Gestation and Remixes

I have been thinking about the concept of gestation as it relates to this record and I keep coming back to it because it’s starting to manifest itself with more clarity. As I wrote, assuming time is a scarce resource, which it is for me, you can focus on recording a lot of things quickly and constantly putting out fresh new material out of context or you can focus on really exploiting the tentpole concept that you’ve been developing. In this case, it’s the record.

Lately, it’s becoming more and more apparent that there’s a latent value to this notion of gestation. There’s a value to inspecting these songs from a variety of different perspectives. I remember writing this a few weeks ago:

There is something to be said for treating the album as a unified body of work, poking and prodding it from a variety of angles and really pulling it apart to see what makes it tick. I’m talking about live versions of songs on the record, remixes, videos, etc. Rather than treating the narrative or story of the record as just one small piece of a huge slipstream, using the material to create its own slipstream, finding new ways to think about the songs and their meaning. I find something cool about that. Really working with this record and letting it occupy a period of my life rather than discounting it and moving on and shifting focus.

I am really starting to see the power of that concept recently. I’ve been working on getting people to do remixes of the various songs and I have a couple underway and more as potentials. Obviously, it would be great if someone like Diplo or James Murphy was going to do a remix but, barring that, frankly, I’m just excited to hear what all these different artists come up with. My only editorial note to people has been that I’m looking for something with momentum, something dark and propulsive that can people’s head moving. I think I specifically have referenced the album “From Here We Go Sublime” by The Field which has been on rotation fairly heavily over the past few weeks.

So far, we’ve got Nancy Hess who’s going to do Dirty White Coats, Ezekiel Honig who’s going to take a stab at If You See Something, experimental artist John P Hastings, and a few others. Collectively, I think we’ll end up getting close to almost all of the songs re-interpreted in some way. And, again, to the point of that gestation concept, what it will undoubtedly do will be to open up some new vistas for the songs and experiment with some of the core melodic components to see if we can’t unearth something new or different.

Meanwhile, I got a few tunes from the recent Rockwood Show mastered by Joe including live versions of Broken Bow, Dirty White Coats, and Hold My Heartache. Again, those new versions and those new intepretations can lend a perspective to the record that may not have been present or obvious before.

Part of the benefit of all of this different work is keeping me engaged because I’m realizing what a grower this record is. How it takes some people some time before it snags them in the right way. The fortunate thing is that when it does snag them it seems to set their hooks in pretty good. A friend of mine got an advance copy of the record months ago and seemed kind of blase about it on the first few listens. I cursed him under my breath and went about my business. Then, months later, he runs up to me breathlessly telling me that the album has recently sort of taken hold of him, that he’s now quoting lyrics and singing along to himself and really enthused by the whole affair. That plus the two best reviews from the two biggest publications only recently came in, about a month after the official release.

So I think my goal is to keep people focused on this thing and make sure I water it and tend to it and give it the time it needs to absorb and capture people’s attention. At some point it will be time to move on but hopefully we’ll have told a long and multi-faceted story at that point, through song, that includes instrumental versions of songs, electronic remixes of those songs, live versions of those songs, music videos of those songs, etc. All of these things coming together to the point where the songs really touch a few people and become a part of their lives.

Maybe that’s pretentious. In fact, I’m sure it is. And after all, pretentious comes from the two words pretend and affectious which comes from affection and infectious and the word “to shun”, etc. [ed note: what are you talking about?]

Gestation and Remixes

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