Tiny Telephone: I Recorded the Last Album Before the Pandemic Changed Everything
I am a musician, of sorts, and this is the story of a mental health break that was also an album
The Frontier Psychiatrists is a health-themed newsletter. Owen Scott Muir, M.D, writes it. Today’s post is about sanity— as in things we do that aren’t remotely medical because we need to hold our s*hit together. For me, that is music. The album described here was the last one completed there before the pandemic led to the closure of the historic studio in which it was recorded. Don’t wait, people. This is some of the story behind it.
December 27th, 2019-January 10, 2020 were the dates.
The album would eventually be called “The City of Woe.” this refers to Dante’s Inferno, Canto III.
I flew out to the mission district in San Fransisco to record an album. It was the last album to be finished at Tiny Telephone Studios, with my friend John Vanderslice as the recording engineer. His band is the backup band, and I wrote a series of songs in the year leading up to this. It now exists in Oakland.
Also, please follow it on Spotify and consider listening or adding to playlists. It’s better than no one hearing it!
I went to get some feelings out. I went to record music that I needed to get out of my head. A weight on my heart and crying to do—this was the state of affairs. The experience was not very rock and roll. I would show up at the studio in the morning. I spent the nights in a hotel. I would spend hours each night simply weeping—two to three. I had a friend in the neighborhood whom I connected with; she and her videographer brother came to the studio with me. I pulled myself together by the morning and went back to record more music.
I wish I could have something more “rock and roll” to say about recording a rock and roll album, but I don’t. I left some equipment on loan with John, which was stolen in a studio break-in. As I have written about, San Fransisco has become a rough city.
“Have you talked about your main profession formally or just talked around it?” My videographer asked me.
“I want to talk about my dad,” was my response. The song about my dad is the last track on the album; it’s a letter to him about losing his father to completed suicide well before I was born.
I decided to make a record at Tiny Telephone because of John Vanderslice. He owns the studio and he's the engineer for my recording. We've been friends for about 15 years. The first time I was here at Tiny Telephone was for a tour to surprise my wife on Valentine's Day— six years ago.
Some of my favorite records were recorded at Tiny Telephone: Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism!
This is a place where they use analog tape. This is a Studer 24-track reel-to-reel. When I worked back at Sony Music Studios when I was younger, we still had these machines, which were still in use.
Now, it's several years later, and very few places still use analog equipment completely. They do that at Tiny Telephone in the Mission District of San Francisco. We didn't micromanage. Most of the things you hear on the record are first takes. Most of them are only one take. The vocals were done in one take, with only one exception.
It’s an exercise in imperfectionism.
I’m not a one-take singer, historically. This was about letting go and happened to generate some music as well. There's very little “punching in and out”—that was editing on tape and slicing tape, which we also abstained from doing. The whole album was completed in a week and a half between pre-production, recording, and mixing.
There are 3 cover songs on the album. One such song by the Avett Brothers is I and Love, and You. The chorus has a great lyric that goes:
“Brooklyn, Brooklyn, take me in. Are you aware of the shape I'm in?”
Here we were in San Francisco. During the take, I changed the words. San Francisco gets a mention, and so does Oakland, right next door.
The musicians are remarkable session musicians, and they just pick everything up immediately. I had to do almost no work. I had a couple of “ideas” here and there, but really, I let other people, for once in my life, interpret the music I had written. I let go, over and over and over again. John kicked me out on the last day of mixing entirely.
A couple of instruments define the sound of the record, including the Fender Bass IV (sponsored link!). Here is a video clip from the session:
It's a six-string bass, but it's tuned like a guitar, and you can play it like a guitar or a bass. It is the secret weapon on a lot of Motown albums we love. It is all over the record. The Arp Odyssey is a synthesizer and is another signature sound. The Minimoog, of course, is the classic bass sound that appears often. It is bringing in a lot of the bass sounds. And there are 808 drum machines. It's just this place is just lousy with classic stuff. There's a ukulele. That's a big one.
A couple of different drum kits in several rooms make the range of tones more broad. The epic Jason Slota plays drums.
My voice sounds different across the record because I got a cold. You get a little “growly me” on some tracks and a much cleaner and pristine version earlier in this session.
Recording studios with tape machines are also the only place you can have razor blades kick it around and have it not be something you're worried about.
I did not know what it was going to sound like. It sounds like what it is, which is relatively modern music played on instruments, musicians, and studio equipment that are all 70s vintage: I was born in 1979. John is older, and so are the instruments, console, tape machine, and other technology. The music was written now about now things. I don't think it sounds old or classic. But maybe other people will? Some of the vocal stuff has a little David Bowie vibe— that was John’s flair!
I made one music video with a friend, which is good; I struggled with seeing how sick I was with obesity at the time!
Thanks for reading or listening. I have 5 albums total released; some are worth your time. The City of Woe was the last full-length album created before the studio In the Mission district closed permanently.
nice to hear that you are grounded in the REAL world of all things analog. peace brother.