The Hold Steady studio diary - Stay Positive - #6

Every band has its own dynamic. Sonic Youth, DBT and Dinosaur Jr are all very different bands internally. Some are more democratic than others, and with that, dealing with each band and individual member is a case by case scenario. The same holds true with The Hold Steady. In terms of songwriting, both Tad and Franz are strong songwriters in their own way.

Up until this point, we had been tracking strictly Tad songs. Now it was time to start tracking Franz’s songs. He had four that were in the batch of songs for the project, all really cool and all really different. One of my favorites was “Sapphire,” a really cool, up-tempo song that Craig had an awesome lyric for: “Oh, Sapphire, if I cross myself when I come, would you maybe receive me?” Really awesome lyrics.

Anyway, it was mid-afternoon and the boys were loose. In fact, Bobby and Tad had been threatening to make dinner for the crew since we started tracking. One of the perks of working at Water Music was a 1,000 square foot loft that was part of the complex. With a kitchen and plenty of hanging space, a band of five could stay together and not get into each other’s shit for a couple of weeks. With the kitchen and a huge Shoprite food market across the street, it makes sense to have as many family-style dinners as possible.

We tracked “Sapphire” a bunch. During rehearsal, we added a cool Keith Moon-style drum break in the bridge that leads into a rousing outro section. Mr. Finn sings over the outro, “I was a skeptic at first, but these miracles work!” It builds with the band accenting on the last few repeats. It makes for big rock.

The bridge section was pretty much a workout for Bobby. It would be for any drummer. As we were doing takes, I knew we would have to do some tape edits, so I was taking notes as the takes went by. After a handful of takes, I knew we had gotten the best we could out of Bobby, so I brought everyone in to listen back. As we listened back to numerous takes and agreed on what bits to edit, Bobby and Tad were upstairs making dinner.

Just to be safe, I did all my test edits in the digital world to make sure the takes were consistent tempo-wise. One of the things Bobby has really gotten better at is his internal metronome. He’s very good at playing a number of takes and he is always around the target tempo of the song. True to form, he was very consistent, so it was time to cut the analog tape. Except dinner was ready.

And oh, what a dinner it was. When we came up into the loft, waiting for us was a great dinner of meatloaf and lasagna. That, and some red wine and a kick-ass salad, and we had a feast. It was a perfect dinner with some of my favorite guys in the world. After an hour and a half of eating and laughing, we went back to work.

At this point, it was 11:00 p.m. and I was feeling a little toasty. I should have just called the session and did the edits in the morning, but the red wine had me buzzing. So we forged ahead, tape everywhere. We used a combination of four different takes to come up with our master version. Verses from one take, first two choruses from another take, bridge from a third take and the outro from a fourth take. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but it was busy work. And with a few takes cut apart, it’s deadly to lose your concentration.

So we did our editing for an hour and listened back to the take and did a tweak or two and we were done. At that point it was too late to accomplish anything else, so we called it an evening.

We finished tracking Franz’s songs the next day and we had a few more songs to look at. One of them was a song with the working title, “Four Sticks.” When I got the demo of the song, I was not too impressed with it. The demo had a “new age” vibe which I didn’t really get. Also, the demo was only an instrumental version. That’s why it was the demo.

When it came time to cut the track, we had a little fun with it. Tad was cutting this song on acoustic guitar, so we set him up in his amp room. I put up a room microphone, which would be useful to add some depth to the acoustic sound.

Franz played organ and used the Hammond B-3 foot pedals, which give a deeper sound than the keyboard does. We put towels on Bobby’s drums and recorded them, “Ringo style.” And Galen sat this one out. With no real part on the song, we felt like the organ could take over the low end.

Craig sang his ass off in his vocal booth and when I heard his lyrics, I had a new appreciation for this song. It really came to life as we were tracking it. And then I realized that the track was the song. We really didn’t need to add anything else. We did add an extra guitar and keyboard track as sweetening. And Craig changed one lyric, but agreed to keep the rest of the great live track that he sang. And then I would get J Mascis to lay down some hot banjo on the song, but in essence, that song was finished when the band came in and listened to the playback. That was a case where a song went from nowhere to on the record, without a doubt. That song ended up being called, “Both Crosses.”

It was time to start working on some of the more recent ideas the band had. Like the ideas that they wrote while we were in the studio. Some of the songs were just ideas and some were songs that we agreed to try if we had the time. And so that’s what we did. Tad finished the song that we called “Citrus 2.” It was an acoustic riff that Tad had knocking around. It was cool and it was really new. So we put that down, with just Bobby and Tad jamming to it. Overdubs would follow. And it would be renamed.

There were two other tracks that we cut and we were basically done tracking. One last bit of business to attend to was going back and comparing the first few songs we tracked to the later ones. Sometimes, as a band gets on a roll, the playing gets better and better. At the end of the sessions you realize that the first one or two tracks are not as good as the later ones.

Thankfully, this was not the case with our tracking. Our boys were golden from the get-go and we were officially done with phase two of Stay Positive. Phase one being rehearsals. Phase two being tracking.

With four more days left at Water Music, we needed a plan to utilize the time we had in an intelligent fashion. But first we had to do some rough mixes. Just so various members could listen to the rough mixes to get any ideas on overdubs out of their head. And then we had a very important meeting with two bottles of Jameson.

Read Agnello's previous blog posts about the creation of Stay Positive:

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#2

#3

#4
#5