Episode 1 - Las Vegas

The Seed

I've regrettably spent a colossal amount of time in Las Vegas over the years, mostly for a variety of professional functions. I find there are Vegas people, and I don't really trust them - I found myself there each year for multiple 2-week stretches, and every time I walked through the metal detectors at McCarran airport on the way out I did a little dance to the casino gods and ran away screaming. I spent so much time there that at one point I had the order of the casinos on the strip memorized (and I’d stayed in most of them). The old Aladdin before it was knocked down, the MGM, the Hilton in both pre and post Manilow years (though at all times enjoying the Star Trek themed bar in their lobby).

You find weird things about Vegas once you're there for more than a long weekend. There aren't any bookstores anywhere near the strip. The entire place has a kind of druggy rhythm - taxi drivers and breakfast chefs in the morning, and sex workers and alcohol and smoke in the evening. It smells like bad cigars and mothballs and plastic and sunscreen. It's a silicone oasis in the middle of the desert.

The Arrangement / What Would I Change?

I programmed some simple drums and laid down a bass part over it. The initial riff was written on guitar, but I transposed it to bass and added a fuzz over it (this is all digital because I'm still studio-free right now). I've noticed that when you write on guitar, it's tempting to just use that as a consistent pedal or ostinato behind everything. But I think about this book Getting Things Done that talks about how the brain is misused - it's so rarely used for critical thinking (which is its designed purpose) and so frequently used for remembering (which it's terrible at). It comes down to an intentionality.

One of the reasons I think everyone loves those recordings from the 60's and early 70's is that there was this economy to the arrangements. A real give and take. A lot of the time there was only bass and drums, and then when the guitar came in, you FELT it. It's not about the thing itself, it's about the change around it - the contrast. So in this arrangement, the guitar comes in only when it serves a role, and it needs to make itself known. For the thing it's uniquely good at.

A couple more interesting things here:

• As a lark, I put a formant filter on one of the harmony vocals and ended up really liking it. It gives that part a little bit of a warped quality, and it pairs well when you're multi-tracking vocals (singing harmony with yourself can sound pretty artificial, which is fine if you want that, but - I don't know - it's a useful vector to be tweaked shall we say)

• I like doing a little editing pass against these when I'm done and kind of cutting and pasting things around. I found a nice guitar part at the end that I ended up looping for longer than I'd originally played it, which creates a nice tension in the third verse.

So listening back to it now, what would I change?

• Like most of these, I can't wait to play this with the band - could be really garage-y, which is hard to get in the box.

• I'd like to add some more definition in the chorus figure - hand claps, tambourines, bigger guitars.

• It could either be incredibly stupid or a lot of fun to put some casino sounds in there somewhere.

• It's short, there's something missing structurally, but I'm not sure what it is. Maybe brass? Maybe a bridge?