Still | Thanks: Guest Musicians & Strings, Part One
The majority of the tracking for Still had been completed in the fall of 2014: we’d laid down the drums, bass, guitars, piano, keys, programming, and vocals in a relatively reasonable amount of time of two to three months. That’s fairly decent for a bunch of dudes who all have other full time jobs and commitments. We had a fairly short to-do list before things would be ready to move to mixing and mastering, the final sonic steps in getting songs ready to release.
We checked off one of those items in September of that year: acoustic guitar. Our friend Dan Smith came in to add his magic to Lamplighter, a song that demanded the warm tones from an acoustic. We knocked that out in an evening, as well as some additional parts added to Pioneer (but I can’t remember if Dan or Andy actually ended up playing the part).
I owe a whole lot of my own personal motivation to reenter the writing and recording world to Dan and his wife Lauren. They pulled me into the writing process for their own album a couple years back and pulled me out of my self-imposed musical exile. You can read about that writing process here and a weird story about escaped studio hounds here, but most importantly, you can also listen to their music here. Or right below.
But after that evening on September 23rd, 2014? Obviously, since we didn’t release the record until November 2016, our productivity stalled. I don’t even have a good excuse for this. Yeah, we were all busy with other things. That’s fine. What’s not fine is that I let that become an excuse, allowing days, weeks, months to go by without making any progress. Busyness will always demand attention away from your goals, and you’ll feel justified, until, suddenly, you notice the missing calendar pages.
Maybe it’s just the current season of end-of-year forced reflection seeping into my self-disgust at allowing so much time to slip by. Or maybe I’m feeling the pull to create and write once again now that this project is finished. But regardless of motive, I AM motivated to learn from this long process. All of us feel compelled to not let our next record take so long, and we’ve committed to releasing some music in 2017. We’ve already taken some steps to do so, ensuring that this won’t be another New Year’s resolution sinking slowly out of consciousness as real life resumes.
But I digress. This isn’t supposed to be a reflection on humanity’s struggle with the fleeting nature of our perception of time. Back to the thanking.
Apparently it took the thawing of spring to defrost our record perpetually in progress. In May 2015, we gathered some recording equipment in the dining room and stairwell of a friend’s house and tracked violin, cello, and upright bass.
While preparing to graduate from Berklee College of Music in Boston that semester, a friend of ours had also been working on some arrangements for us. I had some rough ideas going in: the cello part to open the record was mostly written (and sometimes performed) on a glockenspiel, the string sweeps in the bridge of Pioneer were my insistent homage to Giacchino’s work on epic cut-to-commercial moments in LOST…but I needed someone who actually KNEW strings to take some very rough inklings of melodies and turn them into realized arrangements.
Enter Zac Cambria. He’s responsible for the lovely string quartet-esque feel of Stale Houses, as well as the epic soaring violins in the bridge of Pioneer. And because he was tired of staring at a computer for his final projects at school, he hand wrote the scores.
Zac brought his longtime friend and classmate AJ Fick to engineer the session, as well as violinist Derek Lehn. Reaching way back to Calling Out Closer days, I suggested a cellist, Isaac Leavitt, who had recorded on our 2009 album (and performed at its release show). Zac’s main instrument was the upright bass, so he handled tracking those parts.
Going into that session, I had seen the scores (and sat at a piano to play them), but hadn’t mustered the composer’s ear to really know what all the parts would sound like together overtop the music we had already recorded. I was a bit nervous, honestly. What if something didn’t fit? What if I straight up didn’t like the arrangement for one of the songs?
I knew Zac and AJ a little bit from our collective band pasts. They were members of Patrick’s former band, and we had played multiple shows together. I knew they were good dudes and excellent musicians, but what if it just didn’t work?
My fears were unfounded, of course. Sometimes while tracking a record, a bandmate will play a part or come up with a melody that’s just PERFECT for that song. So perfect that I’ll laugh or make a sort of muted, excited squeal like a little kid opening his most-requested gift on Christmas morning. That session provided lots of excited gift-reactions, which was fitting for me since it happened to be my birthday.
Zac’s arrangements? Melodies and runs stood out exactly where they needed to take precedence, harmonies and layers filled out and blended in expertly where they needed to support other instruments.
Derek, Isaac, and Zac nailed their parts, AJ provided the technical expertise necessary to capture all of this in one day’s work (and later mixed all of the varied takes and parts into the final arrangements heard on the record).
A massive thank you to these six guys mentioned in this post: your talents continued to propel our own process forward and are a huge part of why we’re so proud of this record.