Liner Notes- Recording the Modern Illusion by Paul Curtiz - CH3

Join us each week as we release exclusive, never-before-seen chapters from Paul Curtiz's latest book, "Liner Notes- Recording the Modern Illusion", the companion to the highly-anticipated album release of "Modern Illusion". Be sure to listen to the first single "Nothing Like California" from the album available on Apple Music or Spotify, and you can also follow Paul on Facebook or Bandcamp for more updates.

Chapter 3: Promo Day

Yesterday was “promo day”. Not that we have anything new to promote yet —we are very much still wading in the muddy swamp of arrangements, which chord sounds hippest and has the greatest potential to alienate yet another segment of our already seriously “selective” audience, and all that… Nevertheless. We were (mostly) good boys and played along. This was supposed to drum up some much-needed press coverage about us and re-kindle a flicker of media presence for the forthcoming album, and sometimes you just gotta play the game, y’know? The girls at the label —well, technically they’re not a team of just girls anymore, they’re thoroughly diversified and genre-free these days, but I guess one of the perks of coming up a few popes ago appears to be that we get a free pass for calling them “the girls”… anyway, the girls at the label had lined up a few major dudes and dudettes for us to chat with, re-draw the contours of the map and re-invent the meaning of life. 

The day started off nice enough with a guy from an important jazz aficionados rag. Dude had obviously done his homework and pored over our catalogue in great detail, asking long-winded questions about multiple modulations in a single verse, stacked fourths and the overuse of added second chords (with a third in the bass) as a symbol for larger than life egos and the need for more than a few sessions of therapy. We tried our best smart-ass comebacks and one-liners, sprinkling the conversation with such gems as “you’re only as good as your last modulation”, but the comedy of these seemed to fly right above his head, as he was digging into his notes looking for more in-depth questions to fire at us.

Next up was a nice lady of approximately the same vintage as ourselves, the current caretaker of a “culture” column in a wellness/yoga magazine. She seemed rather pleasant until she started picking up all kinds of potentially un-PC lines from our lyrics, and asking how we felt about perpetuating the notion of an all-male dominated music industry. I tried to make nice of it, explaining how the narrators in our songs are mostly fictional, how our lyrics are multi-layered and that, as artists, we sometimes use poetic license to get a deeper message across. My musical partner, slightly irritated at this point, decided to jump in in his very own communication style with a rather frank “Lady, we don’t do PC.” Said lady shuffled her notes for a further awkward 30 seconds and we left it at that.

The subsequent interview was much more up our alley, as it was for a renown guitar magazine. My buddy and myself are known to  tinker on a bunch of instruments but guitar and bass are our main weapons of sonic destruction. We are gearheads, and we love guitars for their sound (obviously) but also for their look and collectability. We know the ins & outs of the vintage market —a ‘59 “burst” Gibson Les Paul can fetch around 350K at the time of writing, so there are worst investments. The young man they sent for the interview had meticulously researched our live and studio setups on the previous albums and tours, and his questions revolved around any new gear we would be using on this project. We both smirked, because this is an ongoing in-joke for us: lie about the gear or make stuff up. Much more fun than quoting a laundry list of expected instruments, amps and effects. So we came up with a bunch of cheap entry-level instrument models as our main “axes” for this venture, as well as a bunch of exotic or non-existant effect pedals that had the guy puzzled. “Those are beyond “boutique”. The guy who makes them doesn’t even want people to know his name. Consider they don’t exist. But they sound absolutely fantastic.” We did, however, plug a few brands we love that have always been good to us (big up to our friend Josh at Telson and to everyone at Rebel Relic). Anyways, I’m not sure if the guy was on to us, but he played along very politely and seemed amused. A photo session with the cheap guitars was planned for a later date —we need to grab a couple of those, and fast!

Finally we chatted with a guy who hosts some kind of hipster podcast. No music involved, but he was highly interested in our band name, asking if we had ever been harassed by government agents and if we had noted a recurrence of helicopters hovering above our respective quarters. When he mentioned he could clearly decipher Nixon’s “I am not a crook” when playing a certain song from one of our previous recordings backwards, my buddy said the only way to get the true message would be to play the full album (vinyl, please) backwards, in sync with the Blu-Ray of “All the President’s Men”. The guy nodded quietly, gave us a knowing wink, put his index to his lips to indicate we should all stop talking, rolling his eyes at the ceiling and walls of the room as if to indicate hidden microphones and proceeded to leave without so much as a further peep.

All in all, an efficient morning. I’m particularly looking forward to the article in that wellness/yoga thingy. I could use some tips for a mellow workout.

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