Lately I’ve been working on a different – but no less creatively rewarding – project. Instead of music, writing or film, I’ve been dabbling in interior design!
Lou and I always wanted to re-paint the walls of the house – the all beige colour scheme was… fine, but we wanted something that spoke to our vibrant and camp tastes. The crown jewel is the amazing peacock mural we commissioned from Houl, but once we’d painted parts of the rest of the house, I started to resent the still-brown walls of the music room. I play drums every day and while I hadn’t considered them much before, now staring at those walls began to actively tick me off.
While sitting and playing the drums, I began to daydream about what the space could become. First step was excising that drab brown. The colours are inspired by the many bold palettes we encountered during our travels this year through New Orleans and Miami. Specifically, I loved the inside of Sweat Records, and sought to match their combination of minty walls with purple accents.
Painting took longer than expected for this first timer. Every surface needed three coats – a primer layer and two coats of colour. Wanting the doors and trim a different colour to the walls took extra time, but I am ecstatic with the results. There was a third colour I had considered including – a deep orange – but after painting the inside of the window frame this colour, I realised that much orange was a step too far. Instead, I let it come out in pops of colour across the room – the bamboo curtain, the ukulele, the masks, the Mothersbaugh figurine, even the centre column of buttons on my Moog. Combined with the green and purple, I had intuitively stumbled into using the 60 30 10 rule!
I had an old kitchen table as a desk, but it took up too much space. All I require is enough room for my laptop and monitor speakers. Enamoured by how interior designers on Instagram were transforming mundane items simply by painting them, I thought I could do an upcycled version of a milk crate desk. I painted four milk crates gold, cut a piece of laminated board to size, and voila! Bespoke desk!
The gold palm tree hooks were kismet – when I came across them at K-Mart, I knew I wanted to make a feature of them. They serve as another tropical motif, and double down on both the opulence and playfulness of the room.
The ‘Wall of Idolatry’ remains – Earl Palmer, Al Jackson Jr., Tony Allen, Bernard Purdie and Johnny Vidacovich (I got to meet Johnny in New Orleans and he signed a drumstick for me!) – and will soon be augmented with portraits of Clyde Stubblefield, Jabo Starks, Zigaboo Modeliste and James Gadson. I adore looking over at these titans while I play, it’s inspiring and humbling at the same time.
The room used to be the old master bedroom of the house, replete with an ensuite. I thought there might be something fun I could do with the frosted glass sliding door. The glass door made me think of private eyes’ offices’ from old noir films, the kind that have their name and title imprinted on them. I thought maybe I could put the name of the room on the sliding door in a similar style. An earlier music room in our old house had been called ‘The Baby Room’, a jokey reference to what the spare bedroom might eventually become. For this revitalised space, I wanted something that spoke to my drumming obsession. I went with ‘The 3 Side’. The 3 side of the clave is my favourite rhythm – well not just mine, it pops up everywhere and underpins some of the most popular styles of music across the world – and seemed like a name suitable for both a studio or a smokey speakeasy. Now it looks like the entry way to a jazz club, or another dimension!
Capped with a fern, the room has transformed into a welcoming and calming space. I love sitting in there, a Miami hideaway tucked away at the back of the house! There’s still a couple of touches I will eventually add – some more pictures, a rug – but I have found it extremely satisfying having a clear vision for what the space could become… and then just executing it! Doing makes you right.
I wanted to enter last year’s Department of Rock, so I asked three friends in my branch to start a band and compete in the competition. They separately declined for various reasons, but perhaps I had planted a seed, as I asked them again this year and they all said yes!
I met Sam when he replaced me in a work team many moons ago, and we later discovered I knew his wife from the old Phoenix Bootlegs days (how Canberra!). He’s currently the bass player for The Rain Gauge, with my old Faux Faux Amis bandmate Darren Atkinson (even more like Canberra!). We’ve been talking about working on something together for a couple of years now, and this competition proved the nudge we needed.
Emma, Marivi and I were all working in the same team last year. Emma picked up the guitar nine months ago – one of the first times we talked we realised we were both at the same Badly Drawn Boy concert in 2003 so I knew she had good taste. And Marivi used to sing along sweetly to Ariana Grande at her desk. I collected and filed that away for later use!
So Sam and I were somewhat old hands, but neither Emma or Marivi had played in a band before. My feeling was the easiest and fun-est music to play would likely be that sweet spot between garage rock and soul – which purely coincidentally happens to be some of my most favourite music in the world! Our set soon coalesced, comprising renditions of Dusty Springfield’s Spooky, The Gories’ Sister Anne, The Detroit Cobras’ Cha Cha Twist, and The Jesus & Mary Chains’s Sometimes Always. The latter, a duet, marks my first time singing and playing drums at the same time – something I wasn’t even aware I could do prior to this band!
We rehearsed weekly for a couple of months, splitting our time between my place and Redsun Studios. Emma and I also went on a reconnaissance mission to the Department of Rock heat the week before our own – the mixture of polished and not-so-polished performers was reassuring.
Our heat was a blast, with a stacked crowd from work who had come to cheer us along. They laughed at all my banter, and immediately clapped along or sang when implored – it was a tremendous boost to our confidence. We held our own against some other great bands, and miraculously the judges deigned to send us through to the semi-finals! It’ll be interesting to see how we fare at the semis, but just performing this gig was my goal – everything else has been icing on the cake.
TL;DR: Simon asked me to helm this for him – the concept is all his. He is a perfect producer – I asked for a generator and a smoke machine, and he delivered! Rafe and I both filmed, and then I had fun in the edit. I love shooting in forests. This one turned out beautifully. Pagan/Blair Witch/black metal vibes FTW.
The Lost Album was recorded live at Smiths in 2019. We didn’t release it on Bandcamp until October last year, and now it – along with the rest of our discography – is up on streaming services. Yay!
A few months ago, I wrote an ambitious list of things I wanted to get done this year, including a lot more cinematography. To ease back into shooting and editing, I thought a no-stress video for one of The Lost Album songs could be a good opening volley. The note I wrote to myself was ‘formal but busy – 20 set-ups of band playing (same framing) in different locations’. Plus there’s something appealingly perverse about doing a full music video treatment for a live recording… that contains no footage of said live recording.
We shot the video over a weekend – five locations in Braddon and ten in Queanbeyan. I didn’t have to think hard to come up with any of these spots – the only hurdle we encountered was I wanted to shoot at the Guns ‘N’ Hoses carwash in Queanbeyan but it was too busy on a Sunday morning. Instead, we moved two doors down and shot out the back of a tyre shop, which probably worked out even better. The shoot was breezy – we had Lou and Violet filming for us! – and it was fun just to hang out with everybody. We got a few bemused looks and some friendly enquiries at some spots, but mostly people paid us no mind.
Along with shooting a bunch of b-roll, Violet also manned the drone for the final shot – what a kid!
It’s nearly two years since I answered James Montgomery-Wilcox’s request for a drummer for a ‘glam rock’ band. Initially nameless, we quickly morphed into the Transit Dolls.
We’ve now done over a dozen gigs, spread across the Pot Belly, the Irish Club, and Smiths Alternative. That number would be higher, but we had some trouble keeping a bass player. We are now on our fourth bassist(!) – and best – Stuart Mitchell.
James’ songs for this project are short blasts of pub and punk rock – there’s some Sweet and David Bowie influence in there, but also the New York Dolls and maybe even a little Angels. James spent years as a bassist so writes with groove and rhythm in mind, making all the songs super-fun to play! My partiality for ‘pocket’ drummers – like Al Jackson Jnr, Nick Knox, or Phil Rudd – fits well. I try and keep the songs flowing as much as possible, only adding fills as another hook.
It’s the first time I have been a sideman and not the band leader – or at least co-songwriter – in a band. I’ve been determined to be a good ‘hang’ more than anything – to show up on time, prepared to play and up for anything. And as I suspected from the off, it has levelled up my drumming – my speed, my fills and vocab, my confidence – in ways just practicing at home never could. Plus I love playing with James and Stu – we’re having a blast!
The above video for You’re Mine is maybe the quickest I have ever filmed and edited – shot after practice on Wednesday, edited on Thursday, and up on Friday!
LUKE: Nick and I have been involved in several long-form (think multi-year) art projects of late, with a bevy of collaborators, including a full-length Babyfreeze album. This has been fun and rewarding stuff, but I grew to miss the immediacy of our earlier projects. Working quick and dirty is our preferred mode, and one that we both excel at. With that in mind, I suggested to Nick we do a short and sharp challenge – write and record an EP and shoot videos* for it over the course of a single weekend. Of course, this isn’t exactly what transpired, but it gave us the framework and impetus to create Life’s The Best.
For my part, I envisioned something guitar-heavy – the instrument we both have the most experience playing – and for it to be an opportunity to finally record my drum kit. Again, it didn’t go down exactly as planned! SONGWRITING TIP #1: follow the muse and do what you have to in service of the song.
We set aside the first weekend and then both struggled not to write anything ahead of time. The plan was simple – we would set the timer for 45 minutes, go to opposite ends of the house, and write. After the timer went off, we’d then play for each other what we had written. Rinse and repeat.
The first couple of times went almost identically for me: 10-20 minutes of utter panic, followed by landing on an idea and then chasing it down for the remaining time. 45 minutes is a koan – both a lot of time and not a lot of time!
The first song I wrote became Learn To Love You. By our self-imposed rules, I failed on this first attempt – I only came up with the bassline, drums, and vocal melody, running out of time to bed down any lyrics (apart from the opening line, ‘gotta sweat it all out’, and the ‘I could learn to love you’ refrain). Nick offered to take a crack at the remaining lyrics overnight and show me when he returned the next day. I gratefully accepted! SONGWRITING TIP #2: Always break the rules before ruining a song.
The second song I wrote became Night Off From Love. After writing a fast-paced up-tempo number, I decided to go in the opposite direction and craft a ballad. I started with the chords and what I thought was a 5/4 rhythm – turns out I was just playing a janky 6/8. My time management fared better but was still a little off – I managed to wrote the chords and a vocal melody for both sections… but only the lyrics to the first verse. Again, I handed it over to Nick to finalise overnight – what a good system for me!
We had so much fun on these first two sessions, we decided to throw caution to the wind and round out the day with a third. I finally cracked the code on finishing a song in the time limit – Blubbering Mess was the result, a no-nonsense garage rock belter. SONGWRITING TIP #3: Sometimes (most times?) simplest is best.
One of the other album cover mock-ups
The remainder of this weekend was spent testing and tweaking arrangements. It became apparent quickly that if we were going to record live drums especially we were going to need longer than one weekend to get everything done. We booked in a second weekend to record as much as we could.O
At the start of the second weekend, with six songs in hand, Nick suggested we do one more 45 minute session, to give us eight songs – closer to an album than an EP. For this final session, I started with the lyrics first – which is typically how I write, at least starting with a title or hook – and smashed out the entirety of It Don’t Work Like That No More, even including a bridge! We then got down Nick’s vocals and some other bits and pieces – basically enough for me to continue on my own to add instruments and build out the arrangements.
It took a few weeks to finalise the songs – some of this was spent writing drum parts and then recording my drums for the first time. The drum sound is pretty muddy but I learnt a lot and have already developed methods for a cleaner sound next time. SONGWRITING TIP #4: Treat everything as a draft.
The ‘live instrument’ aesthetic I’d envisioned remained for some songs, but we mostly ditched guitars for synth, and by the end, I was back programming midi and drums – full circle back to Babyfreeze J
This is the first time I’ve sung lead since Faux Faux Amis broke up in late 2018 – in that band, I’d leant on a very gruff ‘rock’n’roll’ bark when singing, almost like adding a distortion pedal to my voice. Part of that approach was to mask some of my vocal insecurities (I actually love the sound of my voice but struggle with pitch). For this project, and others going forward, I consciously decided to ditch that and sing in more of my natural register. Frightening – but fun – stuff!
So, what are my highlights?
1. Nick’s fantastic chorus for Night Off From Love, which tied the rest of the song together and elevated it to Classic Songbook status.
2. The solo on Teenage Atlantis – I wrote it on guitar and then played it using Massive’s default sound (I agree with Louis Cole, it sounds great).
3. My drumming on I Am Your Child – we digitally sped this up drastically to see how it might sound. When we liked it, I then had to learn to drum it at that speed! Very proud of this single take.
4. Rifle Through My Clothes – perfect song meets the most effortless arrangement of the album.
*Making videos quickly fell off the list of things to do, but I reckon we will do at least one before putting the album to bed!
More mock-ups!
NICK: It’s funny seeing Luke write that I made his life easier, writing chunks of lyrics to songs that he started. This is yet another project where I mostly just write a vocal and chords and then Luke has to do almost all the hands-on producing and arranging. Don’t get me wrong, I provide strong briefs and takes such as ‘the drums should sound too fast for the rest of the track’ or ‘this is feeling like those backing tracks that guitar students use to solo over and I like that and we should make it even more that’.
I was more than happy for the production and arrangements to end in a mid-fi kitchen sink space, and particularly glad we got to have some nicely scuzzy drums before Luke works out how to record them cleaner. We blew out the single-weekend idea to the equivalent I guess three weekend’s work, knowing that that’s all it takes for Luke and I to make a record that we like is almost scary.
The first thing I came up with in the first 45 was the main hook for Teenage Atlantis. ‘Love and death destruction on the sea floor’ with a melody and chords. If I had longer to work I would probably change those words to something less restrictively specific, so it’s good that I didn’t have time. The melody had 50s rock vibes so I built out a lyric about being an Atlantean prince who is fated to prevent an apocalypse, but blows that off to take his girlfriend on a date.
I Am Your Child is me trying to emulate my favourites songwriter Johnathan Richman, his lyrics have a warmth and openess but also an off-ness, the sense of a brain that is tacking in a slightly dangerous direction. The line ‘I Am Your Child’ felt very in that pocket and then I just leaned into hectoring second person, which I just love as a way to do pop lyrics. Cracking how to make this one work (the guitar chords were pretty bland on their own) was probably what showed us that the record was gonna have plenty of synths.
Mock-up #3
The Slow Collapse is a repetitive shanty which Luke brought necessary wonkiness to, it’s basically a Magnetic Fields song now and look that’s a favourite band of mine. My friend Max describes it as ‘quasi-futuristic military love cult guru’ which makes me feel pretty seen. Writing these up I realise I’ve gone HARD on the second person actually, I clearly love an Instructional voice.
Rifle Through My Clothes is the one I wrote on the second weekend after suggesting we do one more each. It tumbled out really quickly and it’s the best one I wrote for the record, one of my favourite songs I’ve ever done actually. A lot of that is Luke taking it from the jaunty country swing that I wrote it to a synth lighter-swayer, I never would have imagined it like this and it’s perfect. Lyrically it’s the latest in my endless procession of Mortal Dread songs, that will keep coming until one of you sorts out immortality once and for all.
For years I’ve wanted to call a band Life’s The Best, I was always imagining a sort of Australiana post-hardcore thing with that name but it actually works better as a name that celebrates Luke and I and our 20-plus years of making songs together. Because irony’s for cowards and Life actually is The Best (that’s why I don’t want to die ever).
I think the idea for the cover shoot (Luke and I standing soaking wet) was mine, but it was Lou and Violet McGrath aka Luke’s family who got to enjoy throwing the water on us. Like the cover shot this record is us making something Good with our most available resources, it feels like a consolidation to then work out how next to stretch ourselves. Maybe we will consciously overstretch ourselves with an unhinged music video idea.
Nick here. Been working on a couple of long-form projects (a film script and a micro-budget feature with Luke) each of which will have taken at least a couple of years to complete once they’re done. Just staying in the oven with those (and otherwise doing the odd band gig and recording for Rank Ideas) has been a new flavour of life, kind of fun and kind of hard. I should blog about it sometime, but instead I’m gonna blog about this little bit of acting out I did last week.
It’ll be a while until I get to do any new band recordings, and meanwhile some friends were bugging me to put my music on spotify. Just porting my band camp over seemed boring, so I had the idea to rearrange some of my existing recorded songs into some kind of new configuration. First thought was to canvas friends for their opinion on my ‘best’ songs, but that seemed like a recipe for stress (as much as I love the Greatest Hits format).
So then I started to pick the songs that I thought of as the most ‘me’- that is, that felt like the most distilled version of what I’m even trying to do as songwriter. Once I picked the first few songs a dominant vibe of un-chill indie-pop was prevailing, so I leaned into that for the rest of the selections. My friend Fi (who was the chief person bugging me to do this) made the cover art to my dorky specs, I had a deliberate rationale for sequencing the tracks but fuck if I can articulate it. Then I started DMing it to people, ’cause I don’t know how to actually promote things.
Presenting it as a ‘Singles Collection’ is mostly a cheeky exercise in alternative history- a history in which I released ‘singles’ over a consistent period as a pure Recording Artist, rather than embedded in chunks of multiformat performance art that have made it almost impossible for the audience to assess the songs on their own terms.
So this time people have been assessing the songs on their own. It’s been nice and funny for people who have been watching my gigs and videos for years to suddenly go ‘oh there’s some real consistent themes and ethos across years of your songs’ and ‘wow Nick you are very sentimental and earnest aren’t you?’ and ‘Nick is this death fixation real or a bit?’ Which confirms that some of the Persona and Story World stuff I do and will always love doing has made it hard for some people to clock that stuff before.
Part of this is me wanting to draw a line under my music output to date to set the stage for some new recording and album plans I have for the next ten years. But of course doing this means that these songs are suddenly new to a bunch of people, and I wasn’t expecting to have such a lovely experience of that. Looking forward to thinking about how I can keep misrepresenting my body of work to nice trusting people for my own enjoyment.
But here it is – four emcees, two producers, six tracks and two interludes! It sounds amazing to me. Each track has a theme (the Heist one, the Revenge one, the Diss track, etc.) and hearing each of the other guys take the concept and go off is a pleasure. Coolio Desgracias and Housemouse have long been one of my favourite groups so to share an EP with them is pure butter.
Production wise, the beats I contributed come from my earliest attempts at sampling, before I knew all the do’s and don’ts. I love that phase of learning an instrument – you come up with stuff you will never do once you are more polished! The samples I used are from all over the shop – a scratched up Toots record I’ve had for years, an early 70s soul song I jacked from Youtube, and a snatch off Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion that caught my ear while watching the movie (I grabbed it, with foley sound still intact, straight from the blu-ray). The Female Prisoner 701 series also formed the lyrical basis for that particular track – Grudge Match – hence my shout-out to screen goddess Meiko Kaji!
And like all songwriting, but especially sampling, I was helped by a good splash of serendipity. I had just watched a video of Marley Marl explaining how he layered two breakbeats on top of each other for LL Cool J’s Mama Said Knock You Out and tried it for the song that became Goin’ Through My Mind. It worked perfectly – so good in fact, I’ve never been able to replicate it for any other song!
Lyrically it ended up being a combination of writing in the room and woodshedding at home – I’m pretty happy with just about holding my own among such esteemed company. When it came to Zonin‘, I had already written a couple of verses on the topic for an impulsive early remix – so what to do for the real thing? I ended up using the second verse of my original track but in trying to fit it in, I rapped most of it in double-time.
Coolio and I mixed and mastered the tracks, adding a few flourishes as we went along. He had the brilliant idea to add some audio of our favourite Youtube drum sensei Stephen Taylor talking about zoning to Zonin‘, and I went widescreen with sound effects on Crackerjack.
I asked Gustavo to do the cover again – it was Coolio’s idea to model it on The Doors’ Strange Days, but with the Mandalay Van in the background.
I wasn’t sure what the Brazil-based Gustavo might make of the iconic Canberra eating spot, but he said he was excited to draw a dope-ass bus after getting requests for the same sports cars over and over for other rappers’ album covers!
NICK: This one didn’t seem to take quite so long to me, cause I was just coming in as a rapper as and when we were all free. I wrote most of my stuff in the room with the other guys which was handy for maintaining a sense of healthy competition. Which probably isn’t apparent from the mid-paced slackness of my rhymes, but look the others are all so hard on their fast-and-nimble tip that it’s kind of the obvious hole to fill! I appreciated having a brief to work to for each song, and then I just did my usual Babyfreeze shit of making raw personal disclosures in a context where they will never be read as such.
I was a deliberately terrible team player on this one, scrolling my phone for any part of the sessions that didn’t require me to write or record, but I like to think I made a pretty good contribution with the chorus to Zonin’ which is easily one of my favourite things I’ve ever written for anything. That was a case of just vibing on a loop that Simon had on one of his many mixtapes, and yeah now that I think of it Luke is right I wrote that literally years ago. Anyway, the others all did a great job of writing to the theme of Travel Braggadocio, and of general world-building across the record. In fact I would love anyone who listens to the record to send me their best wikipedia summary of the NSU biopic that is suggested by the and includes the plots of all these songs.
I approached Coolio Desgracias about doing a quick EP to keep busy in the first few weeks of lockdown. He jumped on the idea, suggesting we model it after Champion Sound – both of us working separately, spitting over each other’s beats. We immediately hooked in, a fun no-stress exercise smashing something out ahead of the long-gestating Northside Swag Unit EP (more on that next time!).
Needless to say, Coolio’s beats were awesome. For my production, I sent him a handful of beats with samples chopped from records from my last trip to Japan – consider it the latest Lion’s Mansion instalment – and some of my recent raids on new mecca Championship Vinyl. Coolio has an inherent distaste for ‘keyboard beats’ so I sent him my most Madlib-esque flips. Though my favourite track ended up being Nonsense Rhyme where I mixed 60s psychedelic rock with my own trap production, an arrangement idea I took from Pusha T’s Come Back Baby.
As a rapper, I knew I needed to put myself into a box. My rules for this project were 1. No standard hip-hop flexing, slang or ebonics, and 2. No stream of consciousness – every song had to have a story.
Firegolds, Part One is a 1920s mob vignette, about a young buck’s first day bootlegging and the bloody outcome – crime doesn’t pay, kids! The ‘part one’ is a nod to the fact the song abruptly ends at its most climatic moment. There’s definite flavours of A Prince Among Thieves, especially my roping in of Nick to play a between-verse radio announcer and Coolio to play a heavy!
Tierwater Blues saw me riffing on the first chapter of T.C. Boyle’s A Friend Of The Earth. I was so taken with the imagery and premise I started trying to turn it into a song before I finished the chapter. Consequently, both stories start in the same place and slowly deviate. The wizened voice I adopted was character-acting, reflective of Boyle’s aged, ornery protagonist. And yes trainspotters, that is an interpolation of Prince Far I’s classic UnderHeavy Manners in the chorus!
Lone Wolf & Chillcame about differently – I heard a flow before I had a concept. I quickly got it down on my phone, vocalising a mixture of nonsense words and broken Spanish. The Spanish felt natural as I was hearing an open vowel sound on the end of most of the lines. At first I thought I might even try writing the rhymes in Spanish, but when my thoughts turned to what other languages have similar phonotactics, Japanese came to mind. Pretty soon the couplet ‘Back in Edo / Ogami Itto’ came to me and the rest fell into place. I definitely would like to write more like this in future.
We both finished the tracks quite quickly – Coolio crushed it, listen to him go full Chali 2na on Get Your Boat On! – but getting the cover artwork delayed it somewhat. The first artist fell through and while I was organising a second one, I suggested we do one more track with both of us rapping on it to tie the project together. Day In, Day Out was the result – I provided the chop and Coolio provided that killer hook, which still gets routinely stuck in my head.
Day In Day Out was the only song to make reference to the lockdown – we saved the rest for the cover. I asked Gustavo to draw us as The Big Lebowski and Mad Max, a la:
I also suggested he draw us in the Fortress of Solitude, another reference to lockdown. And lastly, we called the EP ‘For The Good Of The Realm’:
Nick and Chris Endrey are producing a podcast – 32 episodes and counting! – where they rank all ideas in human history. It’s ambitious and silly, a niche both have experience within. They composed the Rank Ideas theme in real time during an episode, immediately performing it acapella. Nick asked if I would like to take a stab at a fully realised version, their intention to eventually get multiple interpretations by some of their fave artists. Of course, I said yes.
The first challenge was figuring out what chords to lay underneath. I toyed with putting it to a minor key or doing a jazz take, with lots of ninths and suspended chords (I love Adam Neeley’s versions). But I realised I was getting ahead of myself. Any subversion first needs something to work against – you need the puntal before the contrapuntal. As the first ‘proper’ version, this had to provide that baseline. Thus I went with some traditional pop, though I was pleased with throwing in that F#m7 on ‘sometimes commotion’.
After the chord progression, I needed to choose a genre or instrumentation. I had been wanting to experiment with a vocoder again and thought I would try it here. But again, I noticed I was taking a contrarian position, opting for something intentionally novel or strange, which – importantly – may not have been in service of the song. From that revelation, it was easy to work backwards to identify what I was opposing. In an effort perhaps to challenge myself, I was dismissing – before I think I had even consciously considered it – doing the most logical version, a take in the style I have played most in the last 20 years.
So I made a lo-fi, crunchy guitar, full-throated vocal take. It was fun – I don’t sing enough like that since Faux Faux Amis! The drums are based on what I would have done if I could record my kit – need to figure that out this year! – and there’s consequently more subtlety and variation in the patterns than I would have programmed pre-drum tutelage.
Nick and Chris begun including it from episode 25 – listen to the show here!
Lick Nuke 