A Story of Down the River of Golden Dreams.


I don’t know where to start when telling a story of Down the River of Golden Dreams, because it seemed like such a massive endeavor at the time that very little narrative thread is discernable to me, even after some time has passed. All we knew when we began scheming about album #3 was that, for a change, we wanted a recording experience nothing like that of Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See, where it was hard to get any kind of overview of the record at hand because we were only working on it for a few hours on certain days, skipping whole weeks sometimes, passing over whole months where we would do nothing at all. We thought that, by contrast, it might be nice to do something quick and dirty. And, like most people, when I think “dirty” I think of the back alleys of San Francisco and I especially think of John Vanderslice. And so we decided to cram every conceivable piece of gear to which we had access into Zach’s van and take the three-day drive out to San Francisco and Vanderslice’s phenomenal Tiny Telephone studio, a place I’d been desirous to experience ever since I’d heard the Court and Spark’s criminally gorgeous record Bless You.

Fortunately, we were lucky enough to work with that record’s engineer, Scott Solter (who has also recorded amazing albums by the Mountain Goats, the Jim Yoshii Pile-Up, and Tarentel in addition to a handful of Vanderslice’s great records), and to sleep for some time on the living-room floor of the Court and Spark, who were mind-bogglingly friendly and accommodating, especially given the fact that they’d never met us before. We were also lucky in that the Court and Spark lent us their rehearsal space, where we spent five long days cooped up learning the songs I’d written for this session, with the surrounding mean streets of San Francisco affording us nothing to eat but the occasional Salvadoran cheese-stuffed fried pupusa, Vietnamese banh mi baguette sandwich filled with pickled carrots and char-grilled pork and washed down with a condensed-milk iced French coffee, or a steaming basket of avocado and pinto-bean tacos on fresh-made corn tortillas. Somehow, in spite of these Spartan accommodations, we found within us the strength to keep working.

When we’d learned all the songs, we stuffed everything back in the van and headed over to Tiny, where we recorded our basic tracks live and then began overdubbing – organ, piano, horns, strings (the last of which entailed a traumatic session involving four pots of coffee and four string parts written in about two hours - using a made-up system of notation which caused at least two of the conservatory students we’d cajoled into playing to turn noticeably pale and back slowly away). As in the past, we hewed closely the classic Okkervil River overdubbing method, wherein one piles all the shit they can possibly conceive of onto a basic track and then, in a last-minute spasm of timidity and self-consciousness, pares the lion’s share of it away. But we were amazed when Scott wrenched from the reeking swamp we’d made of our 24 allotted tracks the clear, sparkling melodies that can be heard on the finished product.

(About said finished product, by the way; as before, as with Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See, it features art by William Schaff, my doppelganger, who is a hell of a fine artist and who has previously done covers for Godspeed you Black Emperor!, Songs: Ohia, and Kid Dakota. You should all go check out his webpage at www.williamschaff.com.)

But back to John “Dirty” Vanderslice. He sang “It’s like a whaling ship, oh, is being on tour, you know? Next day you gotta set sail in your 350 Ford.” By the end of our stay in that city from which so many long-haul travelers first cast out onto the water, I felt like nothing so much as a sailor. The last week of mixing I had even slept every night in the back of our 150 Ford, throwing open the back doors every morning to gaze on a deep, wide pool of water left by a week-long series of torrential downpours. I guess that’s part of the reason we decided to call the record Down the River of Golden Dreams. It’s the title of the piece Seth’s octogenarian great aunt Nila plays at the beginning of the record, but it’s also because - to be appropriately California - I think that, if Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See was an earth record, this is a water record. Sailing away never to return, washing clean to start over, fishing and swimming and drowning and all that stuff is floating around in there somewhere. At least, that’s what I hear when I hear these songs.

Out September 2003.