Did I say that? Hope I did.

By the time I was settling on the song ideas I wanted to pursue for lyric writing, I had been living with the thirty-something instrumental loops I'd created for a few months. This album is the slowest I've ever worked, not in terms of how long I'm taking to do the work but in terms of how long I had to wait in between steps. I had other projects eat up good chunks of my time, notably a high budget record that I made with Good for Grapes (the band I play in), working with producer Howard Redekopp. 

It was interesting doing rehearsals and pre-production with him; his advice mostly concerned song structure and consisted of finding ways to play the nicest-sounding parts of the songs more times. Tracking parts was long and frustrating at times. I played the violin and trombone on the record and my parts came fairly late in the overdubs, so there were times when the pitch of the violin especially would never quite sound perfect because it was being pulled in so many directions by the pitches of instruments already recorded. Not to mention that I was discouraged from using vibrato, which made pitch even more crucial. I had a tuner with me, so I was able to check what I was being asked to do against concert pitch when it got particularly tricky. Specific notes had to be played a quarter-tone sharp or flat. It was tough to remember how to detune myself correctly over the course of a long line, but I tried my best!

The experience was interesting though, and listening to the finished product I really noticed how everything we recorded was more or less there, but volume was really used as a means of highlighting the important parts. The violin was mostly single-tracked, which I guess is true to how it sounds live. I'm used to the sound of ensemble strings on my own stuff, but I could see getting into single-tracking them at some point.

I think the time off between the various steps of making this album was helpful, since it allowed me time to come back to ideas and sounds and be more big-pictures and objective about them. The downside is the enthusiasm that comes with pursuing a new and exciting thing has also cooled, which means getting back into the flow of working on the songs takes a bit of doing. When I came back to my loops to start writing songs over them, I had been listening to them for a while and shown them to some people, so I knew which ones I was most excited to work on.

The first thing I tried to do was imagine the sort of imagery and mood I might use for a specific song idea, and then try to pair it with a loop that I thought complimented that in some way. Some pairings came easier than others. I generally started with the ideas I was most excited by and then got a little more stuck by the end. There were quite a few instrumental loops I thought I could write good songs over, maybe 15 or 16. I wanted to end up with about 10 songs in the end, so I figured that would give me plenty to pare the album down to something with a cohesive sound and theme.

I enlisted the help of a few friends to listen to my loops and tell me which they liked. It was helpful in that I felt validated when they liked ones that I did too, but it was hard for them to tell me which ones really went together as a group. They could give me some adjectives to describe the mood of the loops though, and that helped me. I had angles of attack in my head for some but not all of my song ideas at this point. I knew, for instance, that I wanted my song about the dangers of unilateral decision-making on climate change to be a first person narrative story song with an anxious sense of impending doom. I chose to pair that with the idea I'd based on a song I'd recorded live at the Fox Cabaret, thinking that I could contrast the hedonism of a club night with the sober but equally reckless decision-making of some Catch 22-ish government/military types. I knew I wanted the song about the next evolutionary leap forward being someone we'd consider handicapped today to be a triumphant fanfare of themed, disjointed imagery. So I picked a major chord guitar loop with horns and strings, all swagger and strength. These choices were just hunches that I would try and make work, and when some of them didn't end up clicking, I either ditched both parts or tried a different song idea with the same loop. So the ones that worked out were really just lucky.

Before I started trying to write lyrics, I spent a bit more time mixing the loops and seeing if there was anything else I could add. Then I printed five-minute versions of the loops just repeating over and over so that I could put them on my iPod and walk and bike around with them. They weren't sequenced, so it was just everything going at once, like it would be at the song's most intense parts, but it was a good way of getting myself to listen to them with my song ideas in mind. Since they were just the same 5-20 second chunks over and over, my brain would get hypnotized and bored enough while listening to them that ideas of how to tackle the song subjects or just images would pop into my mind. I found this worked especially well when I paired doing it with repetitive physical activity like riding my bike into Vancouver (while I was going to the studio to record with Good for Grapes, in fact!).

I conceived of the rest of the song ideas on the album this way. Instead of having a pre-made idea and finding an instrumental for it, I just listened to the instrumental until an idea for a song formed out of it. So I worked both ways on this album. Music came first, but was then set aside while research that would lead to song ideas took place. Then these two bodies of work that had been growing separately were forced together, and each informed the other. I like the freedom to do instrumental loops before thinking about lyrics at all, but for my next project I'd like to have some more early interaction between lyrics and music. That might mean starting more of my instrumentals with vocal melodies; I only did that once on this album. But it was that one vocal melody that made me want to do the album in the first place.

11 AM, time for TRANESTRETCHING

I should rewind, though, because before I did any research for this album at all, I spent a few weeks to record thirty-something song ideas that would form the basis of all of the tracks on the album. The process was a continuation of the way I worked on Little Gwaii and MB-LP, with the key difference that instead of recording demo versions of the songs initially and rerecord once I knew which I was using, I went straight to recording good versions of the loops. I was able to do this because I finally bought a pair of nearfield monitors, so I wasn't stuck trying to judge the sound of the instruments I was tracking through a pair of headphones. The Adam F5 speakers I bought were great, and I felt more confident that I was capturing good sounds on the way in than I have on past album projects.

This no-demo recording process also meant that I cut the Boss RC-300 looper out of the tracking process. Ordinarily, I would record demos onto the looper, using its three tracks as I would when I play the song live. So drums would usually be on track 3, bass on track 2, and guitar/keys/vocals on track 1, depending on the song. Then I would figure out how I wanted to perform the song by muting and un-muting these tracks to create the song structure. But this time, I was recording good versions of my ideas right onto the computer, as I wrote them. I saved the looper for later, when I was trying to arrange the songs, since having the instruments separated into the three tracks as I would play them live made it obvious what moves and mutes would make sense for live performance.

I generally started the loops with a single instrumental idea or conceptual goal. I make a practice of recording any short ideas onto my phone whenever they come to me, so I mined my phone recordings for ideas I'd had that could form the basis of songs. One thing I also tried on this record was recording snippets of existing songs that were on where I happened to be that gave me a specific feeling. One was a classical piece that was on in Good for Grapes' tour bus when we were recording our album, another was a weird electronic jam I witnessed played by musicians dressed as Luchadors at the Fox Cabaret, and another was a song we played in the Delta Concert Band. Specific places and instruments also played roles in loops I included on the record; riffs I wrote on a terrible old bass at Steve Albini's studio in Chicago started a couple songs, and one I wrote and recorded in GarageBand on an iPad while up the Sunshine Coast made the album as well. I also manipulated found sound: one song started with a chopped up loop of the sound of a Vancouver Skytrain leaving the station, and another began with the chirping sound of crosswalks for the visually impaired.

I went for quantity with the loops, knowing the more I made, the more cohesive I could make the sound of the album since then I'd have enough good ones that I could then choose the ones that fit a similar aesthetic. Since I knew I would make a lot, I didn't have to worry about cohesion while I was actually writing them, which was great since I could just follow ideas through wherever they seemed to be leading me. I generally finished 2-3 every time I sat down to work, and considering I was trying to pre-mix and record nice versions of everything as I went it was a pretty good pace.

This was the first album I finally gave up and used drum machine VST sounds instead of recording real drums. I did it because I've come to terms with the fact that I don't have the gear or the ears or the room to make my drums sound professional, but I also did it because I realized that setting up real drums for my live shows is a bridge too far for me right now anyway, so I might as well record the way I'm going to end up playing live, with a drum pad triggering sounds. I still miked up a drum kit and played real drums while recording though, because I didn't want super quantized drum machine timing, just nicely recorded samples. So I converted the audio I recorded on close mics into MIDI and fed that into my soft synth, Session Drummer 3, editing for timing and velocity afterward.

Bass and guitar I recorded much as I have in the past, with both the DIed signal and miked amp and making decisions about which to use or how to blend them later. One thing I did a lot with the guitar was use my Boss DD-2 delay pedal to sync 8^th note delays to the song tempo, and then just hit chords once every couple bars, letting the delays continue almost as loud as the hit. I found that really filled space, when that's what I needed from the guitar.

One thing I noticed in playing the songs from my previous album MB-LP live was that I really underused violin and especially trombone. So I made sure not to do that this time around, incorporating them more often and more centrally, usually at the expense of the guitar. Violin I recorded very normally, with a cheap overhead pencil condenser, but overdubbed many takes onto every part and panned doubles in interesting ways to make a real ensemble sort of sound. I sent the trombone into Guitar Rig 5's talkbox effect, except not with the plugin “talking” but at a static position. The extreme EQ filter effect gave the trombone a nice place in the mix to sit, and I thought made it sound like an old-timey car horn, in a nice way.

I included some other instruments as well; the keyboard sounds all came from presets on my dad's DX7s, and I sent one through the Boss looper for the slicer effect it has. I made more extensive use of shaker, tambourine, and cowbell than I have in the past. Since I wanted this album to be a dancey, beat-driven album, I thought percussion could help propel the songs forward.

Different things would inspire me to write the loops that I used on Extinct! Sometimes it was an instrumental melody, other times a groove, and other times an interesting length for the loop. There are 3, 7, and 14-bar loops, as well as ones where chord lengths are asymmetrical, as in one 8-bar loop where the first chord goes for 6 bars and the second for the remaining two. Any way I could play with my own expectations for how the loop should go, while also making something genuinely nice-sounding to listen to, that was what I tried for. Harshness crept back in with the vocals, but in writing the instrumentals I really tried to make it a priority that they sound nicer than things I'd done in the past.