Two men in baggy T-shirts and baseball caps are about 25 feet from me on a neighboring rooftop adjusting a microwave antennae they are installing this morning. They're awfully close. It's awfully close. They can’t see me through the translucent blinds. They stand right on the edge of the roof, bolting and screwing this thing into place. Six stories up. All my audio gear is this room near the window — will the microwaves create interference the way cell phones do near a microphone?
The other day the street was dug up at night. One of those machines with the big circular blades that cuts asphalt appeared in the evening and all night they worked — the sound of grating and machines screaming never stopped (I put a pillow over my head.) In the morning there was a trench about four feet deep with perfectly straight sides that ran halfway down the block. The next day they laid some PVC pipe in it and by evening were beginning to fill it up. Now there is a black tarmac scar that runs down the middle of the street to about halfway down the block. Most N.Y. blocks have similar, though slightly older, scars... I ride my bike over them almost every day, avoiding the bits that have collapsed and the other bits that have folded and warped into little moguls.
Last night I went to Staten Island with Louie Vega, the DJ and also part of the dance music enterprise Masters At Work. He's reworking and remixing the tune I did with the Thievery Corporation, "The Heart’s A Lonely Hunter". He's making it more club-friendly and a bit longer too. Currently he DJs at a club called Cielo on Wednesday nights, so he often tests out his mixes in progress to see how the dancers react. He says the mix in progress has been getting a good response.
Unlike many dance producers he works a lot with real musicians — on this track the original guitar and keyboard parts the Thieveries recorded and looped have been replaced by a funky picking guitar — somewhere between Fela and Talking Heads — and an electric piano (and?) an organ that throws little riffs and counterpoints around the guitar and vocal lines. There's a guitar lick at the end that is a direct lift from "Born Under Punches", the Talking Heads song. Normally I would never repeat or quote myself in such an obvious way, but as this is someone else's vision it might be O.K. — and part of what he’s doing throughout this mix is referencing other music — afrobeat, seventies soul, Latin House, Talking Heads — it's all alluded to.
Louie has added at least a minute of instrumental jamming to the ending after the regular song stops, and he wants me to add some vocal ad libs here... and, he says, a hook, which might be a tall order to come up with on demand, we’ll see. He tells me this as we drive over the Verezanno bridge in his Mercedes and he plays his mixes in progress over the car's sound system. (Not having a car myself this is a treat.) We've met before — he worked a lot with Los Amigos Invisibles and there was once talk of us collaborating, but this is the first time we've worked together.
In the studio he really has a composer's sense of how to rearrange parts, sections — how to make a section build and then release. I warm up by singing the verses then when I get to the new ending I improvise a slower more languid melody. After a couple of bars I lock on to it, reusing some of the chorus lyrics.
We both agree this is going somewhere, so we flesh this idea out and I realize that just like in "Born Under Punches" this slower melody can maybe have the faster chorus vocal simultaneously going over it.
We try it and it works — though one has to be "introduced" to the slow melody first, before the layering happens, or it’s all too confusing.
We thicken up some grunts I did and I lay a track of spoken responses and answers to the singing vocals that Louie likes, some of them are funny — like me in a low voice giving a come-on to visit my spaceship.
I still haven't quite figured out what this song is about — there are references to going off the grid and putting sheets over the windows — a world of surveillance and fear — but there is a simultaneously a kind of wacky joyous hopeful search for love and human connection. (Hence the title.) Maybe, almost unbeknownst to me, it's a kind of reflection on the world we're all in right now.
We work fast. I can follow Louie's thinking process as he quickly cuts and pastes bits of the new vocal. He comments that some artist who come in spend ages getting the mood, preparing, wavering in self-doubt, hesitant — but this was almost instantaneous, easy.
I go home optimistic, what if it’s good?! Wouldn't that be great?!
