read this far?). At 5:55, 2nd x through the verse, now w/ vocals & at 6:11 the micro-chorus starts as those drums finally settle in for the missing song/take and everything immediately moves to fade-out.

Exeunt omnes.

Of all the ridiculous work I did on the record, this is one of the things of which I'm hilariously most proud. And because I never printed them, and because someone was asking yesterday, here are most of the words to that whole connector-y song:

Maybe that's enough / there may be faster guns / maybe I give up //

Maybe money isn't coming / maybe last ditches are done /

Maybe married counts as running / then ready?, let's run together... //

the last line, I just can't remember & can't tell. Might be "I'm going back in time"

Tomorrow, shorter, promise.

Meadowlands 20th-anniversary behind-the-scenes trivia story #2:

That preacher dialogue that comes in at the very end of Ex-Girl Collection and connects into Per Second Second, mostly out of the left speaker, is actually not a sample dropped in there as you might assume (which was super common in say, the '90s, less so by the time this record was finished).

It's technically not at the end of Ex-Grille Confection, it actually exists at the beginning of Per Second Second and that was one of the few songs that I didn't use my same amp set-up on (more on that trivia later), but instead, mic'd up a Marshall half-stack in the basement, possibly with a guitar wireless unit (tough to recall, it's pushing 25 years at this point).

And because we were living back in Secaucus at the time, on Huber St. near one of the fenced-off swampy areas that hosted a number of radio transmitters for NYC-area stations*, ...(*and one in a very long list of environmental factors I used to wonder about, whether it had contributing to my developing myeloma. But it's an impure modern world and it could've been a lot of things - ha.)...in writing & tracking the guitars on that song, my guitar/amp/mic combo just picked that up, on a Sunday if I remember right, an actual sermon being delivered & broadcast live, so I hit record and captured it.

The sorta crazier part is that that portion of the sermon is roughly as follows: "mary went to the tomb of Jesus...just to be there / but how when she went early, she found something strange had happened.../ the stone was rolled away - and by the way, by the way...god did not have to roll that stone away for Jesus to come out"

And then it goes straight into Per Second Second which is, while somewhat of a throw-away song lyrically, essentially about this dream i had where I was shot and died, Jesus pulls up in a very tricked-out late-model convertible to 'gather me home', that sorta thing.

I don't think anyone's ever noticed or at least pointed it out to me, but at the time I was completely bamboozled at the timing & coincidence of it all, and thinking about it again now, still sorta am.

meadowlands 20th anniversary story time: the erase the meadowlands master tapes story

It's funny, for a long time I'd had in mind the notion of doing a long post, or series of posts, on dumb trivia you prob. didn't know about the meadowlands album ('you' being the dozen+ readers in theory) and pictured myself trotting out amusing anecdotes about this song or that. But then I've been so busy this past calendar year (regular life + going back to set up release of this next album now) that I completely forgot about it until today!

There are a few stories I don't think I've old-man'd about, so I'll post a few more shorties tomorrow, the apparent 20th anniversary of the album (actually even that's its own trivia-the album release date was not actually Sept. 9th - ha). This one though, that "erasing the meadowlands' master tapes" story, is 'true' w/ an asterisk (the * being that it's only mostly true due to the album being made on ADAT's) and is both long AND boring (ha)...

I've prob. prattled on about it before but it's relevant here because of the nature of ADAT's & the positively ancient form of ADAT's back-up/archiving. For the members of the audience not in bands in the '90s, ADATs being this sorta revolution that happened in home recording straight through the decade, for better & worse - better 'cause it brought high-quality multi-track recording, in this case early digital, to home studios at relatively budget prices (I think we paid $2000 for our first 8-track ADAT in '93?) And also better 'cause it was modular so you could connect one to another ($2000-budgets allowing) and thereby grow to 16- or 24-track, which is what we did.

But worse in that it was both digital AND tape, a VHS tape, in fact. So picture every VHS movie you had (or your parents had, younger set) & how if you rewound it to rewatch a scene like even twice, it began to get glitchy in spots. Glitchy when you're watching Trading Places is an annoyance, glitchy when you're depending on perfect reads to sync one machine to another was disastrous.

So the workaround was that I had to make digital copies of every tape as I went, 'cause they were constantly, over the four years making the record (1999-2003), being eaten. Since there were 3 ADATs playing in sync at all times (8 tracks per machine, totaling 24 sync'd tracks), that meant every "tape" was actually 3 tapes (i.e. one 8-track VHS tape per ADAT, if that all makes sense so far (regretting you clicked on Capt. Geek Answers No One's Actual Question yet?)).

Soooo...there were a few 'takes' of each song tracked winter/spring of 1999, I think filling 3 'tapes'-worth total - but remember that's actually 9 tapes total (one per ADAT). Then w/ back-up copies of each, and copies of those copies as they failed, you quickly ended up with a literal bookcase of glorified VHS tapes, all labeled things like "Dig. cc of Dig. cc #1, Tape 1, T-T8" etc. (trans.: 'digital copy of Digital Copy #1 of recording-session Tape #1, tracks 1 through 8). And all that capping out at about 30- or 40-some VHS tapes total.

So that's meadowlands 4-year recording on ADAT and only relevant here because with erasing them, the sheer number of all those digital back-up copies and the nature of ADAT recording is the alluded-to asterisk above.

In the last year of working on that record, I rarely left the house except to go to work, because I was as paranoid as a right-wing blogger that there was gonna be a fire or theft or God-act (you should've seen me on this next album). So,at a certain point, fueled by a resentment at choices I'd made in life that lead to me work on a record for 4 years and THEN turn 40 (ha), of music in gen. & the album specifically, I decided I wanted to erase the master tapes at our 'hey, the album's done' party (summer '03).

(Just an aside, the desire to erase everything was 'not' to prevent going back to keep on working on them, in spite of what we may have joked at the time (i don't actually remember). The album was done, done finally-not perfect, either musically or sonically but that is never the point (or at least never mine, even if it was within my ability,which it isn't). The record was done in that top-to-bottom it finally felt right (to me) and so it was...perfect (ha). (an aside to the aside, I'm very proud of the record even as I have only ever listened to it, i think, twice?, since finishing.))

Anyway, so I dragged two of the ADAT machines (entire VCR's essentially) into work at the ad agency I was an admin asst. at then, in a backpack weighing in at a cool 40+ lbs. (hilariously, the post-911 beefed-up security in our bldg. wouldn't let me leave w/ them for a half-hour). But it only registered once I got to the party & set up that the thing is, ADAT's are 'digital' but they're not computers, they're still tape. So shy of holding them over a 3rd subway rail, there is no 'command-delete' per se. There's only 'erase', which is really just recording - in real time - with no signal going in, which erases what was previous on there. So w/ each tape running 45 minutes, it meant that w/ two machines, over the course of a 6-hour party, I only made it through like, I don't know, 10 tapes?

Plus, erasing tape in real time as a means of wowing your friends is...underwhelming. With no signal going into the machines (so that they erase what's already on there as they 'record'), there are no flashing lights etc., essentially nothing's happening. So many of our friends, most of whom aren't musicians, understandably did not quite get what was even going on: "wait, you're recording the party?". "I can't hear anything". "why is your album so quiet" etc. (ha). But that did cover, technically the "orig" 9 or 12 tapes (session tapes one through three, each comprised of three sync'd ADAT vhs tapes. Jesus). It's also where I began to think about the notion of 'originals vs copies', but I'll come back to that in a bit.

The rest of the digital back-up tape copies I had to, exceedingly uninterestingly (like picture this long post but as a whole lived weekend) erase at home.

And that concludes the least interesting post in Facebook history. A couple blessedly shorter anecdotes tomorrow, then album announcement week of Oct. 6th.