You hear that? That part there… yep. The honking trombone. Who was puffing on that sucker? Lincoln, was that you? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Mitch? Anybody going to own up to that heinous honking?
Oh, hi. You’re getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present…) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green’s music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn’t even know was there when we were tracking them. That’s part of the Big Green method, man. It’s a bit like found sound; it’s basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment.
I guess in that respect we owe a great deal more to our old friend Trevor James Constable than we ever actually gave him credit for. He was famous for that orgone generating device he used to park in our basement (or courtyard, depending on the weather conditions). Far from a generator, that thing was more like a collector of energy, like a commercial fishing net or a big radar dish. (Yes, folks… it’s simile week at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill.) Well, when we record, the simple act of our making a record creates a virtual “collector” of random sounds loosed upon the universe by substandard musicians everywhere. Those bits of music congeal with the tracks we perform on to produce the zig-zag rococco 
rock arrangements Ann Powers spoke of so eloquently in her review of 2000 Years To Christmas. And hey-presto: another obscure Big Green song.
Well, that’s the creative process. For a somewhat more mentally challenged process, see Big Green’s newly launched podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, now available on iTunes. Yes, this is the stuff, folks – stories ripped straight from the front pages. (Front pages of last week’s news, actually.) The inside poop on all that is Big Green. Plus never before (and never again) heard tracks from the archives, and some new, lightly pan-fried material, unreleased and unashamed. The maiden voyage features a tour through the Hammer Mill basement, a segment called “Ask Marvin”, a remote from Matt on Betelgeuse (or what he thinks is Betelgeuse), and more.
Okay, so anyway – what is this, take twelve? STOP THAT HONKING!
