Hello everyone, Clemens here!
Well, I’ve been living here in San Francisco for the past few months and it’s been a truly inspiring time. As a result, I have tape after tape of ideas and they just won’t stop. I ordered 50 cassettes when I moved here in August, and I am now on my last 10… While not all of them are going to make it through the final rounds, we have already come up with more than a ‘hand’ful of new songs and are pretty much ready to take on the full length album! We have been thinking a lot about how to tackle the new record, and how to continue from where we left of on the Hands’ EP. It’s a very interesting time for us all, everything has drastically changed from a year ago.
Box of tapes in my apartment, my sweater.
I have been wanting to write about our process of making the Hands’ EP for a while now, I think it’s a story worth sharing. So, let’s take a trip down memory lane to give you guys some info about how this whole thing came about, shall we?
Before Mr. Hands, we all played in a couple of projects together named Bamboo House and Emanuel Gears. Without those bands, Mr. Hands would never have existed. They helped to shape the common ground on which we all met and learned from one another. That, in conjunction with our developed recording and engineering skills, allowed us to create and focus on one particular aesthetic. We had collected many lively pieces of old and new recording gear, instruments and ideas over the years at Bard and in our last summer of living together, not knowing when we’d have another chance, we just wanted to “wrap it up” somehow.
On one of those very hot and humid summer days of June, Dan and I decided to turn our living room into a recording room. It was one of those floating days when you don’t give yourself any tasks but the one you think would bring you the most joy of all.. we wanted to record something. So, we set up his drums along with some carefully placed mics and got the 4 track ready. Throughout the year, we had messed around with mic placements for the drums a bunch and by this point we really knew what we wanted.
Dan’s getting ready for a walk in the woods
House on the Hill
That day, we recorded the basic track for House On the Hill. When tracking on a 4-track, as the name suggests, you have to be thoughtful about your arrangements, since you only have a limited number of tracks to work with. Fortunately we’d been playing this song for a while with Bamboo House, and had a pretty good idea of how the tracks should be divided up. For the basic track, I played the bass and Dan played drums. I think it went: bad take, good take, great take… and we took that third one. The next day, Josh and his guitar came over and filled up the second track with his lead part, solo and some bells for the chorus. At this point we realized that this intuitive, easy-going approach we were taking was really playing out well and gathered even more motivation to keep recording. Later, we added the piano part along with the flutes and I started messing around with the sound for the funky synth part that comes in towards the end. The mixing didn’t take long, and before we knew it, we had our first song of the EP… though we weren’t thinking about that yet.
Pilot
The living room never really found it’s way back to being a living room and remained some sort of in-between place until we moved out. There was always someone playing something. The room more and more became filled with instruments and suddenly it was the hangout spot for all our musician friends in and around Tivoli, NY. We let our friends The Nineties rehearse there and I even ended up tracking and mixing their album that summer.
Alex, Dan and Dorian (The Nineties) rehearsing in the living room
One day we started talking about another song we used to play in Bamboo House: Pilot. I remember telling everyone how much I didn’t like the way we had arranged it and in the light-hearted, open-minded mood we were all in, we picked up instruments and made it into a really rocking song! Someone suggested that I strum in eight-notes, which drove it in a completely new direction and towards the end of that “jam-session,” we decided to roll the tape. Everything was more or less still set up from the House On the Hill session, so I just had to make a couple of mic adjustments and knob-fiddlings in order for us to start. I believe we rehearsed the new arrangement 4 or 5 times at the most before pressing record…and we had the full basic track in one try. I played the rhythm guitar, Josh played the bass and Dan was drumming. Afterwards, we were very weirded out by the fact that we had just completely turned this song around and recorded a pretty cool take of it all in a few minutes…it seemed to come out of nowhere! We were impressed with ourselves… but it wasn’t finished yet, it needed something more. And then there was Dorian. Just sitting right there on the couch, hangin’ out. Dorian is one of my favorite guitarists and people and I asked him if he would like to add a part to the recording. He was super into it and came up with the perfectly fitting piece that finished the struggle-less puzzle. The next day I added a keyboard part, and that was it… there was our second song.
Du Wirst Schon Seh’n
Alex’s transcription of “Du Wirst Schon Seh’n”
After having such a grand time recording Pilot and House On The Hill, we decided to try something new and record one of my father’s songs. He wrote “Du Wirst Schon Seh’n” with his best buddy Michael Baier in the late sixties. They were recording a bunch of really great songs, including this one, during that time and though I grew up listening to them, I had only recently recognized their full integrity. But, this song in particular has always been a family favorite.
With the help of our friend Alex, we figured out how the song was arranged and took a whole day to get the instruments to sound close to, but not quite the same, as in my fathers’ recording. With Dan on drums and myself playing the guitar part, it took good many takes and quite a while of rehearsing. But, after a beautiful afternoon drive to Stewarts® for milkshakes, we were able to get a really great sounding take. There was nothing wrong with it, something had clicked… yet another wonderful recording experience!
Dan left for Alaska the next day, and by the time he got back I had added my vocals, bass and the tron parts. I presented the full song to him and the others when he returned, and we all immediately agreed that it should be the third track on our EP.
Josh and I were given a box that had a patchbay stuffed in it, and we completely renovated the whole thing to set up a pretty cool mixing spot in my bed room..
Palapa
..now this one is a little different. When we played Pilot with Bamboo House we always added on “Palapa” right after it, as though they were one song. That is why they are so short when separated! Right as we moved into that house a year earlier, we recorded a few songs as Bamboo House. Unfortunately it didn’t work out the way we wanted it to, so we scrapped everything from those sessions… except for Pilot’s friend Palapa. The recording on the Hands’ EP is the lone remnant from those sessions. Though now fuzed with a somewhat deformed version of it’s brother, I thought it would be cool to have the two songs still be united in the end. Because the two recordings are in a slightly different key, I had to very carefully slow down the speed of the tape in the transition so you don’t jump out of your chair once everything suddenly sounds badly out of tune. That’s the explanation for the little space-jam between Pilot and Palapa.
Josh, Aaron and Dan doing back-up vocals for “Palapa”
Good Night Nancy
I wrote this song in the winter of 2010 and immediately recorded it. It never belonged anywhere, but the recording always existed so we made it the final song on the EP. Aaron added a piano part to the recording I had done, and I asked our friend Nolan to add an organ part. Nolan used to play keys in Bamboo House and Emanual Gears and also lived in the house with us at the time. I was still not completely satisfied with the recording, but we were running out of time and my move to San Francisco was just around the corner. When I was doing the final mixes of all the songs in San Francisco, after I had some time to settle in, I added a few vocal harmonies and backwards guitar to it, and the deal was done… the song turned out to belong right there at the end of our Hands’ EP.
This record was born out of such joy and intuition and we are really looking forward to bringing these new demos to life in a similar fashion and spend another few beautiful weeks with each other.
I will be moving back to New York in the summer to reunite with the guys, so expect a lot of us in the fall!
I really can not wait to share these new songs with all of you.
-Clemens
