Making 'Wholeness & Separation' ((Part One))

This is the first in a series of text, audio, and video entries relating to the making of the new Halou record by members of the band and outside contributors:

**

Ryan:

Looking back on the making of the record, I sort of divide it up in my mind into two halves - the songs written just after "Wiser", and the more recent songs done after moving house.

Many of the older songs were done in the dark back room studio I had set up in our old place that just felt temporary and uncomfortable. Once we moved into the new house and I built out the new studio, work was much more relaxed and productive. Might have something to do with that floor-to-ceiling window...

For most of this record, we worked as we did on "Wiser": I put the demos together at our place in Marin and we finished things up at Count's in San Francisco. This time, Count took a couple of trips out to Dallas to record drums and guitars which really gave a couple songs the attention they deserved. Also, our new studio in Marin meant the countless trips over the Golden Gate Bridge, the long waits sitting still on Van Ness, and the late night drives home listening to rough mixes slowly became a thing of the past and made way for heightened wine consumption and puddles of DigiDelivered audio files.

**

So, for this part of the story, I thought I would focus on the songs that were near the end of 2001, right as "Wiser" was being released. Though "Wiser" came out in October 2001, it was finished about nine months earlier, so the songs we had written in that time could not be included on the album. Looking back, it was one of our more prolific periods during which quite a few songs came about:

The Ratio Of Freckles To Stars
Ingénue
Night Divides The Girls
One Sunny Day (the outro of which became the track "Separation")

...and four or five others that have not yet been released

It was during this period that we were playing a lot with Greg, our upright bassist, and Elizabeth, the cellist who played with us during the "Wiser" shows. The arrangements of these new songs reflected that lineup and so the demos were little more than bass, cello, piano, a beat, and Rebecca's vocals - occasionally a bit of xylophone or glockenspiel. The reason for keeping things simple like this was (hypothetically) so that we could take each song in a different way once we began 'production' on the final versions.

As it turned out, "Freckles" was the stand-out track of the bunch and ended up being the only one to make it onto the record. Though the others are each interesting and enjoyable in their own way, we chose to omit them for one reason or another - usually to do with the production style. It was important to us to have an eclectic record as opposed to our previous two, which were fairly consistent in tone.


Ryan.

(to be continued...)