Last week Nick Zammuto (formerly of The Books) started sharing a series of in-depth blog posts about his band’s new album Anchor. Covering a song per day, he’s current up to track 8, “IO.” In anticipation of Zammuto’s show at LPR this coming Sunday, October 26, we’ve highlighted some choice excerpts from his notes.
Check out our selections below (and listen along). Click on the link for each track to dive into more fascinating background on the music of Anchor, and keep tabs on the Zammuto blog this week, as Nick is on pace to cover the album’s last four tracks just in time for Sunday’s show.
Track 1: Good Graces
“The concept for the melody of the verses was to twist the scale as much as possible by ending each line on an odd note, and double the voice with subtle piano notes to reinforce the twists. It’s not major, it’s not minor, it’s not blues: it shifts between the three without commitment, allowing light and dark to shift unexpectedly in small moments.”
Track 2: Great Equator
“While working on the lyrics for this track I became obsessed with reading the wiki tvtropes.org. As they say on their front page “Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” It’s literally a catalog of all of the tricks and conventions of fiction writing, backed by thousands of examples. Right off, I got a few great lines from it. The kind of lines that invoke an entire world in just a few words.”
Track 3: Hegemony
“I asked [Zammuto drummer Sean Dixon] what a punk beat would sound like in 3/4 (instead of 4/4) and he said “Oh, like this…” and I pressed record. Then after a while exploring the double-time beat he said, “But the really cool thing is that you can go here…” and he proceeded to drop into a 3/4 break without missing a beat. It was a MOMENT. I’d never heard a 3/4 breakbeat, and I don’t know why!? They sound great, especially after a 3/4 punk freakout.”
Track 4: Henry Lee
“I tried and failed miserably for several days trying to find good words and melodies for the track, and started to feel desperate and defeated. The 4/4 frustration started to set in. So, I started to look to the public domain for inspiration. I turned to THE SOURCE of modern American songs, which is Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, a 4 LP compilation of songs recorded in the late 1920’s. And there it was: The first track on the first record. A ‘murder ballad’ from 1929 called ‘Henry Lee’ by Dick Justice, based on the Scottish folk standard ‘Young Hunting’.”
Track 5: Need Some Sun
“I think this song is about me (and probably many others) when I was in my twenties. Making the transition from an environment of ‘higher education’ to a world of mundane rat races was soul crushing. It’s really a story for another time, but in my twenties I found myself in a place where I couldn’t imagine a future, and was frantically searching for someone to tell me what to do to fix my life. That person didn’t exist, but the search for them did lift me out of my predicament. Generally, I feel like if you don’t deal with your existential shit in your twenties you’ll probably end up taking it out on the other people in your life until it becomes a midlife crisis later on. At any rate, I was determined to get my crisis over with so I decided to drop everything and hike the Appalachian Trail in 2001. I walked from Maine to Georgia in 129 days, and after that my internal compass was much stronger. This song became about that moment of dropping everything and ‘lighting out’ for a new frontier.”
Track 6: Don’t Be a Tool
“Until recently I’ve shied away from reverb. All of the Books tracks were bone dry (with a few exceptions). Being stuck ‘in the box’ gave me access only to the most rudimentary digital reverbs, and they rubbed me the wrong way since they tended to obscure the fine detail of the samples I was working with. But recently I’ve had a reverb epiphany. I feel like a lot of the technical methods I’ve learned over the last year involve using reverb as compositional tool, and as a way to create space, either a realistic one or a super-natural one. I recently heard a great interview with a sound recordist that experimented with firing guns inside of anechoic chambers. The sound is shocking, in a very unimpressive way… it makes you realize that reflected sound plays a huge (and largely subliminal) role in creating the context of a sound. Mushing sound out in space and time, either as reverb or delay, is a FINE art that I haven’t fully appreciated until recently.”
Track 7: Electric Ant
“Obviously, this song is about my disillusionment with the cancerous obsession our culture has with making money at all costs. In the verses, the game was to start with a sort of cliche image of overly confident business people in transit and then abstract it to reflect human systems as a geophysical force. That is to say, zoom into a self-involved individual and zoom out to reveal the ant army. But then, the chorus is in a completely different key, sort of ruing the fact that we are generally so reticent about what really satisfies us.”
Track 8: IO
“I wanted to YELL on one track on this record. Yelling is really not my thing and that’s part of the reason I had to go for it. One of my favorite records is Tom Waits ‘Bone Machine’ because of the huge range of textures he gets out of his voice (and other instruments). I’m no Tom Waits, obviously, but I like the idea that I’m not defined by the sound of my voice and I can get different textures out of it without sounding disingenuous (I hope).”
As Nick mentions in his Anchor blog posts, you can support Zammuto’s intrepid musical explorations by buying the new album and other releases from the Zammuto webstore, coming to a show, and spreading the word about the band’s East Coast tour. Get your tickets here for Zammuto’s show at LPR this Sunday 10/26 .
posted by John