Playing enough instruments to fill out the song required judicious use of the Boss RC-2 loop pedal I have been borrowing from my friend Chris for the past several years. I'm therefore able to lay down a verse/chorus guitar part on the first pass, then play drums over top of that the second time, then solo over both the third time. But the bridge chord progression is different, so that forces me to go back to just guitar and hope the vocal harmony can carry the momentum. It's a tricky way to perform but I think it's worth learning. It's so hard to make money touring that being able to cut down on personnel without losing much enthusiasm is important.
But back to the recording, I had a few ideas for accenting the basic guitar/bass/drums arrangements. I did my usual violin and trombone work, with the trombone being the main focus on the chorus of "Your Turn" and the violin getting a solo on track 3 but otherwise being much more subdued than on the last one. My dad noodled a bit of clarinet on the final track. And when certain parts of songs felt like they needed fattening, I added electric guitar. That was my Mexican strat through the AC30, cranked, a 57 on the cone.
I wanted kids' voices doing the refrain on the aforementioned "Rubber and Glue", so I spent a morning at my mother's Grade 1 class and taught them the song. They thought it was hilarious, and afterwards we wrote a little song of our own. It was a lot of fun and reminded me of the time I spent teaching music to kindergartners in Montreal, except most of these kids had punjabi accents instead of french ones. They were practicing a song for a class play and I snagged a bit of it to use as a transition from that song to the next on the record. I'd like to do more location and atmospheric recording in the future.
I had a photo I wanted to take in mind for the album cover, but I wound up doing a painting instead. It's a torso with hands wrapped around it, except one of the hands has lost its grip and all that's left is the impression of the fingertips as the blood returns to the capillaries. At the last minute I changed the order of the text so that it wouldn't read "Greg McLeod: The Invisible Girl", since that was not my intention. And I used some GIMP trickery to make the ends of the word "invisible" slightly transparent. For better or for worse, the whole thing wound up looking like a racy Young Adult novel's book jacket.
I tried to limit the time I spent mixing this album, partly because I wanted to see what sorts of results I was able to achieve quickly, and partly because I wanted to finish before I started recording an EP with The Oh Wells at Fader Mountain Sound in Vancouver. In the end I did all the mixing and mastering in three days, while still tinkering with the arrangements. I then did a few revisions while sitting in the control room at Fader Mountain, and put it up on the internet at 5 am, April 5th.
I have still received almost no feedback from anyone but am pretty happy with it. There are timing quirks that bother me, the vocal level is sometimes a bit low, and the whole thing could benefit from a couple passes automating levels. But I think it has a raw and wholesome sound and pretty solid songwriting. And the final chorus of "Giants", that is something I can stand behind. I'm about halfway done writing songs for a new record. More on that later.
