Nine Bands Share Their First Recording

Page 6 of 9

For musicians of all ages, one of the most exciting things in the world can be digging your teeth into a brand-new project. With fresh faces and skill sets, the experience can make music feel brand new again for many. So we appreciate it when bands are willing to step back and share earlier works that haven’t seen the light of day.

We asked eight acts, including Rubblebucket, FAWN and ARMS, to share their first recordings as a band and talk about this process, and they were generous enough to revisit their beginnings. Feel free to share your own first recordings in the comment section below.

6. Teeth and Tongue – “There’s a Lightness to My Bones” (Demo)
“This was one of the first songs I wrote after leaving my previous band, and the first song I released as  my new solo project Teeth & Tongue. I remember writing it on piano in the stairwell of this giant old warehouse I lived in with seven other people. I think they put it in the stairwell because of the acoustics, but it was definitely a fire hazard. Later I was playing it on an old Rhodes at my friend’s house and decided that was the best sound for it. At the time I was just getting into writing drum parts with samples on my computer. I didn’t have a stand-alone drum machine yet, just a bunch of drum sounds someone had given me, so I just moved all the little .wav files around on a grid. It meant I started using all these other sounds, like the gueiro, and this one’s even got a whistle. A lot of people hated that bloody whistle.”—Jess Cornelius