Roger Powell Returns!

Aug 18, 2006 4:30 PM

You overdubbed those instruments in your home studio?
Yes.

What mic did you use?
I used a Rode NTK tube mic. I don't have a lot of mics and don't do enough acoustic recording to invest in a bunch of expensive mics. I used that for all the acoustic stuff. It has a nice, warm sound.

Are you using the preamps in your interface?
Yeah, nothing fancy. The flugelhorn was recorded into a Pro Tools session with the Digi 002R. We would use plug-ins for whatever effects that we needed. Mostly, just plug it in and go. I have an adage: if it sounds good, it's a good sound. It's more about the playing.

Tell me about the solo piano tracks.
Sometimes I just sit down and start improvising. I can hardly remember an actual piece from beginning to end, but I can get around on the piano. Gary suggested I do some piano work. I really didn't want to get into recording a fancy piano, because all I have is this upright and I don't have a proper studio, and I didn't want to turn this into a life-long recording project. So he said "Just put up a mic and improvise and we'll find some useful parts in it." So that's what I did: I recorded it using the JamMan. After dinner and after a beer, I set up my mic and thought, "What am I going to record it on? Well this thing is portable [laughs] and it creates WAV files."

It's not the best recording. But it is in keeping with our philosophy that it shouldn't be technically perfect.

You recorded it at home?
Yes. I have a top of the line Schimmel upright I purchased in 1994. It's a little bit seasoned and it hasn't been tuned in three years! I put the mic above my head and opened the top, and the recording ended up having a nice ambience. I recorded one continuous piece. Gary processed it, stereofied it, and chose two little segments out of one larger, inebriated walk-up to the piano.

The acoustic piano pieces fill out the record nicely.
They do! It's funny, because we let people hear the recording, and I thought people were going to hate this piece or that piece. They're just not going to like it: they're all going to like this other piece. It turns out that everybody liked something different, and yet they enjoyed the other stuff. A couple of people said "Man, I'm really glad you put those piano pieces on there."

Do you find yourself being inspired by synth patches, or do you have a mental concept of a piece before hand, and then figure out the sounds to match it?
I'd say it's the former. The most fun is to just sit down at a synth and noodle around until you find a texture or you can overlay a few sounds together. Or work with a beat box.

I was so excited to have the modular finished. I put all those kits together and everything worked, so I figured I should spend some time playing them. It was really inspiring to go back to the old way of doing things without presets, by plugging patch cords and twiddling knobs.

The system has a fairly well rounded set of modules, with some weird filters and a Wave Warper. I just found it fun and inspirational to make sounds on it that would lead into a certain mood or a style. Then I'd start adding other parts to it.

This album is fairly different than both of my earlier albums. On the other albums, a bunch of the songs were actually composed on the piano and then realized using synthesizers. But on this recording it's very much a stream of consciousness type of composing, where we let things develop organically.

Do you amplify your hardware instruments before recording them or use a special preamp?
I just plug them in directly and use plug-ins once they've been recorded. Sometimes I'll use some external processors. I have a Vox ToneWorks device: it's got a little tube in it. I've used that to just mangle sounds. If I'm looking for a Rhodes-on-Mars sound or something, I'll plug it through that and mess around with it until it sounds like something else. I'm starting to do more with soft synths, because they're responsive enough and sound good enough.

I still have stand-alone hard disk recorders, too. And I really like using them because you don't have to be in the room where you have a mondo-DAW setup. I like portability. Sometimes, I just like to sit on the couch downstairs and work. So I've got a little Fostex thing that records onto Compact Flash, and I've got one of the Tascam 8-track hard disk recorders. I love that thing. And six months ago—and I love this—I bought a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. That is actually the most fun.

Why is that?
There are no screens. There are no menus. It's totally predictable and straightforward. You can record four channels at once, and it actually doesn't sound half-bad.

I'm lucky: for the kind of music that I do, I don't need 192 kHz or to be able to record in an anechoic chamber with $4,000 microphones. I like stuff that is kind of smudged a little bit. This thing was a little over $200—that's the cost of a stomp box.

Where does the name Fossil Poets come from?
Once this project took shape, we thought it sounded kind of like a band. But Gary said it should still be a Roger Powell album, because I have the recognition and so forth. But we didn't know what to call the album?

For weeks we went back and forth. We went to Band Name Generator [laughs] and came up with all these stupid names. We were sending 30 suggestions back and forth every day, and every one was either too serious, too silly, or had already been taken.

At one point I started looking through poetry books for inspiration, and Gary sent me a list that included "fossil poets." I said "That's it!" Because we're all aging: none of us are kids.

The ironic thing was that we came up with the name and said "let's live with that for a couple of weeks." It sounds like a band, but it could also be an album title. Months later, I found this Ralph Waldo Emerson essay that has a paragraph that starts off "language is fossil poetry." What he meant was that all of the original words that people came up with for things were just poetry then. And language is, therefore, fossil poetry.

So now when people ask how we came up with the name, I say "apparently you don't read Ralph Waldo Emerson." [Laughs.]

We're probably going to put out a limited run of the project on vinyl. We can't fit the whole CD on there, but we've picked out what we thought were the highlights. It's a bigger format for the artwork.

Did you see Herman Serrano's artwork before the recording was done?
Only afterward.

What turns you on about it?
It's very mysterious, with lots of detail. I keep finding new things every place I look—little hidden things. He came up with that boy on the fossil beach after listening to the music, with the little glyphs. And he created this logo with a sort of yin/yang fossil thing.

Apparently he's well known for doing art for games. It just gave me chills when I looked at his portfolio and saw all this stuff. I thought "This guy is good!"

Three or four days after we began corresponding, he sent me a 2-minute slide show to the musical excerpts I'd put online. As soon as that boy on the fossil beach came in, we were like "Whoa!" I was inspired with what I saw. Herman immediately came up with ideas, and they were all good. That, to me, was the missing element.