Phenobarbital

Over the course of my recording career, I have worked on at least ten records with my friend Scott Loewen, but it wasn't until we worked together The Blistering Speeds' first album "Casablanca is a State of Mind" that we really hit our stride. The album was recorded in an historic mid-century modern house in Dallas (a now defunct studio called The Busy Box) and one of the last things we recorded was the acoustic song "Phenobarbital." We did a half dozen takes of Scott playing the guitar and singing live, and as soon as we hit record, it started pouring rain. With each take, the intensity of the rain shifted, which created a subtle spliced together background ambience that really fit the unsettling atmosphere of the song and the record (though the effect was mostly buried by other sounds and, I believe, by some well intentioned noise reduction by the mastering engineer - I was still early in my career and not assertive enough to send it back because it didn't have ENOUGH noise). Several years later, we recorded a loud, full band, electric version of the song at Sonic Ranch outside El Paso, TX, which showed up on their EP, "Teen Grease." The main vocal melody is a simple but infectious earworm.

Last spring, while traveling with my family in Berlin, I kept hearing the vocal melody from "Phenobarbital" every time a door opened or closed on the SBahn. With the song echoing all around me, I started grabbing sounds on my phone. Back in El Paso, I took all those samples, mostly SBahn chimes and motor sounds, and put together a cover of the song in Ableton Live. All of the sounds in the song are rooted in SBahn field recordings, except the "hi-hat" which is a crosswalk chirp (also from Berlin) and, of course, the vocals.

The single will come out via Bandcamp and Subvert on June 10 (my birthday!) and on streaming about a month after that. I think I'm going to do some breakdowns on how I processed all the sound in a future newsletter, maybe when the song is out, so sometime in June.

(I'll add the link right here when the song is officially out)

Cover art: I've been going out to Tulsa for the past year to work with Emily Davis on their new record (I'll write something on this, I'm sure), and on one of the drives back I took some pictures of a huge brushfire just after passing from the Texas panhandle into northern New Mexico. Shot on my Fujifilm X-H1 with Fujifilm XF18-55mmF2.8-4 kit lens and processed in Darktable and Affinity Photo.