I’ve been sick all week… flu or something. Whenever I lie down, my nose clogs up and I get too uncomfortable to sleep. The lack of rest is making it tough for me to get better. I was using nasal spray earlier in the week, but you can’t use that too many days in a row so I put it aside. Decongestant pills don’t seem to do much of anything. This is a tricky one!

This is the worst I’ve felt since my 2006 pneumonia, which was really bad. If you want to see something rough, search for The Hanslick Rebellion’s Checkerboard Kids performance on YouTube. I was just beginning to recover from pneumonia when we did that gig. I’m wearing like a dozen layers, I couldn’t speak or sing, and half the muscles in my body were pulled from coughing so every movement unleashed bolts of pain. Even after I got over that pneumonia, it was still two years before my immune system worked properly – I was sickly the whole time. I don’t want to get anywhere near that point ever again.

I’ve been trying to relax at home, do a little tidying up. I moved here way back in May but the unpacking part never really ends. I came across this old J-Bird Records box tucked into a milk crate; I assumed it was surplus copies of We’re All Going To Jail! or some shit, but it turned out to be full of 4-track Portastudio cassettes.

I thought I knew where all my old 4-track tapes were… this was a secret stash of about twenty cassettes dating all the way back to 1992. There are Skyscape tunes I had totally forgotten about; collaborations with old friends like Joe Aversano; some of my earliest solo demos; the only existing recording by Pavlov’s Dogs, my freshman-year band with Mike Keaney; even multitrack takes of live gigs where we used my Portastudio as a mixer. I’ve started dumping them into Pro Tools and playing around – the perfect way to pass sick time at home!

I’m no mix engineer, but the raw material is lo-fi enough that even I can’t mess it up. There is a lot of charming stuff here. I’m polishing and putting snippets online as they catch my ear. Here they are, with more to come – a work in progress, 19 years and counting.

I particularly love “Wheelbarrow Rosebud”, the Joe Aversano track. Joe was (and still is) a really unique guitarist, and he writes such pretty stuff. His delivery on this tune is totally 1992, straight out of “Valerie Loves Me”.

Then there’s “Hippies On The Road”, which always started as Skyscape’s cover of “Riders On The Storm” but inevitably morphed into whatever Dom wanted to sing about that day (most often something concerning the Brady Bunch). The drums were recorded mono, so I shoved them into one channel and compressed them until they blew up… then I dropped them out in spots and added some 909 kick and snare. The bass is the keyboard bassline as I originally played it, but dumped into Melodyne, converted to MIDI and now triggering a Fender Rhodes Bass sample. I then EQ’d the bass out of the keyboard track so only the new Rhodes part remained. I guess I could just do clean, faithful mixes of everything, but this isn’t about preserving history – it’s about making cool shit!

Dom and I have been secretly working on a new Skyscape record: Dr. Des Moines. Like Zetacarnosa, it’s a mashup of hi- and lo-fi sounds from the present and the past. I recently unearthed a couple of unfinished tunes from 1992, “Poetry Read-In At Bob’s” and “Motorvate”, with the intention of slipping them in amidst the newly-written material. We’d gotten far enough with them that keyboard sequences exist, but I couldn’t find lyrics anywhere. Turns out there were 4-track demos of both songs that I’d completely forgotten – so not only do we now know the words, but I’ve got classic takes of Dom singing them that I can weave into the 2011 versions. This is awesome.

I lost about half my wardrobe to water damage right before I moved upstate; what remained when I got to Albany included a number of green plaid shirts that I hadn’t worn since college. Some had purple accents so I busted ‘em out and started wearing them to work on Fridays. School spirit thing, purple on Fridays. Anyway, I’ve named the project after these shirts, which, like the 4-track jams, originated in the early ’90s, sat in the dark for almost twenty years, and are now back in action. These are my Green Plaid Recordings.

Whoa, a little Descendents action in the title there!

One of the best things about making music is that it comes with pictures, and you get to choose what picture comes with your music. Not even the death of physical product has spoiled the symbiotic relationship between music and album cover. Awesome for me; album art is the place where my two passions intersect.

As much as I love designing for print and dimensional objects, I have to admit that the digital album cover presents specific challenges which are very satisfying to meet. In digital, you only get one small image to make your impression – there’s no inner sleeve, no booklet, not even a back cover. You’ve got to be perfectly on point. Clear, vivid imagery; metaphors have to be extra clever because they have to be extra simple.

In digital, as in print, color choices need to be just right. The color of album art can have an almost synaesthetic effect, causing the listener to associate that color with the music, and that absolutely does affect the listening experience. I still “hear” Faith No More’s Angel Dust as blue, and their King For A Day as red… prescient choices on the designer’s part, or simply my reaction to the packaging?

I love doing referential stuff, period stuff. With our “classic American music in classic American studios” approach, Sevendys has given me a chance to have fun with classic American musical design. Since each song is being treated as a single, I’ve had to make a corresponding “cover” for every one and I’m having a LOT of fun so far.

Here are some notes on the concepts and techniques behind these designs. Maybe one day I’ll do a cover-by-cover retrospective post on every item in my back catalog (assuming you missed the Art of Eschatone Records exhibition in Brooklyn a couple years ago), but for brevity(and sanity)’s sake I’ll keep this to the first four Sevendys illustrations.

“City Of My Dreams”
My friend and frequent collaborator Michael Doret recently designed an awesome typeface called Steinweiss Script. It’s based on the “Steinweiss scrawl”, the calligraphy developed in the 1940s by Alex Steinweiss, the Columbia Records art director who invented the album cover. Since this would be the first piece of Sevendys art, I figured why not take it from the top and do a tribute to Steinweiss?

“I Hate Love”
This song is technically the “double A-side” of “City Of My Dreams”, so I wanted to play in roughly the same era design-wise. In both pieces, the color palette is limited and all the elements are built out of repeated simple geometric shapes – “City Of My Dreams” is just a series of rectangles, and everything on the “I Hate Love” cover is made of circles. For a vintage look, I messed with both illustrations to make them look like they’d been printed slightly out of register.

Also, honestly… I can’t believe no one thought of the heart-shaped mushroom cloud before me. I’m still waiting for somebody to come forward and ruin my moment.

One welcome side-effect of starting so simple was that it helped me work my drafting chops back into shape. During my decade-plus of art direction, I hadn’t spent much time in the trenches doing any actual illustrating – conceptualizing and compositing are not the same thing as getting in there with your hands and scribbling. I’m still warming up, but after the first two covers I began to feel confident enough to forge ahead with the next round of Sevendys artwork – two pieces I might have otherwise farmed out.

“So So Close”
When I was in college, I was way into the work of Victor Moscoso. I loved psychedelic art in general, but to me, Moscoso’s stuff had something extra. Maybe it was his “vibrating color” – the way he would put opposing colors right next to each other with no borders – or his truly creative sense of layout. If you look back at old Skyscape flyers and demo covers, that’s me biting Moscoso’s rhymes hard. Not that I could even come close; his concepts are super high, and his techniques are his alone.

I had the chance to work with Moscoso on packaging for The Cutting Room Floor, and it was such a thrill for me. He still has it, and he doesn’t use computers to get it (though I learned that he does make pretty heavy use of Xerox machines). Moscoso was able to superimpose multiple images in a way that created a compelling illusion (look at the cover through a pair of old red-and-blue 3-D glasses, one eye at a time, to see what I mean) while still being beautiful at a glance.

The “So So Close” cover design is a tribute to Moscoso: the simple negative-space illusion created by lettering, the vibrating placement of borderless green and blue on a red background. By the way, you haven’t missed this track – the song’s not mixed yet. March, if not sooner!

“When I Step Off The Train”
This one’s a nod to all of the Big Five San Francisco poster artists – it’s got a little something from each one. The colors are the same as “So So Close” (plus black and the white of the paper) because the two pieces will be screenprinted onto one jacket when both songs are released on 7-inch. The vibrating color is your Moscoso connection; the deconstructed-train columns on the sides are, to me, reminiscent of the techno-psychedelia Stanley Mouse was doing well into the Eighties; the use of the Art Nouveau block lettering is a Wes Wilson thing; the Mucha-like columnar composition, including the Nouveau ornaments in the upper corners and outline of the hippie girl’s hair, is something all of the Five used, but none so faithfully as Alton Kelley.

Both this and “So So Close” were sketched on paper, then scanned and completed in Illustrator. Knowing that they’d eventually be printed, I felt comfortable giving both designs a bit more detail. Oh! The diamond checkerboard area at the bottom is not wasted space – it’s a spot for the band to sign and number when the singles are pressed. Just sayin.

By the way, here is an almost-finished mix of “When I Step Off The Train”, just in. The single won’t be out for a while, and the mix still needs one or two more tweaks, but why not stream it anyway?

Sevendys | “When I Step Off The Train” | in-progress mix
Jed Davis: keyboards, vocals
Avi Buffalo: guitars
Sheridan Riley: drums, tambourine
Chuck Rainey: bass
Recorded at SugarHill, Houston, TX
Mixed by Eric Jarvis

Sevendys’ next session: Presidents’ Day weekend in sunny LA. Chuck Rainey will be joining us once again, along with a few other surprise guests. The venue: EastWest Studio Three, where The Mamas & The Papas used to record… and the Beach Boys created Pet Sounds. We’re pretty psyched!

Here’s Collider performing “California Sun” live at CBGB, December 17, 1999, at an event called the Ramones Cyberpunk Blitz. [The Blitz was technically the launch party for Arturo Vega's officialramones.com, which was and will always be the only website endorsed by all of the Ramones while they were alive - both ramones.com and the late band members' individual sites were developed posthumously by their families, who then strongarmed Arty into giving up the officialramones domain and changing his site's name to RamonesWorld.]

The Cyberpunk Blitz featured 10 bands doing Ramones covers and a performance by Joey. All of the participants were asked to play under a Ramones-themed pseudonym; we changed our name to Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Crummy Stuff for the occasion. Because we were the only band with a keyboard player, we got to do some of the more esoteric tunes – “Howling At The Moon”, “We Want The Airwaves”, “All’s Quiet On The Eastern Front”, and this one.

That’s Chris De Rosa on drums, Bonnie Bowers on bass, Sean Gould on guitar, and yours truly. Video courtesy of Chris De Rosa.

I’ve been thinking about the term “Americana” as it relates to music. Technically, it refers to “roots music” like R&B and various folk and country styles. The contemporary distillation is “alt-country”. All that is what it is… those are culturally agreed-upon definitions and I’m not going to dispute them. But when I think of the word etymologically, as music that is American, it seems to me that we could expand the definition if we wanted to. Everything from jangly San Francisco pop to the Wall of Sound to bubblegum to Broadway to rap to jazz to the arena rock power ballad could be Americana.

Music was our culture’s most robust art form for almost half of the 20th Century. It was a vital driving force, the way the novel had been before it, and visual art before that, and poetry before that. But I think those days are finally over; music is now what all of those other things have been for most of my life: ephemeral entertainment. Music reacts to cultural change, and no longer directs it. Audiences are too fragmented for any one piece of music to have the impact of a “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, or an Appetite for Destruction, or any Beatles record.

You could argue that the chef or the comedian is the new rock star, but I think the art form that has replaced music is stupidity. It’s the only thing for which you can bank on every American tuning in. We love to gawk at other people’s moronic behavior in any medium. Stupidity inspires us to create and collaborate, and most importantly, to share… in YouTube form, stupidity brings us all together around the Facebook Wall the way a hit single once brought us together around a turntable or car stereo.

Anyway, if music is no longer America’s cultural lifeblood – and sure, you can argue that it still is, though I wouldn’t – then it should be safe to look back on its reign from here, just after the end, as something that can be considered in its entirety. What was American music?

I have my opinions, honed by years of friendly (and sometimes not-so-friendly) debate with Mike Keaney and the Hanslick Rebellion gang; informed by countless priceless firsthand conversations with New York punk rockers and San Franciscan concert poster artists; colored by my experiences in the music business of the 1990s and early 2000s, and by my status as a white male, a citizen of the East Coast, and a member of Generation X. My perspective may be useful, but it’s probably also sort of Cubist.

Say what you want about the “attention span issues” of Millennials, but the fact is that when they choose to engage with a subject, they go deep. They’ll use the Internet to its fullest potential, tracking down and consuming every morsel of information. I learned this when hanging with the Avi Buffalo crew, who pissed all over that stereotype about the intellectual indolence of Gen Y. Those guys are passionate about music and so they want to hear it all – every note ever recorded. And they want to know everything about how it was made. Avi and Sheridan are on the obsessive, beautiful quest of the true scholar, and they see music history in a context that’s as different from mine as mine is from that of someone who attended the first Television gig at CBGB.

Avi, Sheridan and I had been talking about doing some recording together… making it an adventure, trying out some of America’s legendary studios like Muscle Shoals, EastWest or Ardent. Studio recording is arguably a dying art, and in the past decade classic studios have been disappearing faster and faster. As we brainstormed potential destinations, I thought about how each studio represented a time, a region, and a sound. I began to categorize newly-written songs by appropriateness for a particular studio. A tune that might lend itself to lush sonic experimentation would get earmarked for Dreamland. Something basic, grooving and soulful, for Muscle Shoals.

We settled on SugarHill in Houston, Texas for our first recording safari. Originally known as Gold Star, it’s the oldest continually-operating studio in the United States. The air in that room has gotten shook up by all manner of hillbillies and bluesmen, by the Big Bopper and the 13th Floor Elevators. SugarHill isn’t synonymous with a sound, but the studio’s output represents a spectrum of styles that are all genuinely American.

All across the country, musicians of generations past – the very players who helped to develop their region’s signature sound – are still kicking around and quite vital. As a guitar/keyboard/drums trio, we lack a bassist, so that’s great for us… a local bass player can be our wild card, anchoring two Californians and a New Yorker to whatever city, style and era we happen to visit. As regards such, our trip to SugarHill went better than we could have imagined: the Texas bassist we drafted into Sevendys was Chuck Rainey.

We recorded basic tracks live in the studio, all in one room, instruments bleeding together. The sound was incredible. And here’s what it looked like:

The result: four songs, two of which are now available for listening and downloading. The other two are being pressed to 7″ vinyl, and we’re currently planning our next session. Working with Sheridan and Avi has me feeling so musically rejuvenated and excited… this is the most fun I’ve had playing in years! And there’s so much to consider, and to learn, about the history and fabric of American music as we embark upon this adventure. I almost feel like I’m getting to experience everything from multiple angles – through my own eyes and ears and simultaneously through the perspective of my other-generational partners. This is the first rung of a whole new ladder.