Well, we've been sitting on this puppy for quite some time and we've been making great progress on songs for album number three while waiting around. But while get into that, I'll instead sit down and tell you about the tracks on our 2nd album that just came out, one track at a time. Today we'll talk about track one:
DISCARDED RITUALS
"Again?" That's how I'll always remember it. Anna and I had just been down to demo tracks with my good friend Shawn Jones in Lockhart, Texas. This session happened in-between our first and second albums. But now we were now about to work up a full band version of the song for shows and possible re-recording with Knol Tate. Anna was unsure. The Texas version's pretty hot. Shawn plays some nice guitar and also helped us out with vocals. That was the second version, spooky.
The first version was recorded in my studio during the debut album sessions when Witch Watch consisted of just myself and Anna. My recording techniques are rather pedestrian and at the end of the day, Rituals (Version 1) was axed from Wandering and Wondering for being what I thought was "too thin sounding".
A third version was demoed with the full band (now including Robert Kramer) and then the fourth was tracked during the second session of the Underground recordings (February 2018). During the session we employed some pedal steel courtesy of Marty Lestock. He guested on three tracks, the other two being Seconds and Would You Know? Robert's guitar part on the song emulates the feel of pedal steel and so when both came together and clashed, we had to ultimately choose Robert's part. Lestock's parts do survive on the other two tracks.
Composition wise, the song was a rare moment in which it wrote itself. The riff fell out of a second capo position I had in place while rehearsing Happy Hollows. The melody came really fast and the lyrics possibly even faster. It appeared to be another of our neo-goth folk tracks. Most likely Bauhaus or Faun Fables inspired. It was written on an unvarnished 12 string Fender acoustic I bought from Twin Town Guitars for a cool $100. It solved my queries as to how The Go-Betweens/Smiths/R.E.M./Bauhaus got those dreamy/shimmery sounds.
Lyrically, it's a pretty straight forward reading. The "ritual" in this case being reckless spell casting to influence an organic situation, ie: relationship.
The Knol "mutt" Tate album version is available HERE.
The Shawn Jones Texas version is available HERE.
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