New Album Progress

Two Mondays ago marked the first time I’d stepped into a jam space to work on songs with other Dreadnoughts musicians in fourteen years.

Because I’ve been living out east, and because the rest of the band was out in Vancouver/Edmonton, every album since “Uncle Touchy” has been done like this: I make a bunch of demos using fake drums, and then the band gets them and learns them, and then we go into a studio and record them, frantically fixing any missed notes or strange dynamics.

It’s astonishing how much music we’ve made this way. Into the North. Roll and Go. even Foreign Skies was initially a bunch of weird sounding demos. This, for example, is the Demo for Amiens Polka I sent to the band. It has marimbas in it and goofy clapping and is entirely missing the third part that I wrote on the plane on the way to the recording sessions in Vancouver. And somehow we ended up with the amazing-sounding track on the album. Huh.

This, to be clear, is like 47 songs all worked up by me in a basement or bedroom, playing most of the instruments and writing all the harmonies/etc, and just hoping to God it works out in the studio. And it somehow did. But it is a profoundly stupid way to make music. You have these amazing musicians, each an expert on their instrument and a lover of folk and punk music, and you just get almost zero input from them during the creative process? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Which is why it is exhilarating and even a little scary to finally be doing it right again, here in NYC.

Me and the American crew have been meeting every couple of weeks, and working on new songs. And the suggestions are starting to flow, and the songs are getting better, bit by bit. There’s one about Stompin’ Tom Connors. There’s a polka about getting super drunk at a bar in Staten Island. There’s a mishmash of two classic classical songs. And finally, for the love of God, there’s a song about submarines, which has taken me way too long to write, given that I basically love submarines more than anything. Ping! Dive planes down! TDC active! Schome thingsh in here don’t react well to bulletsh! Etc.

(Side-question: can they get wifi on submarines now? Or do all those navy guys just spend three months on patrol with no access to Twitter? How do they manage that?)

The album is shaping up to be a bit weird, it’s polka-heavy and shanty-heavy, which means that it’s lacking the inexplicable unity that Polka’s Not Dead had; where a sort of klezmer-punk theme united 8 or 9 of the songs. This one is more “all over the place”, like the more recent Roll and Go, to the point that it’s almost worth selling vinyls where one side is the polka-punk and the other side is the nautical stuff.

And finally, there is a struggle with the lyrics; for some reason when I was writing this one, every second song seemed to cry out for a “boys!” or “me boys!” in the lyrics, and as I documented in the last post, that is not always a good idea. I know a lot of pirate-identifying bands would never blink an eye at having this many samey-sounding lyrical themes, but I can’t handle it, when I hear the songs together I’m like “oh… this is dumb”. So we’ve had to replace a bunch of the shouts of “Boys!” with other words. When it comes out, the cleverest among you will be able to spot where this has happened.

Anyway, dreadfully sorry for the long break in posting; as the new album develops you’re going to get sick of these updates, and you’ll wish it was November 2024 again, where you were paying $5/mo for blissful, Dreadnought-free silence.