Guster Studio Journal

Dustin’ off the studio journal for this one.  A few months ago when the weather got really cold in Brooklyn my neighbor's pipes exploded and dumped a foot of water into my basement.  This is the same basement where we wrote Evermotion and did some work on the still-unmixed-still-unnamed new album.  Here’s a video of my suffering.  That’s me suffering in blue pants.

And yes, those are my drums soaking in ice water, but don’t worry — drums are waterproof and material things are for suckers.  I spent all night pumping the basement dry and flew to Montreal to record the next morning.  I am a problem solver.

Except that even after the insurance check cleared and the dehumidifer did its dehumidifying, there was a lingering mildew smell.  After a while I figured out it was the IKEA record shelf -- it had absorbed the water into its depraved corkboard soul like a sponge and never let go.  So that got sent to the curb… and yet the musty smell persisted.

But yesterday I think I found it.  It was a shoebox full of old Gus / Guster fan mail from the 90’s, when people would write actual physical letters to our band, and we would (sometimes) send them actual physical letters back.  These fossils had been sent to me from the Guster office years ago because I fancy myself an archivist-if-I-do-say-so-myself.  I opened the box to find that these precious notes from people-who-really-dug-our-new-album-Goldfly were still wet and moldy.

And as I went through the process of peeling the letters apart from one another and trying to air them out, I was joined by my ten year old daughter who was home from school with a stomach virus.

JOLENE:  Whatcha doin’ daddy?

THUNDERDAD:  I’m airing out these wet papers that got soaked when the basement flooded.

JOLENE:  Can I help?

And because nothing helps a stomach virus like a face full of black mold, I said she could.  At which point I remembered she could read, and….

JOLENE:  Wait.  Dad.  These people actually took the time to write letters to your band?  Why?

THUNDERDAD:  Well, that’s how we communicated with our fans, before email and Instagram and stuff...

JOLENE:  Oh my god, this is so cute, this person said her whole high school liked you because she played your music in the cafeteria one day.  DID YOU WRITE HER BACK?  TELL ME YOU WROTE HER BACK!?

THUNDERDAD:  Umm, sometimes we wrote back.  I think.  

JOLENE:  WHAT!?

THUNDERDAD:  In general we are pretty good to our fans —

JOLENE:  YOU DON’T REMEMBER!?  OKAY, I’M GOING TO WRITE HER BACK IF YOU WON'T.  

THUNDERDAD:  I doubt she still lives at that address, it was twenty-two years ago.

And then Jolene spotted something peculiar.  A sealed envelope with a stamp on it, addressed to Claire Higgins in Hinsdale, Illinois. 

It was one of those SASE deals, and Jolene was in detective-mode so we dug around until we found the accompanying letter Claire had written us:

THUNDERDAD:  If you do write back to Claire, can you ask her why she put “celebrity” in quotation marks?

When we opened it up, there were a few stickers inside and some of those awesome gretus-heart temporary tattoo things.  We should totally make those again!  

Anyway, Claire Higgins, I don’t know when you wrote that letter, but stamps cost 33 cents back then so we could probably do some googling and at least find the general range when you might have written it BUT, we’re sorry we never sent you anything back.  Clearly, someone in our office came really close to sending you some stickers and stuff, but couldn’t close the deal.  

Where can we find you?  I want to add 16 cents postage to this mold-ridden envelope and mail this off as if being a couple decades late is no big deal.  Also, my daughter will kill me if I don’t.

Brian

Two point five days left in the studio.  Three songs left to sing.  One set of lyrics left to write.  Mixing is different with Richard Swift.  You've been mixing and tweaking as you go so your mix is pretty much where you end up once everything's tracked.  You don't sweat the little things.  Christ, I think we really made a record in 3 weeks. 

It's a little daunting to think about all the remixing, mastering, video-making, Just-for-Men'ing before the press photo shoot, etc... but the plan is to just digest what we did for a few weeks.

On the domestic front, I told Tonya we were leaving The Commune in a couple of days and she seemed genuinely sad for a split second and then perked up and offered me a glass of gross fermented liquid from a giant mason jar.  She said it was "kefir" and some guy from The Healing Matrix gave it to her for free.  She said it was supposed to be good for you.  It smelled like salad dressing.  What would you do?

I poured a big glass and drank it down, only letting myself taste it after I'd swallowed it all.  It was okay.  With courage from watching me survive it, Tonya followed suit, drank a big gulp, and then flailed her arms and crinkled her face in an animated gagging motion.  That was Tonya's first and last sip of kefir.  Then she told me that she had to put her dog Daisy to sleep tomorrow.  I said goodbye.  Kind of sad, huh?  Here's Tonya with Daisy:

And here's Rosa who recently said goodbye to her uterus:

Today we take a couple of days away from the music, to come back fresh for one last week.  We've worked like 18 days in a row.  Ryan looks like this:

There are a few songs that have real vocals on them and are close to finished.  I am beyond happy with them.  When my kids are older and they say "hey dad, tell me about when you were in a band"...I will kick back, loosen up my tie and fire up a pipe for the first time in my life.  I will be able to call up "Expectation" and "Doin' It By Myself" and "Gangway" -- all weird new titles to you, but songs that have been in our band's vernacular for a year or two -- I will play them these songs to show what I accomplished being in a band for 22 years.

You might be thinking, "but play them Demons, or the Two Points for Honesty Song, or this song or that song" -- and those are good songs too.  But for me it's the difference between 8 Days a Week and Abbey Road.  I am lucky to be in a band that grew, and is growing.  I don't know of a lot of bands that have had this experience.  This album will challenge you.

At age 36, after making quite a name for himself as a drummer, singer, songwriter, and new keyboard player for The Shins, Richard Swift got his first "new drum set" on Tuesday.  I was 36 when C&C Drums gave me my first new kit too.

There's a reason everyone plays C&C kits, they sound fantastic -- we tore open the boxes and set up the drums and were recording it on our song (working title CAVEMAN) within minutes.  The photo and comments are from Swift's Instagram where I'm laying it down, one-hand one-stick style.  Caveman is sure to make the record and will be the first ever Guster song you could describe as "sexy" -- with X-Ray Eyes coming in at a distant second.

Yesterday we recorded a song (working title COME TOGETHER) that was supposed to be 'one of the big ones' and then scrapped it entirely.  There's a precedent for this.  "Emily Ivory" was supposed to be the biggest tune on Ganging Up on the Sun, and "Okay Alright" was going to bring the house down on Easy Wonderful.  Not so.  More than ever we are going where the energy is flowing, rather than banging our heads against the wall to bring something to life.  May or may not be the last we hear from that song, but it's disappointing to say the least. 

The night before we had a moment of inspiration and recorded a tune as a full band performance, live in a room, with Swift on drums and me on tin bucket and shaker.  Ryan put a Harry Nilsson-like piano part on a song called "Never Coming Down" that we were planning to record in several styles, and the feel came together in the moment, which we captured.  Almost sounds like old Toots and the Maytals.  Guster's all grows up.

It's Day #5 in the studio and we're actually working on Song #5 (out of 15), much to everyone's surprise.  Usually we'd still be on Song 1 at this point, after spending a day on drum tones, a day comping together a scratch vocal, a day creating a tempo map and editing between 12 drum takes before everyone re-plays their parts from scratch. 

Don't get me wrong, we're very proud of how those records turned out, but we're better players now and we're working with a producer who's an artist first, helping us make the big decisions we need to make without sweating the details.  He's Andy Warhol and we're all Nico.

I am not sure how much to detail the process.  It's hard to convey and I know the music will speak for itself.  Today we are reinventing a song called "It Is Just What It Is" -- it's a great tune but the feel was a little close to some others on the record and it needed a new direction.  All Guster songs, left to their own devices, will gravitate to a tempo of 118 beats per minute, for the record.

There were a couple hours of hemming and hawing before we settled on a Phil Spector-y direction, still mid tempo, but away from another quite precious song (working title Phoenix) that we will record next week.  There's marimbas and hand claps and piano and I dunno here are a bunch of studio photos.  People only comment when there are photos.

That's Swift (from the back side)... and here is Luke outside the tiny cottage he shares with Ryan (they didn't get spots at The Commune)...

The sun doesn't come up until like 8am for some reason here in Oregon.  If it shows up at all, that is.  But I've been awake since I heard the woman in the room next to me take her two poodles for a walk a couple of hours ago anyway.  I think her name is Tonya. I go downstairs to eat a bowl of Little Bite Mini Wheats with Vanilla Soy Milk.  Trust me, I would never go "Little Bite" if there was a "Big Bite" option, but no such luck at the Safeway here in Cottage Grove.  I think they may be phasing out the Big Bite Mini Wheats. I am alone in the fluorescent kitchen of the commune-style rooming house where me and Adam are staying for dirt cheap this month.  There's doily curtains by the sink and a grandma-era ceiling fan above me.  Someone's walker is parked at the table.  There's a jar and a note in front of me:

Everything starts today.  Or, a couple days ago when United Airlines (oh my god fuck you United Airlines) canceled our trip to Portland.  We scrambled and ended up routing to Oregon through Texas on another airline where Ryan Miller's gold status got us exit row seats and free bag checks for our guitars and bubble-wrapped analog keyboards.  I got pig flu again and shivered under an airline blanket for two 4 hour legs, but was happy to eventually arrive at our (Hotwire 3.5 star, let's splurge) Embassy Suites hotel where they have futuristic glass elevators, raging lobby waterfalls, and flowing rainforest rivers to guide you to the breakfast buffet where a man in a white hat will make you a custom omelette.

They also have bedbugs.

I got the knock on the door around two in the morning.  It was Luke, and he had his "my hotel room has bedbugs" face on.  In addition to seeing the little guy crawling around on the box spring, there was the blood of many a hotel guest staining the surface beneath him.  If you want to read the TOURING version of this story, check out this fairly epic road journal from a couple years ago:

http://gusterjournal.tumblr.com/post/9577932688/nothing-will-stop-us-from-rocking-tonight-in-indiana

This story begins with the usual whoa-is-me-the-hurricane-cancelled-my-flight drivel that you've already read about in everyone else's road journals.  But on Saturday when Delta announced they'd cancelled my Monday morning flight out of New York, there wasn't much time to react.  A hurricane was bearing down on us, and we had to be in Indiana by Monday night.  We needed action.   While I was safely tucked away in a cabin in upstate NY, Young Naive Luke was stuck in Brooklyn with no car, no flight options, and no bottled water or cans of chick peas left on the shelves at the plywooded-up Trader Joe's.  All the staples I needed for a week on tour were stuck in Brooklyn too (mostly finger tape, socks, underwear, and t-shirts)... they would have to be spared.

We spoke on the phone briefly.  "The George Washington Bridge is closing in 45 minutes" said Luke, who was also going on and on about how he had some avocado and wheat bread in his kitchen, but it's the weird big Florida-style avocados that don't taste very good, and always get a little runny.  "Get in a cab and make them drive you to New Jersey" I told him.  "Now!" I added, like a dick. He swears he was the last car allowed over the GW Bridge.  He swears the cab driver had to swim across the Hudson to get home to his family.  The cab was a hundred bucks.  I drove two hours through heavy rain to rescue him at an A&P in Fort Lee NJ, where thank god they had Haas avocados.  I brought him to the cabin upstate, where we ate chicken pot pie and drank wine.  Life was good.  Our friends had rented us a mid size Chevy Malibu one-way to Indianapolis, just before the last local car rental place closed.  It was a 14 hour drive, but we could leave after the hurricane and still get to the show.  We went to sleep.  It was Saturday night.  Then the hurricane hit. We'd left NYC to escape the drama but ended up right in the belly of the beast.  I felt the winds gusting through the windows at 5am, and heard trees falling in the distance.  We woke up and surveyed the damage.  Trees were down and the little bubbling creek had turned into a raging river.  There was no electricity and there was water leaking from the ceiling.  But the big blow was that Adam's Monday flight outta Portland ME was cancelled too.  We made him rent a car and drive through the hurricane to Albany, where we could pick him up.  Or so we thought.  The creek broke its levee and there was a flash flood.  The long dirt road to the property was like the Mississippi River. 

That's me standing in the "driveway" -- why am I smiling?  Fuck if I know.  We were punchy.  We were about to spend a calendar day in a Chevy Malibu.  The river raged on furiously and washed out the road entirely.  Luke and I had to drive the Malibu across peoples' lawns to get out (sorry) (people of Indiana need us).  Goodbye wife and child who have no electricity or path to civilization. Getting to Adam was a massive problem.  Just getting to Route 87 was almost impossible.  Roads we needed to not-be-flooded were flooded.  I knew side routes, but there were trees down across all of them.  There was one tree leaning against a power line that I thought we could squeak under.  I also thought it was okay to drive a car over a live downed power line.  Young Naive Luke disagreed and made me turn around.  It took about 9 different tries through back roads to get out to Woodstock.  By the time we got to Woodstock.... 87 was closed.  We had to take half-flooded back roads all the way to Albany.  It took us about 5 hours to get to Albany instead of the usual hour and a half, and Albany wasn't even on the way to Indiana.  We picked up Adam and briefly thought about testing our luck with a Monday flight to Indianapolis, but carried on with the road trip instead.  14 more hours in a Chevy Malibu didn't seem nearly as bad as getting fucked over by an airline at the last minute and missing our show.  We'd come this far. 6 more hours in the car.  At some point I got pulled over, for the second time in two days:

Today I realized my last two road journal entries were accidentally posted here in the studio journal.  A minor blogging technicality to some of you, but the difference between a tickle in the back of the throat and a nasty case of swine flu to me.

Huh?

If you'd like to follow along as I mock deadly global pandemics online, you ought to click this link and join up with the road journal, where I've been blogging for the past month under the accidental header "What the #$&! is Tumblr and how do I use it!?"

Together we can prove that twittering is for people with A.D.D. and tumblring is for people with slightly less A.D.D.

Yours!

I've been delinquent again, but I have good reason.  I can't find my digital camera anywhere, and without my camera these entries are just bland walls of words.  Obituaries.  Thankfully Adam has a FLIP video camera, and did his best D.F. Yonkman impression yesterday while our friend Larry played fluglehorn on our record.

Working title for the song is "Lost at Sea" -- yes, we are in a room full of old televisions.

Last week I wanted to snap a photo of Ryan playing the Omnichord on a song (working title: Cars/Love) (Shut it! Working title are always lame).  But I couldn't find my camera.  It's an old keyboard that plays chords and beats and generally has an awesome harpsichord-like tone, and we've tried to use it on records before without much success.  This time I think it's going to stick.

In lieu of Ryan performing the Omnichord, I found a photo of some woman playing it online.  And she's hot, to boot.

"Kenny R." in California writes...

Brian- It has now been one day short of a month since you last updated the road journal's new "Tumblr" page, and that can mean just one thing. You have quit the band after a heated debate with Ryan over what you thought was Bruce Willis' worst performance on screen. I don't want to get into the argument or studio in-fighting, but if I had to guess, I would say that you went with "Last Man Standing," and Ryan took "The Bonfire of the Vanities." Both valid opinions, but unfortunately, you are both wrong. The film is of course, "Hudson Hawk." (Though the case can be made for both "The Sixth Sense," AND "Hart's War.")

It's so cool that someone was checking our website because they wanted an update.  My bad.  I think it's been all downhill for Bruce since "Moonlighting" but that's not what we've been arguing about.  We've been arguing because while recording the second batch of songs at a studio in NY last week, someone slobbered all over my snare drum right before a really important take...

I know what you're thinking.  I know what Kenny R is going to write about next.  Oh no, the new direction of the studio journal and the band in general is to make corny jokes about their kids and post adorable photos of them holding instruments.

All I can say is this... wait until you see the lyrics, Kenny R.  You wouldn't think a band could rip off "Cat's in the Cradle" in so many unique ways.  In the end, I forgave Ryan for drooling on my snare drum because his daughter Leo is so damn cute.

At this point, the drums on the record are all recorded, and it's my job to sit on the couch, listen while the flaws slowly sink in, and then figure out the perfect moment to go fix them on the computer.  One of the things I'm most proud of so far on this record is that I used these old crappy old 12 inch hi hats I once bought on the road on like, more than half the songs.  They sound like someone throwing a toaster oven in a metal trash can when you play them next to your ear, or next to Leo's ear, but somehow they sounded like sweet creamy butter in the mics.

I didn't pay ten dollars for them, I think I paid $200.  But someone, once, paid ten dollars for them, or at least wrote $10 in permanent magic marker on the underside of them.  They sound best on Jesus & Mary, which is a kind-of-reggae song we wrote with the hi hat chugging through all the verses.  I know, reggae.  I know.  We try to write one reggae song every album and then it never even makes it to the studio because it sounds like reggae.  This one's actually getting recorded and might end up on the album.  Probably because it's not really that reggae.  It's reggae in a clashy way.

Also, after many experiments with "rocking," and many failed experiments with "rocking" (see: The New Underground, circa 2006), we are making an album with little-to-no rocking on it.  It's energetic and up tempo like never before, this record, but there are no songs you'd want to put up devil horns with three fingers while listening to.  There is one song, working title: Ry Plays Guitar where you might put up a half skull or something, but he's rocking on an acoustic and it rocks in a more slackery indie way.  That one is tentatively titled as such a) because we need to write the lyrics for it and b) because it's the one song that Ryan plays guitar on.

We're breaking for the holidays now, but before we split up, we tried out a vocal on Hebrew Joe, which is one of my favorite numbers.  It's this soft graceful Nick Drake-y song we wrote where Joe was singing gibberish in a Russian accent during its conception.  Lots of "chuh's" and "shne's" and stuff.  It's kind of silly but kind of awesome, and we've had conversations about whether to put English words on it, but always thought that it would sound weird with real lyrics because it was conceived in a real moment, an inspired moment, and it just strangely works with foreign gibberish lyrics.

November 21st 2008. We've recorded 8 basic tracks now.  It took us 3 days to do it.  That's 2 and 2/3rds songs per day.  Most bands that David Kahne works with knock out 4 in a day, but we'd never done more than one a day before (we started in a dorm room! we're just cavemen!), so for us this represents a real accomplishment.  Should there be pride in recording songs quickly?  If you're Guster, and you can spin your heels like nobody's business in the studio, absolutely.  We actually practiced the songs this time.  Usually we'll get into the studio and say things like "it feels like the click track is speeding up in the chorus" because we're used to slowing down in the chorus (my bad).  This time we got that out of our system in rehearsal, where the rent is cheap.  I don't think we did more than 4 takes on any song, and we usually got what we needed from the first couple of takes.  There will be fiddling and tweaking, as we are wont to do in the studio, but there will be no "take the bridge from take 18 and the second verse from take 31, but use the fill into the chorus from take 4" this time around.

I'm on a plane to San Diego where our tour manager Seth is getting married this weekend.  It's been an exciting month for the Gusters, with Dave Yonkman's wedding, Dave Zamboni's wedding, and the much-anticipated beginning of this recording. As I sit down to reflect on our first few days in the studio, I'm not even sure what direction the studio journal will take this time around.  I could get into each song, as I've done in the past, describe the sound, admit the influence (did I ever confess that "Satellite" was just us trying to write "Under the Milky Way Tonight" by the Church?), or maybe I'll let people be surprised when the record comes out, and write about other things. Like the fact that I got a full on "bye-bye-da-da" on my way out the door this morning (my wife speaks in crude remedial phrases, not unlike a baby). Or crashing the set of a local cable access show when we discovered it was just down the street from where we were recording.  Oh wait.  That happened two albums ago. Or maybe I'll offer up little tidbits, here and there.  Like the fact that we have a song we call "Yacht Rock" (working title) that will be so polarizing, it's destined to be the "Highly Suspicious" of this album.  But better.  We'll just see how things go.  Working until midnight and then waking up at six (I'm a morning person now!) doesn't leave a lot of energy for journal writing, but thankfully the kind of journal writing I do doesn't take a lot of energy either.  I just hammered this shit out in twenty minutes and now it's back to 36 channels of DirectTV and my cushy leather seat and wondering if I should have paid the extra thirty bucks for an exit row because I have to pee, I'm in the window seat, and there's an old man on the aisle sawing away with his mouth open.  Maybe I can hold it for another three and a half hours.