William and Emily (spoon river demo)

. . . continued from Ollie McGee (spoon river demo) . . .

William & Emily. Last song on the 2000 album The Hill. The final version was re-recorded with air-chord organ & cello at Wavelab Studio in Tucson AZ in 1999.

	I’m guessing that this 1997 home demo was the first stab at this poem because of the squeaks at the beginning & end. At the time, I was recording demos in a small basement room in Edmonton AB. The captured squeak is from an old circle-seat wooden stool.

This is the Hammond chord organ I used. Twenty-four tubes, two Jensen speakers. Made in the late 50’s: 

. . . stool missing in action . . .

I found the organ at a thrift store in Edmonton while I was on tour. It was too big to take with me, so I stored it at a new friend’s place when I moved on. When I came back to pick it up, instead of taking it to the US with me, I just moved in with the friend. 

This is the keyboard also used on the first instrumental on The Hill, Mrs. Merritt. 

That song was recorded on my Yamaha MD8 minidisc recorder with a Shure SM58 on one of the speakers about the same level as the squeaker: 

I recorded Mrs Merritt on that 8-track machine as I sat on said-squeaky-stool while I played the song’s melody on each track without listening along to the previous in real time, to see how it would accidentally land in disjointed layers. Each of the eight blind takes included squeaking at various points when I’d spin around on the stool to work the recorder behind me while tracking. 

	I found the below-embedded track, William & Emily, on a CD of reference mixes from the time. The song-version was born in that Edmonton basement. The singing is slippery, still unsure, trying to arrange the poem with the music. 

	The genesis of The Hill was unintentional. I was in the midst of a week-long room at the Ranch Motel in Olancha Calif. I rented what used to be a garage. No phone. No TV. I brought a cassette four-track cassette recorder & the book Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 

The motel was originally a hunting lodge for Howard Hughes. Behind my room was a long-abandoned airstrip. 

. . . said airstrip behind barbed wire fence decorated with horsehair . . .

After checking out, I tossed the cassette in the glovebox of my then-newly-leased Toyota Tacoma, forgot about it completely & headed next for Wavelab to work on what would become my second album Devotion & Doubt.  

session for Devotion & Doubt

I found the cassette again in 1997, still in the truck.

William & Emily (spoon river demo) :