Well, We Did It
TBT has a new record in the can
A few years ago, I wrote a poem entitled Good Dogs. I am not a very adept poet, but I do enjoy messing around with it once in a while when there are no songs to be found.
Good Dogs To all the dogs we’ve lost you were good dogs I imagine you woke on a leafy hillside staring across a summer-green meadow grass about tooth high (Your tooth not mine) on the other side of the valley lies a high canopied forest ancient oaks and what’s that? is the ground moving? no, my friend, that is ten thousand squirrels oblivious to your arrival a rowdy grouse behind each tree when you tire of them, there is a pile of steak, rare off to the west a bit and a rug that smells like home and a giant lake enjoy, for there is a hole back here that will not fill and you were worth it very much
The theme has been on my mind for the last year or so: Good Dogs. When I walk into my house I am greeted by two of the best of them. When I walk the fields or forests with friends the dogs make a small pack, quickly finding their place without doubt or guilt. They work happily and love with abandon. We don’t nearly deserve them.
This eventually became part of a song I was writing late last year. The song isn’t about dogs, but they make an appearance as an integral part of my view. I started noticing them in a few of the other songs I was working on as well. Often not literally, but they were present in my mind as I read through the lyrics. The spirit of them. Essence of dog?
All this being so, when my brothers in TBT and I set to mixing our new album, I couldn’t shake the simple title, Good Dogs. I don’t know if the other guys thought it was a good title or not, but the passion with which I made my appeal was apparently enough to get it past the editorial board. My son Jack was fully against it, even though he loves dogs. He’s come around, though.
We made a new record and it’s called Good Dogs. The cover is photos of our dogs and the dogs of friends. The songs came from all over, as songs do, but they are similar in personal ways. As I wrote before, we wanted to make this record sound and feel as human as possible. Imperfect, live, like this particular group of people was playing songs next to each other in a particular space on a particular day. Not eternally level, not seamlessly repaired. The idea seemed simple, and as it turned out, it was.
We recorded the songs in an old way, direct to a 24 track tape machine. We mixed them from the 24 track machine, through a beautiful old API console, to a 2 track tape machine. We pushed the computer up against the wall and left it unplugged. Nick, the amazing engineer at Pachyderm and our dear friend, put the 2 track machine in his car and drove it to our mastering guy, Huntley Miller. What you’ll eventually hear, if you are willing, will come from those reels of tape.
This is not a revolutionary method, most of the records made until about 30 years ago were done this way, but these days it feels almost risky. We, in the music business, have been deeply conditioned to the endless capabilities of digital recording. The quick note fixes, the ability to take one syllable from a different take, from a different day even, to make that word in the chorus just perfect. Maybe you just sing the chorus once and the rest is copy paste. Maybe AI sings the harmonies for you. This is just scratching the surface. Of course you need an engineer with the proper training, but there are plenty of those.
I am not claiming to be better than artists that lean heavily on this technology nor am I above repairing mistakes in recording. I’ve fixed plenty. For this project though, the idea was to avoid all that. The guys and I have played a helluva lot of music together. That relationship is unique and unlikely and probably our greatest asset. I think we sound our best when left alone, mic’d simply, when everyone is playing at the same time, and when we can see each other. Most modern songs are recorded very separately, in sterile little spaces that have no life of their own, each “instrument” (sometimes they are just ones and zeros) recorded in its own universe, each singer there at a different time. All of this is put together later in the loudest, cleanest, most compressed way possible, to catch our weak little attention spans for at least enough time to get through the reel.
Jaded? Hell no. There is an entire landscape of gooey delicious analog recording through which to wade. Watching and smelling the tape machine and hearing its repetitive beating heart while we were at Pachyderm making this record was a revelation. Think of the little tape inside a cassette, but instead it’s two inches wide. Heavy, hearty. On its mud brown depths is magnetically, and maybe magically, held the physical representation of our music. The tape machine is a fertile field, not a gloved laboratory. It is an early morning trout stream, not a rectangular subdivision. It is physical, fragile. It also sounds really cool. If you turn up this album you’ll hear the tape hissing its gentle prayer. Its low end sounds round and earthy, and the high frequencies are mellow yet clear as a bell.
In the spirit of all this romance, we are going to release Good Dogs exclusively on vinyl for a while. We thought, if even for a little bit of time, that the way we’d love for you to hear this music initially is physically. Maybe intentionally? Not on a phone speaker while frying eggs or in ear buds while at the gym. Every artist hopes you’ll put their record on and simply listen to the whole thing straight through. So much work goes into them. Of course not many of us listen to music like that anymore, gathering the family around the Gramophone, but we are dealing with art and ideas here, not reality. We all get to pick where we walk. You may even think such an approach arrogant. But, in the end, it’s our album and we can do whatever we want with it. Good Dogs will eventually be available on all the little services that fight for your attention. It will eventually disappear into the churning mass of endless new releases and drown meekly into the abyss of social media. It will be streamed, alright. When it is released however, I invite you to take a trip out into the actual world to your favorite local record store (if you’re lucky enough to still have one where you live), take a few slow passes around the aisles, make small talk with the clerk, take the record home, and have a listen. As Kurt Vonnegut famously said, “We are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.”
Good Dogs is just an album. There are thousands made every day, probably. For me though, each one I make is a part of my life’s work. I know the other guys in the band feel the same. I think of each album as a piece of a whole that won’t be fully apparent until after I'm gone. But, that’s just hubris, most likely. I don’t have any illusions of one particular project becoming somehow more important than any of the others, but at the same time, whenever I make one, it feels all encompassing. This album is the most current version of whatever creative force I’ve been lucky enough to tap, and that, for those of us who subscribe, is a singular feeling. I am very proud of this record. I think it’s one of the best pieces of work our band has ever produced. Of course this is subjective, and of course if I didn’t feel like my newest work wasn’t among my best, what would be the point?
We will officially announce Good Dogs soon. For now, it’ll be released on vinyl sometime this fall. It will be available everywhere maybe a month or two after that. I will put a song here for you paid subscribers before it’s released to everyone. I am really excited to share it with you, thus accomplishing the final step in my creative cycle. The record’s done, but the work will be complete once it is released out into the world. This is the most exciting time for a band, and we can’t wait.
P.S. While developing a kind of vision for this project, I found myself getting really into American folk music. Old and new. Throughout the years that music has been captured live and in person, raw and some may even say honest (though I don’t use that word to describe music). Nowadays recording live to tape is a stylistic choice, but for a long time it was simply the only way to capture a song for later enjoyment. I thought I’d drop a few recommendations here from the mountain of available folk music out there. Some of these are people making music today, some from the distant past, but all in the sprit of a recording as a snapshot, more than a sculpture. The links go to Bandcamp where possible, as they at least offer you the option of buying the art that people create.
Music for a Revolution Vol 1: Guinea’s Syliphone Recording Label (1967-1973)
Charlie Parr (I picked this album because he recorded it on a portable reel to reel, mainly in friends’ houses. Also, Ryan Young and I got to play and sing on a song)
Original Folkways Recordings of Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, 1960-1962
Good luck out there. Thanks for reading,
-Dave
This is exciting. I look forward to the release of Good Dogs.
Your production method ties directly into something I developed called the Certificate of Embodied Production (CEP).
The first iteration was tied to a label and record club where the songs would be recorded through the CEP methodology and then released only offline. The original tagline was “The future of music is offline.” I could not find any artists willing to take the leap, although they all loved the CEP concept.
The CEP concept is a method for how a recording is made, rather than an analogue recording concept.
Instead of fidelity to the source, think fidelity to the act.
Your comments on being in the room, eye contact, committing to the take, and the risk, trust, and vibe that result from not relying on what I call the infinite undo playlisting of modern recording production are spot on.
The CEP certifies recordings that do not use pitch correction, generative AI, or grid correction. It has its roots in the philosophical insights of the philosopher Susanne K. Langer, who argued that music is a presentational symbol that necessarily contains epistemological import and presents to us the morphology of felt life. I gave a presentation on this two months ago at a philosophy conference in Vienna, where my argument that modern recording practices destroy this vital source of knowledge was received with excitement and support by the people immersed in the work of symbolic forms and epistemology.
My published research on the crisis of gridification is meant to show that perfect music is teaching us to see difference as error in need of correction, rather than as an opportunity for collaboration, and that music recorded through the CEP methodology presents to us an image of life as we actually live it. We are not perfect people, so why should our music be?
At its core I created the Certificate of Embodied Production as an intervention in the crisis of democratic coordination because how music is made shapes how we live together.
I love the fact you are releasing this on vinyl only for a few months. Looking forward to it.
https://musicalform.org/cep
A snapshot of an artist’s perspective as he reflects on the recent creation is a rarely experienced joy. Thank you for this. We enjoyed hearing GOOD DOGS in St. Paul the other day.