I've owned two copies of the Joy Division box set Heart and soul. The first one was lost for a while, so I ran out & bought another like an emergency prescription refill. Then, of course, the first one suddenly turned up.
I used to cover Love Will Tear Us Apart years ago with my brief Austin TX band AA Nightmare, but left the song there as a memento of that period & tried to fashion a personal arrangement with Isolation instead. I gave it a few cracks over the years in my home studio, but was never satisfied with the interpretations. I've been planning on it again since the lockdown happened because, of course, the meaning expanded along with the free time.
I wanted to record it this time on my phone for textural reasons — ya know: a voice heard through a phone mic as if a wrong-number message from a stranger spilling something private or bewildering. That kind of situation . . . Have you ever gotten one of those? I did recently — There’s a future post about it called Enigma of Initial Curiosity.
Like I said — “I wanted to” — but my locale wouldn’t allow it. I live among dueling catalytic converter deniers who street-park on both sides of my place like growling stereo bookends filled in with the din of lawn-care junkies & non-permit residential handy-andies loudly half-assing their rundown docket of disrepairs.
To isolate myself from the noise, I camped out in a backroom of my house where my Roland multi-track recorder is holed up & went all-in for a single live performance with my Kalamazoo strung with nickel bronze 12-53’s tuned D G D G G D & skin-picked at an AT C3000 focused on the neck near the body, a Shure SM81 narrowly staring at the bridge & a Rode NT1-A backed off for a distant vocal thread. When I somehow got this version recorded last week, I felt as if I’d just crossed a fluky high-wire of chance over the surrounding racket.
The result is a public free for all: Isolation (lockdown home demo):
I ordered a Since box and there was an address issue that I didn’t think to correct, so it’s probably coming back to you. Can you let me know when it does and maybe we can sort it out?
Catalytic converter deniers. Good one.