Casa Jonsson

It took a while but Eric’s first CD is finally finished. You can listen to track previews and buy the disc online.

There’s a hidden track on the album for you Easter egg hunters. It begins after the full minute of silence that follows “O Quickly Come,” the chilling final song. This devastating number needed some comic relief, and it comes in the form of a 39-second outtake ( hi-fi or  lo-fi) from the sessions at Blue Couch Studios. Here’s the back-story.

When I came into the studio, the guitar, percussion and scratch vocal tracks were already recorded for most of the songs. On top of these I laid down the fiddle parts Eric had written. It took several takes to get track 3, “From Depths of Woe (Psalm 130),” just right. In the process, I got well acquainted with Garrett Buell’s exotic percussion work on this song. The end of the tune fades out with Garrett shaking all his world-music toys, and he actually kept going long after the end of the song, transitioning into what you hear in the Easter egg. His outlandish clatter morphs from tribal to rockabilly to waltz in just a few beats. After I wrapped up the third take of this song, Garrett’s percussive goofing off played in my headphones as before, and I decided to join in. The result was a cross between baroque and country fiddle, but that was before all the other instruments were added.

I didn’t realize the tape was rolling—you can tell by my absent-minded plucking at the end—until a few months ago when I heard this outtake for the first time, after Eric and Lance had added guitar and cello tracks to it (along with general vocal mayhem and Eric’s voice announcing “polka!” in the middle). It was too late, but I felt like asking them to let me redo the violin part because now it sounded both harmonically and rhythmically out of whack with what got added afterward. The bring-me-another-stein-of-beer-Heidi atmosphere is probably the better for it anyway.