Understatement of the year: It started a while ago.
I wanted to make a record that would be a bit of a retrospective, of songs of mine that I’ve always wanted to record, and some covers that defined a few moments of my music life.
My normal recording progression is: click track, rhythm guitar or guitars, lead vocal, backup vocals, instrumental overdubs, and drums, in that order. Seems simple enough. But you never know which part is going to hang you up. On the medley, I couldn’t even record rhythm guitars until I relearned to fingerpick without using metal fingerpicks. (They’re louder for live performance but too noisy for recording.) That took months. Everything took months, or more.
Sometimes lead vocals hung me up. Like in “Driving from Calgary” the unresolved lead part needs to seat with the prospective harmonies in the verse b part, “…what a strange, strange boy to see so clearly…” With a line like that I practically have to do a whole workshop on the 10 notes it employs.
Some artists these days will put together one strong performance of a chorus and just cut and paste it into every chorus. I sing each chorus as an actual event, as do Lenne and Eliza on backing vocals. I think you can always tell when the song has the added texture that comes from through-performing it as opposed to flying things in.
I wrote the arrangements for the backup vocals next and that took forever. My harmony and arranging boot camp happened from 1973-78, as a member of the band Harlequin in Montreal. Joel Zifkin, Ellen Shizgal, Howard Engel, and Linda Morrison were my partners and mentors. Vocally, nearly everything we did involved three-part harmony. And Joel’s violin and my guitar were always harmonically calibrated. To hear and deliver 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, 7ths, major 7ths, and 9ths were part of the deal. It was that palette that I returned to for Roots and Branches—and for that I needed two women who could sing dead-on. I knew Lenne was one, but she was on the West Coast, so we would have precious few days to record her parts.
It took me forever to find Eliza, which I did when she was sitting in with Roma di Luna. Fact is, all that took nearly two years.
I had hoped to get additional singers for other parts, and some didn’t materialize until years later, as when in the final stage of the project I found Mark Christine to sing on the two vocal songs in the medley, parts that had originally been sung in the mid-1970’s by my bandmate and dear friend Howard Engel, who had passed away in 2009.
While I knew how to compose vocal harmonies, I had never arranged strings or brass and woodwinds before. Horns are more technical given the necessary transpositions, but strings are more elusive. First there’s pitch and intonation, the inherent sound of a particular instrument, harmonic separation, vibrato, mic techniques, the sound of the room, blending strings with voices and acoustic and electric guitars. It’s complicated, but fun complicated.
And it all takes time. Time enough for things to drift. Time enough for nagging doubts.
Nagging Doubts Galore!
Doubts enough that you’ll shelve the project over just about anything. Family, summer, work, life…and then the nagging doubt about whether there will be boxes of CDs languishing under your bed. Never underestimate doubt!
In 2013, Mark and Lenne convinced me to upgrade to Pro Tools, which meant re-outfitting the studio, getting rid of all the metal black-box sound processors and actually learning the program…a program that is not intuitive to the self-taught newbie. That took months.
Once up and running on Pro Tools, I set my project aside in early 2014 and began work in earnest on writing, production, and initial tracking for Lenne’s debut album The Heart Is the Hunter. I had wanted to make a record with her for years and had written a good number of draft songs and fragments (none of which were used on the record). It was much easier to get enthusiastic about her project than to slog ahead on mine.
And so, with Mark Christine, we made that record. Deadlines juiced the writing. I came up with “Ain’t Nothing Sissy About Love,” “The Heart Is the Hunter,” (both with help from with Lenne), and “Low Lying.” Then there were instrumental arrangements to complete for that project.
Running a micro-label like Humuncules Music, there is limited bandwidth; definitely not enough to even consider the crosstalk from two family-driven projects at once. So Roots and Brancheswould just have to wait. Not all of that was music driven. There was the little project of buying and retrofitting a lake home—camp—in the mix—and I was prone to being distracted and preoccupied by anything and everything. I was relieved to learn that Jeff Beck used cars the same way I used repairing dry rot and refurbishing canoes!
One payoff from waiting is that I found John O’Reilly, Jr., the drummer on The Heart Is the Hunter, and after John supercharged that project, he became my main drummer on Roots. (Mark found the very talented Henry Fagenson in Santa Monica, and he played exquisitely on two tracks.)
After the burn of Lenne’s project wound down I picked up where I had left off—drum tracks and lead guitar.
Then, in July 2018, while I was out of town for several days, the water hose to the washing machine broke in the laundry room adjacent to my studio and flooded it, precipitating a complete teardown of the room and, once again, months of repair. (Many pieces of gear were toast. My Fender Deluxe was toast. My 1974 Gibson 335 was damaged.)
I played around extensively with “Famous Blue Raincoat, “ “Lucky’s,” “Anybody’s Girl,” and so on before stumbling onto my ultimate parts. To me it’s like Zen, you find a vibe that just takes you over. Most of the best parts, I have no idea how I arrived there.
That experience led me to the ultimate challenge of the medley, which had all originally been written or arranged for most of the lead parts to come from violin, originally played by Joel Zifkin in Harlequin. So the bar was high. It paralyzed me for a while, until I just went for it, beginning with using my new nylon string guitar on “Travelin’ Man…” and like the medley itself, it was a journey. While I had written most of the arrangements to the other songs for my guest players, I had nothing for guitar overdubs on the medley. That was sheer improv.
I finished it in January 2019, around the same time I enlisted Mark to finish the vocal triad on the medley. He knocked it out of the park.
He added some piano to “Lucky’s…” and tracking was done! Finally.
Three months later I slipped on some leaves at the lake, shattered my finger and it was off to surgery-land, rehab therapy, and the Great Unknown.
It took a pandemic and another year for me to save the cash, clear the decks, and call the amazing Neilson Hubbard, who agreed to mix Roots and Branches, just as he had The Heart Is the Hunter.
And I will guarantee you that I either didn’t know or didn’t truly believe in what I with my team had created, until Neilson’s first mix came back from Nashville and Barri and I listened, and we just said, “Wow…” Neilson is an amazing talent.
Even so, I was so superstitious that I did not disclose the impending release of the album to anybody for fear of jinxing the deal. And yes, a few more wrinkles did arise…maybe some other time!
