Dream, brother

Mouthful of Bees' singer Chris Farstad's quavering alto¹ has gotten me back on a mini-Jeff Buckley kick this morning. Also, local label Sugarfoot Music has just put out a compilation called For New Orleans whose real standout track is a recording of Jeff Buckley singing "I Shall Be Released" over the phone on a radio show from Jersey with a band of on-air musicians that includes cellist Michelle Kinney from Jelloslave. That was a complicated sentence. It's a striking performance for the ridiculous clarity of the sound of the band² as opposed to the ragged phone-compressed sound of Buckley's voice. The full story of the recording is included in the extensive booklet that comes with the disc. Anywho, the release party for the disc is this Sunday, and you can get more info on the Pulse website here.

So anyways, this Jeff Buckley kick is reminding of the story about how they made Grace at a studio in upstate New York³. Apparently they had three completely different setups for recording the tunes: one was a regular studio setup for the full band, one was a live setup on a stage and one was for more intimate, smaller and/or acoustic setups. And they had amps set up with mics and everything all the time, just ready to go. To me, that seems like just a fantastic way to make an album. I remember when I used to work on recordings in my apartment in Connecticut with my bandmate Todd and we had to set up and break down all the stuff every time⁴.

I also just recently made the connection between Mouthful of Bees' lo-fi fuzzy glory and Chris Lee's soul-infused indie rock. The connection mostly hooks up at the Jeff Buckley comparison, but what I really dug about Lee's first disc was how it sounded like a gutter-version of Buckley, and Mouthful of Bees has that same vibe--the feeling that you've walked into a rehearsal space and caught them in mid-tune, the high end pushing into the red just a bit.

¹ Maybe? I'm not completely clear on the demarcation of voice ranges, but it seems higher than tenor. Perhaps tenor with a kick-ass falsetto?

² So clear you can even hear the crickets outside the studio on the recording.

³ Bearsville, I think.

⁴ Well, either that or live in a forest of microphone stands in the living room. Which we did, sometimes.