The Hold Steady studio diary - Stay Positive - 11/29/07-2/19/08

We just finished mastering “Sequestered in Memphis,” the first single from Stay Positive, The Hold Steady’s fourth record. We’re mastering at Sterling Sound with my favorite mastering engineer, the one and only Greg Calbi. Great man, great mastering engineer. Tad, Bobby and Franz are with me, and Craig is expected soon. Galen was a no show for the day. All are in agreement that it kicks ass.

The album version of the song is great for me, but I think it’s best to have the vocal sit a little more on top of the mix for the single. And we’ll cut the intro in half so we get to the vocal quicker. You know the old saying: “Don’t bore us, where’s the chorus!?” Actually, that saying is not that old.

I pretty much knew from the first day we rehearsed this song that it was gonna be special. It was back in December while we doing four rehearsals a week, hashing out all the songs. It was really cold. And we’d run over to the local bar, Jacks, to get hot toddies. That’s how The Hold Steady roll. Hot drinks in the winter, cold drinks in the summer.

In it’s original form, the chorus melody was not focused. Also, the chorus went about 16 bars too long. As we ran through it, we knew Craig needed to hit the chorus on the downbeat with a melody or hook that was strong and memorable. We spent a bunch of time on the previous record, Boys And Girls In America, talking about that. We call it, “hitting on the ones.”

This is how The Hold Steady rehearse. Tad and the rest of the boys hash out the arrangement and get the song sounding tight as Craig works out his melodies and lyrics over the top. He is constantly refining the delivery and lyrics. He’s always in his book pulling out new ideas. And Tad can crank out the riffage like nobody’s business.

Listening to the demos of the new songs, there were some things I wanted to achieve. I’ll get to most of them eventually. One of the things I wanted to have in one song was a chorus breakdown with a group vocal. Kind of a sing-along, if you will. Knowing how involved their fans are at the shows, I wanted to give them extra room to stretch and sing along. “Sequestered” was the right song for that treatment. On the demo, that song had a long chorus outro and something needed to happen during it.

One of the ways to add a dynamic to that vamp out was to put a breakdown in there. The reaction at rehearsal went both ways. I think half the guys liked it; the other half were skeptical. Franz had also thought that a breakdown would be good in the song. So we agreed on the concept, but not the execution. We started with a drastic break, which contained only claps and vocals, but that seemed a bit to light. At one point, Bobby started to play a cool Phil Spectorish beat to the break and we were there! These moments happen in rehearsal often. An idea stalls and then someone in the band makes it happen. A couple of guys didn’t buy the idea, but I promised it would be awesome in the end. I’m still shocked they took my word.

While overdubbing at Wild Arctic in Long Island City, we had a visit from a friend of the band. Ben, the singer from Lucero, was in town, and he came by and hung out for a day. And we put him to work. While he was putting backing vocals on the choruses, the idea came up to have Ben be the singer in the breakdown of the song. So he sang the hell out of the break. After living with that direction for a couple of days, it was decided we still needed the gang in there. It seemed odd going from Craig singing the chorus to Ben’s totally different character in the break. So we added about six guys in a stairwell, with a microphone at the bottom of the steps singing the chorus of the song. After two takes, we had the best of both worlds. Ben’s distinctive voice and a bunch of singing vikings in a live stairwell. I like!

As I said before, Craig had been messing around with lyrics at rehearsal, adding certain ones, dropping some, changing vocal inflections and entrances. We all knew that basis of the song, but it wasn’t until Wild Arctic, when Craig actually started the lead vocal for the song, that I got to hear the entire story. On his second take of the song, after I had checked the vocal sound, me and Tad, who had stopped in to be on call, were laughing our asses off about how good it was! Whenever I hear the song, I can see Craig singing it!

Another of the things I wanted to accomplish on this record was to get Craig more involved vocally on the basic tracks. On B&GIA, Craig played guitar live and didn’t do much singing while the band was cutting the basics. Although it worked well then, I’ve been really psyched lately having singers lead the band while tracking. The advantages are many, but I’ll name a few right off the bat. When a band hears a vocal and can play to it, they know where the spaces are and how to play around the vocal. Y’know, put fills in certain spots, drive the chorus a bit more, be noisier in an instrumental break or an intro. It’s actually a great map when and when not to overplay. Also, I notice tempos are more under control when there’s a vocal on top. Or at least you can tell when the track is getting too fast by the singer rushing his delivery. It’s super helpful, believe me.

So on this record, I set up Mr. Finn in a booth right by the control room with a bunch of different microphones to try out on each song. He’s got a distinctive voice and a distinctive delivery, so I was able to audition a different microphone for each song. It was kind of a sneaky way to do a microphone check without wasting his time. Anyway, we decorated his booth with Christmas lights and a comfy chair and he was able to hang in there and listen to tunes and read and whatever he wanted. I also stuck a couple of dolls in his room for inspiration. Kinda, but not really. (When the band posted some picture of us making the record, one of the “Unified Scene,” the band’s rabid fan base, posted that he thought he saw a Freddie Mercury doll in the vocal booth.) Craig was super focused on guiding the band. Even without finished lyrics, he was able to be the focal point of the song. In fact, we kept one live vocal on the record, because it was awesome.

Anyway, as we were finishing up the single edit, I was pretty stoked that we had finally completed the record. Except we weren’t done. We all took our reference disks home and lived with them for a week. Vagrant, the record label, got their refs and lived with them too. As it turned out, the label felt that the record would be better served to be brighter. I wasn’t necessarily in agreement, but I understood why they wanted it that way. Greg, the mensch that he is, made time for me to run in and audition brightening two songs just a bit.

We started with the first single and then we did “Constructive Summer,” the first song on the record. Greg gave both songs a sprinkle of top end and we presented it to the band and the label. The label loved it and the band was fine with it too. I liked it too, and if it made the label happy, great! Now all Greg had to do was tweak the rest of the record to match the sound of the first two. Which he did over the next couple of days. So we finally were ready to put the record to bed.

“Goodnight, Stay Pos!”

“Goodnight, John!”