the fourth tMG forums compilation
twenty-two songs celebrating the
tenth birthday of All Hail West Texas.
the fourth tMG forums compilation
twenty-two songs celebrating the
tenth birthday of All Hail West Texas.
You can direct download the entire 64-minute, 320 kbps mp3 album for free.
Give what you can to Farm Sanctuary.
It’ll go into the Forums Goat Fund.
Performed by Daniel Trombley (dtrom4)
Where you live: Washington, DC, USA.
What it was like recording this song: Recording this song was intimidating, because this is the song that got me interested in the Mountain Goats. It's always a tough balance to do something new with a song while not changing what makes it great.
What you learned recording this song: My challenge here was how do you improve an acoustic song about death metal? My answer, as it all too often is, is to add mandolin. And I figured no song ever suffered with an extra piano track.
Performed by Silver Speakers (SaveMeASeat)
Where you live: New England, USA, where it can’t decide if it’s an early summer or a hangover of freezing gray February into the spring at the moment.
What it was like recording this song: This one was fun, I had more of a specific idea of what I wanted the thing to sound like when we first laid down the basic tracks, and it came out fairly faithful to that which is a rare and wonderful thing. I also got to work with someone new as compared with the last comp so it was a very different experience which is one of the joys of doing these things to begin with. I think we communicated really well and just went for it which was a blast though the final version is way more of what we knocked out in that day than originally planned (see below) so it’s pretty lucky that that went so well.
What you learned recording this song: I had my own Nebraska moment: the story of that album being that Bruce Springsteen made these sparse demos for the album and had them with him and listened to them for about a month before trying to flesh them out with a full band. Then, after playing them all full-bore, decided that the initial tapes had something that the new versions lacked—call it a “feel”, a “spirit” or whatever—you could feel a difference. After adding a bunch of things after our initial date, I listened to the whole shebang and just felt like it was all getting a bit bogged down—the breeziness of the actual in-the-room song wasn’t still there in full. So here you get our version of the Nebraska feel, a back-to-basics track with a lighter touch that hits me as what “Color in Your Cheeks” might have sounded like on Zopilote Machine (heck, the other vocals you hear are even sung by a Rachel!). Since it was going that old-school way anyway, I figured a classic tMG-style cassette recording shoutout at the top would be a nice kicker. Enjoy!
Performed by betamax
Where you live: Birmingham, United Kingdom. It's mainly made of concrete.
What it was like recording this song: Difficult. The original is so damned perfect, and I wanted to keep the chorus as raucously uplifting as I possibly could. Hence why I changed only the verse. I lifted the idea of talking over a gentle guitar track from a wonderful Darren Hayman song whose name escapes me. It’s from January Songs…
What you learned recording this song: It takes a lot to shout ‘woah’ at the top of your voice. I live in a flat, so the ‘woah’ sounds awkward… I’m good with the ‘hi-diddly-dees’ but, the ‘woahs’? Nope.
Performed by Featherweight (shlack)
Where you live: Brooklyn, N.Y., USA.
What it was like recording this song: Recording this song became an exercise in how deeply I could push into its rhythm, even while tweaking it, to see how I could make that carry the meaning of the song itself. I tried to give the whole thing the cadence of a funeral march.
What you learned recording this song: I learned that even if you try to make this song sound as defeated as its lyrics, there's still something in it that’ll keep pushing back.
Performed by Sister City (fivekidsdown429)
Where you live: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
What it was like recording this song: I had a lot of fun recording this song. In terms of feel, the original song is pretty standard, so I knew I wanted to try to fit in different dynamics in a short amount of time. I also wanted to experiment with some multi-part harmonies. I'm still on the fence about whether or not they work in the intro, but I'm glad I tried it.
What you learned recording this song: Having to become intimately familiar with this song was a great experience. AHWT in particular is an album with some particularly big hitters on it, so I was excited when I got assigned one of the lesser-celebrated ones. There is beauty in subtlety as well as in yelling hail Satan!
Performed by Evan Scott Peavey (weshallallbe)
Where you live: Washington, D.C., USA.
What it was like recording this song: Pink and Blue was fun to record because the timing of the vocals has always struck me as odd. I first did a heavy-on-the-fuzz guitar version… but it sounded too silly to me, so I switched to keyboard. The vocals took about a dozen takes (and admittedly still aren’t perfect but neither am I and most would agree that that’s OK). When I finally got the vocal take I wanted I was standing in my very small bathroom holding a Budweiser (which most know as the KoB ’round these parts) that I drank promptly after performing the version you’re hearing.
What you learned recording this song: Pink and Blue to me has always been a track about being overwhelmed by the existence of a new life being added to your own...but recording it for the benefit of Farm Sanctuary made me view it as a tender thought on all animals, not just human babies. It makes me think of the compassion we should have for all creatures and helping them to heal in times of need… which is of course what Farm Sanctuary (one of the absolute loveliest places I have ever been) is all about. I also learned that it’s hard to sing “old cardboard produce box” in a somewhat off hand way… but that’s neither here nor there.
Performed by The Society of Poor Academics (EvilEivind)
Where you live: Lommedalen, Norway.
What it was like recording this song: Frustrating, due to my computer’s bad habit of spontaneously re-booting.
What you learned recording this song: That my impulse control is pretty good. Unlike my computer’s.
Performed by Chris Jamieson (nutopia1213)
Where you live: New Jersey, USA.
What it was like recording this song: Difficult. At base, it's pretty melancholy, lyrically, but I’ve always felt there was an untapped vein of ire behind the otherwise defeated vibe. I tried to bring that out a couple times, but it ended up just feeling awkward, and I backed off a little bit.
What you learned recording this song: Regret is pointless; as eventually you will regret your regrets.
Performed by Kid Steel (Zopilote Steel)
Where you live: Oxford, England.
What it was like recording this song: It was fun. I sat on my bed with the laptop on my lap and played the song over and over again until I got the feel right.
What you learned recording this song: Everyone feels like they’re 16 years old again at least twice a year. Everyone feels that transcendental youth.
Performed by Hackberry Garage (simonfox)
Where you live: Mims, Florida, USA.
What it was like recording this song: It was incredibly, indescribably fun recording this song, but I will try, to describe it that is, anyhow. I created a basic 4/4 beat, since that's the timing the song seems to be in on the record, but for some reason it wasn't working for me. Then I thought, wouldn't this song be cool as a slow waltz sort of thing in 3/4... so I created this very machinelike, metronomic beat and then painstakingly mapped out the chord changes and where their timing would fall while simultaneously using the little bit of music theory I know to program the chords themselves. This was a long and tedious process, but I wanted this organ sound that 1) I couldn't get from my crappy keyboard & 2) I probably wouldn't have been able to play in time anyhow as I am a mediocre keyboardist at best. This was the first day of work. And then, much more quickly than any creative deity (for lo, I am but a mortal) I rested. A few weeks later, when I had time again, I recorded the vocals. I was afraid I had transformed this song, with all the immediacy John infused his tape recorded songs with, into some mechanized, pseudogospel pap and so I landed on the decision to record the vocals in one take. Well, it turns out that it actually took two takes because I completely missed my revised timing between the first chorus and the second verse. The immediacy is definitely there though. If you notice, on the first chorus, I made a strange mistake I always seem to make when singing along with this song… I said “driveway” instead of “bushes” which makes NO sense at all, but somehow I think that's fitting. Singing the second chorus I made a mistake I've never made that actually lends some special continuity to the song… this time instead of “bushes” I said “rose bushes”. Anyhow, overall this was one of the most challenging times I've had recording anything in my life, but also one of the most rewarding.
What you learned recording this song: Just because you can hit notes in your head doesn't mean you can hit them in reality. I often have to transpose tMG songs when I sing them, but this time I thought I could go up an octave and hit it. That was a mistake. When I tried to sing it, thought I swear I pulled it off once when I wasn't about to record, I could not stay on key to save my life, and there were at least three notes in the song that I couldn't hit and couldn't falsetto-fake well enough to be worth committing to a recording. So I was forced to sing in breathy, low tones, but once I heard it, it seemed a lot better that I did that anyhow.
Performed by Justin Mariner Daley (justin23000)
Where you live: Boston, Massachussetts, USA.
What it was like recording this song: I had just come off a span of recording as many demos as I could for a similarly-minded tribute project, which had caused me to branch off into some new sounds. I tried to keep some of that momentum while I did “Source Decay”, but in the end reined things in a bit form-wise.
What you learned recording this song: Recording this song made me think about Thailand a little. It made me think of the types of memories and experiences that have long passed by, but for some reason you want to change them. Or you want them, somehow, to change. You keep asking for reminders of your own mistakes from others, reliving ten minute spans of failure, and wondering if some pivotal event passed by unnoticed. It’s cyclical, you know, and it takes a brave person to change his own way of thinking…
Performed by nils.
Where you live: Paris, France.
What it was like recording this song: Recording this cover was easier than I expected. It took me hours to find new chords and a kind of “personal” approach on this song, but then that was it. I wanted to add many layers onto this to make it sound very different (synth, drums, strings, horns, etc.) but the more I listened to it, the more I liked it the way it was. In the end I probably spent more time listening to it than I did than actually recording it.
What you learned recording this song: I had to google “lithops” to know what it was, so I guess I learned something here. Still not sure how the title is linked to the song, though. But I feel the same way about 3/4 of tMG songs, so it’s probably just me.
Performed by Dark Silver Skies (Mr Glass)
Where you live: Louisville, Kentucky, USA.
What it was like recording this song: It was a calm Saturday afternoon in March, one of the warmest we’ve had yet in the year. Birds were out and few clouds hid the bright sunlight. I had just recorded a song for my new album the day before with a brand new 8 Track digital studio I got with my tax refund. I sat out on my red porch and placed the recorder on the patio table and hit record. You can hear the resonance of my foot stomping at the end of the song, ha. Added the djembe to fill out the sound and the synth to add an air of strange to the equation.
What you learned recording this song: Well, that the narrator wasn’t aware of the existence of the state of Alaska.
Performed by The Smith Family Are Sorry You Had to Hear This (StatusFrustratio)
Where you live: Somerset, Essex, and London, United Kingdom.
What it was like recording this song: I gave Honourary Smith the lyrics and she magically fitted it to a song her and Smith #2 had written 25 years ago. She send us a webcam video of her part. Smith #2 played harmonica, and almost got my granddad to play double bass on it, but we ran out of time. I yelled over the top a few times and stuck the pieces together.
What you learned recording this song: I used to listen to Warm Lonely Planet 5 times a night, and I built this secret story where it’s told by the narrator of Pink and Blue, years on. It’s a hot night and the kid (lalalawhatbirdnotlistening) is camped outside the house. So you’ve got this widower who’s been going quietly crazy for years and something in the air changes and I think I think he decides to take himself and the kid down. But he’s gone so mad he doesn’t see anything but release and sweetness in it for him or the kid and is past comprehending the tragedy, or maybe just doesn’t see the difference, either way. But at the same time he’s never really got his shit together in any field so maybe he’s going to do it, maybe he can’t be bothered. I had to abandon this idea because the new tune was too… empowered?, but I still couldn’t get used to the new chorus.
Performed by Ian Craig & Nigel Ewan (myopic mirror and nigel)
Where you live: Columbus, Ohio, USA.
What it was like recording this song: I (Nigel) have always unironically identified with this song, so I enjoyed the chance to sing it. Ian played guitar, bass, piano, banjo, and bass drum; Nigel sang, played a tiny bit of accordion, and produced. We incorporated part of a Fanny Crosby hymn into the song as a bridge.
What you learned recording this song: Handclaps are tough to record properly.
Performed by Lara Mishler (LaylaDarling)
Where you live: Portland, Oregon, USA.
What it was like recording this song: Recording was stressful, as usual, but I had a chance to finally use GarageBand for more than just a single take. And I got to play with my new MIDI controller. Beyond that it was pretty typical of my process. There may have been some crying and threats to pull out my hair.
What you learned recording this song: I should probably learn how to play guitar properly…
Performed by Jeffrey Wegener (ReferenceToAMountainGoatsSong)
Where you live: Bellingham, Washington, USA.
What it was like recording this song: Recording this song was tough, since I had no recording experience and no real drive to cover this song as I had no emotional attachment to it. I had to try and force emotion into it, because I didn’t connect with this song even after listening to it a lot, and I don’t think it worked.
What you learned recording this song: I learned that it is tough to have dynamics are a tough thing to have when you’re trying to have constant 3/4 accordioning going on, and that I can actually be creative musically when I am able to record and layer over myself (although I didn’t keep any of that stuff since it all sounded lame due to lack of a nicer mic and such), so I think I’m gonna invest in a nice mic soon and once again attempt writing music, but do it more organically cause apparently I work that way.
Performed by ThomThom & the Navigators (Thom)
Where you live: Bloomington, Indiana, USA—2 and a half hours from Cincinnati, to which I may one day go back.
What it was like recording this song:
What you learned recording this song: I am much better at procrastinating than I am at singing and playing autoharp. I am, however, possibly even better at burning bridges.