Shawn's Life Like Luster Commentary
by Shawn Farley
 Our Guarantee
This is the only song on the album that wasn't "written" when we went to the studio to do the basic tracks. Somewhere back in '05 we went in for a session where one of the basics we were doing was "Right Outside." In rehearsal, we had gotten into a habit with that song where we would improvise for a while before I'd start the tune properly - I think Lizzy and I would both kick on delays and other effects, and we'd just zone out. After doing that many times, I started settling into a predictable pattern, using chords that were similar to the "Right Outside" ones, but higher up the neck. As the "Right Outside" session approached I decided it might be worth putting down this new "jam", thinking it might make a cute instrumental interlude somewhere on the record. So I made a click track and imposed a little structure, adding an ending, and called the track "Nugget." On the day of the session, Lizzy and Pete both seemed surprised that I wanted to record it, and told me they didn't really remember what it was that they had been doing in rehearsal. I didn't care about that, and asked Pete to just make up something. So Pete put his drum track down, we added those shakers to it, and then a month later I played 12-string acoustic on it.
And then I didn't even touch "Nugget" for more than a year. I had the guitar/percussion mix of it around, and would occasionally give it a listen. I started seeing it as possibly a really nice way to start the record out. I think Pete and Lizzy had always figured the record would start off with a BANG, with one of the louder tunes, but I knew, even with it unfinished, that I was going to argue for little "Nugget" to be the opening track.
Last October, "Nugget" was the only song that was unfinished conceptually. Somewhere I got the idea that we could use the track to personally address the listener, and given that by then we'd been working on the album for 18 months, we could also apologize for how long it was taking us. Once I hit upon the phrase "Our Guarantee", and the way I could use it, and then tying in lots of inside jokes from the sessions (many of which are described in the session diaries), I knew what I had enough ideas to get it done. So some Sunday afternoon in October of 2006, I sat down in my demo studio and started layering vocals on. I wrote all the melodies and words in an afternoon. That tends to be how I work: I think about what I'm gonna do for months and months, and when I sit down to actually DO IT - it takes an afternoon. For a song that comes off as a very focused statement - the words take exactly as long as the song is to get the point across - it's amazing to me how arbitrary its creation actually was.
I did all the vocals on the final recording myself - I think there are like 12 of me in there. Ridiculous vocal arrangement, and it was REALLY HARD to get it right. Just the opening lines, where it's just one me singing really quietly, took several tries across many different days to get it sounding how I wanted it to. I wanted it to have the tone that you might use if you're whispering in the ear of someone you love, awaking them from a nap. Took for-EVER.
Lizzy's fretless bass was added last, and she was all worried about being rusty on that instrument, but she nailed it quickly. I think that was also the last bass track she did on the album, too.
A Kick In The Shin
Here's the BANG Pete and Lizzy were looking for. This song was one of five new songs that I wrote in a flurry in August of 2003. I made demos of those five (plus demos of "Right Outside", which I wrote in 1989, and "Only Shallow") and made a CDR in late-September of '03 called "The Soft Palate Demos." I went on a month-long vacation in October, and gave a copy of the CDR to the Half Zaftig kids before I left. Every song on "The Soft Palate Demos" appears on Life Like Luster except "Only Shallow", which made it to the B-sides disc.
The four-piece version of HZ that existed in early 2004 started recording "A Kick In The Shin" at the same time we did the initial sessions for the Retrograde EP. Lizzy was playing guitar #2 then, and recorded a whole bunch of rhythm guitar for that initial version of AKITS (as we call it now). I think her rhythm guitar tracks are the only things surviving from that version, as Pete re-did his drums a year later, and the original bass tracks that then-bassist Brian Timpe did were replaced by current-bassist Lizzy. In addition to bass guitar, Lizzy plays a Les Paul for the crunchy riff stuff, and she played a Strat for that first breakdown, and I think she did some 12-string Rickenbacher for the clean chording that pops up in the verses. I'm sure I doubled/reinforced things here and there, but honestly, I couldn't tell you which stuff I did or didn't play. The solo is definitely me. SIGH. I miss having another guitar player in the band.
The main riff of this tune was written on keyboards, and you can hear the synth bass patch I used in the very big "wall o' sound" we constructed. Once I learned how to play the part on guitar, I wrote the chorus and bridge sections, and finished the original demo in a day. A lot of what I've been thinking about the last few years is reflected in the lyrics - how isolated people seem to be from each other; how people seem to have a real problem taking responsibility for their actions; how we'll do seemingly anything to avoid being blamed for something. The demo has everything you hear on the final version, except of course Pete and Lizzy's great performances. People have asked me about the harmonic content of this tune, how it seems to float around between key signatures - where does that stuff come from? I don't know the answer to that. I just followed my fingers to make neat riffs, and then I tried to sing things on top that would sound good. Once I had ideas I liked, I stopped. That's kinda what I always do, and there's usually not much more thought behind it than that. This song was very instinctual, with no second-guessing. I rarely manage to get songs done in this manner. I think I did make a concerted effort to channel Matt Mahaffey in the vocal stylings, with the breathy tone in the verses. That guy makes it seem so effortless, but I always have to work really hard to do anything decent.
There were two or three tracks that were an absolute bitch to get mixed on this project, and this was one of the tough ones. Lots of "junk in the trunk" in this track, and it was hard to get the "wall of sound" working so that you could hear a little bit of all the components - Lizzy's bass kept disappearing. I think in the end we compromised a bit, and while the clarity isn't quite where I wanted it to be, the combined sound is pleasing to me. Especially cranked up really loud.
Fair Use
Hey, look! A pop song! Not much to say about this other than I love how it came out. I've been kicking the riff around for this one for many years. It used to be part of a song I've never finished called "Spokane", and it was one of a pile of riffs I started showing Pete and Lizzy once we re-grouped in November of '04 as a trio. This tune got hammered out by the three of us in rehearsal over many, many weeks. Pete was instrumental (hee) in figuring out where we should take the bridge, and he came up with the rhythm of that little unison lick we all play together going into that section. Lizzy basically invented the groove that is most prominent on the ending bit, where we have the "gospel choir" going. It's a variation of the main theme that happened as if by magic when Lizzy changed up her line (maybe it was a mistake?), and I followed. We need to get back to playing the crap out of parts like that. Ideas I could never come up with on my own tend to show up when we do.
This track also features the first "guest star" on the album, vocalist Liz Aday. Liz came in for one day in December of '06 and sprinkled awesomeness on several tracks like fairy dust. That's her and Lizzy saying "Uh oh" in verse 3, and then her doing the "oooh" bit right after. And then she's leading the "choir" at the end, doing all that cool bluesy, R&B stuff that White Boy Me can't possibly come close to doing.
A lot of this track was recorded live in the studio, too, which makes me really happy. I want the three of us to track live together as much as we can manage to in the future. I overdubbed all the funky clean verse guitars, but all the main heavy stuff is the live track.
I love Pete's aping of the guitar noise at the end. He's such a goofball.
Sublimeinal
Here it is, the big Prog Rock Epic of the record. Listening to this now, I have this feeling that it's a bit too... over-written? Complicated just to be complicated? I don't know. I can't really think of what I would change in it. I just know that I prefer playing this song live to listening to it. For some reason, the sheer physicality required to play it is very satisfying to me, and it tends to be an energetic crowd-pleaser. Pete and Lizzy just kill this thing.
This was also a "Soft Palate" song, but it wasn't no "one day - BOOM - done" affair. It evolved over several months, but I finished it up when I was doing the other "Soft Palate" songs. Lizzy's bass part is a combination of the demo bass part, some secondary guitars that were on there, and of course her own invention. I love on the verses where she's playing way up high, with the The Worm effect pedal on - it sounds like the organ part on "No Quarter."
I couldn't tell you what the lyrics in this one are "about." The original name of this was "Sub Lime In All", and I actually had a bunch of stuff about a sea captain piloting a lime-colored submarine - there's a little of that stuff left in the final version. It didn't occur to me until much later that I could condense the title into one word that's a combo of "sublime" and "subliminal" - and I want to mention that I finished my demo of this in 2003, so my song pre-dates that damned Sprite "sublymonal" marketing campaign. Bastards.
This song is hard to play. For all of us. Lizzy had the longest single session of the whole album to get her bass track done. Pete worked hard, too, and then he had all these ideas for the verses, where he wanted to overdub drum parts that sounded like "loops". It worked out pretty well. Lots of ear candy in this, little guitar melodies that fly by, there's a little vibraphone at the end of verse 3, weird sounds. Darin had a big impact on a lot of the textural stuff. I love that bit when everything stops except for the unamplified Danelectro and me tapping my foot on a piece of plywood.
I ALSO love that one line in the pre-choruses where it's just Lizzy singing. I think I had to trick her into doing that part. If I had told it her it would just be her flat out, she probably would have refused to do it. I think she sounds amazing there. Everybody sounds great on this. I loved working on the solo with Darin. I knew I wanted to use that "super-fuzz right into the board" sound, and he made a lot of suggestions for the ways we orchestrated the different sections.
I guess it's also a good time to just praise Darin Di Pietro in general. He got great sounds, AGAIN, had a ton of great ideas, AGAIN, and made every session a ton of fun, AGAIN. I guess because it's easy to take all of that stuff for granted, it would be easy not to explicitly state it. So noted.
Inscrutable You
My baby. This is my fave tune on the disc. It is yet another of the "Soft Palate" tunes, written over about four straight days. I step-played that Rhodes part into the sequencer, note-by-note, because I suck at keyboards. Luckily, it made enough sense as a part that Pete was able to learn it, and play it on a real Rhodes. Doesn't he sound amazing?
I love everything about this song. I love the story and characters in it, I love all the weird little twists, I love it, love it, love it. I love how Lizzy and Pete played on it. Tight, groovin', understated. Liz Aday shows up in the first interlude doing a "Glinda the Good Witch" vocal that's a little bit buried in the mix. Some of the backups are all me, but some, like the ones in the bridge, are me, Lizzy, and Pete all grouped around the mic together singing harmonies. We also added some vibraphone on that first interlude, now that I think about it.
And then of course on the bridge, I relinquish lead vocal duties to the inimitable Charlie Drown, who knocks it out of the park. Unfortunately because she now owns that bit so completely, she's kind of made it impossible for us to play this tune live without her. What, you think I'm gonna try to sing it now? If you heard me on the demo, you'd laugh (actually, there's a bit of that part in the "Bite Size" sampler I posted back in 2003). Thanks to Lizzy for suggesting Charlie for that vocal part - I was trying to talk Lizzy into doing it at the time.
And then my favorite bit, the "Cowboy Opera" section at the end. Find something like THAT on a King's X record, haters (you know who you are). Liz Aday actually tracked some vocals on that section as well, but we ended up not using them, because it sounded a lot less like a spaghetti Western soundtrack with them in there. That's Pete rocking the castanets. And I played the guitar solo on my then-new Mike Lull TX (Telecaster model). The fact that this song coexists on the same record with "Dusty Demonatrix" makes me really happy. Juxtapositions like that are the kinds of things that get me out of bed in the morning.
Numbered Days
The second-oldest song on the record. The first incarnation of it was the last new Stop Hitting Me song, taking shape around 1994, right before the band imploded for the last time. In 1995 I re-wrote the tune, changed up the chorus and added lyrics, and made a demo that appeared on the "Shuteye/Azure" tapes that I made back then. It was on the list of tunes to record for Any Raw Flesh?, but I decided not to do it then because the subject matter was so bleak (the entire tune is Wounded Pride Lashing Out, oh boo-hoo hoo), and I didn't want ARF? to end up being a total bummer to listen to. We came back to the song for Salve, and a version with Chris G on drums and Bryan Beller on bass was finished and mastered. But I decided that I hated it, and pulled it from the record right before we sent it to the factory to be pressed. We also pulled a solo acoustic version I had done from that record - I didn't want the first released version of the song to be a solo acoustic one (and now it's on the B-Sides disc).
There are songs that you really want to walk away from, but just keep pulling you back. It bothered me that there was no "definitive" version of the tune, so I kept teaching it to the various versions of Half Zaftig in hopes that we could finally make one. The Salve version ends abruptly at the end of the second chorus - that whole instrumental outro on this version was missing (the B-Sides acoustic version ends the way the Salve band version did). By the time we started recording this song for this album, I have to admit that I was over it. I put off doing the vocals on it until there were no other vocals to do. If not for the nagging feeling I've had that this song had "beaten" me, and I wasn't going to let it "beat" me, we probably wouldn't have bothered doing it.
All that said, I think this new version is the best version ever done of the song (and there are like... six prior ones). Pete and Lizzy managed to do the song justice without playing too much. The Salve version was too frenetic and claustrophobic - every nook and frequency was jammed full of too much information. It didn't breathe like this version does. Maybe I'll construct a little medley of the older versions for folks to hear, spotlighting the little differences.
Even so, when the band was drawing up what we thought the running order of Life Like Luster should be, "Numbered Days" was not on my list (I wanted "Only Shallow" instead). It's on the album because Pete and Lizzy really wanted it there. It's not that I don't think it's good. Lizzy and Pete played great, the song sounds good, the restored ending section sounds properly end-of-the-world-ish to me... but as I mentioned - I'm over it. I was 25 when I wrote it - I'm 37 now. I hope that doesn't come off as too harsh - because some folks have told me they really like it, and I don't want to shit all over one of their favorite tracks. Just don't look for us to be playing this one live.
In A Simple Rhyme
Folks are reacting very positively to this Van Halen cover, though there's a hint in the messages I've received about it that contain a bit of "WTF?!?!?"
I was a freshman in high school when VH's 1984 album came out. They were the biggest rock band in the world at the time (hard to believe now), and most teenaged boys I knew worshipped them. The Roth version of Van Halen is probably my favorite band of all time. I had that famous poster of Edward Van Halen in his red overalls in my room (actually, I have it in the HZ rehearsal space now). Notice I'm not calling them the "best" band ever, just that they are my favorite band ever. So, to me, doing a version of a VH tune was a no-brainer. The trick was finding a song with vocals that I could do a respectable version of (Dave's style is near-impossible to cop), AND that I could manage to play Ed's guitar parts while singing at the same time. The list of such tunes is a small one.
Pete had never heard this song before we learned it, though Lizzy was familiar with it, and I love that she cops all of the Mike Anthony-isms throughout. Getting the backups done was sheer torture (as detailed in the session diaries), but boy, I think they came out great. I was determined to keep this song as overdub-free as I could, the only guitar overdub is an acoustic on the bridge section.
This is another one largely played live together in the studio. I think we did five takes that got kept, and my guitar performance is comped together from the best bits of all of the takes. I just remember sporting a huge grin on my face when we were laying down takes of this - nothing takes me back to high school faster than good 'ol Van Halen tunes.
Mold On My Soles
From a lyrical standpoint, this is probably the most personal song on the album. It's largely about struggling with "blank page syndrome" when it comes to doing creative work. Also baked in there are thoughts about difficult life decisions that need making that keep staying unmade... all the boring stuff I suppose everybody confronts as they get older. But whereas quite a few of the Life Like Luster songs are about made-up characters and situations, this one comes right out of my troubled little brain.
Another regular occurrence at HZ rehearsals is that rather than start off playing an actual, like song, we almost always make up some sort of improv groove and milk it for a while. This track came from a very fruitful one of those, that actually got recorded. Basically, I just started playing this song as if I'd already written it - which I hadn't. On the recording, you can hear me go into it, and then you can hear Pete suddenly join in, as if he was thinking, "OH, he's DOING something over there." Then Lizzy joins in, and you can hear her trying to figure out what I'm up to, all the while I'm doing the very same (trying to figure out what I'm doing, that is). Out of that improv came the verse section and the "woke up with a purpose" part, like magic. I finished the rest of the tune at home on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks later.
I love the vibe of this track - it's slowwwww, and Pete really nails the feel to the floor. Because there are huge gaping holes everywhere, you can really hear us playing together in ways that some of the more bombastic material doesn't allow. Lizzy plays another fantastic bass track, I really love the chordal stuff that she does during the solo section. And boy, did I have fun doing the vibraphone stuff over that same section. And then the inevitable shift towards DOOM over the end section. This is a fun tune to play live, and we all really relish that section when we go all heavy, and I'm yelling like a loon.
The fadeout leaving the "SOLES" backup vocals was a late-addition at mix time. I love that vocal texture, and it's neat to really hear it pop as the song ends.
10 PRINT
Hoo-wee, boy! Is this one out of left field, or what? People are calling it "Zappa-like", I guess maybe because of the close-mic'ed "talky vocals" during the verses that call to mind songs like "I Am The Slime" or "Cosmik Debris" - but I was really channeling Kevin Gilbert's work from the Kaviar Sessions album, "Indian Burn," specifically. I had just heard his music for the first time in the months prior to writing this song, and I was really knocked out by his stuff. I think this one all started around basslines, if I recall correctly. I remember that I had NO IDEA where I was going with this song while working on it, but I was just going to follow where inspiration led. I actually got really stuck on this for a while - I had the verses, and the chorus, and that weird instrumental turnaround, but that was it. I remember the day I added in the bridge section, I thought what I was doing really sucked, but I just kept at it anyway. Once I had that, I made a whole bunch of edits and changes in the arrangement (I love you, digital editing) and ended up with the final arrangement you hear on the record. I'll say that when I was done with the demo, I was disappointed. I felt like the song wasn't finished, somehow.
But then I lived with it for a while, and then Pete and Lizzy wanted to learn it, and they added their own special sauce as they always do. And guess what? I think it turned out great! That's Liz Aday again doing the "1-2-3 FOUR FIVE..." vocals. Oh! On the demo, there was a piano part on the chorus that I tried SO HARD to cram into this song. The problem was, we slowed the tempo from the demo version (actually, I think we slowed the tempo from ALL the demos, except maybe AKITS), and the piano part sounded kinda... dumb, slowed down. And then I tried other ways of using the part - I tried playing it on the B3 (you can hear a bit of that attempt in "F-Bomb Symphony" on the B-Sides disc), and then I tried playing it using two clean guitars through an auto-wah pedal. That sounded most intriguing, and it actually appeared on the "Strangercrombie Rough Mixes" version we gave to our local rag The Stranger for review in January. In the end, though, the "10 PRINT" choruses just sounded too busy with it in there. An idea that died hard.
Somehow, as weird as this track is, it strikes me as a totally fun, totally silly pop song. I find it as catchy as anything else on the disc, and I likes the catchy tunes. The lyrics are based on a real person - Weird Eddie does exist, and he does work in a Sebum-Lebum store. The whole bit about 10' Hellhounds is a little less real-life.
Handbasket
We had this one gestating for a while... we called it "Big Dummy" in rehearsal. I had the main and chorus riffs since way back when I was writing songs like "You Fell." Then sometime last year I finally got some vocals written for the chorus, and then I wrote the whole "acoustic" section that starts after Pete's "jungle toms" bit. I like this one a lot, but I could easily have spent another two weeks tweaking the mix. Like AKITS, there's so much stuff going on, and all of it's LOUD, so it's hard to balance the elements the way I like. So there's a couple of bits in this that I just wish were a little different, but trying to make them the way I wanted ended up messing up something else that was really cool, and so on.
Along with "Fair Use", I guess this is another song that vaguely hints at my dissatisfaction with the way the political winds are currently blowing in this country, and in a larger sense my worries about the Fate Of Humanity As A Whole (Lions, and Tigers, and BEARS! OH MY!). It's been a bleak few years, and I guess it makes sense that it would show up in the work I'm doing.
I think Pete nailed most of his drum performance in one take on this one, and the guitar solo on this was largely conducted and conceived by Darin (again, more specifically detailed in the studio diaries). I tried really hard when putting this arrangement together to keep stuff as simple as I could. I felt like the hypnotic, repetitive groove we set up was strong enough to carry the message without adding lots of extra "arrangement doodads" to make things interesting. Lizzy's bass tone on this thing is ridiculously large. There's something really satisfying about beating the living crap out of one chord over and over through a very loud amplifier.
Right Outside
The oldest tune on the album, written in late-1989 when I was about 20 years old. I wrote it for the band I was in at the time, Skeptics. It was one of my very earliest lyric-writing attempts. I think for this version there were some slight revisions, but I don't remember which lines. I wasn't the singer in Skeptics, but the singer we did have couldn't write, so that's why I ended up making up the words and melodies back then. It was my "first step into a larger world."
I had forgotten all about this song in the years since Skeptics, but I re-discovered it when I was working on what became the "Soft Palate Demos", and decided to revisit the thing. I think I was curious to hear what I would sound like singing it. I added that round-robin vocal stuff on the last chorus on the new demo, but otherwise the song was largely unchanged.
This tune is deceptively simple, but the swinging shuffle makes for some tricky bits. In our rehearsals before we tracked basics on this, we were extending the spaces between verses - I had this idea that I would do something instrumentally there, something akin to the harmony guitar breaks that Jimmy Page did on "Ramble On" - but I ended up thinking the song was taking too long to get anywhere. One of my first tasks when I got Pro Tools at home was to attack this song, and edit out all the extra jam areas - thank goodness once again for digital editing.
I think this track got sort of taken for granted by all of us for a long while - Pete did the drums for it in mid-2005, and it was more than a year after that when I finished guitars, and Lizzy added her bass parts. I used the Mike Lull Tele again for a lot of this - all the electric clean guitar stuff, and I think also for the solo. The solo on this has my favorite lead guitar tone of the whole album. When we were all listening intently to rough mixes in January, Lizzy kept telling me, "Man, I'm really digging 'Right Outside.'" I knew what she meant - we'd captured a cool vibe on this tune - and it really lent itself well to the album. With "Handbasket" being so morose and cynical, I really love that "Right Outside" comes in with a more upbeat and laid-back feel right after.
The first voice message you hear at the end, I have no idea who that is, or why they called me. It's just a strange woman who says, "ASTERISK" after a long pause, then hangs up. The second message is my bro-in-law Kevin Chesley, a screenwriter and writer/performer for the LA-based comedy troupe TROOP! He's awesome.
Dusty Demonatrix
BOOM. I think Pete and Lizzy are still a little afraid of this song. They insisted that it should be the last track on the record, and I'm cool with it at the end. Although I imagine it will take some people off guard. You'll note that the lyrics to this aren't printed in the lyric booklet. That was intentional. This song is a very big VENT for me, and there are things in there that I really didn't want to see in black and white. I don't think it's all that hard to figure 'em out, anyway.
"Dusty" was the first of the "Soft Palate" songs I worked on. I knew specifically what kind of song I wanted to do, and I knew what it would be about. I wrote it in a day, the demo took two to finish. It's a 7-string song with the low string tuned down to A, which is why it rattles your guts when you listen to it loud. One of the major influences on me for this is the music of Meshuggah - specifically that opening groove where the drums are playing a heavy triplet feel, but the china type cymbal is being banged on in straight eighth notes. That's a "lite" version of what Meshuggah actually does, but it's good enough for me.
Thank goodness Pete and Lizzy have been spending a lot of time also playing in Charlie Drown's band. Charlie pretty much does straight-up metal, so the HZ rhythm section has gotten lots of experience in the style. I can't really play metal very well, so this song is like my "fake approximation" of it. Lots of weird rhythmic goodies in this song, and holy cow, let me not forget the unbelievable unhinged screaming that Liz Aday contributed. Talk about a mood setter. I had just met her the day of the session, and we were jumping around from song to song, and I was asking her to do some pretty crazy stuff. She never backed down, and went for it full-bore.
The night before we did the basic tracks for this, I went down to our rehearsal space with my laptop to lay down some guide guitar tracks for the band to play to. One weird thing about our rehearsal space: at various times, my amp picks up radio stations loud and clear. So that's what that noise at the end is, a radio station playing through my guitar amp as I scrape the strings of my guitar with the side of my palm. I recorded it because I thought it might be interesting to use.
And then Liz Aday says, "Hello?" and that's it.
Oh - not quite. Fake Bob Dylan comes in for a benediction. That was funny. It happened one night when I was doing a vocal session on "Sublimeinal", and if I recall it was a tough and frustrating session, with not a lot of work getting done. I remember remarking to Darin that, as long as Bob Dylan was around, I couldn't be the worst singer in rock n' roll. Darin agreed, and rolled tape, and what you hear was what I did on the next take. Darin said I should throw a guitar on it, and so I did a pass playing an unamped electric in the main room with me. After that I ran into the control room, and grabbed one of the several harmonicas piled on Darin's desk, and ran out and made a bunch of noise with it. Voila! Instant fake Bob Dylan.
And that's it! Life Like Luster in a nutshell.
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