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September 10th, 2009 Making The JFK Album: “Want to Hear a Lie” More Blog Entries...
This year has been a strange one in respect to recording for me. I have spent most all of it tracking small sections, mixing previously recorded songs and tying up lose ends on many recordings that had been in some way abandoned, and or neglected.  It started with the “Finish what you started vol. 1” album which collected many of my own recordings started and never finished over the last 5 years or so that were intended as part of my own record, 2006’s “and the swede”.  Almost immediately after completing that project, (and just starting to consider the next two volumes of material I would also like to see completed this year), Juliet Foxtrot Kilo, a band I was a member of in the early 2000’s was suddenly offered a “reunion” slot as part of my old home town’s now yearly music festival.   It sounded like fun, so we jumped at the chance to perform, even if I was to come up from far out of state only a day before.  Also part of the deal was the idea that we should finish a record that we started in 2002, which none of us had even heard since the day we tracked it.  
JFK was not really much of a studio band, and I had yet to really delve into that type of thing in earnest (it would be at least a year or so until I decided to make my own record and acquire the gear necessary to do so). Our drummer Pete had a brother named Steve Powers with some serious home studio gear, and some rather serious credentials (including working in some rather prestigious studios in NYC and I hear tell the sonafagun even mic’ed up Michael Friggin’ Jackson!). He wanted to give the band a go at his condo, and we all were pretty excited about the chance... not least of all the price was way right (free). The goal at the time was to capture our tunes by playing live, but the band was stationed over three floors. Pete was playing the drums in the basement, Matt the bass player was on the ground floor, and Joe and myself on guitars were upstairs. This gave us a decent separation for mixing, but perhaps left the recording a bit sterile as there was no opportunity to incorporate any room elements for the band as a whole. Pete’s brother had quite an impressive set up, though I can’t quite recall the particulars at the time of tracking. From what I remember, the songs were all tracked with Digital Performer. What I do recall was that there were some very, very nice mics floating around. Neumann mics all over, especially nice was the vocal mic, which if I recall correctly may have been the M150. Needless to say, we pretty much had a great time playing our tunes in such a weird environment and for the most part, kept it all pretty simple. I think the decision to not track with distortion was a result of the idea that we would actually be working these tracks into a proper album, and perhaps it would be best to overdub any enhancements. JFK was going to play the 2002 Gasball fest in Danbury that year, and this recording session was going to give us an EP for the event. We did some vocals and some rudimentary overdubs on the four songs that would make up the proposed EP, but the rest of the songs laid in the dreaded machine for years after, never being heard by anyone. Now as rushed at the recordings had been, the situation poor Steve had to mix in was even more rushed. We needed the mix to start burning cdr’s, and if I recall correctly, we made the copies the day of the event. The mixes as a result, were very bare bones, with no particular eq’ing and or any advance mixing. The vocals were always a problem, because frankly I think Joe and I did not really like our performances, and the clarity and quality only served to spotlight the lacking performances. Needless to say, no one was too excited about that particular EP being out. Time marched on and the JFK band retired itself. The recordings had never been revisited and the mixes that were stayed the way they were. So when Pete proposed getting the tracks back from his brother and sending them over to me to re-mix and perhaps even re-imagine how the record could turn out, it was very interesting. I had never actually worked on any tracks that had been recorded by other people, save for some mastering and a little bit of mixing for a friend of mine. I was also very curious about some of the tunes on the record that I could not even recall in any way. So in mid July, we decided to finish the JFK record and sell it at our show which was scheduled for September 4th. By complete coincidence, I had been picking some tracks to record myself for the next edition of the “finish what you started series”, finishing songs that had never been properly documented over the last ten or so years. I had been thinking about two JFK songs in particular, the two that were not recorded in any way for the record we did. One was called “Sumsummertime”(which was actually tracked in some form at the 2002 sessions, but lost over time) and the song that would end up being called “Walk Home”. I had already gone as far as to track drums and a scratch guitar for these two songs when the JFK album opportunity presented itself. It only seemed right to add these two songs to the record, and at least get Matt and Joe to add there parts to the songs, feeling the complexity of getting drum recordings done in the small amount of time on songs the group had not played in a few years too daunting of a task. To make this work, we would need some rough mixes of my drums and guitar so Matt C and Joe could add there own parts. Joe and Matt each have recording equipment and working with digital audio allows you to file trade and share ideas quickly. This proved more difficult than expected, and while I was able to get Joe’s guitar tracks integrated, matt’s bass tracks had some sort of issue when they were added to my recording software, and they did not make the final mix.
The two songs that I recorded drums for, were never intended at the time of recording to be a part of any “JFK” record, so no attempt to make them sound similar, or even similar to the original performances was made or considered.  Though the structure of these two songs had not actually changed much, if at all, the sound of these tracks contrasts quite a bit with the original JFK recordings.  Still, I think they work together to form a coherent record, and really, these songs need to be JFK songs... as these were among the bands best, and perhaps were never given their proper due after the band dissolved.
Sumsummertime had never been pinned down properly.  I had taken the song every which way imaginable, even rewriting the entire thing and scrapping the original feel and parts altogether.   For whatever reason though, that week before we even decided on the JFK album at all, I tracked the drums and decided to give the original arrangement another go.  The drum sound is actually one of my favorites I have recorded so far.  It’s my fairly basic set up using 2 Beyer M160 ribbon mics as overheads, a SM57 on snare, an AKG D112 on kick, a Blue Kickball on the floor tom, and an AKG C-1000s on the higher tom.   I incorporated my two Peluso 2247’s in the room to add any dimension they could (my space is ridiculously small).  These mics ran through the mackie Onyx 1640 and I tracked with EQ from the board to “tape”.  I also tracked every channel in some way using the 2 RNC compressors and the 2 RNLA’s I have.  The Darling article featured here will give better insight on the drum set up and micing in greater detail.  There was not much changed between these two recording sessions, except in regards to mixing later.  
Walk home was a real different song altogether from most anything else I have ever done, or at least done as “The Swede”.  The song had a great deal of energy live, and JFK could really make that song a stomper.  Walk Home though was not yet written at the time of the original JFK sessions, as it was one of our last songs we ever pieced together.  The featured recording is actually a bit slower than I expect we ever played it live, but I think it maintains the best intentions of the song.  While Joe was able to get me his guitar tracks, Matt C’s bass tracks had significant technical problems when added.  This lead to me tracking the bass parts.  
Working on the original recordings for the JFK album from 2002 was a new and unique challenge. Steve Powers did an excellent job engineering what we presented to him. His tracks were cut very cleanly, with the exception of some wayward bass guitar bits here and there, which may have been more a result of Matt perhaps playing into the tracks harder than sound-checked. The drum sound was rather tight, as there were no room mics employed and the individual tracks were very clean and detailed, with surprisingly little bleed. This made the drums sound more like say Stewart Copeland of the Police as opposed to a John Bonham type thickness. There simply was little “air” around the drums, which meant if Pete was playing it simple here or there, there was very little body or natural resonance to fill some space. Just a tight kick, snare and high hat. On the upside however, Steve left the recordings with an incredible amount of headroom, which would allow for a good deal of added eq or processing if necessary to be added during the mix. With the songs now loaded in my software, I could begin to add some new elements. All of the vocals on the record were tracked this Summer. Some were surprisingly new. The band collectively forgot what some of the songs actually sounded like, in particular, what would become “Plus” and “Like Crimson”. It was decided that Joe should take the lead on “Plus” as he was the writer of that particular song, and I would figure out something for “Like Crimson”. These were most likely the last songs completed for the album. While the engineering of the vocals on JFK’s previous 4 song ep made from these original sessions was quite excellently recorded, the performance always made Joe and me cringe. These were redone for the album as well. I was happy to resurrect my PRO VLA comp for vocals, which had blown a fuse a few years back. the brilliant minds at ART had also gone so far as to label the replacement fuse incorrectly on the unit itself, leading to a long delay in repairing it as i could not figure out what the issue was. I happened upon an online forum where ART users were discussing this and I heeded the advice of those who had tried other fuses. Bless their pointed lil heads because it brought a great compressor back from the dead at my house!
I began adding some new elements to the recordings.  These included organs, some wurlitzer, a lap steel, and mellotron.  Much of this was the product of long nights and experimentation.  I cant say for certain how successful these elements are in the end, but At some point I felt they would help bring this record out of being a simple demo into being a true album statement.  I smoked some pot and had some fun.  You decide.  There was no real re-tracking of any of the core instruments however.  There are some new distorted guitar bits added here and there, blended in with the original tracks.  
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