The City Veins

Charles and I are sitting in a loft watching Spencer work on his drum sound. Yes, we are in the recording studio, a smallish home recording “complex” in
Rockville. Our boy by the name of Mike, whom Spencer met through a Yahoo! Groups page, comes with a solid Berklee music pedigree. The space is high ceiling and angular. Spencer set out on a mission to find a room with a lot of action and echo, and this room certainly does the trick. It is difficult to determine whether one should treat recording as an extension of live performance or as a perfectly separate entity. The happy medium seems to be, at least for our sound, to try to build the most dynamic drum sound possible, akin to our live sound. Then, after that point, we can think about song construction—building parts and subplot melody—as a different process from our live show. I want the album to pop and have that bounce and intensity to it that we can derive during live performance. However, I would like for us to add a complexity that is otherwise unattainable with three musicians onstage. I think that is the compromise.

Charles is reading comic books and some other material he was given for his birthday. Yeah ladies—he is available. I sense that he is in a good mood. Why? Because he doesn’t have to do anything but listen, and he has ear plugs in. It is in fact possible that he can hear nothing at all, nestling Charles comfortably within his own created world of numbers and cleaning. Charles and Spencer came by the studio to check it out on Thursday, and I can see why Charles liked it: for a recording studio it is spotless. Though it is someone’s home, so Charles may feel the compulsion to do his dishes.

I have to say I am also feeling very positive, albeit I’m loaded with coffee so I’m likely to feel great regardless of my surroundings. But generally I hate studios and sound guys, and this guy seems to be on our wavelength. Plus, he allows us to maintain the impression of a DIY element for this process by avoiding Q Studios and other major local music factories full of their jackasses and ego. I’d always prefer to work with someone with a little less street cred that really cares, rather than some place that everyone and their grandmother has heard of. This guy clearly knows just as much, if not more, than engineers from more well-renowned studios.

Sorry, The End–have to go pay attention.

Aaron and I started the new EP last weekend. We got most of the bass lines down, and arrangements for our songs worked out. I will be spending the better part of the next month sitting in front of the computer you see in the picture. Eventually I will get tired, irritable, and grow to hate the EP. That is how I know it will be done.

As a quick side note, this recording will be the first time where I will be very cognizant of the length of the songs. We have started timing all of our songs in practice, and make arrangement decisions based on length, mostly trying to shorten songs. Absent a few exceptions, we are trying to keep everything to around 3 minutes. For a song to go over 4, it better have something worthwhile going on.

As we’ve continued discussion on our upcoming recording/EP release plans, we’ve turned our talk to what to call the finished CD.  Naming things is always one of the worst parts about being in a band.  It’s a fine line to walk to choose a name that both represents what you want to represent without being one of the following: cheesy/cliched (see: this Toby Keith CD and most country CD titles in general); pretentious/obtuse/confusing (see: the full title of Fiona Apple’s “When the Pawn”); or just dumb (see: this Elton John album). (NOTE: Thanks to Cracked.com’s “20 Worst Album Titles of All Time” for these titles)

Fortunately, in the hierarchy of naming band-related things, naming CDs is not the hardest thing. Naming the band itself is the hardest. CDs come and go, and one bad title can be made up by a great title after it. Also, people will often forgive a dumb title if the music is great, such as with Sufjan Stevens’ “Come on Feel the Illinoise,” an inane title for a collection of brilliant songs (which themselves have dumb titles).  Songs are the least hard to name, though with them it’s much harder to avoid cliches.

Album/EP titles fall somewhere in the middle.  You want an accurate reflection of the songs contained within, but you’d also like it to convey some greater meaning.  Well, this may not be true of everyone, but it’s at least true for us.  Our first disc, “A Weekend Affair,” referred to the fact that those 4 songs were largely written and recorded over the course of 2-3 weekends.  This was back when The City Veins was a band in name/concept only; I didn’t know Charles, Aaron, or our former guitarist Adam yet and those guys put computer drums on the tracks when they were first recorded; I added the live drums to those tracks a few weeks later.  They hadn’t practiced or performed together yet. Now, we’ve been performing for a year.  We’ve defined our sound and musical direction through a year of evolving and experimenting (and the aforementioned line-up change).  We’re looking for something that sort of brings that all together. Plus, we’re most likely going to have cover art this time around, so the title will have to invoke some kind of idea for that too. It’s an interesting choice to make.

That being said, we’re leaning toward 2 choices, both taken from different lyrics Aaron has written: “Something Much Louder” and “By Sight and By Sound.”  Both are by no means final.

Your thoughts?

I grew up in a philosophy heavy household. I didn’t know it until I was in college and became a philosophy major; to me philosophy was just conversation. But my mother is an aspiring theologian and my father holds a PHD in philosophy, so the dinner table becomes a testing ground for all sorts of philosophical rhetoric and discourse. This, of course, makes us a bunch of asses. But this is what I see when I float metaphysically above my family and try to stare back at myself. A dangerous past-time indeed.

As a band, I believe we are guilty of spending an awful lot of time trying to define ourselves to the world. What is The City Veins? It is a constantly negotiated and created being. We write a shitty song and suddenly we are a shitty band. It certainly has happened. We write a great song and we are on top of the world. The same goes for gigging and now album creation. Each moment allows you the opportunity to redefine and shift your personal meanings. And when I ramble it solidifies my stake as a musician and not a writer of fine prose.

Spencer is combing through our lyrics to come up with names for the EP we are working on (actually, we’re not working on it yet). Admittedly this seems extremely pre-mature since we have yet to record a single moment of music, as well as come to some conclusion about what the EP will include. We probably need to write another solid song or two in order to really have a fine sounding EP. And of course we want to put our best foot forward as this is a Zeitgeist-construction moment. However, coming up with a name before the fact may help to point us in a direction, any direction. There is no one correct creative process that all bands go through, or at least I doubt there is. I often wonder whether other bands start an album with an idea, a note, a full song, an ideology, or maybe something more comprehensive. Often I will arrive at the end of an album or a song and wish that I had started at a different point; that the end product would have been better had I begun the process from a different point altogether. So let’s try naming an album before it’s complete, base the music and lyrical content of a portion of the songs on the name of the album and the cover art. After all, we are anything but a completed article, so why not start by defining something in a vacuous and flimsy way.

(Note: I am not being sarcastic; I actually think there is value in this)

So, like my parents dining-room table, I am using this blog as a medium for testing my ideas and philosophies. I always understand things better after I’ve said them, even when I’m spouting shite (as the scousers would say); talking bollocks. This is an area of construction, just like gigging, writing, etc. Check back as we start this EP-writing process…there is more bollocks to come.

(Authors Note: I am aware that Zeitgeist is not the proper word for what I am referencing; that the word has to do with ethos of a culture and people, not of specific entities within a system. But the word has wrinkles of meaning that don’t translate perfectly in English, and who can really tell what German words actually mean anyway. Also, to divert your attention away from this, I will point out that Charles thought the song “Glad Girls” by Guided By Voices was “Black Girls”—- making it the most racist song in history—because they “only want to get you high”. That’s some J. Edgar Hoover shit right there. See—he’s dumber than me sometimes).

Photo by Flickr user hive.

As my good friend Charles and that dick that sings for us have recently mentioned here, we are going to be doing some new DIY recording soon. However, we don’t have the capacity (technical or mental) to record drums ourselves, so if you know of a good engineer with a knack for getting awesome sound of the drums, we’re happily accepting recommendations.