Sorry, no single this month. How about a whole album instead?

Shoot The Piano Player was recorded a couple summers ago in Chicago. LB, Lucy, Joe Abba and I spent a weekend at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, fluffy coffee and Pip the cat. With Joe on drums, I tracked 13 songs live to tape, vocals and all. There are maybe three overdubs on the whole album – an organ part and a couple of backing vocals. Lucy and LB hung out in the control room, where they got to watch Albini work. That is a true privilege.

For me, making a record with Steve Albini is up there with working with the Ramones. I love that dude as a concept and admire him as a human being. Albini is, in my opinion, the incorruptible avatar of Generation X’s finest values. Most of my contemporaries have sold out but Albini marches on. He’s tireless behind the board and radiates competence in a way that is somehow simultaneously intense and reassuring. At the end of the session, he congratulated me on coming prepared and getting my work done. That’s like Wade Boggs telling you, “nice at-bat.” One of the best moments of my entire life!

The songs on STPP were written over a 15-year period, and they are generally pretty songwritery. Lots of roleplaying here. A few of the narrators are unsavory characters (“You Make Me Feel So Young” in particular… that song is just fuckin gross but I had to record it. I lost multiple girlfriends to nasty old dudes when I was in my early 20s and the lyric was born of my outrage). “I’m On Your Side” was originally part of Rise And Shine – it’s sung from the perspective of a bigoted asshole cop, and my job is to make you like him if not inadvertently agree with him.

I do a bit of side-switching in these songs, too: “Piece Of Crap” (the oldest composition on the record; it’s from 1994) comes alternately from the point-of-view of the cynical, sneering wannabe pop star and the spoiled teens who worship him; “For A Girl In Promotions” starts out like a snipe at the title character but the narrator is revealed to truly care about her and appreciate what she does. I dunno, this is starting to sound a little navel-gazey… so how bout: I’m proud of this record and happy that I can share it with you!

In addition to the digital release (it’s for sale at iTunes, Amazon and all the rest today as well, but why would you buy it out there when you can get it right here?), Shoot The Piano Player is also available on 8-track tape. The 8-track run is limited to an edition of 20 copies, manufactured by a really cool company called The Dead Media out of Ft. Worth, Texas. Interesting fact about 8-track tapes: they play back twice as fast as cassettes and use thicker, higher-quality tape. It can be argued that a well-built 8-track cartridge sounds better, and preserves more of the analog experience, than vinyl. I most likely will release a vinyl pressing of Shoot The Piano Player at some point, but it could be argued that this 8-track tape may provide the ultimate STPP listening experience if you’ve got the means to play it. My 8-track deck broke recently, so I picked up an old 2-XL robot on eBay. His eyes light up in time with the music. It’s awesome.

Here are some photos from the Shoot The Piano Player recording session:

From the Song Foundry Archives: Here’s some AMERICA RULES music for Independence Day.

This one’s all like, “America RULES!!!!!!”

And this one’s like, “America rules.”

If Sevendys ever does get to Muscle Shoals, I would totally slow “God Bless Us Anyway” down and turn it into a Three Dog Night “Never Been To Spain” kinda thing. Except it won’t be about Spain. It’ll be about AMERICA!!!!!!!!

Enjoy the holiday, everyone! Let’s meet back here on Thursday… I will have a present for you.

I don’t write too many “nice” songs. I don’t really see the point… if things are good, why waste time writing about ‘em when you could just be enjoying them?

But sometimes you just have to give props!

When your family’s not cutting it, friends get a free upgrade. I drew a shitty hand with the former but have been so lucky with the latter. Lisa Brennan alone is like an entire family in one beautiful little person. How did they fit all that awesome in there?!

After an early-aughts Collider show, a bunch of us ended up at the Moonstruck Diner on Second Avenue. I had some sort of mishap with my coffee and it spilled all over the saucer, making the bottom of my cup drippy. LB slipped a napkin between the cup and saucer when I wasn’t looking. Bryan Thomas saw her do it. He said: “Don’t let it go unnoticed.”

But it did. Mission accomplished, Lisa never said a word. I only found out about the makeshift doily years later. That’s the kind of person you want looking out for you.

“Please Don’t Eat Me I Love You” was an easy song to wanna write, but tough to actually pull off. Especially for someone who is not used to writing positive lyrics! I was still slaving over it the week of the session, and even now I can only hope I got it right. Many of the words come straight out of LB’s t-shirt collection, including the title/closing refrain and the Engrish slogan from the tee on the right.

Production-wise, you are hearing one unedited live take with surprisingly few instrumental overdubs. Drums, bass, guitar, piano and congas were all tracked at once, in one room – Studio Three at EastWest in Los Angeles. That is the space where the Beach Boys recorded Pet Sounds (hence the yellow-and-white-Cooper-Black-on-green single cover art… though it’s also a nod to the “Please Don’t Eat Me I Love You” t-shirt, on which the slogan is set in Cooper Black for both the original and pizza-parody versions).

There are still two songs left to mix from the LA session; you’ll hear one of them soon. The other we’re saving for Christmastime. Next week Sevendys reconvenes in Woodstock to record five more tunes. Which reminds me… I’m supposed to be making charts right now. See you back here on Tuesday the 7th for my June Single of the Month!

It’s the 7th! My Single of the Month for May is “The Breeze”, recorded with Skyscape over two millennia.

I wrote this song when I was 17 years old; my friend Chris Hug and I had been debating whether it was possible to write an emotionally resonant song lyric without including any human (or anthropomorphized) characters. I thought this was possible. And maybe it is… I couldn’t do it, though.

My approach involved a Rube Goldberg chain of cause and effect, but in the end the only way to make it worthwhile was to introduce people – to have it all impact human beings. Ironically, “The Breeze” turned out to be my first love song, albeit a really goofy one. It’s also the first song I ever wrote on a guitar, which probably shows in the chord progression and the opening riff.

Skyscape recorded “The Breeze” that summer (1993… ouch!). At the time we didn’t know whether we wanted to be Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors or Dream Theater, so we sounded pretty much like Pavement, They Might Be Giants, The Doors and Dream Theater all playing at once, and not necessarily the same song. “The Breeze” ended up a casualty of our non-approach, crushed under, like, 50 tons of mëtal.

With the 20th anniversary of Skyscape’s first album, Band Of The Week, approaching, a bunch of us got together to reimagine and rework some of the old tunes. “The Breeze” got the most dramatic facelift; almost nothing of the original recording remains. We kept Steve Theater’s hyperkinetic drums in the choruses, and Sean Gould’s ringing chords in verse two, but the rest is new. Alex Dubovoy added a more textural set of acoustic and electric guitars, and Mike Keaney – who had joined the band about a month after we finished Band Of The Week – finally got to record the bassline he had played live so many times in the early ’90s. I put down some piano, B3 and mellotron (the only keyboard on the original was a now-dated synth pad), and Joe Abba made his Skyscape debut with an entire section’s worth of 11/8 percussion.

The biggest change is in the vocal track. Instead of my dorky solo lead, my friend Maryann Fennimore joined me to make the song a dorky duet. (Maryann is on April’s Single of the Month, too; no matter what weird-ass shit I’ve asked her to sing, she’s always been such an awesome sport.) And since no Skyscape song is complete without Dom, we added a triple harmony at the end: Dom, Mike and Alex.

I definitely have a soft spot for “The Breeze”… with its odd time-signatures and chord structure quirks, the track represents a turning point in my understanding of songcraft. It’s nerdy and a little silly, and it reminds me of how little I’ve actually changed since I was 17!

——-

Don’t forget, the 7th of every month is Single of the Month day here at the Song Foundry. We’re already hard at work mixing next month’s track, which will be brought to you by the initials A.F., R.G., G.M., J.S., and L.B., and the word “kalimba”!

I seem to be at a point in life where all of my public school classmates are getting divorced. There are so many custody battles being documented in real time on my Facebook wall right now… sorry to be a cavalier douche about this, but it’s actually pretty good reading. Definitely more interesting than what was for lunch, or how much Monday sucks.

If Facebook had existed when we were 27, our walls would have been splattered with breakup drama, followed by lots of engagement announcements six months later. It was shit-or-get-off-the-pot time… anyone whose relationship wasn’t the relationship ended it and married the next person he or she saw.

These are the people they’re divorcing now. Here’s a song for both sides.

Wait, what’s a Song Foundry Single Of The Month?

It’s how we’re gonna do things around here for a while. On the 7th of every month, you’re gonna get something new. It might be a Skyscape track, or Hanslick Rebellion, or a JD jam from the vaults that you’ve never heard before. Or, like this month, a brand-new solo studio track (finished yesterday!) with special guests Tony Levin, Anton Fig, Earl Slick, Maryann Fennimore, Mike Keaney and Ralph Carney. Listen, download, and please pass it on – if you like what you hear, share it on Facebook or elsewhere. That’s all I ask.

(Sevendys isn’t part of this. Sevendys is extra; Sevendys cannot be contained!)

It’s the Sevendys model that inspired this change: record, mix, release. Seems simple but it’s not. You have to actually record, mix, and then release. When you’re making full albums, it’s really hard to get to step three because first you have to record everything and then you have to mix everything. Waiting to track one last instrument on one last song? If that takes a year, then your whole album, all that work, sits in limbo for at least a year. Not a particularly efficient way to do things.

I like to work on six or seven albums at a time, slowly bringing them to completion over what could be years. When I feel a song approaching doneness, I focus on that one and knock it out. But then the track just kinda sits there until the rest of the album is done.

With Sevendys, we go into the studio, cut four complete tracks, and simply release them as they’re mixed. For example, “Enjoy It” was mixed the day before it was mastered, and released ten minutes after the master was approved. That’s exhilarating. I’ve got Eric Jarvis, who only started mixing my stuff last year, telling me how great it is to work with somebody who just gets stuff online and out so fast, and I’m cracking up because I really move glacially slowly. But Sevendys has managed to put out something in every month of 2011 so far, and I see no reason why that will stop.

Lots of italics in this post! I am emphasizing all kinds of shit, WHOOOOOOOO!

I’ve decided not to wait around for albums to happen anymore. There are mechanisms for collecting singles into albums and pressing albums into cool physical products, and I’ll still do that stuff, because I love to do it… but I see no reason to hoard tracks for moments so far in the future, they may as well never come. Let’s enjoy “She Loves You (NO NO NO)” today!

I decided to move on the idea of a Hanslick Rebellion live archive. I’ll make everything available for download once I can get it all properly mastered; in the meantime, raw audio directly off the soundboard tapes will stream from this new site. Shows are as complete as the source tapes allow… there are a few glitches here and there. Most of the material comes from 15-year-old cassettes.

First one online is our November 2, 1995 gig at the QE2. The band had only been playing for about a month, mostly house party gigs. This was our first time in a real club. Also on the bill: Dryer, Splendiferous Monster and Queer for Astro Boy.

This was clearly before we started breaking our “no banter” rule, ha ha.

I’ve been archiving old Hanslick Rebellion soundboard recordings all morning. Rediscovering what an excellent band we could be, particularly once Kearns became the drummer.

The local blogs occasionally post flashback articles or polls concerning Albany bands of the ’90s, and I’m always amused by which acts folks up here consider the best of the era. Sorry, but the Rebellion was the best. Anyone who claims otherwise obviously never saw us play and forfeits their right to comment.

I’d like to make all existing live tapes available somehow. I do think they need to be mastered first. The sound quality is surprisingly good in general, but someone who knows what he’s doing can probably make them louder and less murky.

There is always the rebellion is here. But we were a very reactive band; every performance was unique and most are worth hearing.

I did find an extra-rare artifact while going through these old tapes… something I didn’t even realize still existed: the one and only studio recording by the original Rebellion lineup. We started tracking “The Four-Minute Mile” at Scarlet East in early 1996, but it wasn’t coming out to our satisfaction so we aborted. Being broke musicians, we eventually decided to repurpose the tape for another project, recording over “Four-Minute Mile”. I thought that was that, but this rough mix survived!

The Hanslick Rebellion | “The Four-Minute Mile (studio version)” | rough mix
Mike Keaney: vocals, bass
Jed Davis: vocals, keyboards
Alex Dubovoy: guitars
John Dobson: drums
Recorded by John Delehanty and Rich Libutti at Scarlet East, Albany, NY, 1996

Sounds to me like vocals were still scratch and the guitar solo was not a priority for this rough mix; I consider this more a curiosity than anything else, and would still refer you to the rebellion is here version for the real stuff.

I keep hearing that the ’90s are “back”. I can kinda see it… I mean, there’s flannel plaid on every mannequin at the mall. But it’s like when all the hair metal bands reverbed up their drums, strung half a dozen blues riffs together and claimed to be channeling Zeppelin. C’mon, Led Zep was about so much more than that.

Reality Bites was available on demand so I watched it last night. I had never seen the movie… at the time it got too much hype, so true to my Gen X roots I passed on it. Watching it now depressed the living shit out of me. I don’t know that the film really captured the essence, the energy of the time – in fact, nah, it didn’t – but it did serve to remind me how cool the ’90s were. How cool we were. How cool we’re not now.

I’ve beaten generational demographics to death in other posts, and that’s only a smidge of the story here anyway. This is really about nostalgia.

I spend a lot of time dicking around in my own past. Not just musically. I use Facebook every day. For people my age, Facebook is a Ouija board through which we contact spirits from our past. You send out messages; ghosts reply from beyond. You can correspond with them, recount memories, share inside jokes. But you’ll never encounter one in person. They don’t exist in the real world – they’re spectral apparitions of people whose bodies still walk the earth, but are now being used for different lives, with different interests, different priorities, personalities marked and molded by experiences that did not include you.

I don’t mean to say that a Facebook seance isn’t enjoyable and comforting – it is, or we wouldn’t all engage in them every day – or that you wouldn’t appreciate the person your old pal has become if you got to know each other again in real life. But for the most part, the interaction is less a friendship than a mutual haunting.

My favorite musical endeavor lately is Sevendys – I think I’ve made that clear. Fresh music, wonderful new collaborators. I find it exciting and energizing. But my second favorite right now is Skyscape. Maybe it’s because the ’90s are back, or maybe it’s because, for Skyscape, they never ended.

Dom and I (and our legion of bandmates) generated so much material so quickly, and recorded so much of it, that I have albums’ worth of Skyscape music stored in bite-sized lo-fi chunks on old 4-track cassettes and floppy discs. A lot of it is terrible. Most of it is badly performed and indifferently recorded. But it’s full of energy and ideas which are begging to be harnessed and shaped by experienced hands.

When we work on Skyscape music, so much of it is about the people we are today – the skills we’ve developed, the attention to craft and context. But just as much of the process involves the people we were in the ’90s, the kids who built this foundation of ideas and sensibility, who laid down the trail of breadcrumbs by leaving so many recorded artifacts behind. On a Skyscape record, instrumental components are sourced from 20 years of material, as though everyone who was ever in the band is still a member – eternally young, free and full of passion.

For me, bringing these tracks together is like living in all times of my life at once. I think that’s how so many people my age are desperate to feel; I’m grateful to that younger version of me for the opportunity.

Here’s a perfect example in progress. This track started as a Portastudio recording made live at Dom’s 1992 high school graduation party. I was using my 4-track as a mixer and took the opportunity to pop in a cassette. The band was horrible… it wasn’t even really a band. Dom, Rob Hill, Sean Gould and I set up in a line – two guitars, no bass or drums. But our attempt at covering “Hey Jude” was as hilarious as it was awful, and I decided to see what I could make of it.

I thought adding a deadpan full-band arrangement would help the vocals seem even funnier and more absurd. Step one was to add drums. My preference was to have drums that sounded similarly 4-tracked, and sure enough I was able to find a suitable performance: drums from early 1993, when we were demoing songs for Band Of The Week. In this case, we pointed one microphone towards Loren Wiseman’s basement kit and he played “Age Song” at a tempo which was, coincidentally, a dead match for “Hey Jude”. I flew the drums in, added some tambourine, piano and a couple of backing vocals, and here we are. Still needs bass, guitar and more backup singers, but it’s turning into something listenable and fun!

Skyscape | “Hey Jude” | rough mix
Domenic Maltempi: vocals
Dom’s cousin Tina: vocals
Jed Davis: keyboards, backing vocals, tambourine
Lisa Brennan: backing vocals
Loren Wiseman: drums
Rob Hill: guitar
Sean Gould: guitar
Adapted from a live recording at Dom’s house, July 1992

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