Track 9: Time And A Half

The odd thing about how I made Muscle Memory, which contributed to the album's painfully long gestation and which I am trying not to do with my next record, is that I wrote and recorded nearly all of the music on the album before I wrote barely any of the lyrics. There are plenty of bands that operate that way, and it's not necessarily a bad way to do things, but I think in some ways it's more expedient or efficient to write everything together, or build the instrumentation around the words, than to retrofit the meter and melody of lyrics to an existing track.

So most of the songs didn't have real titles until pretty late in the recording. And throughout the Mobtown Studios sessions, I labeled the songs with working titles that were never meant to be final, just so Mat and I had some way to easily refer to specific songs without using confusing numbers or vague descriptions of riffs (for instance, "As Friends" was "March" and "ETC" was "Decent," and so on). I still have a lot of rough mixes on my iPod under these titles, with 'Al Shipley' as the artist name because I wasn't even sure what the band name was yet during most of the recording. The only song that had the same working title as its final title, though, was "Time And A Half." It was also always the closing track in every rough running order I made of the album, even when we mixed down the very early Takoma Park instrumental recordings years and years ago.

The reason I had the title for "Time And A Half" so early is because the phrase, though usually used in reference to how overtime pay is calculated, stuck in my head as a way to chop up time signatures. So I mapped out this song structure with my drum machine, of a song that starts with verses in a slow tempo, then moves up to 1.5 times that tempo in the chorus, so that a bar of the chorus tempo in a 3/4 time signature runs the same amount of time as a bar of the verse tempo in 4/4. I might be explaining it poorly, but if you listen to the song, you might get the drift.

I had the original organ line for the verses years and years ago, in fact it was one of the first things I ever wrote on keyboard, along with pieces of "ETC" and "Sore Winners." But I didn't use it in the first Takoma Park attempt at recording the song, which had a different keyboard line that ran over the whole song through all the time signature changes to kind of illustrate the how the tempo shifts fit together. But that makes for a bit of a boring song, particularly for how long it is. So when we returned to recording at Mobtown Studios, I used the same drum machine track as the click track and rerecorded the drums, and rewrote the keyboard parts. Really it's the only song on the album which was played over a programmed beat but doesn't have any of the drum machine in the mix, everything else either has an audible drum machine, or is played on drums completely live with no click track.

When Mat Leffler-Schulman moved out of his house in Takoma Park and we stopped the initial sessions for the album, I helped him move into a new house. And his neighbor was giving him this cool old organ that we picked up with the moving truck and took to the new place. And then, when he opened Mobtown, I helped him move it into the studio, and it was a big bulky thing, so I kinda vowed that I would eventually make use of this organ that I broke a sweat moving a couple of times. And so it came in handy for the bassline on "Sore Winners" and for the organ stuff all over "Time And A Half."

The organ was located in a hallway near the front entrance of Mobtown, next to the recording area. So rather than move the organ, we just ran mics out to the hallway, and I listened to the drum machine click track on headphones. I really love the weird ambiance of all the sounds rattling around inside the instrument and the sound of me pushing the foot pedals on the bassline (recorded as a separate track and played with my hands, because I'm really not coordinated enough to do all that at once).

Muscle Memory was influenced by a lot of bands that combined synthesizers with loud, energetic rock, and one of those bands was Trans Am, who Mat got me into. So there's a bit of Trans Am all over the record, but there's a bit toward the end of the second verse of "Time And A Half," when the tempo picks up, that Mat always said sounded just like a particular Trans Am song. I didn't even know the song, though, he had to play it for me, and I don't remember what it is now.

Since I had the title "Time And A Half" for years and years, I pretty much knew that was going to be what the song was called regardless of what the lyrics were. But I wound up writing some lyrics around the phrase that I liked, so it all fit together pretty well. My scratch vocal for the song was one of my better vocal performances, but I was looking for a 2nd song for Andy Shankman to sing after he did "The Power Let Me Down" and it fit well. We've played it at almost every show, sometimes as a closer and sometimes as an opener, with Andy singing, although there was one show we did without him and John sang it. And it's one song where I tend to slow down the tempo a little, particularly for the chorus, just to give it a bigger, more dynamic kind of arena rock vibe.

When we played the release party for the album in December, we opened with "Time And A Half" and played the whole album in reverse sequence. That was something that I'd wanted to do ever since Jay-Z celebrated the 10th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt by performing it in reverse order, and I found out later that ?uestlove got the idea for that from Marvin Gaye doing it at the What's Going On release party. I know They Might Be Giants have often performed Flood in reverse order as well. I think it's a good way to perform an album, since a concert often benefits from closing with the kind of high energy songs you usually open an album with. Plus, I kinda feel like it's a good litmus test, if you've made a consistent album that isn't frontloaded, it sounds almost as good with the tracklist reversed.

The Mobtown Sessions took place after my first son, James, was born, and he was of course part of the inspiration for "Child Of Divorce," and I wrote previously about how he was present for the "Sore Winners" vocal session and was kind of part of the reason I ended up completing some of the vocal track myself. But I would say the most concrete musical influence he had on the album was on "Time And A Half," because we would play around together on my Casio a lot as I was finishing writing this song and a couple of the other last few I finished. And I ended up using a particular 'sax' patch on on the chorus and the bridge because James kept hitting a button on the Casio to play a song demo in that patch. And I started to really like the sound of chords in that cheesy Casio sax sound, which I'd never ever really used in the decade or so that I'd owned that keyboard.

The second way that James influenced "Time And A Half" is in the little weird echoing sound that closes the song (and the album). When I was in college, my dad retired and inherited some money and took the family to Jamaica for a vacation, and one of the silly little things I picked up while we were there was a little steel drum. My first job out of college a couple years later was at a medical eye bank, and they had odd little eye-themed stuff around the office, including a little rubber cluster of eyeballs like this. When James was a baby, we made a game of rolling the rubber eyeballs around the steel drum, and it made such a cool sound that I took them to Mobtown and just did that in front of a microphone and Mat threw some reverb on it. Most of the songs on the album have a real written ending, but I knew I wanted to just play out the end of "Time And A Half" on drums for a long time and let it fade out, but I'm not a huge fan of fadeouts and felt like it needed something a little more, so that sound effect really became a nice little bow to put on the end of the album.