A Story of Black Sheep Boy Appendix.


When I was writing songs for Black Sheep Boy, there came a point where I couldn’t stop. My writing process became compulsive and less and less productive – I came upon a theme, took some songs to zero in on it, wrote a few songs that seemed like they were central to the theme, wrote some more songs that seemed like they helped, and then spent a good month writing songs that went from redundant to almost nauseatingly excessive. When I realized that two older songs I’d always wanted to re-do seemed like they’d been patiently waiting to be used on the Black Sheep Boy record, I even went ahead and re-wrote those as well (it’s always been kind of a minor goal of mine to eventually re-record all the songs from Stars Too Small to Use, our first album, anyway). So, when time rolled around to start the rehearsals for Black Sheep Boy, we realized we had far too many songs to include on the album without it being some kind of ridiculously self-indulgent double or triple album monstrosity. Right off the bat, we cut a handful of songs that seemed totally unnecessary, and we proceeded with about 20 numbers that we knew we wanted to at least try.

When Brian Beattie showed up to rehearsals to hear what we’d been working on, I think he was a little overwhelmed. He told us there was no way we could record that many songs for the record. We had to admit he was right, so we asked his opinion about which extra songs to cut. That led to another generous handful of songs knocked out of the running. We went into Brian’s studio with 15 songs on the docket.

In the process of tracking and overdubbing, we had to make some more decisions about what to cut, but it was harder this time because we felt like pretty much everything we’d tracked was working. In the end, a lot of factors decided what we did and didn’t include on Black Sheep Boy, from how much work we thought we’d have to spend on a song to how much we felt like certain songs competed with each other. But we went ahead and excluded four more songs from the finished LP, leaving all of them except “The Next Four Months” – which we polished up for the For Real single – behind until we could figure out what to do with them. It was hard to figure out, though, since they were so mired in the Black Sheep Boy theme that I couldn’t imagine putting them anywhere else.

Sometime during the initial round of American touring for Black Sheep Boy, I had the idea of putting all the leftovers together to form a kind of “alternate version” of that record, like an encore sped up three times as fast with everybody switching roles. I guess I was thinking about movies that use the same characters and the same situations but totally recast everything, like 2046 or like the ending of Mulholland Drive, or even like that bastardized Alice in Wonderland movie Return to Oz, which I remembered seeing when I was a kid. I liked the irreverence of that approach; it’s like the more creative version of the crass, calculated Hollywood sequel. Also, I felt like the only way to use these songs, which had been conceived especially for Black Sheep Boy was to use them in a context where we overloaded and exaggerated everything about that record, with serious intent but almost to the point of parody. So we conceived of the Black Sheep Boy Appendix record as supremely excessive, planned to drench everything in overproduction, to overdo the concept elements, to stitch all the music together into one continuous piece without silence. Also, I liked the idea of going overboard while working as quickly as possible, so that we didn’t have a chance to second-guess anything. I whipped up two new songs to frame the record as opening and closing tracks, I re-wrote some of the lyrics to the old songs to further intensify the overall theme, and then we plunged into about two weeks straight of recording without a break. When we were done, we sent the masters off to Jagjaguwar and tried not to look back.