Track By Track: Yo La Tengo – This Stupid World

Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey (where we have worked for many years, and where we recorded this album). Once he left, he vowed never to return. He wound up returning once, to campaign for Ronald Reagan. Sinatra Drive (formerly River Road) runs through the town. I’m sure he was told they re-named a street in Hoboken after him, but I do not think he ever gave the slightest shit.

Around the year 2000, someone briefly acquired the rights to Danelectro guitars and began producing excellent, cheaply-priced reissues. We purchased a purple sparkle 12-string from Guitar Bar (NYC area’s best music shop). In 2018, it became the first guitar I ever broke. I sat it down for a moment and it fell; the neck snapped in two. The sound was sickening. I had nightmares. As luck would have it, they had just come back into production and I purchased a red/ black sunburst model at the Queens Center Mall. That is the guitar you are hearing on “Fallout.”

For quite a while, we only knew this song as its timestamp: “3/13/2020.” Drums, bass, and whatever the heck Ira was doing (guitars? Organs? Saxophones? Tape loops?) through two amps, were all recorded live less than 48 hours before the lockdown began.

A fun, if time-consuming, part of our “process” is to try to re-learn something we once played, spontaneously, sometimes years ago. This requires extensive forensic analysis, until finally arriving at a facsimile. Then realizing, eh, not as great as we remembered. Then, the bass part is simplified, then replaced altogether. Then the rhythm changes. Then the guitar chords all change. Then all these things change again. And again. Eventually, not one element of the source idea remains. And that’s how we wrote “Aselestine.”

We often employed the Glyn Johns method of mic’ing the drums during these sessions. This setup turned out to be an excellent way to capture Georgia’s expressive, amazing playing, especially on this track. Things like this made me appreciate that real studio engineers are scientists. And wizards. Respect.

On vinyl, this track ends in a locked groove. But how do you approach putting a locked groove on a compact disc, or digital file? I guess if you want to really stick to the concept 100%, you let it last for the remainder of the disc (or in the case of a file, forever). Not practical, especially if it’s not the last track in the album’s sequence. Or, do you estimate how long it might take for a vinyl listener to realize there’s a locked groove, and print that length? Anyways, that’s a great question.

Many years ago, I purchased a yellow plastic melodica, in the bustling Chinatown of Flushing, Queens. Pretty sure it was from a toy store – the instrument and its carrying case bear the image of Dick Bruna’s beloved “Miffy” (or “Nījntje” in the late, great artist’s native NL) rabbit character. Anyways, it plays like a dream. You can hear it wheezing through this song.

Filters: can’t get enough of ‘em. Somewhere along the way, I read an interview with the legendary Craig Leon where he said he ran all of Johnny Ramone’s guitars through a Moog filter bank when mixing. Thus began many hours of fun. Why stop at guitars? We didn’t! So much fun, I could still be auditioning different filter settings right now.

One helpful feature of the recording platform we use is the option to make clips, waveforms, channel markers, etc different colors. It’s good for grouping tracks, organizing takes when comping, and general note-to-self stuff. The edit window of this particular session wound up looking like a Jen Stark painting. YLT studio secret: Georgia’s vocal tracks are always yellow. Also: I am colorblind.