Elizabeth Childers (spoon river demo)

Hi you.

We return now to read together about another mislaid musical finding heard from my attic. This installment of spoon river demos examines The Hill’s journey from demo to final track, including the melodic treatment of Edgar Lee Masters' poem Elizabeth Childers.

continued from Oscar Hummel (spoon river demo)

            It was 1998: the contrary period between my album, Since, being contractually released by MCA & physically buried, partially in the form of hundreds of actual copies about to be tossed in a Universal Studios dumpster in Hollywood. An obliging intern at the company contacted me with news that they'd pulled aside a box of my stock from the trash pad & offered to send my way. The recycled merch arrived fresh as a daisy, so I sold them at shows with a clean conscious — I considered it inadvertent tour support. If you bought one during that go-around, you were a part of planting a smaller footprint up the ass of a major label. Thank you, then & now, for your unbeknownst consumer activism.

In spite of nothing, when I was personally tossed from the label as well, the announcement came as a no-shocker. Aside our quarrelsome interactions, I'd already assumed that if it didn't happen by mere kismet, it certainly would when they received the eighteen-piece, one-track song cycle of Spoon River Anthology poems that I was in the midst of creating — an anticipatory one-sided win-win kiss-off. Subtle guerrilla sabotage is also a fine art.

Earlier, the label had sent me just enough funding for one day in a studio to record demos for their unintended optional third release. I used the unrecoupable to purchase an eight-track mini-disc recorder, instead, which I've been using through the years since. Thus, once again, they were unwittingly supportive & everyone got away by screwing someone else over — it's Business 101, inbred in corporate nature. A round of touché!s for all!

I had rented a workspace in a defunct medical facility in Edmonton AB, where I was sedately living it up at the time. The compact room was the size of a walk-in medicine cabinet. I had an ART tube preamp, a Shure SM58 mic &, along with a few standard musical instruments, a Boss SP202 Dr Sample — a cheap, portable sampling device used by club DJs & dance music designers on a budget. I used it as a 16-bit metronome where I could tap its rubbery buttons to calculate a beat & the good doctor would deliver a lo-fi heartbeat-like loop.

            In 1999, my demos & I drove down to Wavelab Studio in Tucson to meet up for five days with engineer Craig Schumacher, producer JD Foster & musicians John Convertino & Joey Burns. Having worked with the same cast on 1996's Devotion & Doubt, I knew what they were capable of crafting. Technically, it was a shoe-in, but as my disposition characteristically leads, I wanted to step out of convention — especially my own. Unlimited evolution comes from slight variations, so I inherently select, in all things, to amend the laws of second nature.

For this assignment, I proposed a loose instruction to diversify the go-to: as in go to where a remarkable rhythm section lives & compel them from assembling with their well-established drum kit & bass rig. John would only use parts of his kit, disbanded around the main recording room, along with other improvised percussion devices, & Joey would arco a double bass or bow a cello in glassy isolation. I knew it wouldn't be a stretch for them. At our previous session, John had bowed a vibraphone & Joey had thrummed his low-end on the headstock — gratefully, second nature isn't necessarily their first instinct.

We kept the bones of the home-hewn instrumental songs intact & merely tightened them up for fidelity & individual track time, with additional overdubs by J & J & JD. As a broader impression of the body began to emerge, I ended up subtracting from my over-frilled arrangements of the sung selections to suit the unfolding mood of the whole. A comparison of the album version of Elizabeth Childers to my demo-stab proves the limitless precision of these aces, given whatever criterion is thrown at them. The contributions of all participants, including the seamless sequencing & mastering of Jon Marshall Smith as a final touch, allowed me to privately progress on terms met by their openness.

            The take of Elizabeth Childers (which I offer below, at the end of this post) is one of two pre-Tucson demos that I cooked up in that Canadian examination room. I chose this one in particular because the general essence differs most from the album selection & explains why I didn't pursue this direction as a final track:

1. The chug & jangle of the electric guitars, conjured at this writing with a foot atop a front stage monitor, too-happily misrepresent the tone of the poem.

2. Though I'm sure the beat was left in to personify a human pulse, this example has Dr Sample unabashedly thumping like a mixed-up nineties dance clubber just following implied orders to "Putcha hands together people! Let's take it home!"

3. Lastly, important to me anyway, is that I mis-sang the eighth line of the poem, trading "'cause you've never traveled" with "For you never traveled." Had we stuck with this rendition, I could've easily enough re-sung, but we moved on. My foremost aim from the outset of this project was to transplant the text exactly. The singsong already takes liberties with the penned punctuation as a function of arrangement, but misquoting is a step too far in my book.

From Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters

            All said, since retrieving these reference mixes a few months ago from my upstairs heap, they've also taken me aback to scenes of other, unassociated, personal attempts as if stumbling upon a soul-splattered mirror. It leaves me reappearing tightly wound & running loose, randomly sorting through a guitar caseload of open options, musical & otherwise.

Thank you for exploring my attic with me. Take away whatever suits you & try on this unreleased home recording of Elizabeth Childers (spoon river demo):