Roger Powell Returns!

Aug 18, 2006 4:30 PM

It sounds like Greg Koch enjoyed himself, based on the guitar parts. There is some amazing playing on there.
I finally met him at Guitar Showcase, where he did a Fender clinic. He's a riot: a certified comedian as well as a Tele-master. He's playing stuff you can't believe he's playing. He says "On my new record, I do things to the Tele that you wouldn't do to a farm animal." [Laughs.]

Are you going take this on the road?
I don't see that happening. First of all, I still have a reasonably lucrative day job. And it wasn't composed as a band. I suppose we could recreate this stuff, but that would be a lot of work.

Are you going to do a CD release party?
We might do a CD release party. But I don't know what I'd play. The pieces were assembled. Looking back on it, they sound like maybe a band put them together and recorded them, and then added some parts.

We basically kept the guitar sound pretty straight. He used a fuzz box or whatever, but we deliberately decided that the guitar was going be this bluesy, grounding element. So you have this electronic groove-oriented stuff, with Albert Collins playing on it. We kind of used that as a theme.

I'm sure Greg could play his parts live. But I would have to go in and figure out how to recreate some combination of synths and loops and whatever. And I have not been playing live that way. That would be a major effort.

It's not really my goal at this stage in my life to go on the road. It's not like we're revved up, and practiced, and ready to go. Like I said, I'd never even met the guitar player until he finished his parts.

That means you'll still be friends on the road when you go...
Well, for at least the first week. [Laughs.] It would probably be fun. But I've got my hands full already.

What I really want to do is start working on the next one, because we learned a lot by doing this, as I was mentioning about the work flow. We eventually figured out that it was pointless to send Pro Tools sessions back and forth. As soon as I found out that Gary could handle the editing and mixing, I said "That's perfect." All I have to do is sit there and listen.

Did he send you MP3s to see if it was the right direction?
He would just burn a CD and say "What do you think of this?" And if I needed to add a part, I would just pull that into Pro Tools and add the part. And then send him that track back.

I like the call and response of the guitars on "Crème Fraiche," but I'm surprised it wasn't a call and response between guitar and synthesizer.
We decided to feature Greg on that one. There are a couple places where I pulled the guitar back and did some answering things. I originally thought I wanted to do more of that, a la Utopia, by doubling the guitar part and adding a harmony—that sort of thing. We just did things a little differently.

You have to remember this is all being done serially. On most songs, he probably played all the way through the thing, for coverage. Then I'd say "I like these phrases, and I should play something." So we did that. But on that song, this is his tribute to Eric Clapton [Laughs.]

And then at the end, there is a surprise: a wild organ solo. So we saved up the keyboard, and I bloodied my hands on that. The song has a couple of holes in it, and the MOTM is covering where the beat stops. The spooky background stuff—where it kind of floats for a second—that's all MOTM. It does another one of those stops towards the end, and I wanted a swell up to the organ solo and do a Steve Winwood type of thing.

Did you play a real organ?
No, I think that was a Roland D50. But we doctored it. It took us an hour to set up the sound. I did that in Wisconsin. Once we had the structure of the songs, and a lot of the guitar parts done, then it was my turn to have fun. That's where we figured out some parts and where they should be.

Originally, I flew out there to just deliver stuff and talk about fragments and what might happen. I left it with him for two or three months, and he started piecing some arrangements together for songs that weren't complete. And then he worked with the guitar player for a couple of months. We edited those to the point where we had the structure of the songs, and we knew where the guitar parts were going to be and where we wanted Roger Powell licks.

Then he flew out to my studio for overdubs over a long weekend. After working on it some more, I flew back out there for another weekend of overdubs and final editing. We wanted to get to the point where we could start doing the mastering. And by the end, I was usually taking things out.

I saw this great quote the other day: You know you've achieved perfection not when you can't think of anything more to put into a piece, but when you can't think of anything else to take out.

I really wanted this project to be a minimal thing, and have the ambience carry it. We put solos in, but I didn't want it to be this typical verse/chorus "Okay, here comes the guitar solo! Here comes the synthesizer solo!" So we really tried to mix it up a little bit and have it flow more than have it be composed songs.

How did you know when each piece was done?
We had differences of opinion in some places, but we worked it out. It's always nice to have somebody who has a different perspective on things, so you can get into these discussions. It helps you define what the overall thing is supposed to be.

I sat there with Gary when I went out there the last time, and we started listening critically to every song. If I heard something that I wanted to change, I would just say stop, and we would do something to change it. I drove him nuts here and there, but he was the Pro Tools master and was able to do things that I would suggest and do them much more quickly than I could do them.

I was mostly interested at that point in making sure we didn't over do certain things because then the parts would stick out better. It was like, "We don't need that lick repeated that many times: take out the second and the fourth and maybe I'll put something in if you think there's a hole there."

I kept pushing for little sound design elements. I wanted little things here and there. I've got a short attention span, and it would start sounding boring to me real soon, and I'd say "Something else has to happen here. We have to take something out and put something else in." Every now and then you'll hear some out-of-left-field drum fill, and it'll only appear once or twice in the piece, but it just breaks it up. We also did that in judicious places with some of the guitar licks. "He's played this one the same way three times, so let's mangle that one." We didn't do much of that because I wanted to keep his pure, straight-ahead guitar sound and let everything else swirl around it.

Will you have vocals on the next project?
It's possible: I'm not ruling that out. I am my worst critic as a vocalist. I find singing very hard to do. But people have told that sometimes I can pull it off, so I might consider it. I know that that adds a lot of human appeal to a record.

Actually, I don't mind singing so much. I just find writing the lyrics to be very painful. The other philosophy I've had most of my musical career is that once you put lyrics on something it becomes very concrete. Unless you do stream-of-consciousness lyrics. It pins things down, and doesn't allow as much interpretation of the music.

It takes it into a new audience. There's an audience that can't really listen to music unless it has words on it, and you seemed to have tapped into it with your second record, Air Pocket.
Only the first side of that record had vocals on it. The second side was all instrumental again. I guess what I was saying was that I'm thinking about a more structured approach, but simple structures. Keep the retro thing, but maybe use, for example, simple blues structures and do interesting things with them.

I don't want to just repeat what I did on this one. I don't see how I actually could, because it just became what it is. It grew out of all these fragments.

You won't start with, say, a collaboration with the three of you in the same space?
We might. That was another goal—to try to be in the same room for some of this. The whole thing was just an experiment to begin with. I had all this loosely strung-together stuff, and Gary took it to the next level. The whole thing just kind of grew organically. It was certainly a challenge. But we've got some experience now, and now I know what Greg can do, and what Gary is good at.

It sounds like you have the inspiration to do it.
This gave me the confidence back. Because, when you're out of the business for so long—you're kind of rusty and everybody has forgotten about you—you lose a little of your self confidence. It's like "Wow. Has it really been that long? Can I still do this? Do I still have something to say?" I have something to say, but it just comes out in some other language-fossil poetry.

Have you begun working on the next project?
I'm in the fragment stage again. I think because we've been through this process, we'll probably have a little bit more direction for the next recording. Maybe it won't take another 26 years.