Spell (2005 MD8 demo)

	Spell was written & demoed from a Bed-Stuy brownstone second floor room overlooking the street. I’d just moved in & was absorbing the new surroundings & taking notes.

pocket moleskine first impression

I setup the Yamaha MD8 to keep things moving. I’d left my Roland 2480 recorder in S. Austin, on consignment with a friend, so I was back to sketching out ideas on eight tracks instead of twenty-four. The limitations made me keep it simple, as the plan was to have other musicians reshape & fill out the arrangements with a producer. I wanted the sketches as free of my preconceptions as possible. I wrote about that time in Kingdom (session, song notes & bedside table version).

	For this recording of Spell, initially called Go Where You Must, I didn’t even want to influence the underpinning with strumming or percussion — mostly just basic notes as sparse punctuation & a few suggestive frills. The vocal mic captured the character of the neighborhood I was writing about & seemingly singing to as much as along with. 

The demos for what would become my 2006 album Meadow were the last I’d do with the Yamaha MD8. That Roland 2480 was consigned back to me about a year later & I started using it again instead for a few stay-at-home projects, like Our Blood & Surrounded, that needed more options.

The Roland is in semi-retirement now, but the Yamaha is unpacked again, regenerating possibilities from the myth/gift of limitation. This mix of the 2005 Bed-Stuy tracks was done yesterday.

spell (2005 MD8 demo):