Jun. 09, 2010 - Issue #764: Hot Summer Guide 2010
On the Record
All that jazz (with Video)
The City Streets come into The Jazz Age
» The City Streets return from Montréal for an album release tour / Eden Munro
VUE WEEKLY: How long did it take to make The Jazz Age, from the initial songwriting through to the end of the recording?
RICK REID: Most of the songs were written in the the latter half of 2008 with the exception of "All Is Grace" and a few others. The closer "Slothrop's Ghost" was written right up until recording, as I was trying to tie up the album thematically and musically with that song being the final piece. The arranging and rehearsals went surprisingly fast, about three months before the studio, with a few songs being road tested before that on previous tours. We intentionally didn't want to road test most of the songs on The Jazz Age, since that's what we did for Concentrated Living, and we wanted to do something different this time—we knew what we wanted with arrangements and we wanted the songs to be fresh in the studio.
VW: When you were writing the songs, did you come at them in a particular way? Lyrics first? Music first?
RR: The songs all came fast and were written mostly on acoustic guitar, with the exception of "White Noise," which was written on an organ. The City Streets method usually is, I write a song on acoustic, basically complete with lyrics/melody and song structure, and then I bring it to the band and we take it apart and try it different ways until it gets to a place we generally like, and then we pick it apart even more through recording and listening back, adding and subtracting until hopefully we have the best possible version of the song. There is plenty of self doubt and disagreeing along the way, although sometimes it's magic and everything works almost instantly.
VW: Did you take the songs into the studio fully formed, or were they sketches that were then filled out while recording?
RR: The songs were fully formed, except "Slothrop's Ghost," which we basically constructed in the studio. We wanted to have the basic tracks down efficiently on this record so we would have more time to experiment.
VW: Did you record as a band live off the floor or did you piece it together one track at a time?
RR: We always record live off the floor with scratch vocals and then overdub extra guitars, vocals and everything else after. But the bass, drums and bed guitar tracks are us playing together in a room.
VW: Were there any other songs written that were left off the album?
RR: We probably demoed around 25 songs and we recorded 14 in the studio. One song was left off the record which will be released on a comp, as well as an SNFU cover that should be coming out on a seven-inch at some point.
VW: How did you decide which songs to include on the album? Did you have an idea of what you wanted The Jazz Age to be when you started, or did the finished shape emerge as the writing and recording went along?
RR: The songs came together naturally and there was a uniformity in the lyrics and mood within the songs that comprise the record that made it pretty obvious to all of us which songs to choose. This was an album that was our easiest to rehearse and record, but the hardest to write in terms of the darkness and emotional aspects ...
VW: You recorded the album with Jesse Gander producing again. What does he bring to your sessions as a producer?
RR: Jesse Gander is brilliant in many ways, but he has the knack of making you feel comfortable in the studio so you can give the best performance possible, whether that means building a makeshift wine dispenser or accomodating our "unique" sleeping patterns.
He is also a good friend and fellow musician with similar musical taste and ideology, and a great engineer and mixer. I could go on but he gets enough praise.
VW: If you were to trace the musical map that led you to The Jazz Age, what would it look like?
RR: Four years of playing music together, almost 400 shows two albums and and EP—we were confident in our musicianship and our songs, and we knew what we wanted and how to get it. That's not to say we didn't suffer and fuck up profoundly along the way, but it all worked out somehow.
VW: Is there anything else you’d like to say about the album or the making of it?
RR: I can speak for all of us that it is our proudest hour, and the first time we really got the record we were hearing in our heads and hoping for in the studio. It's our big rock record about failure (among other things) and it's meant to be played loud, but, God, I hope I never have to write another one like this again. V vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus
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