Northwest Passage - Isolated Vocals

The press release for 2018’s Into The North read, in part, as follows:

Holed up for a week in a small wooden cabin in Northern Canada with nothing but whiskey in our glasses, four microphones in front of us, and hordes of mosquitoes outside singing along, we belted these damn songs over and over until we had them just right, and the result is the album we’ve always wanted to make.

Damn right. Given the enormous attention that a capella nautical songs have rightly received in recent years, it is easy for me to forget just how weird it felt, in 2017, to be doing an entire album full of them. The label was confused, the bass player and drummer were confused, and a lot could have gone wrong, and a lot almost did. But it worked out, and if you listen reeeeeeeeal close on some quieter parts, you can actually hear the mosquitoes humming along. (I have never seen so many mosquitoes)

I have mixed feelings about the cover of “Northwest Passage”. It’s an interesting take and it feels fine as an arrangement. But covering your hero’s greatest song is almost never going to end up satisfying you. Anyway, it’s fine, it does the job, but at times I feel like the greatness of the song is doing all of the work. I much prefer “Dear old Stan” which is my goddamn song, you know.

Anyway, one of the things about this cover that you might love or hate is all the folk instrumentation and chording, which is cool but which often masks the raw vocal sound. And the one thing I am super proud of about this album is that there was no auto-tuning and no separate takes: everything you hear is straight off the floor, all four singers just singing together with no edits. So I’ve gone back into the studio files and remixed this cover so you can just hear the voices. With alllll the flaws left in.

Another regret I have about this cover is in the chorus. While we were practicing it someone said “isn’t it wild and savage?” And I, who had always been singing “wide and savage”, being the idiot I am, didn’t look it up. On this take, you can hear me singing “wide” once and then announcing that I fucked it up. But of course I hadn’t, it is “wide”, and doubtless sea shanty nerds around the globe have been wagging their fingers at us ever since for singing the wrong word. Whatever, nerds. You couldn’t figure out this four-part harmony if I paid you $1,000,000. I figured it out. Get stuffed.

Recording Into the North was a truly intense experience; that cabin had wood acoustics for days, and you’d wake up to make some bacon and coffee and three guys would be jamming their acoustic instruments. And you’d just be bathing in this incredible sound. So I grabbed a little take of those instruments and cranked the room mics and stuck it at the end. Maybe you can imagine what it was like to be there.

So here it is: The Dreadnoughts: unplugged! And then somehow unplugged again.

There is more of this “remixing” of older stuff coming soon, so if you want to keep hearing it, become a paid subscriber!