Wambola Porridge

It's amazing what you can get done when you spend all day doing it.

Due to strange circumstances at work I was off on a Saturday this week so Jesse and I got in touch with Trip and decided to spend all day at his house finishing up lead vocals for Ridin' Steam.  Trip said anytime after 11am so I stayed up til around 2 last night playing video games, got in bed and watched a movie then went to sleep thinking I'd get to sleep in.  Nope.

My mom always seems to call or come over when I'm the most tired.  Today she brought donuts and milk around 9, after she woke me up by texting me at 8.  So much for sleeping in.  At least I got breakfast.  Jesse came over around 10:30 and we gathered our stuff and headed to Trips.

When we arrived Trip was just waking up, Sarun was heading to the store to grab groceries.  We went to the backyard so Trip could have a cigarette and some Pocari Sweat, which is apparently Japanese Gatorade that "tastes like a flat fresca".

Trip mixing up some Pocari Sweat before we get started

Heading back into the house we loaded up the mixes, which this time I had conveniently labeled correctly this time.  By luck of the draw we worked on Flying J first.  This was supposed to be a Kory Fontenot tune. Kory has been unable to make it to any sessions so Jesse decided to go ahead and record leads on it so that when all the backing vocals are done, if we want to go ahead, we have something.  If Kory still wants to record on it, at this point that's cool, but we're ready to push forward.  Jesse got done in about 5 runs.  There was some contention about which one sounded best.  Trip had saved takes 3-5.

It's sort of Goldilocks syndrome.  I liked 3 because Jesse had the least amount of grit in his voice, Trip liked take 5 because he had a lot of grit in his voice and Jesse likes take 4 because the grit was just right.  It's his voice, I don't care which one he picks, in the grand scheme of things they all sound fine.

Then Sarun returned with sushi

To make quick progress, Jesse wanted to move onto "intro" next.  This song has 2 verses and including crackling fire and wind sound effects is about one minute long.  I think we spent an hour on it.  It wasn't completely frustrating, there were actually very few takes.  I think Jesse took 2 main takes and punched in one phrase on the first verse... about 4 times.  Not because of pitch.  The line is "Listening to the cool autumn breeze, warm bowl of porridge between my knees".

Apparently when you sing warm bowl of porridge it sounds like "Wambola" which lead to trip sampling that phrase, cutting and pasting it, doing loopers, delays and splices and all sorts of comptech lunacy.  It was pretty amusing but mostly just burned 30 minutes.  So after we had fun with that for a while, we tried different lines... "breeze... bowl of porridge between", "breeze... warm bowl of porridge tween", "breeze... warm porridge between".  Jesse couldn't even make it through the line without the bowl.  He got to warm por and burst into laughter saying "it's gotta be in a bowl".  Apparently he got the mental image of a warm oatmeal spread between his thighs in some sort of sexual oat conquest.  Disturbing.  I really liked the contrast between cool breeze and warm porridge.. which I voiced, and then was picked on about writing 'high art'. Ah well.  The porridge is no longer warm.  We have no Wambola.

To end the song Trip wanted Jesse to sniffle like he was sad.  We took more takes on the sniff than the vocals.  "Give me more drama in the sniff".  It's not a phrase I would have ever expected to hear.  And trust me, when you do hear it, and the person saying it is serious, it's really hard to be serious and not laugh afterwards, no matter what the sniff sounds like.

After Jesse finished having the sniffles he wanted a break so we did Riding in a Boxcar.  I originally wanted Kory to do a call and response on this one with me.  Since I still had lead vocals on it either way, I ran through all of them and much like Flying J, if Kory makes the time to come over and record we'll happily put him down, but in the meantime, we can push forward.  Jesse and I have completely different vocal timbres, so after a few quick mic swaps and preamp tweaks I was ready to go.  Most of the song went pretty straight through.  Before we started Trip said "lets work on your annunciations first."  I resang the first line the way I knew he wanted me to and he got excited and yelled "Lets go!"  I guess you work with someone long enough, if you're paying attention you learn what they want.  Things went pretty quick except for the last line which I always knew needed to be there, but I hadn't ever decided what the line needed to be, nor had I written a melody.  That single line took longer than the rest of the song.  Oh well.

After we did that Trip said "I hear beach boys on this".

Trip doing his best beach boys impersonation

Trip laid down 6 or 7 vocal tracks doing "ooh woo ooh" underneath the last line of the song and... it's hilarious.  We aren't sure if it's going to stay yet.  To quote Jesse "I want it so I have the option, if it's to gender, I mean genre-bending we'll remove it."  I like the idea of it, but I'm also not sure about the genre bending, although, it really wouldn't bother me if it weren't for that it's 7 tracks of Trip.  My original, probably lofty and faulty, idea was that no one would ever be harmonizing or doubling themselves, which is why it was important to have so many people in the band that sing.  If we can achieve the same sound with Jesse, Trip and Kory (and maybe a few random other people) doing the oooh woo ooh's, I'm all for it even if it does genre bend a little.  We shall see.

The last song to get worked on was Mowin' the Shoulder.  I stepped out to cook dinner at this point so I didn't hear any of the process, funny incidents or even a final take of it so I have no idea what happened, but it's apparently done.  On the drive home I asked Jesse if he was happy with it and he said "Trip made me change the way I sing the chorus so it goes somewhere I didn't plan on it going.  It'll have to grow on me, but I trust the process."  The process being that when we leave Trip's house, Jesse is never happy with the way he sounds and after a few days it grows on him.  We shall see.

At this point all the lead vocals for the album are done and we can start working on backing vocals.  That'll be pretty straight forward since I'm going to attempt to hold Jesse and I both to 1 backing track per song.  He's off this whole week and in town so if I'm in town things could come together quickly.  On the other hand, my girlfriend wants me to go to San Antonio with her for three days and I am not entirely sure about my crazy work schedule.  We'll see how things go.

Ain't no stoppin' us now