The Light of Day

The cheaper the better, the cheapest the best
KeithHandy posted in Old skool, Producing on May 13th, 2007

I updated my discography page to include Cheap Thrills, a sample track I picked out to represent Leave of Absence vol. 1 (1999). I just remixed it this morning to try and bring the drums into the 21st century best I can.

Leave of Absence was my most diverse collection of songs, and featured more experimentation than any other project. In the later half of the 1990s I had made the commitment to try to be more “avant garde”, although I never went atonal or anything. My last installment in the “So You Want” series mentioned something about stolen drum tracks, so I figured I’d bring your attention to Cheap Thrills as an example of that.

My long-time friend Jeff Lewis had recorded a couple of his songs in my studio, one of which was called Popping Flowers Off Of Dandelions. I think he was starting to go through a transformation, where he was waxing as a singer/songwriter and waning as a drummer, because the drums were not a satisfying outlet for him anymore. This reflected in his rather busy and insane drumming style. On this session, his tempo was rather, how shall we say, “rubbery” as well.

In spite of that, I thought the beat would be a good match for Cheap Thrills, and that it would be interesting to try to fit the song to it. I copied it onto another reel of tape and then used one track just to count measures out loud as a reference — “one… two… three…” — and so on. That way, while listening through, if I heard a fill or a crash, and thought, “hmm, measure 57 would be a good place for such-and-such part of such-and-such verse to happen”, I could write that all down and then figure out how many extra measures needed to be filled in with instrumental breaks. I mapped the whole thing out and worked out some extended versions of my original chord progressions, and went from there.

There was some extra space at the end where I extended the third verse with additional lyrics, though I’m not 100% sure if I did that before or after mapping out Jeff’s drum track. It’s kind of unsettling that I wrapped up the lyrics with something foreshadowing American Idol when the rest of the song is apparently about terrorists and serial killers — satisfying as it was at the time, I’m not sure I needed to make that drastic of an association.

Cheap Thrills: