Leave of Absence vol 2 - analysis
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Lists, Old skool, Producing, Songwriting on August 18th, 2007
I just listened to the rest of the tracks from Leave of Absence vol 2, the ones I hadn’t heard recently, to kind of evaluate them as far as what might be needed for a remastering. I was re-organizing the file system on my G5, so that the most up-to-date versions of any songs would all be in one place. I listened to a couple of “deep cuts” from Unfinished Business and Leave of Absence vol 1 as well, just to get a feel for where everything stood sound-wise and production-wise, but of those three albums, LoA2 would be the only one where I didn’t have any songs in the remix queue.
None of the songs from LoA2 can be remixed, because they were all assembled on the Korg D8 portable eight track hard drive recorder. Most of the songs did start out in some analog form on the Fostex, but the bulk of the work was done on the D8. It was all digital mixing and editing, like using a computer, but without the benefit of a screen to see anything on. It just has a little LCD display that tells you what song you’re working on, the elapsed time, and the paramaters of whatever effect you’re tweaking. You can copy sections from one track to another, slide things back and forth in time, and even do a “repeating paste” that effectively loops a sound up to 99 times. But you’re kind of doing all this in the dark, by today’s standards.
Whenever I was happy with an overdub, I would bounce the tracks down to make room for more overdubs, and erase the original tracks. So although I wasn’t losing sound quality, and I did have the benefit of being able to “fix” my overdubs to some degree, once I committed them to this submix, there was no going back. When I felt that the songs were done, another audio engineer in the same building was gracious enough to let me plug my D8 into his CD recorder to save the final mixes to CD before wiping the D8 clean for more work (the timing of the track IDs is weird because you have to hit a button at the exact right moment while it’s recording). So in the end, those CDs were all I had. I eventually ripped them to a computer, while they were thankfully still playable, and have preserved the files as I migrated from computer to computer.
I didn’t bother listening to the first three songs, because I’ve already got a remastered Never Turn Back and Open the Window on this website, and remastered P.S.R. for the YouTube video. So the first thing I checked out was Quit Your Job and Join a Traveling Hindu Cult. This is just a meaningless, silly title, to keep in line with my alphabetical naming scheme. What struck me about it is that it’s a mashup. You remember when mashups were popular? Oh, yeah, of course you remember, because it’s now. Well, this was a mashup I did in 1999, of my own material, and whatever tapes were lying around with friends’ material as well. Kim’s voice (backwards, mostly) wafts in and out, as well as some of Garrett’s voice and guitar from his album. A bit from Wake Up is used, some of the Mind Mogger jam from Friends and Players that didn’t wind up on volume 1, some of Paul Gaspar’s trumpet from the TFBD sessions, a bit of a weird “vampire” speech Jeff had done on a song of his — the surprises just keep a-coming. The overall effect is somewhat chaotic, like a more tuneful Revolution 9. Since I went to the trouble to time things musically and match keys, it also reminds me of parts of the more recent Love album.
Overall — and this goes for all three albums — the need for remastering is not “icing on the cake”, it’s urgent. Everything sounds muffled. But this is extra true for the next song, Revelation in the Resonance (the title lifted from Never Turn Back’s lyrics just to fill the “R” spot). I actually remember EQ’ing and re-EQ’ing this one because it never sounded good. And the only way to undo the damage is to EQ it yet again. It sounds like a beautifully sad and powerful eulogy for something, and I think that “something” is it’s own sound; this was the last time I ever faked a lead guitar by distorting the CZ-1 synthesizer (I did this all the time, especially for demos, when I was a “keyboardist”). In one spot it hints at the riff from Ten Years From Now, but only because they were both written around the same time.
My memory of Soldiers of Music, in contrast, was that it was sonically pristine. And my memory would be wrong. Although a step up from Revelation…, it’s in just as much need of treatment as the rest of the tracks. But it does groove solidly. I then skipped ahead to Various Fakes, which had me furiously bobbing my head, and X-Ray Tex and X-Ray Ted and the Marvellous X-Rated X-Ray Specs on their Heads, which as you might guess, was titled at the last minute to fit the convention. The latter, a short and sterile faux-jazz experiment, would be more suitably identified as something like “Plastic Lounge”, and sounds like it would be at home on a Zappa album.
You Feel Exactly Like Me is stunningly dark and pointed, and would be appropriate to dedicate to anyone who is hurtful for no reason. It was about something personal at the time, but I remember hearing about the Columbine murders around that time and weaving my feelings about that in with the more personal stuff, as if I was confronting a killer from a channeled victim’s point of view:
Who am I…
Watching you watching me die?
Fantastic improvised guitar noodling in the background on that one, too — sort of Oldfieldian. And then, at the very end of Red-esque rocker instrumental Zero Gratitude, there’s a brief sound of an acoustic guitar and my voice saying “I think I’ve got… enough of that one”, which is actually me doing takes for Never Turn Back, thus making the album subliminally circular (even though it’s supposedly the second half of a two-volume album). Without the listener knowing this, it just sounds like me casually saying that’s enough material for the album, and it’s simply time to end it — an equally groovy interpretation.
I think I can definitively confirm that the album was completed by the end of 1999, because as I recall, Christy had moved to Rochester, and our friend Rich was up to visit, and the three of us celebrated New Years by playing Worms Armageddon (and replacing the existing sound effects with in-jokes and obscenities, which probably made for one of the top ten most eye-tearing and snot-clearing laughs I’ve ever experienced) and listening to the album from start to finish. We all agreed in the end that it was a good album. I still think it’s a good album, but I don’t know if it would fly with something like Magnatune (the compilation idea felt “wrong” to me — I was starting to think maybe I’m a singles person and not an album person, but apparently I was right the first time). They stress that an album should be chock-full of good tracks, and not have fillers — but I think in the broader context, the fact that it does have “fillers” is what makes it work. The emotions are not always at an intense level, so it doesn’t burn you out. You get a chance to just relax and have a laugh between the catharses.
Well, it won’t hurt anything to remaster the dang thing and send it in…
