Sunday Night Reader:
It’s Sunday evening and I’m sitting down on the grass in Thorton Park, Vancouver, it is raining and I’m wondering if today is the day I’m suppose to be getting on a bus and heading back to Edmonton. Of course I won’t be heading back there until the end of March when we have some shows to play including our show in Calgary on March 29th at the Epcor Center. My Dell desktop computer hooked up to my old car battery is getting wet. I doubt if I’ll be able to finish this post. Tomorrow Yes Nice is going to be releasing a remix album. It is quit interesting for us to have our work used in such a collaborative project. For the record we are total control freaks and don’t like anyone having a say in what we do. In fact, it was with much hesitancy that we made the stems for the re-mix artists to use. We hope you like what you hear. The songs remixed include Horses, Blindfolded, and Empty Space.
Besides the Re-mix EP we have been working away at our new LP. We were thinking of calling it “Warm Gun” for a long time but we might change that as the project evolves. We basically got really into Prince and some nasty Linn LM-1 drum samples and pasted that hot sauce over about half the album. I’d like to say it is sounding way better than it should. Let me also say that Scott really has a way with gated reverb on Linn snare samples. I just finished some epic choir arrangements for a song “We Set Sail.” And no we have not written some kind of Decemberists ship sailing song, but I bet if we did it would be in French.
I think that one of the questions raised that is really important to our process in our new work is: why did Prince leave his vocals so raw on When Doves Cry and yet so wet on Purple Rain? I’m happy to know that one day we will know the answers to these types of questions. Like blindfolded we have been thinking of this new album as more than just series of number 1 singles. What we are doing now is more about telling a story with a grand narrative about selling out shows, being number 1, and accepting fame as something deserved by hard work. Get ready for a musical journey sort of like Dark Side of the Moon if it was recorded by a bunch of real-estate tycoons who loved singing Air Supply ballads. In other words the greatest story ever told.
Nathaniel