What are you going to do, play on garbage cans? That works for some songs, but how long can it possibly hold up? We need a more permanent solution to our problem. (Did I say that?)
Okay, so … this will come as no surprise to any long time followers of Big Green, but we make recordings using technology roughly equivalent to stone knives and bear skins, as the late Leonard Nimoy once put it. (My guess is that he had 1000 times the resources when he cut “Mr. Spock’s Songs from Outer Space,” but I digress.) We are plagued by technical glitches and the spotty performance of superannuated recording equipment, including a first generation digital workstation with no practical means of exporting song data or sound files (namely a Roland VS-2480 from the year 2001). It is choked with projects and ready to keel over.
Now, don’t get me wrong … we have invested in newer technology. Mitch picked up a new blender last week. Great for daiquiris (I hate daiquiris!) and it makes a nice whine on high. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) installed a new oscillator the other day. THAT cost a packet. Seems like when it comes around to music gear, the well runs dry. Not freaking fair, I say. But then, I’m liable to say anything by this point in the day, or perhaps just build sentences using words that Android suggests (Android:) the same time as the most important …
Yeah, see? This machine doesn’t know how to make sense. Give me a rudimentary non-verbal robot assistant any day. Still, with our grueling production schedule – 20 songs a year, sometimes 50, sometimes umpteen thousand – we need to come up with a way of plugging these suckers together, like widgets on an assembly line. I’m sure this is the type of problem all songwriting teams have encountered since the beginning of recorded music. The difference between them and us is, well, we’re not paid. But it’s the mission that matters! Huzzah!
What is our mission again? Oh, right. Finish the songs.
Well, as you can see, we have had a house invasion. The perpetrator? None other than our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. When NASA’s Dawn spacecraft started orbiting his adopted home world of Ceres, he became extremely agitated. Smoke began to pour out of his ears and mouth, like VOL, from Star Trek. He simply could not live with the idea of being spied upon by the space agency. What if they stole his ideas? he thought…. then his plan to (dare I say it?) RULE THE WORLD would be scuttled. Shot down by a measly little, tin-pot space robot. THAT MAKES ME SO MAD …. !
Of course, we’re building them stick by stick, using the usual bailing wire, string, tape, toothpaste, and whatever else is handy. And, well … they sound it. These are homespun recordings, my friend. We’re not riding over to the Record Plant and laying down some serious tracks. No, sir … we march straight down to the hammer mill basement and bang on those pots and pans. We tune up the tired old strings on Matt’s Rickenbacher bass and start thumping along, hollering into distressed old condenser mics, cupping my superannuated headphones to our ears. Not a lot of nuances, friends. Not hardly.
Tonight Matt and I will return to tracking the new songs we’ve been working on these long, frigid winter weeks. Mostly working on vocals now, though that effort often descends into strange hooting sounds and choruses of background harmonies that incorporate the words “banana boat” in some fashion. I had the temerity to attempt a guitar part the other day … an ELECTRIC guitar part … but thought better of it. Mostly confining myself to keys lately. House keys … and car keys. Now where did I leave that kazoo … ?
This time out we have, let’s see …. six new songs, maybe? I’ve lost count. It’s become this blur of recording parts onto different projects, a piano here, a horn section there, a beery-sounding horse voice on this one, some fucked-up swabbies on that one. That’s the only way I know how to work – just keep chipping away at the mammoth rock until it looks a hell of a lot more like Lincoln. That’s how Mount Rushmore was made. That and driving native people off the land (we don’t include that in our creative process).
It’s not all fun and games, you understand. Matt and I have been hard at work on another crop of songs that will be featured in the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek parody we include in our 
Then there’s sFshzenKlyrn, our occasional sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon. It seems sFshzenKlyrn has gotten back together with his old band, “The Pillars of Creation”. I didn’t actually find that out from him directly. They apparently did another photo shoot with NASA, using the Hubble Space Telescope. (I hear they’re doing a promo spread in Sky and Telescope). If you look closely, you can see how sFshzenKlyrn has changed over the past couple of years. A little older, a little wiser, a little cloudier, perhaps.
Well, here we are. First days of the year and we’re already snowed in. Mountains of the stuff piled up against the front door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Just as well that it’s relatively congenial in here, that is if you don’t mind being cooped up with crazy people. There’s Matt, of course, though he mostly occupies himself with tending the wild creatures and feathered friends. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) does have some annoying habits, much as I’ve tried to program them out of him. (I’m not a scientist – I just play one on the internet.)
Oh, hi. We’re just thumbing through a book on the ascent of man. If I were to pick one that looks most like me, it would clearly be Australopithecus, from maybe 3.5 million years ago. Old school, if there ever was one, and yet a mere wink of the eye in evolutionary terms. So I’m a throwback, for chrissake. Curvature of the spine. Small brain case. Predisposition for randomness. (Good thing old Australo had thumbs, or I couldn’t thumb through this thing.)
Oh, hello. Just working up our census form. Don’t mind me. Didn’t know there was going to be a 2014 census, but I guess that’s understandable, since we don’t get a lot of news flowing into the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squathouse. Just yesterday some dude in a Fedora knocked on the front gate and handed me a questionnaire. He said I had to finish it by Saturday or his friend might set the mill on fire. (I think the friend’s name was Giancarlo.) How old is Mitch Macaphee? No … I mean before the youth serum?