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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

125. "The Night Is Very Soft" by The Church


A rare instance of the tribute album cover image dictating the specifics of the cover recording, and I am glad of it.

Quite a few of the recordings I've done for 39-40 sound rather a lot like songs by The Church despite the fact that none of them have been Church covers. My methods and playing and instruments and the way I use my lower vocal range just kind of tilt that way. But I really didn't want to just do a slavish cover for the first song by the band selected for me by The Machine. It was very tempting nonetheless, not least because the original recording starts with solo drums, making it very easy to create a perfect drum loop and build from there.

But before I started I gave some thought to recreating the iconic cover image of the Hindsight compilation. Well, I don't know, it's iconic enough in the real world that there's a t-shirt of it, and it's iconic to me because I used to stare longingly at the cover of the double-cassette edition of it that I couldn't afford as a young Church-head. Doesn't matter, the point is that my electric 12-string, which is ironically more or less the same one Marty Willson-Piper normally uses, just doesn't have a headstock that looks anything like that thanks to Rickenbacker's distinctive perpendicular-to-itself way of installing tuners on their twelves. But my Epiphone acoustic does. So that's the guitar I ended up using on both the cover image and the recording. Except for the raging feedback bit; that involves an electric and moreover two Fender amplifiers facing each other and mic'ed in stereo. It made my stepdaughter's brain explode even though she was a flight of stairs and a closed door away... she told me so.

Personnel: Rex

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