November | 2018 | Dressing to Undress

Last summer we got hit with what I believe was the residue of Hurricane Harvey. It has to stand as one of the worst floods in Windsor’s history.

I was asleep when it happened.

Earlier this year I stumbled onto a sleep schedule that works. It nods to my body’s strange desire to turn me into a vampire while affording me enough daylight to mingle with the other daywalkers, allowing me to pass for one of them without too much effort. After two decades of struggling with chronic sleep problems that progressed from “kind of irritating” to “near-debilitating”, you can imagine what a nice change that’s been.

I’d like to tell you I discovered some big shiny secret to better sleep health. The truth is I got lucky. I did the same thing I’ve been doing for years whenever my sleep gets messed up enough that I’m waking up in the dark and going to bed at noon or later, with any semblance of a normal day lost in a haze of fatigue and brain rot — I went a night without sleep, crashed around 8:00 the next night, and reset my sleep clock to get back on “normal” hours. That lasted for all of a week before my sleep started to shift, as it always does.

And then it just…stopped shifting. Since sometime in February I’ve had a pretty consistent sleep schedule. I think I’d have to go back to 2005 to find the last time I was in a similar position for any appreciable length of time. It isn’t perfect, and eating a normal breakfast is now a distant memory, but my body and brain both seem to have accepted the new programming without any serious complaints. I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to wake up most days (or nights) feeling like my brain was gummed up with motor oil.

“Relief” isn’t a strong enough word.

The day the flood hit, my sleep was a mess and I had no reason to believe it would ever stop being a mess for more than six or seven days at a time. I went to bed early in the afternoon. I had a dream I was catching up with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years. He was making it his mission to remind me why I was in no hurry to see him again. He made a big deal out of wanting me to walk with him through my back yard. It was muddy back there from a heavy rain. I wasn’t interested in getting my shoes dirty for no good reason. He was livid.

I swear people get mad at you for the stupidest reasons in dreams.

Other amusing/random dream things happened, and then the scene changed. I found myself alone, swimming through a flooded city. The sky was raining spasmodic scrap metal. Every once in a while a piece would fall and threaten to cave my head in. I always managed to get out of the way, but there were some close calls.

I thought I could sense the homes of a few friends nearby. It was impossible to find them. Every recognizable thing was submerged. I might as well have been paddling through the Detroit River at the end of the world. It wasn’t quite a nightmare, though it kept threatening to turn into one.

I came to a place where it looked like a few people had set up camp after finding a bit of dry land. Maybe it was a dock, or a bridge. It jutted up above the lip of the water just enough to separate itself.

There was one person in a tent. A woman. I asked her to help me.

She agreed to give me shelter on one condition. I had to convince her I was her female best friend inhabiting the body of an unfamiliar man. She asked me two questions only her friend would know. One was about an unpublished book she wrote. The other was about the one song she always screwed up when she played bass.

Somehow I got both answers right. Then she handed me a piece of paper that had a second set of questions on it.

Before I could try to bluff my way through this “test”, I woke up to a city that really was flooded, with streets turned to rivers, cars abandoned, homes destroyed. I saw pictures of washing machines floating in flooded basements like stranded rescue boats, and videos of people struggling to drive through water deep enough to wash them away.

I didn’t even know it was raining while I was sleeping. It was a mild, sunny day when I looked out the window before I turned in.

If you know me, you probably know about my lifelong fascination with dreams. I keep a dream journal, though I’ve been slacking off for a while now, getting down little more than the essential outlines of dreams most days instead of writing them out in exacting detail the way I used to. It never fails to amaze me what the sleeping mind can create, from fleshed-out songs that didn’t exist before a dreamworld-dwelling music supervisor planted them on the soundtrack, to outlandish erotica, to interactive psychological horror films.

I’ve had the odd dream over the years that’s told me something I needed to know. Most of the time it’s been emotional stuff. Things like, “This relationship was never going to work,” or, “These pants are not slimming.” But I’m not someone who has prophetic dreams. The closest I ever came was dreaming once that a lightbulb in my bedroom burned out, only to have it die on me in the waking world a few days later. You can chalk a thing like that up to coincidence without breaking a sweat.

This dream was different. It freaked me out a little.

There’s a bit of a twisted cosmic joke in here.

We rent the house we live in. Our landlord lives just down the street. His name is Jerry. Eleven years ago, when we first moved in, he lied about the house having central air on every floor. There’s no air movement upstairs at all — the side effect of an ancient half-assed ducting job. My bedroom just happens to be up there.

When confronted, Jerry said the previous tenants had children who must have stuck their toys in the vents. After he was presented with a professional assessment that noted an incompetent and toy-free ducting job, he made it clear he was never going to spend the money necessary to fix the problem. When he was pressed to do something, his solution was to have a friend who would work for free or next to nothing cut a vent in my bedroom wall so it would blow air into my closet.

It’s great if you sleep on the floor, inside your closet. I sleep in a bed. So that vent does nothing for me.

Jerry waited about five years to fix a leaky roof, letting rain eat through the ceiling and walls in four or five different places. In one part of the house you can look up and see the wooden beams that support the roof. He’s never going to fix the internal damage as long as we live here. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to look at it.

Every once in a while he’ll trim our hedges or rip some plants he doesn’t like the look of out of the ground and leave the mess behind. When the furnace crapped out one winter, he said, “Open up the oven and turn on a fan. That’ll keep you warm.” Only after we’d been here for more than a decade did he have the ancient knob and tube wiring updated and go to the trouble of fixing a persistent leak in the basement.

The maximum amount a landlord is allowed to raise the rent for any property they own in 2018 is 1.8%. That’s it. That’s the law. Because we wouldn’t allow Jerry to break that law (and he went ahead and broke it anyway), and because we wouldn’t agree to buy this house for $100,000 more than it’s worth, he’s kicking us out. We’ll probably be gone next spring.

That’s extortion. Not that it matters. People who do this sort of thing almost never get hit with any form of serious punishment. They fuck up your life and live to torment someone else another day, laughing all the way to the bank. It’s the way of the world.

Here’s the cosmic joke. It’s a good one.

Jerry paid someone to flood-proof his house a few years back. He didn’t extend the same courtesy to us. No surprise there.

When the flood did its business last summer, we got the least of it. There was maybe an inch of water in our basement. Nothing important was damaged. Nothing precious was lost. There was only a mess to clean up. A lot of ruined carpet had to be torn up and thrown out.

“You don’t need carpet anyway,” Jerry said when he thought he might be expected to replace it.

A lot of people got hit much harder. We were lucky.

As for Jerry and his flood-proof house? He got seven inches of water in his basement.

Sometimes I think karma is real, even if it tends to dish out a slap on the wrist when a kick to the nuts is what’s called for.

The city took its time cleaning things up in the aftermath of the flood. For weeks, if not months, one front lawn after another was littered with belongings that were water-damaged beyond repair — chairs, couches, tables, dressers, trinkets, and other things. Some people lost a lot. Some lost everything.

All that abandoned furniture and all those garbage bags full of things that were never meant to be thrown out created a solemn, powerful visual poetry. Taking pictures would have felt too much like I was stepping on someone else’s private pain. Still, the imagery wouldn’t leave me alone.

Out of all those thoughts came a potential album title: Things We Lost in the Flood.

I knew there was nothing groundbreaking about it. Things We Lost in the Fire was already a film, and a song, and who knows what else. Still, there was something magnetic in those words. I’ve always been drawn to elemental imagery — earth, water, fire, air — and I find myself returning to it again and again in my writing. Might as well embrace it instead of trying to run from it.

The first problem was working out which album to give this title. I had a few on the go, and a few more hanging out at the brainstorming stage. The second problem was finding someone to illustrate it.

I thought I’d come at it backwards and find an artist first. It never hurts to have cover art taken care of long before an album is finished.

I tried contacting people outside of Windsor. A lot of artists make a point of telling you on their websites that they do freelance work and they’d love for you to get in touch with them, no matter the size or scope of your project. Most of them are full of shit. They’re only interested in high-profile jobs that will help them build their brand. A small potato like me isn’t worth considering even if I do have the money to pay them what they want.

Then I started thinking local, and Alain Rocha came to mind. His art is like nothing else I’ve seen. I don’t know how to begin to describe it. Maybe it’s best if I let him do that. On his website, he says his work “focuses heavily on characters and organics, exploring the human body and its deep connection and harmony with plant life. Utilizing candy-like colours and bold line work, all of these elements intertwine to create eccentric and singular imagery.”

Like so:

I shot him an email. He responded with an enthusiasm that surprised me. My idea was to give him the album title, send him some music, and let him interpret it however he saw fit. Actually, I gave him a few potential album titles in case something else stirred up some ideas. Flood just happened to be the one I hoped would stand out for him, and it did.

He sent me a sketch to see if I liked where he was thinking of going with it, we worked out the payment side of things, and then he sent regular emails to keep me posted on his progress. I was able to see the piece develop one step at a time over a period of weeks, from a rough monochrome drawing to the finished product. No visual artist has ever given me this kind of insight into their process before. It was fascinating.

I got to watch this…

…turn into this.

Alain was going to add some lettering. I asked him not to. I’ve come to feel that some album cover art is more effective when it’s left text-free, and I thought the imagery he created deserved to stand on its own.

He misquoted the title as WHAT WE LOST IN THE FLOOD when he shared the image on Instagram. Instead of correcting him, I thought, “You know what…I like it better that way. What instead of things. It sounds deeper. More all-encompassing.”

By then, I knew what I wanted to do with it.

I ran the idea by Gord, filling in the backstory. I told him about my dream and explained why I thought it was an appropriate album title for the follow-up to STEW. Given the subject matter in a lot of the songs we were working on, it made perfect sense. There was even a song called “Flood and Fists”, for rice’s sake. Second Stew was a fun working title in the early going, but this collection of music deserved a less jokey calling card.

Gord looked at me like I was speaking another language. He did at least like the cover art when I showed it to him. That was a start.

Recording had picked back up in January of 2016, a few months after STEW was finished. I knew I wanted to do something farther-reaching and less immediate for the tenth official Papa Ghostface album. Beyond that, there was no clear vision or endgame. By the time I had an album title and the art to go with it, work in the studio had slowed to a crawl and we were still nowhere near finished.

I started seeing a lot less of Gord. It was a gradual thing. His work hours and my sleep schedule became more difficult to coordinate. Somewhere along the line I came to realize we weren’t on the same page anymore. We weren’t even reading the same book.

I think a little friction can be healthy. This was more than that. When two people have very different goals, it can be difficult to sustain a creative relationship without feeling like a serious amount of compromise is involved. “Compromise” is a dirty word for me when it comes to music. It gets dirtier when I’m the one who’s expected to do all the bending.

That’s the diplomatic way of putting it. The whole truth is a little uglier, and it led to the death of a twenty-year friendship.

Even before things fell apart, I knew this album was only ever going to get done if I rolled up my sleeves and finished it by myself. It just took Gord being out of the picture for me to feel I had the freedom to do that. The first stumbling block was my desire to include him in the process as much as possible. You don’t get a lot done when the person you’re trying to include is turning into a ghost. Then I grew reluctant to work on my own because of some of the feedback I was getting when I did go ahead and finish things without him.

A few years ago Gord started trying to sell me on the idea of bringing a third member into the group. He felt my drumming was the weak link in our music. He was convinced a “real” drummer would catapult us to the next level (whatever that was).

For twenty years Papa Ghostface was a duo. The guests on STEW were only passing through, as brilliant and valued as their contributions were. The last time we added a dedicated drummer to the equation we stopped being Papa Ghostface and became a different band altogether. And while that was a great adventure for as long as it lasted, it was a one-time thing. Drummers as intuitive and open-minded as Tyson are hard to come by. I doubt a three-piece band would be enough to pull off what I want to do these days anyway.

The drummer Gord wanted to bring in was all flash. That was another thing.

I’m not a virtuosic drummer by any means. I’ve simplified my playing a lot over the years because of the way I choose to record the drums now, but even as a busier player with more mics on the kit I was never going to be John Bonham. At the same time, no one has ever said to me, “Hey, [insert album of your choice] was great, but it would have been better if you had a show-off drummer playing busy fills all over the place.” I’ve developed my own style, if you can call it that, and I think I know how to adapt my playing to suit whatever music I’m recording. There’s something to be said for subtlety and knowing when to lay back. As a rule, you don’t make a song better by using it as an excuse to jerk off in public.

(This is something I put into serious practice with the Ron Leary album I hope people get to hear soon. I had a few opportunities to go off on the piano during instrumental breaks. I chose not to. My piano work on that album is some of the simplest and sparsest I’ve ever committed to record, and I wouldn’t change a note of it. Just because you can play a flashy solo doesn’t mean you should.)

Every time Gord fell into one of his “we need a ‘real’ drummer” reveries, I would listen to what he had to say. Then I would explain how I’d need to mic up the drums in a completely different way for another player, leaving us with less tracks to work with and wreaking havoc with sonic continuity. He would drop it for a while…until it came up again a month or two later.

We were working on a song called “Rook” the last time this happened. It’s the one thing on the album that’s Gord’s work for the most part, though I revised the lyrics a little and contributed some musical ideas.

I got down a rough drum track. After listening to it, Gord said, “I like what you’re trying to do, but…” and he was off to the races. This time there was no mistaking the message.

You’re a shitty drummer and you’re holding our music back.

After that, I came up short every time I sat down and tried to record a keeper drum track. I could never get it right no matter what I did. Gord’s criticisms gnawed at me even when he wasn’t in the room. I started thinking maybe he was right. Maybe I was a shitty drummer.

Once I closed the door on our friendship for reasons that had nothing to do with him denigrating my drumming, I sat down and tried again. There was nothing in my head but the music.

I got what I wanted — and what the song needed — in one take.

Endings to creative partnerships are often as messy as any other breakup. Once in a while you get a situation like the one captured in the Pattern Is Movement episode of Shaking Through, where two people acknowledge they’ve reached the end of what they can do together and choose to part on good terms, creating one last great thing as a tribute to the body of work they’ve built. I had an opportunity to document a much more contentious goodbye the night of the final GWD jam session in 2002. I could have captured all the tension in the room and twisted it into what might have been one of the more interesting and intense songs we improvised together, but it never occurred to me to hit the record button.

Here it was a much more protracted thing. There were really two endings when one should have done the job.

The first ending came in 2004. I wasn’t seeing a lot of Gord anymore by that time. We were in pretty different places as musicians and people. The rot started to set in when GWD broke up in 2002. I wanted to keep evolving and pushing myself as an artist. Gord wanted to get another drummer and keep playing the same songs we’d already captured the definitive versions of. After a few bizarre auditions with musicians who were more interested in waving their dicks around than making music, I assumed we’d get back to the Papa Ghostface ways of old. Gord wasn’t interested.

My efforts to keep our friendship afloat outside of music didn’t go much better. For a while all Gord wanted to do was get wasted on my dime. When that got old and I wasn’t into smoking pot or drinking to excess anymore, he started standing me up or blowing me off whenever we made plans to do something.

He did try to get me involved in a new band he started putting together once he gave up on the second coming of GWD. I gave it an honest shot, but I couldn’t get into the idea of being second banana in someone else’s band. I had my own music to make, and these guys — no disrespect intended to them — weren’t the musicians to do it justice.

I kept trying to get together with Gord, kept trying to spark some meaningful collaboration, kept hoping the guy I made all that crazy music with once upon a time would come back. It was all for nothing. That guy was gone. Taking a drunken piss in a stranger’s mailbox and lighting gunpowder off of a passed-out bandmate was now more appealing than spending time with me.

One of the few times I was able to get him to talk about our music, Gord told me he thought we should reinvent ourselves as a cover band. “That’s where the money is,” he said.

My testicles cowered in fear.

Even if I wasn’t a part of it anymore, I wanted to support what he was doing. In October and November of 2004 I caught a few of the first shows his new band played. They were calling themselves the Shed Ninjas.

Gord’s friend Josh stepped into my old role as his best pal and main musical foil. The transition was pretty seamless. Josh was the nominal bandleader and did most of the singing. In the middle of a show at Changez by Nite, he introduced a new Shed Ninjas song called “Black Donnelly”. Only it wasn’t a Shed Ninjas song. It was an old Papa Ghostface song off of SONGS FOR DEAD SKIN called “I Got My Hair Cut and I Thought About You”. It was simplified, gutted of my contributions, and given a new name, but it was a Papa Ghostface song all the same.

I felt numb. I drank until I threw up and wondered how someone I once thought of as my musical soulmate could do something like that to me.

At another show, right around the time they changed their name to Surdaster, I heard the band play a few more recent song ideas Gord and I would mess around with whenever we saw each other. None of them were crafted into finished pieces. None of them had any words. As with “Hair Cut”, the parts I came up with — which constituted most of what made the sketches sound like they had some structure and movement — were removed. The “songs” became nothing more than unchanging riffs.

I’m convinced the only reason the audience didn’t throw beer bottles at the stage was because most of the people at those early shows were friends and family who would have cheered for anything.

I brought up the “Hair Cut” incident one night and asked Gord, half-joking, if there were any other songs of ours he decided to pass off as Surdaster tunes.

“Well, I tried with a couple,” he said, “but they didn’t work out as well, so we haven’t played them. I guess they were too complicated for everyone to learn.”

I couldn’t believe it. He came right out and admitted he was trying to repurpose songs we wrote together instead of going to the trouble of writing enough original material to fill out a live set with his new band. He never asked if I was okay with it. He just went ahead and did it.

Josh could tell I was angry. To his credit, he told me they wouldn’t play any songs I had a hand in creating at future shows. I have no reason to believe he didn’t keep that promise. But Gord couldn’t understand why I was so bothered by the idea of him prostituting our music for his own benefit. He didn’t see what the big deal was. He didn’t even consider the songs we recorded together real songs anymore. Now he was calling them ideas.

The Papa Ghostface and GWD pages on the sidebar of this blog suggest they were a little more than that.

When someone does something to mess with my music, that’s usually the end of whatever relationship we might have had. And what Gord did was about as bad as it gets. But it’s complicated when you have a lot of history with someone. You don’t want to believe they would disrespect you in such a repulsive way and not even try to apologize for it. You want to believe they’re better than that.

It was a wake up call, at least. Now I knew I couldn’t trust Gord. I turned down a number of opportunities to record the first Surdaster album in exchange for a case of beer, when in the past I would have jumped at the chance to help. I didn’t disappear all at once, but I started putting less of an effort into getting together with Gord. Since I was the only one who was putting in any effort at all, it wasn’t long before we stopped hanging out altogether.

We did touch base once in a while. Every few years we’d get together to play a little music for old time’s sake. It felt like blowing a few inches of dust off of a long-dormant alliance only to find more dust underneath. The one time we recorded something slouching toward a new song, Gord made it clear he was more interested in reworking old material, and that was the end of that.

Given all of this, what happened a few years ago was almost incomprehensible. Against all the odds, it felt like we were on the same wavelength again. I got so excited about the unexpected second life of Papa Ghostface, I gave Gord an undeserved coproduction credit on STEW.

He was excited for different reasons. He heard commercial potential in this music that didn’t exist in anything we’d done before. He was convinced we could be stars if the right people heard these songs. He thought I was nuts for giving the album away for free and not doing anything to promote it. There were even hints that he wasn’t happy with my recording abilities. More than once he mentioned how the backing of a record label would allow us to re-record the whole album from scratch in a professional studio (and we would want to do that…why?).

I explained my whole philosophy about music — how it’s something I need to create for myself, and how charging money for this stuff that’s quarried from my head and heart and guts would feel like asking to be paid for breathing. Instead of accepting it, he tried to convince me to change my ways, not hearing or not wanting to hear what I was saying. It was a conversation we would have over and over again, and another way he felt I was holding us back.

I’ll admit I got excited in early 2000 when I finally bought OK Computer and heard a band that was making such ambitious, unpredictable music while signed to a major label. “They remind me of us!” I told Gord. I didn’t think we were going to be the next Radiohead or anything, but hearing that album for the first time made my heart swell with a feeling of kinship. Knowing there were other people out there who were nuts enough to make music that didn’t sit still and aspired to communicate something beyond the same old platitudes everyone else was peddling…it made me feel less alone in what I was doing.

“Climbing up the Walls” was just like something we would have done if we had access to more equipment and a real drum set. I wasn’t pissed off about them getting there first. I was ecstatic anyone would think to go there at all.

Any aspirations I had of being a star withered and died a long time ago. And here I had a bandmate who was convinced — for reasons only he understood — that we could take over the world if I would just swallow my pride and let it happen.

I tried to sweep this weirdness under the rug, along with some other things I won’t get into, for as long as I could. I’ve been guilty of avoiding confrontation more than a few times in my life, and I know it isn’t the best way to handle things…but how do you have a serious conversation about the state of your relationship with someone who’s made it pretty clear they have little respect for what you think or feel?

Fate and Facebook intervened and made it easy for me. I caught Gord taking credit for something he didn’t do, just like he did all those years ago with the Shed Ninjas song that was a Papa Ghostface song. This was worse. He took a public dump on two decades of friendship so he could make himself look good on the internet for a few minutes.

I told him what I thought of him, and then I was done. That was the second ending. There won’t be a third.

When we were still working together, the old “Hair Cut” riff came up as an idea worth pursuing. We took the best bits from the original jam, added some new sections (most of which were my work), and rebuilt it into more of a structured song.

We didn’t get around to recording it together, so I recorded it by myself and gave it a new name. It isn’t a coincidence that the opening riff is the same “idea” I heard being played as an act of stomach-churning musical betrayal fourteen years ago after walking into a bar that became a safe haven for underage drinkers and hardcore bands.

The song isn’t on the album. As much as it appealed to me as a bit of delayed musical justice, in the end it felt like old news. At least you know the thought was there.

This may seem like a lot of score-settling that has nothing to do with the music. Believe me when I tell you I’ve left out the worst of it. And all of these things did have an impact on the music. I couldn’t have made the album I wanted to make if business went on as usual. We would have ended up with something more like Stew 2: the Reheating. STEW might be the closest we ever came to making a “perfect” PG album — something pretty easy to digest that doesn’t sacrifice experimentation in favour of accessibility — but I’ve never had any interest in recycling a successful formula. That way creative death lies.

I don’t think it would have been a bad album if Gord stuck around for the whole thing. At the same time, I think it became a much stronger and more varied piece of work thanks to his relative absence. I was free to do whatever I wanted without having to worry about a lack of enthusiasm on his end, and I didn’t have to invent things for him to do in musical situations where he was uninterested and I had a clear idea of how I wanted all the pieces to fit together.

I used to believe I couldn’t make Papa Ghostface music without him. First it was more of a nostalgic thing. I thought about giving a solo PG album a try in 2008 before CHICKEN ANGEL WOMAN happened, but it didn’t seem right. Later it had more to do with self-doubt, as some of the things he said to undermine my drumming and mixing abilities got in my head and I started to almost minimize my own role in creating the music.

For years I always tried to err on the side of being democratic and inclusive when it came to crediting other musicians for their work, sometimes giving someone a writing credit just for playing on a song when they were barely doing anything at all. That extends to Gord as well.

When you break it down, I could have — and would have — made almost all of the music that constitutes the Papa Ghostface catalogue without him. Some of the songs would sound a little different without his musical contributions, but most of them would exist in something very close to their present form. Remove me from the picture and it’s a different story. You’d be left with about five mostly-finished songs, some good guitar riffs and bass lines, and not much else.

Put another way: I recorded the better part of a Papa Ghostface album on my own. Gord plays on nine of the twenty-two songs on WHAT WE LOST IN THE FLOOD and only has an argument for being involved in the composition of five of them. There’s no loss of continuity when he fades from view.

I think that tells you something.

I probably sound like a musical megalomaniac when that isn’t what I’m going for. I’m just not sure there’s any way to say any of this without sounding self-important, and I think I’ve earned the right to say it. Maybe there’s no need. I can count the number of people who’ve heard a significant amount of the music we made on one hand. For all I know, they always assumed I was the driving force behind Papa Ghostface without being told. It doesn’t matter. Having a chance to set things straight with this album still feels like reclaiming a piece of my musical identity.

So how is it not a solo album if it’s mostly my work? I’m not sure. I thought about calling it a Johnny West album, or even releasing it as Papa Westface. Didn’t feel right.

In the early days, whatever I improvised when Gord was in the room was Papa Ghostface. Whatever I improvised on my own was solo music. With PAPER CHEST HAIR, when I started writing a fair bit of the words and music on my own in a more conventional, premeditated way, it became more about feeling. Some songs felt like they belonged on a PG album. Some songs felt like things I should keep to myself.

A lot of songs on STEW were created the “usual” way, where I was responsible for the lyrics and we both contributed to the music. In a few cases Gord cowrote the lyrics with me (“Situations”, “Fly’s Hive”, “A Question, a Thought, a Confession”), and the words for “Samhain” were his alone.

“The Devil Wants His Car Back” and “In the Name of the Impostor” were both solo pieces. I wrote them for YEAR OF THE SLEEPWALK. Likewise with “Movin’ on Loon”. That one was an idea I’d been kicking around for a long time without knowing what to do with it. I always meant to write some lyrics. It ended up working better as an instrumental segue than it ever would have as a conventional song with words.

Gord played on all three of those songs, but their shape was determined without him. And still, by the time I was recording them, I knew they were Papa Ghostface songs…even if I didn’t know that when I was writing them. Time has done nothing to dispel that feeling.

With FLOOD it was different. When the “split” happened I knew we had close to an album’s worth of material recorded. I figured I could throw a few coats of paint on what was already there, add a few more songs, and call it a day. In revisiting those songs, I discovered a lot of them were undercooked, and some of them weren’t even worth slapping on the grill. At best there was enough good stuff for a short EP.

I wasn’t about to close the book on Papa Ghostface without making one last substantial, sprawling musical statement. All at once I saw a very clear picture of what I wanted the album to be, and I took matters into my own hands, stitching the best of the work I’d done with Gord into a larger quilt of solo pieces.

I don’t think Gord would be a big fan of the album I ended up creating, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over that. I guess in a way that makes this a breakup album. It’s the sound of Papa Ghostface ceasing to be a duo and me taking back what’s mine, snarling and kicking all the while.

Short of a posthumous out-takes collection (which I’m already working on in my head), there won’t be any more albums released under the PG banner. I think separating PG material from JW material would threaten to become an exercise in unintentional self-parody as I tried to distinguish me from myself. This feels like a good way to bow out. It may not be the longest Papa Ghostface album of all time, but it’s the densest and most wide-ranging of them all by some distance, and it demands more of the listener than anything I’ve done since at least MEDIUM-FI MUSIC FOR MENTALLY UNSTABLE YOUNG LOVERS. I like that. Letting STEW stand as the last word on Papa Ghostface would have been way too easy.

Anyway. Enough about all that. Onto the music.

I’ve always looked at the first track on a Papa Ghostface album as an excuse to create something for the listener to get lost in. “She’s My Girl”, “Horsemouth (part one)”, “Yogamo”, “Rippin'”, “Don’t Go”, “Kissing the Bald Spot” — all of these songs take their time establishing a mood, exploring it, and sometimes turning it inside-out. They also each act as something of a litmus test. How you respond to them says a lot about how much you will or won’t like the albums they live on.

After STEW got an opener that was more of an appetizer than a main course, “Flood and Fists” serves as a triumphant return to the good old-fashioned album-opening epic, clocking in at just over nine minutes.

It began the way so many other PG songs were born over the years, with the two of us improvising to a synthesized rhythm track. Instead of relying on the Yamaha W-5 for extra nostalgia points, I triggered a beat on the Maestro Rhythm King — a vintage analog drum machine best known for its use on the Sly and the Family Stone masterpiece There’s a Riot Goin’ on. I ran my electric guitar into both the Montreal Assembly Count to Five pedal and the crusty old Digitech GSP-21 for some of the richest-sounding ambient racket I’ve ever recorded. Just bouncing a pen on a string or two created a huge wash of cascading sound. Playing actual riffs and volume swells made it sound like there was some strange synthesizer supporting the syncopated echoes of the guitar. Gord followed along on bass.

I cut it off when the ideas ran out and improvised some piano on top of the whole thing. The next day I recorded real drums, leaving only a small introductory drum machine bit behind. I need to start making more use of the Rhythm King someday soon. There’s a warmth and a real archaic charm to its voice. Running it through some effects pedals could get interesting.

After adding some shaker, I grabbed some lyrics that were meant for a warped torch ballad I never got around to writing music for, improvised a new first verse, threw out a few lines that didn’t work, and recorded a rough vocal track. My working title was “The Soft Slow Beating of an Underwater Heart”.

This bit came from a dream:

I only want to watch a dream
after midnight air
with my flood
and my fists.

Like dream music, dream dialogue is almost always a little off-balance, and not always in an obvious way. Sometimes there’s a strange poetry to it. I had no idea what that particular phrase was supposed to mean, but I remembered it after waking up, wrote it down, and found a place for it. It even gave me the final title for the song when something simpler felt more appropriate.

It sat for a little while in not-quite-finished form. Then Brent Lee came over and played some soprano sax. He’d never heard the song before, so he was coming in cold. It was almost as if he was in the room when the initial improvisation took place.

I think this was filmed somewhere around the third take.

There’s nothing wrong with that performance at all. I would have been happy to keep it.

Right after I stopped filming, Brent looked at me, smiled, and said, “I think the next take is going to be the one.”

SWEET BADGERS FROM NEW BRUNSWICK, THE MAN WAS RIGHT. I hit the record button, he locked in, and for more than three minutes he developed one compelling melodic idea after another. Any hesitations there might have been in some of the earlier takes disappeared. It was “the one” and then some. His playing even inspired me to record a better, more committed vocal take.

I kept meaning to overdub some wild, discordant guitar stabs to punctuate certain moments. I thought that would be the finishing touch. When I did sit down to finish the song off, almost everything I tried felt unnecessary. Some simple acoustic twelve-string guitar strums helped to thicken the atmosphere. Other than that, I left it alone.

Mixing it was a challenge. There’s almost always one specific song on each album that gives me some grief, and I had a feeling this one was going to be the thorn in my side this time. The arrangement was what made it difficult. My electric guitar takes up a huge amount of sonic real estate, but it’s more of an atmospheric wash than a conventional guitar part. It has no percussive properties. The groove is what holds the whole thing together. Every time I thought the drums were a little too prominent, bringing them down in the mix took away too much punch. It was tough to get the balance right.

I mixed it nine or ten times. That has to be a record for me. It wasn’t as dramatic as that makes it sound. Most of the time I was making small adjustments. I had to walk away at some point and say, “This is as good as I’m going to get it.”

The intro was something I came up with when I was messing around with sampling. I found an old vinyl record of string quartet performances — I can’t remember offhand who the composer was — and ran a few bits through the Count to Five pedal, chopping them up, slowing them down, and reversing them. I got some pretty evil sound clusters happening.

I was going to end the song with those string samples. That idea got chucked out the window in the ninth hour because (a) even though the compositions I sampled are probably in the public domain by now, I’m not sure if this specific recording of them is, (b) it was a fun curve ball but made it impossible to create a clean segue right into “Rook” the way I wanted to, and (c) it broke the spell in a way that almost felt disrespectful to the song itself. There are plenty of other ambient interludes on the album, and I created all of those myself, without help from any prerecorded material. So I wasn’t too sad about losing one I “cheated” a little to make.

The same night I was messing with string samples, I sampled my own electric guitar and chopped it up. Over the next few days I added sampled vocals via the Yamaha VSS-30, bass, drums, a bit of unprocessed electric guitar, some strange public domain-dwelling vaudeville recording from 1923 I’m unable to find any information about now (this is where the disembodied trumpet sound comes from), and I got Gord to strum a few strange chords on acoustic guitar. Later on I got rid of his guitar track. He played with a pick, and the sound was too thin and bright for me. It didn’t fit into the massive murky mess I wanted to create. I replaced it with some chunky six-string banjo of my own, playing different chords, recorded a new drum track, and played some piano into a distant mic plugged into the Digitech. At the end of all that, there was less than a minute of the sort of music you might expect to hear at a jazz club in hell.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done something so demented to start an album. As much as I like throwing people off, it felt like a natural prelude to me.

“Rook” could be the best song Gord ever brought to the table, and it’s on the PG album he had the least to do with by far. He carried it around with him for at least a decade before we recorded it, and it changed a lot during that time. At some point he threw away his first verse and made the pre-chorus hooks the verses instead, shifting everything forward.

I don’t get the feeling Gord did much research before he wrote the words. There don’t seem to be any allusions to the true value or use of a rook in a game of chess. I’m guessing he liked the word, figured it wasn’t much different from a pawn, and chose to use a chess piece’s lack of autonomy as a metaphor for some larger thoughts about fatalism. Either way, it works.

Instead of playing guitar with him, I had Gord record the acoustic parts by himself. He played the Futuramic archtop that got a good workout on STEW. Then I asked him to lay down a guide vocal so I could write down the words. I made a few changes without altering their fundamental shape or meaning.

For every repetition of, “You alone and no one else can find out what it means to be a rook,” find out became fathom. I thought that was a little more elegant.

At the end of the first verse Gord sang, “With every branch the tree will spread unto,” and kept repeating “unto” over and over again. There probably weren’t any real words there, or maybe he forgot them. I fleshed that part out and it became this: “With every branch the tree will spread its roots anew. Soul’s brew. That’s you.”

I left the first chorus and the second verse as they were, with the exception of “every vision that you sent”, which I changed to “with every vision that they send” for extra mythology-building points.

In the second chorus, “taste it” became “waste it” and “walls at home” became “hallowed home”. The last verse mirrored the first, and to create a bit of contrast I tweaked, “With every breath you seek your death,” making it a fencing match: “With every step you parry death.”

Nothing too dramatic, then. I just wanted to punch it up a little and iron out a few clunky bits. Gord approved of the changes I made with an eagerness that caught me off guard, but again he had no interest in singing a song that was really his baby. I have no idea what that was about.

Gord’s clean electric guitar playing here (using my Telecaster) is a good example of the kind of unique shading he was capable of adding to a song. He alternates between emphasizing the chords and playing borderline lead lines without ever stepping on the vocal melody, generating all kinds of harmonic interest inside of a pretty standard chord progression.

His guitar solo was recorded with one mic. I prefer to use two unless I run out of extra tracks. He was doing a dry run without having prepared at all, and I didn’t think it was necessary to set up a second mic. Neither one of us expected the first pass to be as good as it was. It would have been foolish to ask him to do it again. I reinforced his solo by playing an identical solo myself an octave lower and then double-tracking it.

I don’t think I’ve ever doubled someone else’s guitar solo before. It was a neat little assignment, figuring out what he was doing and matching all the little nuances.

I tried overdubbing some piano with Gord present. He liked what I was doing, but it was too much clutter for me. I tried some Wurlitzer and Omnichord flourishes before settling on the Ace Tone combo organ. When it’s used the right way in the right song, that funky old thing seems to impart a certain ghostly quality.

“Conscience of the Everyman” holds the distinction of showing up earlier on an album than any other spoken word piece I’ve ever done. Gord’s fascination with the telephone microphone a former friend made for me was the catalyst. He managed to get its erratic patch cord to work for a while, and he thought it would be fun to record a song in which we simulated the sound of a phone conversation by using an actual phone.

I had two ideas for where to take this. One was a monologue given by an inmate to his significant other through soundproof prison glass. The other was a story about an unexceptional person getting a disturbing phone call from the physical manifestation of their conscience in the middle of the night — inspired in part by this brutal takedown of a comedian by Jamie Foxx.

There are a few things to unpack here.

It came out later that this guy took some shots at Jamie Foxx before the roast they were both involved in, blowing off a genuine offer to help him with his material and acting like he was the future of comedy and Jamie was roadkill stuck to the bottom of someone’s boot.

Even if you happen to be a brilliant comedian on your way up, you don’t do that. You’re asking for trouble.

When his moment in the spotlight came, he got off to a decent start, but after getting a few laughs his jokes started to tank. It sounded like a desperate bid to get something going when he fired another shot at Jamie, downplaying his success as an actor and saying, “Thank God you got Ali.”

What you have right there is one of the most idiotic extemporaneous insults to ever come out of someone’s mouth. Ali was built around Will Smith’s starring role. It got some good reviews but didn’t do well enough at the box office to be considered a hit. No one remembers Jamie Foxx from that movie. Most people don’t even remember the movie itself. This roast took place in 2006. By that time Jamie had proven himself as a dramatic actor, first in a memorable supporting role in Any Given Sunday, then with a much larger role in Collateral (an underrated duet with a playing-against-type Tom Cruise), and he followed that up by winning every award in existence for his portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray.

I’m not even a fan, and I know this stuff. If you’re going to go after the guy and try to get a laugh at a roast, at least deliver an insult that makes sense and has some basis in reality.

You can see at that moment Jamie, who was content to let this guy bomb without getting involved, decides he’s going to mess him up. What follows is either an amusing example of someone getting their comeuppance, or a star with a dented ego going way too far, depending on your perspective.

Now imagine this. Instead of soldiering on and trying to finish his unfunny act while a real comedian ripped him to shreds, what if the guy rolled with it, threw away whatever jokes he’d prepared, and started having a dialogue with Jamie as his conscience? It might have made for a transcendent moment of bizarre improv, and he might have managed to redeem himself in the eyes of both the audience and the sleeping giant he pissed on long enough to stir from his slumber.

He didn’t have that kind of spontaneous invention in him, so what we’re left with is little more than one comedian heckling another.

Back to the song. I went with my second idea when the first one wasn’t going anywhere (what was I going to talk about — prison food?). The plan was to have Gord scream his head off in the role of The Conscience, but he was long gone by the time I started recording this song, so I handled that myself. Instead of using the telephone microphone I put some distortion on my voice as a bit of a callback to spoken word pieces of the past like “Nothing from Nothing”, “Something Pink”, and “The Old House”, adding a second voice with the pitch shifted down to make the one-way phone conversation a little more menacing.

The music started with the bass. I plugged into a Strymon Flint pedal for a little extra ambience. The drums were recorded the usual way, with an AEA R88 stereo microphone, plus a distant mic I ran through some distortion and phaser — the Digitech again. It felt appropriate to make liberal use of that old friend, since it was one of my main sound-sculpting tools on a lot of the “classic” Papa Ghostface albums.

I’ve grown so used to using the guitar as an initial building block, I don’t often treat it as a free-floating thing anymore like I did back when I had a proper band. It was fun to return to that approach here. I improvised two different parts and played through the Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water, which is a really unique modulation pedal. It’s too subtle for some people, from what I’ve read. They must not have spent much time with it, because I was able to dial in some pretty extreme settings without much work. Of course, you can get some nice, mellow chorus sounds out of it. I opted for something that sounded more like the guitar was being played back on a cassette tape that kept eating itself but refused to grind to a halt.

Some jazzy piano and a backwards VSS-30 vocal sample added some nice texture, but something was still missing. I thought a guest musician might be able to help. When Austin Di Pietro was over here to record a half-written part on a bossa nova-tinged song for YEAR OF THE SLEEPWALK, I asked if he’d be up for improvising on top of this one. I rerouted the mic he was playing into so it passed through the Digitech and punched in my all-time favourite setting. It’s called “Like a Synth”. A more appropriate name might be “Ambient Chaos”.

A musician can react one of two ways when you hit them with such an extreme effect. They’ll either find it a little overwhelming, or they’ll enjoy exploring the options it opens up. Austin had a blast creating weird chords and massive washes of sound. As Brent did before him, he added a little extra magic dust to a song that needed it. Not only that, but I was able to take about a minute of him fooling around with some a cappella trumpet and move it to the beginning of the song, giving it a film-noir-on-hallucinogens intro that leaves the listener wondering what to expect.

A few bits of sampled Wurlitzer from the VSS-30 and some dissonant stabs from a Korg Monotron Delay later, the sound world was complete.

Not all of my spoken word tracks are created equal, but I’m really fond of this one. The story strikes a nice balance between slow-growing dread and lunacy, and I think the musical backdrop might be the best any of my talkies has ever had.

No Papa Ghostface album has been home to a larger or more diverse group of instrumental pieces than this one. On STEW most of the instrumentals served as little segues. Here they’re a much more meaningful part of the fabric of the album.

One night Gord brought over this bulky flute. He said he bought it from a guy who made them by hand. He got it for a good price because it wasn’t quite in tune with anything else in the world, living in some no man’s land between the keys of F# and G. In spite of that unfortunate quirk, it allowed him to play two notes at once, with a single drone note offset by any of about half a dozen notes spanning the next octave up.

I think the proper name for one of these things is a drone flute. I called it a wooden flute in the CD booklet, not knowing any better at the time. Don’t hate me, Flute Gods.

Even if the intonation was dodgy, it created an eerie, exotic sound. I recorded a few minutes of Gord playing a little motif he came up with and got him to double-track it. Then I sampled my voice with the VSS-30, singing in a few different octaves, almost delving into throat-singing territory with the low notes, and recorded a single track of that to create some harmonic movement, playing chords and countermelodies.

That’s “Peruvian Mountain Song” right there. I mean, that’s the whole thing. Three tracks. Proof you don’t always need a lot of layers to build a solid soundscape.

The hazy sound at the end is the same vocal sample that runs through the body of the song, but with the “fuzz” button engaged on the VSS-30. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: that little sampling keyboard is one powerful secret weapon. I’m not sure how I ever did without it. I know I could do more with a “proper” sampler or the right computer software, but I love the simplicity and immediacy of being able to take any sound at all, mess with it, and make it musical with the touch of a few buttons.

“Just Can’t Seem to Get It Right” came out of goofing off at the piano. The first half of the first verse came to me right away. The second half was a little different to begin with.

Give me lozenges or give me halitosis, mama.

What the crap kind of crap is that crap? I’m pretty glad I rewrote that part and sang about a clever little torso dance instead. I recorded a bunch of vocal tracks with the microphone halfway across the room and then added a single close-mic’d vocal to play against the roominess.

I like to do this thing sometimes where I take one of the catchiest songs on an album and make it so short it’s sure to infuriate at least a few people. As such, this song is only sixty-seven seconds long. It felt like it said all it needed to say anyway, and I think extending it would have killed its charm.

This album might be home to some of my more adventurous electric guitar playing in a while, from strange textural touches to unhinged solos. Even on a song like this, there are discordant stabs of guitar slobbering all over the verse. A little saliva never hurt anybody, did it?

“The Evil Angel on Your Shoulder” is discussed at length in this blog post over here. It had an interesting journey, starting out as a song that felt destined for the out-takes bin only to become one of my favourite deep cuts on the album.

“Every Angry Element” was a sound before it was a song. I was mixing something that might end up on YEAR OF THE SLEEPWALK when I put a big chewy chorus effect on an acoustic guitar track just for something to do. Right away I knew it wasn’t the least bit right for that song. I also knew it was a sound I wanted to do something with.

I don’t tend to play a lot of conventional chord voicings on guitar. Because of the way I play and the tunings I use, what comes out is almost always at least a little bit different — and sometimes very different — from what you’d get in standard tuning with traditional fingerings, even when I’m playing “closed” major or minor chords.

As soon as I had the chorus-drenched acoustic guitar sound going and a blank slate to apply it to, I wanted to get away from anything that was at all familiar to me on the fretboard. A few unresolved chords arranged a certain way shook loose a vocal melody unlike anything I would normally think to sing. I scratched out a few lines of lyrics and recorded acoustic and electric guitar, vocals, bass, and drums. Everything was smothered in chorus or vibrato except for the bass.

Even after I added two quick fragments of drones from the FM3 Buddha Machine it still didn’t feel cooked all the way through. The next time Gord was over, I asked him to contribute some “noise guitar” without giving him a chance to get his bearings. I plugged him into the Count to Five and the Digitech. Soon there were a few huge swathes of semi-dissonant sound bouncing around. No more pink in the middle.

https://vimeo.com/301719109

The idea here wasn’t to get a whole lot of definition in the mix, but to smear everything together so it feels like every sound is fighting to break through a thick haze. It’s fun to do the opposite of everything your musical instincts tell you to do every once in a while.

The little instrumental coda after my backwards electric guitar drops out was recorded during the STEW sessions. When we were working on “Fly’s Hive” I held my Casio SK-1 up to the amplifier while Gord was playing guitar and sampled a random snippet of what he was doing. I recorded two different pieces that involved me “playing” the sampled guitar on the keyboard. The mutilated lo-fi sounds were unrecognizable as anything that had once been generated by a stringed instrument. Gord said he thought what I came up with sounded like a dinosaur orgy.

I added some Omnichord to the first piece and made it a solo track. I wasn’t sure what to do with the second one. It struck me as something that would make a nice unexpected fake-out at the end of a song, followed by a slow fade. I dropped it in here and it worked better than I thought it would.

And so the most psychedelic-sounding thing I’ve ever done ends with a muted dinosaur orgy.

I meant to grab more in-studio video footage for this album than I did for STEW. I ended up filming nothing of any consequence. Phooey. Determined to make at least one DIY music video, I lucked into matching Walter Ruttmann’s Opus III with a song that’s almost the same length. Only a few small edits were necessary to get the music and images to play nice together.

“Stepping Stone on the Way to Better Things” kind of fell out of the air. Gord was messing around on my mandola when he hit on a riff I thought had potential. I recorded about a minute of him playing it, got him to double-track it, and wrote some words. It was a long time before I sat down and recorded the vocal track and everything else. When I did get around to doing that, it was fun to have an excuse to pull out some instruments that haven’t been getting a lot of use in recent years, like the melodica and the glockenspiel.

“Cessna 172 Skyhawk, Stranded” began as some music and a vocal melody. I was revisiting my long-neglected Simon & Patrick acoustic guitar at the time, and a lot of new ideas came toppling out. This was one of them.

Cessna (demo)

The lyrics didn’t take too long to show up. They included a verse I didn’t use that found its way into a song called “Boy See” (another one slated for inclusion on SLEEPWALK).

I’m not sure why I ended up with the Cessna 172 as my plane. I must have been reading about small aircrafts. I was less interested in the specs than I was in conjuring a dazed amateur pilot’s fragmented thoughts after running out of fuel, making an emergency landing in some unfamiliar, unpopulated place, and going a long time without food or water.

My main electric guitar throughout the album was a Squier J. Mascis Jazzmaster. That axe has become my favourite electric guitar over the last year or two, and I haven’t swapped out the stock pickups or even given it a proper setup. Playing it just feels good. Here I gave the neglected Epiphone Casino some love and saved the Jazzmaster for the fiddly bits.

For most people it’ll probably be a mid-album mood piece that doesn’t call much attention to itself, but I really like the way this one turned out. Maybe it’s all those layers of guitar and wordless vocals. Or maybe it’s the surreal lyrics like, “If you want a man like me, just climb up the dead man tree.” I don’t know. There’s something kind of hypnotic about it to my ears.

“Meet Me in the Middle of the Ocean”…now that one came right out of left field.

When I was sifting through the things Gord and I recorded together before everything ground to a halt, I couldn’t believe how much garbage there was. Things that seemed like a good idea at the time now sounded uninspiring. Songs I remembered being somewhat fleshed out were barely there at all. This was another one I was expecting to be a disappointment. I remembered taking a few stabs at recording an instrumental improvisation, playing piano while Gord experimented with my hammered dulcimer. I didn’t think we came up with anything great, but I wanted give it a look-in for the sake of being thorough.

Revisiting the recording, I found not only was the final take a lot better than I thought at the time, but it was followed by a half-finished electronic workout that supplemented the piano and dulcimer with synth bass, a synthesized drum pattern, and some more weirdness from the FM3 Buddha Machine.

It had some serious potential. With a little creative editing and some overdubs, I was convinced I could make something pretty cool out of what was there.

The first thing I did was snip out a bit of aimlessness so the piano-and-dulcimer bit would transition into the beat-driven section in a less jarring way. Then I went to work adding things. The beat I used on the Alesis Micron sounded pretty bland. I dialled in some distortion and it came alive, with the extra grit emphasizing little accents that were buried before. I ditched Gord’s dulcimer in this part of the song — not out of spite, but because it drifted in and out of tempo. In its place I recorded lap steel and got some nice analog-sounding tones out of the VSS-30’s stock strings sound after tweaking the attack and release settings.

The industrial-sounding blasts of electric guitar are samples. I strummed a guitar with one hand and held the keyboard up to the amp with the other, somehow timing it just right so the sound I triggered was in rhythm with the song. There’s also a mangled vocal sample in there near the end, and I doubled back to add a different vocal sample to the first section.

At the end of everything I found a random piano idea I’d recorded so I wouldn’t forget it. It became the perfect ending to something that I think evolved into one of the most interesting PG instrumental tracks on any album. There’s something almost disquieting about it that really appeals to me.

“Blinded by the Evening Sun” was a little piano idea I had. Instead of developing it into something longer I thought I’d let it stay small. The second I recorded it, I knew I wanted it to lead straight into “Prayer for Redemption” (which is discussed in some depth over here). In some cases I can give you a sensible explanation for why one song follows another. Here it was something beyond logic. I felt it, and it needed to happen, and that was as far as it went.

Aside from “Rook”, “Prayer” is the only other song on the album that has a conventional chorus. I try to stay away from those, but every once in a while a song will decide it wants to walk down a more conventional path and there’s nothing to be done. I take some comfort from knowing both songs have a second chorus that shifts the meaning of the first one through a subtle word change or two.

“Crawlspace Waltz” was recorded on a night when Gord was telling me about a claustrophobic experience he had working on someone’s plumbing earlier in the day. He brought his own electric guitar over for a change (I can’t remember what kind it was), and I plugged him into this Hungry Robot pedal:

He started playing a melody that sounded like the perfect soundtrack for his crawlspace adventure. I played bass, picking out some counter-melodies. We worked out some structure for the thing, with the verses in 6/8 and a “chorus” section in 4/4. What kept the verses a little on-edge was the lack of a typical four-bar turnaround (each repetition of the melody ran for three and-a-half bars).

Then we forgot all about it.

This was another one I was expecting to be pretty useless. I remembered my bass playing being kind of lame. When I dumped the guitar-and-bass recording back onto the mixer I couldn’t believe how tight it sounded. All it needed was some additional instrumentation.

I made a bed of acoustic and electric guitars for Gord’s melody to float on top of and threw in some distorted ambient guitar swells for good measure. I recorded two different drum tracks, with the snare close-mic’d to emphasize the brush work during the first verse and the typical ribbon mic setup for some harder-hitting playing on the chorus, and then combined the two in the latter half of the song. On my birthday I recorded some bugle.

If there’s one thing life has taught me, it’s this: you can only go so long without making drunken elephant sounds with a horn you don’t really know how to play.

“Pop Song #82” gives me some pretty strong ABSENCE OF SWAY vibes. Maybe it’s just me. The demo didn’t offer much indication that it would turn into anything.

Pop Song #82 (demo)

After it was a fleshed-out song, recording it was pretty straightforward, but I found myself again searching for the right sound to tie everything together. I tried recording electric guitar, organ, and electric piano, all to no avail.

I have no problem leaving a song alone and ignoring leftover tracks on the mixer when it feels right. Some things cry out for a little extra seasoning, that’s all. When that happens, I make it my mission to keep throwing things at the wall until something sticks.

As it has so many times before, the upright piano came to the rescue and gave me the salt and pepper I needed.

(My “ouch!” at the end is a direct response to playing Gord’s malnourished twelve-string that now seems to be my guitar. It may offer just the sound a song needs sometimes, but it’s the most uncomfortable hunk of junk I’ve ever played in my life.)

“Lean Years” gave birth to itself, strange as that sounds.

I had some lyrics I liked and a working title of “Chaos and Sedition”. There wasn’t any music in my head to go with the words, and that’s pretty unusual, but I thought it would be fun to build an abstract ambient ballad without knowing where I was going. The idea was to record some free-floating electric guitar with the tremolo cranked all the way up, negating the guitar’s natural attack. Then I would throw some random things on top of that and find a way to slip the lyrics in there somewhere.

Several guitar tracks later, I realized what I had on my hands was not an abstract ambient ballad at all, but more of a shoegaze folk song. This is what I mean when I say some songs have minds of their own. I had a very clear idea in my head when I sat down, even if I didn’t have a whole song yet. The song-to-be said, “Nope. Not gonna happen. This is what I want to be.” The unexpected direction the music took forced me to write a whole new set of lyrics, and the small amount of space I had to work with kept me from getting too ambitious with them.

It’s a song about a couple of fugitives (or a fugitive couple, if you prefer), like “Zebra Stripes” on AFTERTHOUGHTS. Where that song is overflowing with details, here the guts of the story have been sucked right out. It’s a fun way of turning a narrative piece on its head, offering a few blurry snapshots without any context or plot to ground them.

As with the direction the song itself took, the guitar solo at the end wasn’t planned. I had some room to do something there and thought I’d get a little noisy and spastic with distortion and some pitch-shifted delay from the Count to Five. I ate up so many tracks layering different guitar parts, I had to record the solo on the same track as the lead vocal. I did it twice, with a different vocal to go with each solo. The second time I sang an octave higher and used a different, more distant microphone on the guitar amp.

Though the more subdued vocal felt a little more appropriate, I’m sure the unused take will show up on a misfits collection one of these days. I’ve got half a mind to go all-in and make an alternate mix that emphasizes the clean guitars and uses an earlier drum take I recorded with the snare strainer thrown off for a more muted sound.

In the months that followed the dissolution of GWD in mid-2002, Gord and I didn’t record anything of substance. We did play a lot of acoustic guitar together for a while, usually at his place. This is when we polished the music for the songs that would become “Samhain” and “Hiraeth”. Gord would come up with a riff or two and I would fill in the rest. We developed a way of playing that was so interconnected, after a while it was difficult to pick out who was playing what.

Even if no new music came out of our brief reunion, it would have been worthwhile just to have the chance to document a bit of that kind of playing we got down to a fine art when no recording equipment was around. You can hear some of it on STEW, on songs like the aforementioned two, along with “A Question, a Thought, a Confession” and “The Same Starless Sky”. But the single best distillation of it might be found on this album’s “Blue Rose”.

We started improvising together and the song pretty much wrote itself. We layered a number of tracks, both of us playing at the same time, and then I did the last looped-sounding bit by myself, double-tracking something like four or five different parts to build up the harmonies I wanted.

Gord wanted to accent this classical-flavoured instrumental ballad with — you guessed it — the harsh sound of a bullwhip cracking. I told him I didn’t think we’d be able to find anyone willing to lend us a whip, and even if we did, trying to record it would be a good way to destroy some expensive equipment or lose an eye. He said we could always just hit the floor with a belt.

I’m going to let that hang there for a second.

You know you’re living in different worlds when your collaborator thinks destroying the hardwood floor with a belt is somehow a valid musical idea. I’m all for experimenting, and I’ve made it my life’s work to carve out an idiosyncratic musical path, but…no. No to the no-ing-est degree of no-ness.

There were three tracks left on the mixer after all the acoustic guitars we recorded. I got down a bass track, thought about recording some piano, and then got rid of the bass and stripped it back to just the guitars. Some things you need to leave as they are.

The electronic-sounding outro is the VSS-30 again. I sampled Gord playing mandolin and played around with it until I had something that resembled an icy synth patch.

“Actuator” is the quirkiest of all the instrumentals, and probably the best example on the album of the VSS-30 kicking ass and taking names.

I was throwing an aluminum foil pan in the sink after eating lunch when I noticed it had a nice resonance to it. I brought the VSS-30 into the kitchen and sampled myself tapping out a rhythm on the bottom of the pan. I lucked out and the pattern I played was the exact length of the keyboard’s sampling time, allowing me to create the impression of a looped rhythm by pressing down on the same key every second or two to trigger the sound again as soon as it stopped playing.

I recorded that and then added sped-up and slowed-down versions of the same pattern played higher and lower on the keyboard, creating some fun polyrhythms. Next came an improvised melody played on one of the VSS-30’s unaltered stock sounds, and then some synth bass and strings from the Micron.

I wanted to see what other unexpected sources I could get useful sounds out of. I sampled the can-opener and layered some of that over a little bridge section. I drummed on a soup pot with my fingers and created new polyrhythms over the last chunk of the song when the extra aluminum foil pan tracks dropped out.

A bit of a funky way to build an instrumental song that’s all of ninety seconds long, I know. But I always enjoy starting from an unexpected place. You almost always end up somewhere you haven’t been before. In this case, I like how it all came out sounding like an electronic junkyard marching band strutting its stuff.

“Rivulets” was one that took a while to come together. The words lived for a long time without music. I thought someday I’d get around to sampling some glockenspiel or wind chimes, record a few layers of that, and get a female vocalist to sing the words. Never happened.

One afternoon I sat down at the piano, started playing some chords, tried singing these lyrics, and everything clicked.

Rivulets (demo)

The final recording was an exercise in trying a million different things only to pull back and simplify the mix in order to arrive at the treatment the song needed. All that’s going on there is piano, vocals, some clean electric guitar, bass, brushed snare, and sampled Wurlitzer processed by the VSS-30, but it still feels pretty lush even with all the sounds I didn’t end up using.

For a long time I was convinced piano ballads were off-limits when it came to Papa Ghostface albums. One of the few times I took a shot at recording one with Gord was during the SHOEBOX PARADISE sessions in early 2000, and the results were pretty half-baked.

If You Were Mine (2000)

“Rivulets” offers proof that a more subdued piano-led song can still possess an edge. Maybe I just needed to grow into a more interesting lyricist and get my hands on a real acoustic piano before I could write a proper PG piano ballad.

Gord would have shot it down without a second thought, edge or no edge. A few years ago we set up a Dropbox so we could send ideas back and forth. I must have sent him twenty demos of songs I thought might work as PG tunes. He never listened to any of them.

I listened to the handful of things he sent my way. There was one song I liked a lot. I brought it up once. He said we couldn’t record it because it was something he used to play with Surdaster and he thought the other guys would be upset if they found out he was recording it with me, even though they’d never done anything with it.

If ever there was a perfect moment to quote Justine Bateman’s character from the great and unjustly forgotten 2003 Showtime miniseries Out of Order and tell Gord he had the most convenient morals of anyone I’d ever known, that was it.

I guess it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. With the exception of a few of the more aggressive songs on BEAUTIFULLY STUPID, he never paid much attention to my solo work. Given the volume of music I’ve made on my own over the years and how many different places it’s gone, you’d think there would be something in there that would appeal to him. And maybe it would…but he’d have to hear it first. Just the thought of listening to an album I made without him always seemed like some vile task he didn’t want to bother with.

I never dwelled on it. But when you really think about it, it’s pretty messed up to make so much music with someone who for twenty years has zero interest in any of the work you’ve done that doesn’t involve them. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand what that was all about.

“Winter Holds No Love” was one of the few demos he did listen to and express some affection for, even if I had to send it a second time in a Facebook message in order to get it heard at all. I thought he could play the second guitar part. Teaching it to him didn’t take, so I went ahead and recorded the whole thing on my own.

Winter Holds No Love (demo)

Winter Holds No Love (second demo/cleaner coda)

The vocal melody was meant to be played by a wind instrument. I was hoping to get someone to come in and play flute. Every flautist I was able to find in the area ignored me, leaving me with no choice but to stick to the wordless singing, since no other instrument did as fluid a job of navigating those twists and turns as my voice.

It was probably supposed to turn out this way, but being ignored by people who claim to do freelance session work when I’m offering them a pretty simple gig is getting old. And this is nothing. Just wait until I tell you about my YEAR OF THE SLEEPWALK adventures! Talk about an object lesson in the flakiness and apathy of (some) musicians.

It doesn’t happen much, but every once in a while I’m moved to record a song twice. Sometimes, with a song like “The Evil Angel on Your Shoulder”, it’s a matter of having mixed feelings about the first version and finding something more satisfying in a wholesale reinvention. Other times — and this is rarer still — I’ll abandon a song halfway through recording it because I can tell I’m not getting what I want. Either the performance isn’t there or the feeling isn’t right. Starting again from scratch gives me a psychological tabula rasa.

I recorded four different versions of “Born Free, Died Expensively”. I’ve never done that before, and I don’t expect I ever will again. The instrumental bridge section changed each time. I’d record the piano and a vocal track, and then I’d listen and feel no inspiration to add anything more. It wasn’t that the song wanted to be left naked. The performance felt flat.

I’d all but given up on it when I found myself recording a lot of piano songs at once and decided it was worth one last try. There was a false start or two when I hit a bad note, and then I got a take that felt pretty solid. I tried singing on top of it. That felt solid too. At last I had the right foundation to build on. All it took was getting to a place where I had no expectations because I thought the song was doomed.

Funny thing about this one — it felt much longer when I was recording it. It was a bit of shock to learn it didn’t even crack the four-minute mark.

I gave some serious thought to bringing in a horn player to play a ruminative solo over the bridge. Then I got on a roll when I was dressing up the basic tracks and forgot about it, letting my own lap steel playing serve as a glorified lead voice.

For the climactic guitar solo at the end I plugged into the Count to Five pedal again, this time using a crazy pitch-shifted delay some people refer to as the “birds” setting. You play a single note and get a cascade of singing sounds. Play a sequence of notes and you get some wonderful chaos.

This was another song that was tricky to mix. Some tracks were pulling double duty and I had to make a lot of split-second adjustments in order to get the last section to sound right. Unlike “Flood and Fists”, it only took me a few passes to get things where I wanted them to be. That was a relief and a half.

The last few songs as a group offer a good illustration of how this album is structured to work in a cumulative way.

STEW ends in pretty grand fashion with a song called “In the Name of the Impostor”. The instrumental coda is me on my own, playing all the instruments without any input from Gord (he played a bit of additional acoustic guitar and contributed a few cymbal swells to the body of the song). In hindsight you could say it was the sound of me moving beyond the confines of our collaborative relationship right at the end of our happy reunion…but that’s stretching it. The real reason Gord isn’t playing on that last bit is because he said he felt anything he added would take away from what I’d already done.

“Born Free, Died Expensively” was meant to be the big album-ending moment this time around. When the song came out a good deal shorter than I was expecting it to be, I saw an opportunity to do something different, ending the album in stages instead of with one big bang. So “The Mind Is Not a Tapeworm” functions as something of a comedown after the violent ending of “Born Free”, and the brief ambient mood piece that follows offers a comedown after the comedown.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t hear a lot of people talk about album sequencing. Most of the articles you’ll find online that address the subject have to do with putting your most commercial foot forward, front-loading your album so it stands a better chance of getting noticed by radio station music directors and record label executives. This has nothing to do with crafting an album as a work of art, and it’s horrible advice for anyone who takes their craft seriously.

There are endless different potential albums to be made out of a given group of songs. Move just one song to a different place, or get rid of one, or add another, and the whole axis shifts. The more songs you’re dealing with, the stickier it gets.

For me it always comes down to two things: what do I want to convey with this album, and how do I get that across while creating an emotional and dynamic journey that feels right to me? What you’re doing every time you make an album, in a sense, is making a film for the ears. Some of my scene selections might seem strange or abstract, but I promise you there’s a point behind every one of those choices and a great deal of thought has gone into them.

What I never hear anyone talk about is how much silence you should leave between each song. How you transition from one scene to the next can have a huge impact on the way your album flows. It might not be as big a deal when you’re making an EP or a shorter album, but when a lot of songs are involved I think it becomes much more important. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, the spaces between the music help to create the rhythm of your album.

I used to chuck songs onto an album in the order I recorded them. Sometimes it worked out better than it should have. I think when you make enough albums that way, you start to think at least a little bit about the bigger picture, even if it’s only a subconscious consideration.

These days it’s different. I spend so much time thinking about sequencing, sketching out rough track lists and then making adjustments as an album gains shape, by the time I’m ready to commit all the songs to CD whatever I’ve worked out on paper almost always ends up being my final sequence. Even if something feels off, I don’t find myself making many major adjustments, because I’ve already made dozens of them on the way to working everything out.

What I don’t always get right the first time, and what I sometimes have to take a few cracks at, is the spacing between the songs.

There’s a world of difference between two seconds, four or five seconds, and no seconds at all. Two seconds is the default gap left between songs on a CD. It’s a pretty quick turnaround, but it feels natural enough because you’ve experienced it a million times. A gap of four or five seconds gives you a micro-space in which to process what you’ve just heard. You’re alone in the dark for a moment. Then there’s the gapless transition, where the ending of one song smash cuts to the beginning of another without giving you any time to prepare for what’s coming.

Most of the time I’m dealing with spaces in the range of two to four seconds — sometimes a little more if a song is especially important to me and I want to try and make it hit a little harder than some of the others. The smash cut is something I only pull out when I want to get a little showy, when I want to mess with the listener, or when it feels so right there’s no denying it. In this case, jumping straight from the end of “Flood and Fists” to the beginning of “Rook” made perfect sense to me on both emotional and sonic levels, whereas cutting from the detritus of my guitar solo at the end of “Born Free” to the beginning of “The Mind Is Not a Tapeworm” was a more practical consideration. With “Born Free” flaming out in such an abrupt way, leaving any appreciable silence after it would feel clumsy.

The Mind Is Not a Tapeworm (demo)

Speaking of “The Mind Is Not a Tapeworm”, it’s the only song on the album to address the end of Papa Ghostface in any direct way. At the heart of the song is a simple message: when time has ravaged our bodies and undone our minds, I’ll still remember the good times. It’s easy to miss that bit of warmth with all the talk of putrefaction, but it’s in there.

Of all the songs that took some work to get the arrangement to a place where it felt just right, this was the one that almost drove me insane. I could make a number of alternate mixes using the elements I recorded and then abandoned — organ, backwards piano, different electric guitar ideas, and a whole lot more. I thought about writing a string arrangement, but nothing I came up with was any good. Beyond the acoustic twelve-string guitar (my own Washburn this time), the six-string accents, the bass, and the vocal tracks, I was stumped.

I tried to forget about it for a while. It wasn’t easy to do, knowing this was going to be the last proper song on the album. I had to find a way to nail it. When I came back to it for another go-round, I recorded some backwards electric guitar and a simple little piano line, and then I knew I had what I needed.

The only thing troubling me was getting the piano to sit where I wanted it in the mix. It sounded a little cold. Maybe I didn’t have the mics positioned where they should have been on the day. Or maybe it sounded off because it was one of the few unprocessed sounds vying for attention while the acoustic guitars had some flanger tickling them and the backwards electric guitar was swimming in chorus. Something as simple as running the piano track through a Leslie speaker effect took care of everything, adding some warmth and situating the sound right where it was supposed to be — in the background without being hidden.

The album ends as it began, with ambient sample-based weirdness. “Stars in the Shotgun Night” is nothing but my voice looped and bent out of shape by the VSS-30. Brief as it is, I think there’s something both open-ended and decisive about it.

The title is a quote from a Jim Morrison poem. I’ve been meaning to use that phrase somewhere for probably about half as long as I’ve been alive. At long last, it’s found a home. It comes from one of the last poems Jim wrote in Paris before his mysterious death. Another bit I’ve always liked, from the same poem:

Naked we come
& bruised we go
Nude pastries
for the soft slow worms
below

Say what you will about Jim’s poetry — I’ve always been a fan. At its best there’s a music that pulses through it, and a line like, “I had a splitting headache from which the future’s made,” seems pretty prophetic now.

I don’t imagine WHAT WE LOST IN THE FLOOD will appeal to as many people as STEW did. It’s a very different kind of album. Then again, I’ve been surprised before. Whatever anyone else makes of it, I think I feel pretty good about it. As proud as I was (and still am) of STEW, this one feels like it’s much more in keeping with what Papa Ghostface was all about. It’s a more dynamic affair, too.

A quick note about that.

Some months ago I discovered the online Dynamic Range Database. There’s no better illustration of just how many albums have been victims of the asinine Loudness War and how much music continues to be compressed and limited to death for no good reason. It’s a great resource if you’re trying to figure out whether or not a remastered version of an album you love is worth buying. It’s also a little depressing to realize there are bands I genuinely like who have never released a single album with a decent amount of dynamic range.

Through this, I found a tool that allowed me to measure the dynamic range of my own music. You can add this to the list of things only I would be crazy enough to do: I built a dynamic range database of everything I’ve ever recorded (minus the many cassette tapes). It was an eye and ear-opening experience.

Some of the results were no surprise at all. I knew my earliest CDs would have a lot of dynamic range — too much, in some cases. And I knew the group of albums I remastered last year would be somewhat compromised in their first-issued forms. But I wasn’t prepared for some of what I saw.

Want to take a guess at what the most dynamic album I recorded was once I started to figure out what I was doing?

Fetal Pulp’s SEED OF HATE, from 2001. A death metal album.

It’s got an average DR rating of 15. That’s almost unheard of outside the realm of classical music. Even vinyl records, which are given a lighter touch at the mastering stage because of the different format, rarely approach that amount of dynamic range.

Want to know which album has the worst DR rating? It’s not the original too-hot master of IF I HAD A QUARTER or GIFT FOR A SPIDER. It’s not even YOU’RE A NATION pre-Scott Craggs magic.

It’s FOUR SONGS IN JULY, from 2000. That EP has an abysmal DR rating of 6. Nothing else I’ve ever recorded comes close to being that bad. And yet, in spite of the massive amounts of compression I used at the mastering stage to get it loud, there’s no audible clipping, and those songs sound pretty good to me.

The revelations don’t end there.

The late-period GWD albums and my three post-band solo albums from 2002 all have a ridiculous amount of headroom. You’d think their dynamics would be off the charts. They all live in the 9 to 11 DR range. Not bad by any means, and far better than most commercial CDs, where anything above an average rating of 4 or 5 is almost shocking these days. Still, that’s nowhere near what I was expecting.

What this tells me is the equipment I was using at the time — the cheap ART preamps and the Aphex opto compressor in particular — muddied the water to some degree.

Fast forward a year or two to albums like NUDGE YOU ALIVE and BRAND NEW SHINY LIE, and everything is DR13, DR16, DR17. The DBX mic preamps and compressor I was using then may be maligned by every recording engineer on the planet, but it’s pretty clear they let the music breathe a lot better.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. You know those eight albums I pushed too hard the first time around at the mastering stage? The worst of them is only DR8. The best is DR10. I was expecting much worse. Of course, the remastered versions are miles better, all coming in at DR12 or DR13, with no clipping anywhere.

To give you a frame of reference, Cat Power’s Sun, which is pretty fatiguing and horribly-mastered, weighs in at DR6. Codename: Dustsucker — a great Bark Psychosis album, and one I would use as an audiophile reference any day — is only two notches better at DR8. The gulf between them in terms of sound quality and perceived dynamics is monumental. How can they be so close in actual measured dynamic range? David Bowie’s Blackstar is worse than either one of those at DR5 but sounds much better and less choked than Sun.

It just goes to show there are different ways of arriving at a loud master, the numbers don’t always tell the whole story, and not all methods of compressing or limiting dynamic range are as hard on the ears as others.

With albums like STEW and AFTERTHOUGHTS I was no longer trying to make anything loud for the sake of loudness. I felt those were pretty dynamic albums.

They both have an overall DR rating of 9. Again, compared to most modern albums, that’s excellent. It’s more dynamic than the Bark Psychosis album. But I was disappointed when I saw that number. It told me I could still stand to back off a bit more.

When I added up the DR ratings for each song on FLOOD and worked out the average, I was a lot happier with what I got: DR11. That’s more like it.

I know numbers aren’t everything, and this is only one measurement. It doesn’t take into account LUFS, RMS, and whatever others there are. How things sound is much more important than anything a meter or reading can tell you. Still, it helps to have a visual reference for what you are or aren’t hearing. I’m glad to have something I can use as a guide to keep myself in check from now on.

As far as the graphic design side of things is concerned, I had some fun with this album, finding a family of fonts that played off of Alain’s cover art. A few years ago I went through a period of combing MyFonts for anything that looked like it might someday be useful. I bought a stupid amount of fonts. Some of them I look at now and think, “What was I seeing? I’ll never use this.” Others, like the vintage Swiss typewriter font used for AFTERTHOUGHTS, have come in handy.

This time around I used a group of fonts called Goodlife, designed by Hannes Von Döhren. Something about the combination of Goodlife Brush for the song titles and Goodlife Sans for the body text appealed to me. There was a nice amount of character without sacrificing legibility.

For the first time in a very long time I was going to break down musician credits for each individual song in the lyric booklet. I’ve figured out a way to include song-by-song credits for YEAR OF THE SLEEPWALK that doesn’t look clunky. I didn’t have as much luck with FLOOD. Given the fonts I was using, there was no way to add credits before or after the lyrics for a song without throwing everything off.

I settled for specifying who contributed to the album and what they did on the final page of the booklet, making it clear I was responsible for everything else. Good enough.

This is all probably more than anyone would ever want to know about an album only thirty or so people in the world will hear, but WordPress told me this was going to be my six hundredth post. I wanted to make it count. Plus, I’ve come to enjoy putting these longer missives together to make up for extended periods of blog inactivity.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say this is my longest blog post of all time. I didn’t plan it that way. Honest. There was just a lot to say.

Something else I wasn’t planning: I didn’t think I would get my booklets and inserts from Minuteman Press before the end of the week. They came through on Friday, so I’ve been able to start putting CDs together. An album never feels real to me until all the pieces are assembled. This one’s real now, and I can officially “release” it.

I gotta say this: I started working with Minuteman Press in 2003. They printed part of the OH YOU THIS insert. I had no idea what I was doing. Neither did they. They’d never made CD inserts before, and I’d never designed them.

Since then, I’ve had them print booklets and inserts for dozens of albums. I don’t even know what the number is. Probably close to fifty if you count all the 2010 “reissues”. Over time I started to figure out how to make things look less amateurish, and they got a handle on how to cut and print the materials. There were always small issues. If my inserts had a black background, chances were the scoring would be done in such a way that bending back the tabs would cause the material to crack or split a little. I hated that eyesore. I had to buy a cutting board because the back inserts were usually too large, even though I always gave them a jewel case to use as a size reference. I had to trim the top or bottom of almost every insert I got, effectively doing part of their job for them.

They were easy to deal with and the prices were reasonable, so I didn’t make a fuss.

In the time that’s passed since I redesigned the packaging for LOVE SONGS FOR NIHILISTS and had it reprinted, new owners have taken over. No one I know is there anymore.

I was a little worried at first. There were a few people I always knew I could count on to understand what I was after. We developed a shorthand. I had no idea how these new folks would do with the kind of printing jobs I need done, and I didn’t get the impression they’d done any work like this before.

You could say the inserts I had made for the remastered version of YOU’RE A NATION were a way of testing the water. I didn’t need to trim anything, and when I folded the tabs over (on a black background) there were no ill effects. FLOOD was a much more complicated job. They knocked it out of the park again.

I think the prices are cheaper now than they were before, and the quality of work is better. Who saw that coming?

For those of you who are used to getting mail from me when I have a new album to share, I can’t promise when this one will show up. Canada Post is in the middle of a rotating strike right now. They’ve got such a backlog of packages, there’s no guarantee anything will get where it’s supposed to go anytime soon. That’s not going to work for me. I’ll do my best to work out an alternate plan of attack with UPS or the Cosmic Carrier Pigeon Service or something.

Dressing to Undress

(The Musical Adventures of Johnny West)

Month: November 2018

Almost as rare as a Bigfoot sighting.

What We Lost in the Flood.