Another Album's Tuning

The opening lines from 76 are relics from back when I was writing the songs on Bay to Maples midway through the last decade. I had written Where We've Been, You Won't Burn Me, and Bay to Maples with my guitar tuned to an obscure alternative tuning with a C# and three E's, and before I restrung the guitar I'd also written "I was born in the early morn on a 76 gasoline station convenience store floor, felt like I had been there before." Three years later Peters and I picked it up again and spun it into a reincarnation story about a convenience store clerk and her lover.

Holding The Same Breath

One of first times we played Salt Water live was as a duo on the corner of State and Carrillo during a Thursday night arts walk in downtown Santa Barbara. Half way through, a drunk middle-aged guy came staggering toward us across the street, hollering and flashing the devil's horns. He was stoked for the song and said he'd buy the CD we were selling (Bay to Maples) only if Salt Water was on it. In the end he was uninterested in our merchandise, and when he took off we weren't a tip richer.

I wrote the opening line and sat on it for a while for fear of fucking up a good thing. By the time I brought the song half written to Peters it was melodically and lyrically intense, but not the explosive tidal wave that it grew into. Once Peters dropped his swampy lap steel and under water delay effect on top it started writing itself and all we had to do was let it go where it chose. Salt Water was the reason I got myself a proper amplifier.

if there's a light

We never were told what to expect at the end of our Mesopotamian war, all we ever got were vague goals and delivered in shifty simplified rhetoric. The Stars Aren't Falling is made up mostly of questions that haven't been answered or addressed in these ten long years. Questions about faith, fire power, family, and fear.

My son was on his way when I started writing the song, and I got to thinking about the sequence of wars in the last three generations, and how exponentially detached some of us have become from the battlefield. From my grandfather on a Navy destroyer at Normandy to my dad doing whatever he could to stay the hell away from Vietnam, to me watching embedded mouthpieces on TV, hoping my few friends that volunteered to go come back unharmed and dreading the inevitable news of innocent casualties.

I have not been on the battlefield and have not been threatened by the fear and violence that war zone civilians and military families face. I wrote this song from my own filtered perspective as a baffled witness as well as the perspective, as I imagine it, of a confused child comforted by his mother.

written at last

After I released Bay to Maples in '07 I used to fly out to the west coast from New York to play duo shows with Peters in northern and southern California (and in between when I could stretch the visit). Most San Diego nights would end in smokey backyard jam sessions over Port Brewing growlers at his place in Encinitas, like the one I wrote about in this post on my old blog.

The recording in that blog entry is of the moment we started playing the guitar part that eventually became the second half of Turn At Last. In the comments below the post my friend Ilan asks if the tune will be on the next record... yes, my man.

There's no denying Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's influence on the acoustic guitar part in Turn At Last, my purge at the tail end of a Howl binge.

we allow ourselves to grow

For a minute, after a quick stint in Hawai'i, Peters pretended like he was moving to Northern California. He half-assed a bartending gig in Hayward and crashed at my house for a couple months, cuddled up with my dad's air compressor and nail gun hose (pop and I were building a closet in the bedroom at the time).

We cleared a space in my garage to set up our amps and pedals and started messing around with new sounds. When we settled into something that we liked we'd make a rough recording and move on. The jam that eventually turned into the song Unfold stood out among all the recordings we made, and once Peters made his inevitable move back down the coast to San Diego I started working on the lyrics. I'd email him rough recordings of the song as it evolved, subject line "banant banant nant." We played it on the road a few times as a duo then dug into it with the full band.

Once we got in the studio this past summer, Peters, Trent, Dennis and I had our parts locked solid. Then Brooklyn Bill flew in, dropped some Zelda werlitzer synth over the bridge and shifted the song's dimension.

This band used to have my name in it, but then our sound outgrew the simple singer songwriter in me. My conscience wouldn't allow me to attach only my name to this collaboration because what I do alone is a distant cousin of what Peters and I create together. This song and this album are the unfolding of our creative collaboration, and Shady Maples is the new view that we've been climbing over ourselves to find.

-Owen

Peters and a sawsall pillow

I came colliding into your hiding place

My mellow disposition has its limits, and the energy I release when my calm reaches its boundary can be explosive. Its Influence is about how quickly calm can dissolve into chaos and the consequences of not realizing that it's happening.

I was listening to a lot of Manu Chao and Xavier Rudd when I wrote the song and I suppose their syncopated rhythmic tendency found its way into the tune. Jesse Nichols, the legend who engineered and mixed the record, lent Peters his Echoplex (a hand operated tape delay) to bring some unexpected flavor to his lead acoustic lap steel part. You can get crazy with the Echoplex, but Peters kept it subtle, bending occasional notes and punctuating his solos.

Everything but the tape delay, Bill Bell's hammond organ and Kelly McFarling's harmony were recorded live in Fantasy's studio A. We recorded Kelly's part in the studio I built in my garage, and Little Billy Tickles overdubbed his organ in studio B (check the video).

-Owen

So We Open

From now until we release the album Saturday, January 7, 2012 at Cafe Du Nord we'll be posting the songs from Shady Maples' debut record, Unfold, along with my commentary about where each song came from.

Peters and I chose to open the album with Tectonic Plates, a spacey mellow groove that I wrote when I was still living in Brooklyn and contemplating a move back home across the country to the Bay Area. The mountain, ocean wave, cloud, and star gazing imagery are both my recollection and anticipation of the west coast. I have a memory around the time that I wrote the song of driving from SFO toward the Bay Bridge when I was home for a visit and saying out loud on the elevated connection between 101 and 280, "shaky ground be still." It was before the 2011 earthquake on the east coast, back when you had faith in the stability of North American Plate in that part of the world.

I played Tectonic Plates on a few gigs with my band in New York but it didn't get its legs until Peters lay his lap steel on top of my guitar riff and brought the ebb and flow that gives the song its motion. We played it in our Doghouse Brewer days on the road as a duo and nailed down the interaction between our guitars. Trent, Dennis and Bill filled it in with tasteful drums, bass and piano parts.

So we open the record and ease in.

-Owen