Ga Ga travels past in a flash-- at 36 minutes, it returns to the brief runtime that Fiction well surpassed-- but leaves plenty of reasons to revisit. Daniel and drummer Jim Eno's tendencies toward studio-based devilry come full-flower here, each listen revealing craftsmen reveling in detail. What in lesser hands could be extra-textual gobbledygook instead feels the product of studio freestyling, something to which the murky mixing-board wizardry of Jamaican dub is an obvious precursor.
Penultimate song "Finer Feelings" is one bit of proof, its wide-open guitars-- straight from Sandinista! With the addition of echoed ambiance from a Brussels fair field recording, "Feelings" acquires the aura of a surreal Kingston sound system.
Earlier, "Evah"'s introduction dips into the self-referentiality the band flirted with on Fiction , featuring a diced-up, looped Daniel asking Eno to record his studio talkback. Two songs later, all manner of discordance enters and exits the reverb-heavy mix of the appropriately titled "Eddie's Ragga", which developed from a jam session with Eddie Robert of Daniel-produced Austinites I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness.
Ga Ga 's most intriguing sonic creation, however, is the song which takes the dub influence in the furthest direction: "The Ghost of You Lingers". Were you guys stocking up on rack-mounted gear during that time? Had you made the switch to digital yet, or were you still all analog? No, we were still all analog. The one like in the wooden box, very big spring. We also used—Mike had a Fender Reverb tank that we used a lot.
We used to just bring in the control and then run through it. Those were the main reverbs that we were using. I don't know if I had my plate then. I have an EMT plate right now.
That could have been around So when you're compiling all of this gear, how are you choosing what to pick? Is this based on recommendations from people you trust? Or is it based on records that you love, and you're like, "Oh, that's a unit that I want in my studio. It's a combination of things. I would say the biggest influence is other engineers and other producers. But then there's also reading a lot. Like an example of that, there's a company I think it's Folktek.
So like for instance, it was What's the Man, there's this producer podcast They did this thing on Nine Inch Nails —. Yeah, Song Exploder. I started getting into those Folktek devices. You should check those out, they're pretty wild.
It's interesting ways to distort things, and CV triggers and things like that. That's an example of when I would listen to something and then go off and just make a purchase. But I would do a lot of research and talk to people. The other thing around this time is like, I guess it was around the Girls Can Tell time, I became friends with John Vanderslice and he told me, "Always buy vintage gear if you can.
If you look at a Neumann microphone—Neumann microphones were made in East Germany. So they were government microphones that were made when there didn't need to be a profit made on these microphones, right?
So every component is top-of-the-line, the best components, the best attention to detail on these German microphones. Now you think of companies doing microphones as an example: They have to answer to investors, or whoever, they have to keep costs down and be competitive.
So the idea is that Neumann microphones, for instance, they were really just made for recording and for other things, you know? And I do have a lot of vintage things. So, by the time you got to Transference , Mike wasn't producing. That record feels so stripped back and contained and raw compared to its predecessors.
How did those sessions differ from the previous records that you made with Mike? We tried to do a lot more band recording in those. Oh, and "Written in Reverse. But we recorded that record to tape, and then I'm pretty sure it was transferred to digital from mixing.
Dave Sardy mixed some of that record. And Nicolas Vernhes also mixed some of that. That's a record with so much vibrancy and such a spectrum of colors. What did each of those guys bring to the table for that project?
Fridmann, I mean, I've always loved everything he's done. I just remember hearing Soft Bulletin for the first time. It was like being insanely, just so blown away, you know? I got a little joy out of that. But Dave—you look at Dave and he isn't usually referred to as a minimalist. And Spoon, people always talk about us as being more minimal. It was always an interesting thing that we felt: What would those two things sound like once they were combined? The great thing is it still sounds like Spoon, but Dave is all over that.
But he's also very respectful and he wants it to be our record. It's not a Dave Fridmann record, it's a Spoon record. A lot of "Inside Out," which we feel like if you look at the bridge between They Want My Soul and Hot Thoughts , it seems like it sort of goes through "Inside Out"—like that track is sort of what we were leading to in Hot Thoughts , you know? You worked again with Dave on Hot Thoughts , which is so sprawling and layered.
To me it's probably like the moodiest Spoon record. Did you and Dave approach that project like any other? Or were there some more experimental measures taken? I mean, we're experimenting a lot with Dave, trying different things. He's great at like, We need a special sound here , and then knowing how we can get that.
It's something that you want in a producer, or an engineer for that matter: Knowing what our strengths are, but then knowing how to turn it into something that maybe has never been on a Spoon record before. So you look at one of The Flaming Lips records, and I mean, those are like sonic masterpieces when it comes to sound. He's been involved in every one of those. So you can imagine how many hours of insight he has into creating crazy sounds. From Telephono to Hot Thoughts , what's the most valuable insight that you've learned along the way as a recording engineer?
Well, I mean the stupid answer would be check phase, that's for the audio geeks out there. I mean, everything that I like to be involved in when it comes to recording is making it fun. I feel like, when you're an artist, it's hard to instantaneously be creative. You cannot just switch that switch on. So as a producer and someone who works in a studio pretty much all day, you have to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable and is having fun.
So that's where ideas come out, that's where creative things happen. You have to create an environment where anyone is free to say any idea, because it doesn't really matter what your experience is. It's sort of like throwing out an idea that may be cool, you know? For instance, on "Chicago At Night," the Girls Can Tell song, we had two mixes of that song done, and we liked the left side of one mix and the right side of the other mix.
So me and Britt, not knowing anything really, decided like, "Hey, is it possible to do that? Can we just use the left side of one on the right side of the other? So I threw them into Pro Tools. We had mixed the songs onto half inch tape, so when I threw them into Pro Tools, the lengths of the mixes were different because the speeds of the tape machines were different. So I had to time compress one so they would equal out, and then we just hit play.
It was like, "Yeah, this sounds pretty weird and wild. After listening to all of these records, which one are you most partial to? Which is your favorite? Don't You Evah song meanings. Add Your Thoughts 33 Comments. General Comment just my humble opinion, but i think this song is about someone not wanting to say "i love you" to someone else. No Replies Log in to reply. There was an error. General Comment This song perfectly describes a relationship between 2 friends of mine. See, the girl has been seeing this guy for like 4 years now, and they had planned to stay together forever Bet you had it all planned, right , but lately their relationship isn't what it used to be, because he's treating her like garbage now which completely destroys her self-confidence.
Because her believe in herself as dropped to point zero, she doesn't have the guts to break up with him Don't You Evah feel down, I said don't evah, Because it's gonna keep him hanging around.
Also, she has told me many times now that being around him just doesn't feel right anymore Bet you think you have to but it doesn't feel right. It just describes her situation perfectly. General Comment This song is so tight and catchy, it's almost impossible to focus on the lyrics. The words are just another detail, like the hand claps, the tam, the cascading drum beat, the subtle reverb, the tweaky guitars If forced to sum it all up in two words?
General Comment 3 people involved.
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