Recording Solar Flares
Last night, in the middle of Grant's vocals, a strange sound started to come through the headphones. At first we thought it was static from a radio station, but it sounded more and more like a strong blowing wind or the way a camp-fire sounds in a persistent breeze. The sound had a pulsating quality to it, as if the "wind" was getting stronger or closer...and then, finally, it disappeared.
"What was that?" Grant asked Joel and Dan, who were listening in the other room.
"I don't know," Joel said. "I've been getting that sound on and off all day."
"Could it be the solar flares?", Dan asked.
"Is that possible?" Grant asked. It sounded more like the flames of Hell, but solar flares was as good a guess as any. Grant turned the lights back on in the bathroom, where he was singing.
Joel started the track over again and Grant started to sing the lyrics to FIRE WORK: "It's in the earth. It's in the movement. It's when closed doors are blown wide open. When the wind has won, it leaves nothing undone..." At that moment, the sound came back again, this time pulsating stronger than before. The floor started shaking. The neighbor's dog started barking loudly outside.
"Stop the tape," Grant said. "What's going on? The microphone is cutting out. The floor is shaking. That noise is back again."
"The shaking of the house was Joel stomping on the floor," Dan said. "He's trying to get the dog to bark."
"Can I see the microphone, Grant?" Joel said. "I think it might be broken."
It was broken.
Grant couldn't help but wonder if the mic wasn't able to handle what it had been picking up: the sound of red-hot bursts of fire pulsating from thousands of miles away. Of course, the mic could have been cutting out all day because it really was malfunctioning of its own accord, making that breezy noise only coincidentally in relation to the news of a Jupiter-sized solar flare heading straight for earth. But recent events had got us thinking about demon possession and the invisible evil forces at work in the world.
Recent events such as...
Last Saturday, after a long talk about who might be to blame for the slow progress of our album and another talk about how BEFORE I GO needs less "high" notes and more "semi-high" notes, the Overhangers went to see a special Midnight showing of THE EXORCIST at the (presumably haunted) Music Box Theatre. The theatre was built in the early 1900's and is part of a ghost tour here in Chicago. None of us had seen THE EXORCIST before, so we thought this would be a perfect place to do it. Many of the lyrics of the new Overhang album, ANOTHER HOLE FOR YOU TO CRAWL INTO, are based on the imagery and concept of demon possession and exorcism, so seeing the movie seemed like a helpful bonding activity for the band. During the movie, doors started slamming in the back of the theatre and Joel and Dan later admitted that they thought their chairs were shaking. This experience, in combination with the fact that we've all been re-reading Cobain's dark/sad/scary "Heavier than Heaven" biography and Joel's been having dreams related to the suicidal rock star and Grant had just seen a man sliding across the pavement on a motorcycle only hours before the Solar Flare vocal takes is what led to the eery feelings surrounding last night's recording session. After last night, we realized that, in the right context, our music can sound very very scary.