Here's another look at the Western Blot album that I released in November, just a couple more tracks left. 

Track 7: Dull Dark Side

When I say that it took a decade to make Muscle Memory, I don't mean I worked at it consistently or regularly over that entire period. But it is true that over 10, in fact almost 12 years elapsed between the first recordings that appear on the album and the most recent overdubs. And in fact the oldest recording is on "Dull Dark Side," and the track was completed 10 years later.

As I said previously, some of the first things I wrote on keyboard in high school appear on some songs, like "Sore Winners" and "ETC." But the actual oldest recording on the album is from a Tascam 4-track that I made the summer after my first year of college, of the main riff at the center of "Dull Dark Side," that weird shrill wobbly beep riff.

After my freshman year at Towson, I spent the summer as roommates with my high school friend Scott Street (not to be confused with the Baltimore rapper/producer Street Scott) in Newark, Delaware. Scott was and is one of my favorite people, I went to school with him for a couple years before he transferred to another school, but we always stayed in touch, and played together in a band that never really wrote anything or got its shit together, but I loved his guitar playing and wanted to do something with him. That summer, though, he had started to get serious about DJing and producing, and gave me some tracks that I added stuff to and considered using for this project, before I decided to play all the instruments on the album myself and tucked away that stuff for possible later use. It was a really fun summer, though, one of the best of my life.

My dad bought me one of those cute little iBooks, the laptop version of the iMac, to take to college, and it had one little error sound, a little 'beep,' a single note. And if you made an error over and over, or pressed, say, the "volume up" button" over and over. Scott had a lot of toy instruments and toy microphones, and one of them was this funny red pitch shifting microphone, it had little up/down buttons to make your voice or whatever go higher or lower, and it would go in these intervals, so it was really like a primitive AutoTune (this was after Cher's "Believe" but before AutoTune vocals became really ubiquitous). And I realized that the iMac beep was a C, and that when I ran it through that mic, shifting the note up and down just made it into other notes on the C scale. But of course, you could only go up or down one step at a time, so I had to write a melody in those stairsteps, so that's what I did with that silly tune that just goes up and down the C scale. And if you go to the top of the range, it takes you back down to the bottom, so of course I devised the bridge, where the highest note alternates with the lowest note.

I worked a terrible telemarketing job that summer to pay the rent, but I still had a lot of free time. And I remember Scott coming home from work one day, and I had just spent the entire day hunched over my laptop and 4 track with that silly plastic microphone, working on that tune and recording take after take until I got the entire song down in one uninterrupted take. I must've looked crazy to him. But I worked so hard that day that I swore that I would preserve that recording and make it into a real song and release it someday, having no idea it would take me over a decade.

We transferred that track, and other 4-track recordings, to Mat Leffler-Schulman's DAT tapes, when I started working in his Takoma Park, Maryland studio a couple years later. And I added some drums and synths to the song in Takoma Park, and had a decent skeleton of an arrangement. But when we started back at Mobtown Studios in Baltimore a few years after that, we basically went back to square one with the iMac beep, doing the drums and synths over. It took me a while to work out that distorted bassline, it was really one of the hardest keyboard parts on the album to play, but really worth it. And the little "deedle deedle dee" countermelody on the second verse came out well, I recorded it over both verses but decided it sounded a little busy there, so we muted it on the first verse and now I think it adds the perfect color to the second verse.

Sonic Youth is probably my favorite band of all time, and I don't know how much you can hear that in Western Blot most of the time, but I think it's pretty evident in "Dull Dark Side." When I first started messing around with the riff I knew it had a little of a "Sugar Kane" vibe to it and kept changing it until I thought it was unique enough. But the drumming on the song is very Steve Shelley, and the whole noisy bridge is very Sonic Youth. I interviewed Steve Shelley as a teenager and really look up to him, he's a good guy.

One of the happy accidents that took place in the recording of the album that I really loved was the end of "Dull Dark Side." The song ends with that one note repeating over and over for a pretty long time, so I just left that open to improvise on the drums at the end. And I did a couple different takes that, and one went a bit longer than the others. Mat recorded the keeper take over one of those longer earlier takes, so basically after the keeper take ends, the other track kinda bleeds in, so there's kind of a false ending. And that's not something either of us did on purpose, it just happened and sounded good enough to keep in the track.

As with most of the songs on the album, I had the music written and recorded for quite a while before I knew what the lyrics would be. But the lyrics for "Dull Dark Side" came to me quicker than probably anything else on the album. I remember pretty distinctly that I was back in Rehoboth, Delaware for the holidays visiting my mom, when the idea for the chorus started kicking around in my head (and since the main riff was recorded in Newark years earlier, this is essentially a song where all the main inspiration took place in Delaware, rather than Maryland). And it was only maybe a couple weeks later that I realized that the chorus fit over this track. I didn't even know when I recorded the instruments which part was the verse and which part was the chorus, but once I had that "I know you've got a dull dark side" part, it all fell into place.

I'm really proud of "Dull Dark Side" because of how the lyric came together. The chorus kind of has this cavalier dark humor to it, kind of dismissively saying that most people have the same boring personal failings. But as I wrote the verses, it kind of became this more empathetic thing. Songwriting for me is a lot like writing anything else, where the chorus and/or opening lyric is kind of the topic sentence, and then you start filling in the details and making counterarguments, and you sometimes end up thinking your way through the topic and finding a surprising conclusion.

I did not initially think that most of the singers on the album would do two songs each, and I initially had Kathleen Wilson of Thee Lexington Arrows come in just to record "Button Masher." I had a male singer in mind for "Dull Dark Side," someone who I still want to have on a Western Blot project in the future, but they were busy when I asked them about it. So I started thinking about who else could sing the song, and realized that there was no reason it needed to be a male singer, and that Kathleen might be a great fit for it, and she was. She's just amazing, there's not enough good things I can say about her work on this album, and this song in particular. The way she sang each chorus differently, the little bend in her voice in that last line before the bridge, she really brought a lot to the performance.

There's a Superchunk lyric about playing "track 6 and track 7 again and again," on track 7 of an album with a great track 6/track 7 section. And I feel like that's a real sweet spot of an album, no matter how many songs are on it, that should be the point where the album is really settling in and hitting its stride or making its statement, musically or lyrically. So I was happy that "Child Of Divorce" and "Dull Dark Side" became those tracks on Muscle Memory, I think that's kind of the heart of the album, the point where I hope anyone that's listening that far is kind of with me for the whole ride and hopefully not losing interest. These days, with streaming and all, I feel like there's a lot less incentive to listen to an entire album if you didn't, y'know, spend money on it or have any feeling of justifying your investment. And you can actually look at listening stats and see them drop off from track 1 to track 2 to track 3 on most albums, unless there's a hit toward the end. So I kind of felt like I had to stick to my guns and not worry about "burying" songs I love in the second half where fewer people might hear them, and sequence the album for the best possible experience for someone who's listening to the whole thing.