On Travelling 1/96
a magnus blur
In 1995, the song On Travelling moved north from Calif to shack-up just below the Canadian border with other songs & situations simmering along in-process. Almost a year later, this demo was recorded with the resulting yield at a one-day acoustic session, back in SF, in a setup called Blackeyed Pig. The collection, to be titled Devotion & Doubt, was coming together from a number of other places — Tucson, Austin, NYC, SF. The next time I was in that border town, photos were being shot for the album in a few places I’d remembered from my smear of time there. It’s where I began putting liner notes together.
The later, final version of On Travelling, on 1996’s Devotion & Doubt, was an impromptu moment captured on a plastic chord organ I’d picked up in Tucson at a thrift store on the way to the studio that morning.
While the earlier acoustic guitar take from SF was rendered from a tensely pressing present, the sighing intonation of the electric organ, called a Magnus Jewel, urged the song be presented as the past. I was trying out the Magnus for the first time with On Travelling when mallets & arco bass unexpectedly weaved in as if planned. Most of the recordings made at Wavelab in Tucson happened this way — unspoken & natural.
