Isolation (lockdown home demo)
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):
May as well share right back - I live in a little midwestern college town full of musicians (am not one myself), and while helping run a local band camp in the summer, we'll sit around and bullshit in the lulls between hauling gear around and running errands. Whenever your name comes up as a favorite songwriter, and it often comes up, people's eyes either go soft or just light up, and they start listing favorite songs or albums or shows, or the first time they heard your music. Like, the first time I heard your music - it was Lil Wallet Picture, it stopped me in my tracks while counting pills in the hospital pharmacy where I worked. I shushed my supervisor - she was so surprised that she actually shut up (my job-saving excuse: I was losing count). I scribbled your name down on a post-it and hauled ass to the record store after work. Anyway, it's been really cool - sorry, it's Friday and I'm all out of words- to hear/read your voice in these stories, recollections, and recordings you share with us. Thank you.
I love being on this journey with you Rich!
It even makes me look at my world differently, and ponder the quirks and the stories behind the folks on my street... though they would be very hard pressed to form a cast as entertaining as your neighbours.
I love the recording of Isolation. The AT C3000 and SM81 have us right there in the room with you. Something happens around the 1:20 mark where your vocal bends into the note as the guitar note arrives, forming one of those moments that less than a handful of musicians I know of on this earth can conjure, where I literally get chills down my spine. So good. And to know you were walking a metaphorical high wire while recording it makes the alchemy of that moment all the more special and amazing.