A Story of Sleep and Wake-Up Songs.


Almost every time we go into the studio, we work up more songs that we know we’re going to use and then end up setting them aside if they seem like they’re not really going to fit in on the record. For about a year we’d been sitting on two such songs like that: “I Have Seen the World of Dreams” (which we’d recorded in Austin for our split release with Julie Doiron) and “No Hidden Track” (which we’d recorded in San Francisco for Down the River of Golden Dreams). I’d been thinking about these songs off and on all during our 2003 touring and I eventually decided that, as soon as I was off the road, I was going to try to finish them. In June the tour had ended and I drove up to my parent’s house in New England to catch up with my family and work on the rest of the songs for the EP as well as new songs for our upcoming full-length. At the end of the month I drove to Bloomington. I’d spent the year homeless and, because I had friends and was dating a girl there, recording in Bloomington seemed like a good excuse to take a month off in a friendly place.

It seemed like “And I Have Seen the World of Dreams” and “No Hidden Track” were sort of related thematically, so I tried to make sure the other new songs I added fleshed out the theme a little. One of them, “A Favor,” I worked up as a chance to do a kind of duet with Jordan Geiger, the lead singer of the amazing unheralded band Minus Story. I selfishly wanted to get his voice on an Okkervil River recording. The other, “You’re Untied Again,” was a song I’d been writing very slowly over the course of all of our touring. I don’t remember when I’d started working on it, but I was pretty much adding one line every couple of weeks during the whole year.

About a week or so after I arrived in Bloomington, Travis flew up and was joined by Jordan. With Michael Kapinus - an amazing musician who played keyboards and trumpet with us on some of our March touring - playing bass, Jordan playing piano, and Travis playing drums, we started working up the new songs. After a day or so of rehearsal, we went into the charming basement studio of the Early Day Miners’s Dan Burton and started finishing the old mixes and basic tracking the new songs.

The whole process seemed relatively quick and painless compared to how I’m used to working in the studio. We kept a lot of first takes, didn’t use a lot of effects on anything, and didn’t really try to worry or overthink what we were doing. The only thing that kept changing was “You’re Untied Again,” which I for some reason felt compelled to rewrite practically every day. One morning I woke up before dawn hung over and came up with the bridge part - we added it later that day and it was our last addition.

My favorite part of the session was getting to add superfluous Les Paul on two songs; we’d used electric guitar before and never had anything against it, but all during the last year I’d been possessed by the unquenchable desire to add totally unnecessary and poorly-played guitar noodling to an otherwise good song, so we chose “I Have Seen the World of Dreams” as the hapless victim of my destructive urges. I liked the spaciousness of the mix, but felt that it needed an instrument in it that was strolling around inside and knocking into walls. We also had a good time adding harmonies by Jordan and by talented Bloomingtonian chanteuse Nicole Evans, who acquitted herself nobly in trying to match my mush-mouthed delivery of overly-verbose lines.

Bloomington was beautiful, especially with the students gone. I tried to steer clear of the Vid and live low-key, though living in the midwest caused me to incur more hangovers than were probably good for me. Days were filled with recording, nights given over to trainwrecks. Sleep, wake up, sleep, wake up. On the last day of tracking, I came in with the idea to replace one old mix that hadn’t been working as well - yet another obnoxious murder ballad - with a more straightforward autobiographical song I’d written in New England in June. I did it with two passes of acoustic guitar, added a vocal, and suddenly the EP was done and the month was over.

Out November 2004.