356. "Remote Luxury" by The Church

Part two of the continuous finale of the Remote Luxury project. Again, meant to be listened to along with and immediately after "Shadow Cabinet" with no between-tracks break.

I had the greatest plan for this track: I was going to craft the backing track and then have Derek and Cliff do all the lead guitar harmony stuff. They're the bassist and drummer in Skates & Rays, but they're both great guitar players and I thought this would be a good showcase for them. However, as I've mentioned, the rehearsals for the past two weeks have been scrapped, so I had to come up with an alternate plan. A few days ago I feared my voice was going to completely give out on me, so I thought I'd make the track mostly out of sequenced elements, the kind of thing I could do while languishing in bed. My voice survived, at least well enough to do the Saint Etienne covers, so I put this on the back burner, but I still held onto the synth track idea and made good on it today. To move even further from the mega-guitarry Church ethic, I replaced to dual guitar harmony leads with mandolin and ukulele (as tasteful as Willson-Piper and Koppes almost always are on guitar, I have a bit of an allergy to straight harmony lead guitar... it tends to sound a bit "arena rock" for my tastes, so no, the Hunter-Wagner era is not my favorite Lou Reed period).

In the end I did add a bit of guitar on the very last section, but that was there to accompany the lyrics I transplanted into the coda of what's supposed to be an instrumental track. I've been really quite obsessed with the song "Savage Night at the Opera" from the new Destroyer album, and I was working on the backing track for this tune I kept finding that I was flashing on the words and melody from that one. Turns out they revolve around very similar chord sequences. So I adapted Dan Bejar's opening lyrics with a few alterations to make them Church-specific. In fact, they're somewhat sentimental and schmaltzy in a way of which I doubt Bejar would approve, but as the other fellow said, a song is anything that can walk by itself, so if you're going to set one down on the ground, you can't be too surprised at where it ends up after it's been there for a while.

Personnel:

SKATES & RAYS

(just Rex this time)

"Remote Luxury" performed by The Church

"Remote Luxury" performed by Skates & Rays