#throwbacksongparty

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Throwback Song Party:  Broadway Ghost

Due to a variety of health- and geography-related issues, we haven’t been very active recently. But we’re still best friends, and we’re still super proud of the music we’ve made together.  To keep the fires burning, we’ve started a monthly series in which we dig into our catalog to tell the story of a song from our past.  This month: Broadway Ghost, the second-shortest song we’ve ever released.  One of the deeper cuts from our 2015 album The Longest Year on Record, Broadway Ghost is contemplative and airy, but packs an explosive finish.  

The Writing Process:  

Pete:  Broadway Ghost actually started out as a solo guitar song Nick was writing.  Before I moved to Toronto, we used to live together in a funky little house on the west side of Providence.  One night, I heard him strumming the basic chord structure down the hall somewhere, and was immediately captivated. The thing is, Nick is almost never working on just one project at a time, and is often in a couple of bands simultaneously. So I heard this happening, thought it was awesome, and in about ten seconds became obsessed with playing on it. I ran downstairs to see if we could use it before anyone else had a chance to jump on it or before it got filed away for some non-Troop of Echoes purpose. Total song-embryo poaching.  I tried to be cool about it, like “do you think this is maybe something we could work on, if you don’t have other plans for it?”  He was like “Yeah, sure.” Nice.

I think Nick had most of the harmonic architecture in place before the rest of us did much with it. It had a pretty strong identity from the beginning, even if some things developed as we went. The rest of us got to work trying to figure out what we could bring to it, and that kept evolving right through the recording session itself.

I tried to write a sax part for the beginning of the song; I kept bringing them to Nick and he justly pointed out that they weren’t sounding right. As a group we decided the sax parts I was writing had too much stuff going on, so we kept cutting material until the opening part was just one-note-played-at-a-time. By this time it had become kind of the modus operandi of the album anyway, and almost became like a dare between each of us, like “see how much you can cut and get away with it.” “Fuck it! It doesn’t even have to be a real melodic line! Just play two notes per measure!” The sax part developed more later, but all I had at first was that beginning part. So the idea of playing “honk” *wait* “honk” *wait* seemed really silly at that point.

But as things took shape, Broadway Ghost started to become pretty magical.  This one is a personal favorite of mine because the guitar sounds are so evocative. It sounds nocturnal and roving and mysterious to me.

Dan: In addition to the guitar parts, Nick also wrote some super rich trumpet harmonies for Broadway Ghost, which ended up playing a huge role in shaping the mood of the song.  We were incredibly lucky to have Doug Woolverton record the trumpet parts for the album, and he absolutely killed it.  He really understood what we were going for, and actually had a few ideas of how to maximize his harmonies.  

Nick: Yeah, so the majority of the trumpet arrangement was worked out beforehand. After we recorded an early demo of Broadway Ghost, I dubbed the harmonies on guitar with a volume pedal to mimic trumpet swells. When Doug came to lay down his tracks, he had some great ideas for all of his parts, including adding a high harmony line to the end section that makes for a great climactic moment.  

Doug Woolverton killing it in studio.  

The Recording Process:

Pete:  As we started the TLYOR sessions, I had a framework sax part in place, but the rhythmic delivery wasn’t solidified.  Dan, Nick, and Harry had laid down the bass, guitar, and drums for the album over the previous few months, and once they were finished up I came back from Toronto for a week for a marathon saxophone session.  By the time we got to Broadway Ghost, we had been tracking sax parts nonstop for a number of (very long) days, and I needed a break from the grind. So we took most of the day off, set up the studio so it could be kind of like a gallery space, invited some friends over and lit the room with a bunch of Christmas lights. We recorded that whole sax session in near-darkness just hanging out with everyone and it was beautiful. 

We got a few decent takes, and there was one that I thought felt better than the one that made the record.  But everyone else disagreed with me, and Graham (our recording engineer) didn’t even let me listen to the alternate take. He was like “nope, that’s the one.” Executive decision. That was the best vibes and the most fun I’ve had in a recording studio.  

Harry: That was totally Graham’s recording style, he liked working with first takes and complete playthroughs, instead of lots of fixes, overdubs, and piece-work.  It definitely helped the album retain a super “live” feel.  

Pete:  In terms of the saxophone approach, I wanted to do something kind of loose and breathy. Tenor sax can end up sounding more like a brass instrument than a woodwind sometimes, and I wanted to see if a tone closer to Dexter Gordon’s or Coleman Hawkins’ could work in the context of this band. I was not comfortable with it. It was a stretch. 

Dan:  From what I remember of the saxophone tracking for this song, we kept feeding Pete whisky and telling him to “keep it g r e a s y.”  I think it worked.  

Pete keepin’ it G R E A S Y.  

Harry:  I was totally prepared to leave Broadway Ghost bass-free. But that obviously didn’t end up happening.  I was away when most of the recording for this track happened, but apparently Dan had a tiny, minor, near-silent drum part he wanted to put down. A few days later, Graham made me sit in the chair and listen to the track with the drums absolutely cranked (which, from the reports I heard, took something like 20 takes to get right?). Graham pressed play and when I heard Dan’s drum part, I *heard* my part note-for-note in my head. That’s only happened twice to me.

Dan:  Yeah, recording the drums was a pain in the ass.  Originally the song was just supposed to be guitar and sax.  As it was kicking around, I had the idea of having a quiet, almost imperceptible drum part come in near the end of the song, basically sounding like someone was air-drumming to the song half a mile away.  We tried recording the drum part with a single room mic out in the hallway, but it sounded really off.  The balance of the kit wasn’t coming through well, the toms got swallowed up, and it made all the fills sound super janky and disruptive.  Graham had the idea to flip the switch on the drum part, turning on ALL the mics and cranking it up to 11 in the mix.  One take later, we knew we had it.  I think this is a really interesting example of what can happen to a song in the studio.  99% of the “musical content” of the song was completely written going into the session, but it didn’t really find it’s identity until that last 1% was figured out.  Messing with the dynamics of the drum/bass parts as we recorded really put the finishing touches on the song and gave it this kind of badass blast of power to cap the whole thing off.  

Pete:  I think the dynamics of this song almost defied the mastering process. It’s very quiet and then VERY LOUD and it took us a few rounds of revision to get it. I hope Carl Saff (our mastering engineer) wasn’t cursing us from his lab in Chicago over this.  

“Broadway Ghost” live at AS220, recorded by our main man Freddie Ross, who also shot the cover art for The Longest Year on Record. 

Trivia, or, What You Never Knew You Needed to Know About This Obscure Song Written and Recorded by A Troop of Echoes:  

Harry:  Continuing our tradition of ripping off and repurposing little nuggets from entirely unrelated bands, the bass part is inspired by "Ceres Walk” off of the soundtrack to “The American Astronaut."

Dan:  Also Freddie shot a sweet video of us playing this at our album release show at AS220.  Pete drops the mic.  Then we have to start the song over.  Rad As Hell.  (see above)

Nick, nailing takes 1-4 of Broadway Ghost.  Dude is a machine.  A machine that has learned to love.    

Critical Reception

Pete:  At shows before the album was recorded, we included Broadway Ghost a few times, just to try it out. I remember kind of getting a ‘meh’ reception at the time, but we knew that we were still working on it and were moving towards something, so I think we were ok with it. Immediately after recording, once we had the explosive outro in place, it killed at every show we played it at.  

Dan:  Broadway Ghost earned a few mentions on some of the blogs and magazines that wrote us up over the years.  Here are a few of the highlights:

A Closer Listen:  “The finest moments include the drum chorale that closes the opening track; the light explosion at the end of “Broadway Ghost”; and the finale of the title track, which is where the singers finally come in.  The more dynamic contrast, the better.” 

The New Fury:  “The shorter songs on the album, “Kerosene” and “Broadway Ghost” could be easily looked over since they seem only to be breaks from the craziness that A Troop of Echoes brings to the table on their album, but these songs have just as much thought put into them as the longer ones...“Broadway Ghost”, however, is much softer, and the ambient guitar chords in the background support a low and slow saxophone. This song also features a very soothing trumpet that accompanies the sax, and the song goes from slow jazz to rock in a second. The trumpet screams with power, then drops out, which leads into the title track of the album.”

Credits:   Nick Cooper - Guitar Pete Gilli - Tenor Saxophone Harrison Hartley - Surprise Bass Guitar Dan Moriarty - Surprise Drums Doug Woolverton - Trumpet Choir Graham Mellor - Recording Engineer Andrew Schneider - Mixing Engineer/Molar-Going Carl Saff - Mastering Engineer

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Throwback Song Party:  “Hollywood Red”

Due to a variety of health- and geography-related issues, we haven’t been very active recently. But we’re still best friends, and we’re still super proud of the music we’ve made together.  So we’re starting a monthly series where we write up one song from our catalog each month.  This month:  Hollywood Red, the leadoff hitter from our 2010 album Days in Automation.   This song is a super kinetic, skittering creature that doesn’t really let up.  

The Writing Process:  

Dan:  Most of the songs we wrote for Days in Automation started as little ideas or styles we ripped off from other bands that were playing around Providence at the time.  Obviously we have a saxophone, and our style never really lent itself to sounding like Lightning Bolt or Mahi Mahi, but in our 22-year-old minds, that’s what we were going for.  Although we didn’t quite hit that mark, these efforts infused a lot of energy, muscle, and athleticism into the music we were making at the time.  These songs were complex and busy, but to me, still felt powerful.  

Harry: I have very clear memory of writing the bass riff for the “verse” in Dan’s parents’ basement. Like Dan said, I was basically trying to rip off this killer Providence band that was around at the time called Sweetthieves.  While my parts basically stayed the same once they were written, Nick would change up his parts almost every time we played the song.  Back then our practice volume levels could be pretty out of whack, so a lot of times I couldn’t really hear what he was playing.  I basically had no idea what he was doing at any point in the song until we recorded a demo.  I remember listening to it and thinking “...that’s what he’s playing?”

Dan:  Nick in particular was always trying to re-invent his playing, and the way he navigated these songs.  He’s got a pretty keen sense of invention and critical self-reflection.  So when he finally does settle on a part, you know it must be pretty stellar.  

First day of tracking Days in Automation at Machines with Magnets.  The figure lurking in the background is Pete in his isolation booth (Chamber of Saxophonic Horrors).  

The Recording Process:

Dan: This was the first track we recorded at Machines with Magnets during the Days in Automation sessions.  For me at least, it was also the hardest song to play.  

We started tracking at the end of the first day, after spending the morning/afternoon setting up and getting sounds.  So we were all a bit frayed, even before we started actually playing.  It was our first time recording in a real studio, so it was unusual for us to have that level of quality control and that level of expectation from the engineer (Seth Manchester).  I’ll never forget how many times Seth had to stop us mid-take to tell us that I rushed a drum fill.  We chose not to record this album to a click, so I rushed a lot of fucking drum fills.  We probably did 15-20 takes or more of this song on that Friday night, and by the end I was bleeding all over the Machines with Magnets snare drum.  It was harrowing.  I distinctly remember getting home that night, completely spent, dreading having to show my face at the studio the next morning.  But over the course of the next few days, we pulled together and finished this weird, quirky, aggressive, incessant, and beautiful record.  

“Uh, Seth?  I think I owe you a new drumhead”

Trivia, or, What You Never Knew You Needed to Know About This Obscure Song Written and Recorded by A Troop of Echoes:  

Dan:  For Days in Automation, we made a concerted effort to put in little nuggets and electronic pieces between a number of the songs.  We all love albums that are greater than the sum of their songs, and that’s what we wanted to create.  With our most recent record (The Longest Year on Record), I think we were able to accomplish this on the strength of the songs, unity of sounds, and pacing of the sequence.  The songs on Days in Automation were quirkier and more disparate, so having these linking pieces really helped bind the songs into something coherent.  

Pete:  The electronic intro nugget for Hollywood Red has a fun story.  We knew we wanted a kind of eerie swell and buzz to kick the album off uncomfortably.  Of course, I went about achieving this in the most laborious way possible.  I ended up pulling snippets of Nick's guitar feedback from a bunch of different takes of another song on the album (New Breath) and then layered them over each other and did manual fade-ins and outs on each one individually.  By hand. There's like 40-50 of them in there.  

Dan:  Holy shit, that’s a lot of clicks!

Pete:  And most of that was done in one night in my basement after [REDACTED] in a church in Providence at like 3 AM.    

Dan:  I don’t know if we can tell that story on the internet…  

Anyway, we also had the idea to do “video liner notes” for the songs on the album. Basically, we thought it would be a fun way to showcase some interesting aspects of the songs. It was a cool idea, but never really got off the ground, as the one for Hollywood Red was the only one we ever officially released.  

I was living near Baltimore when we recorded Days in Automation, so writing and recording the album involved a lot of red-eye Amtrak trains back and forth to Providence.  It was always kind of eerie rolling through the rail yards of Philadelphia at 3 AM, so I ended up taking some footage out of the train window.  It seemed to fit the mood of the Hollywood Red intro pretty well, so I was able to use it in the video, layered over a recording of Pete driving around and talking about the origin of the name of the song.  

Click here to watch this relic of our 2010 internet presence...

Critical Reception:  

Dan:  Scouring the depths of internet sites from 2010 that have managed to survive into 2017, we were able to find quotes about Hollywood Red from several illustrious blogs!  Is This Revolutionary labeled Hollywood Red as “so right on,” and the Music Review Database called it a “Mouthwatering Opener.”  

Harry:  We nixed this song from our live set sometime around 2012, but for some reason people keep requesting it at shows.  

Dan:  If they’ve waited this long, they can wait another five years.    

Credits:  

Peter Gilli:  Alto Saxophone, Electronics Harrison Hartley:  Bass Guitar Nicholas Cooper:  Guitar Daniel Moriarty:  Drums Recorded by Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets, Pawtucket RI Mixed by Keith Souza and Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets Mastered by Jeff Lipton at Peerless Mastering, Boston Ma Assistant Mastering Engineer - Maria Rice

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Throwback Song Party:  Something Like Falling

Due to a variety of health- and geography-related issues, we haven’t been very active recently. But we’re still best friends, and we’re still super proud of the music we’ve made together.  To keep the fires burning, we’ve started a monthly series in which we dig into our catalog to tell the story of a song from our past.  This month: Something Like Falling, a B-side from our 2010 LP Days in Automation.  Even though SLF didn’t make it onto an official release, it’s a quirky and pretty little song that was pretty central to our identity for a few years, inspiring a few avant-garde composers, makeout sessions, and moms.  

The Writing Process:

Pete: Let’s do a before-and-after. I’m gonna say, without having listened to it in years, that this song is sitcom-level awkward for me. I think it’s probably the least good of our professionally recorded output, which is why we didn’t put it on the album (Days in Automation). It’s like coming back to your parents’ house and finding a birdhouse you made in middle school, and they still have it for some reason, and you kind of look at it and go, “what was I thinking?”. It’s missing important features for a birdhouse to have, like a nice little dining room for them to eat dinner together, or a little den for them to watch bird TV shows as a family, and instead it has other unnecessary things like a disco-themed indoor bird tennis court, and superfluous faux-Egyptian bird sarcophagi. This song makes me uncomfortable. It’s the birdhouse version of a poop.

***PAUSE***

Hangin’ out at the disco-themed indoor bird tennis court.

Pete:  Actually yeah. I just listened to the whole thing again and it’s better than I remember.

In all seriousness though, I think “Something Like Falling” is kind of representative of how a lot of trying to make music felt early on. Which is to say that there would be these moments of everything coming together, and you feel like you really have something, and there’s a lot of inspiration, and then long stretches of not knowing how to get to your next killer moment. And part of getting better is learning how to not need the Muse to come save you all the time. You work on craft so that everything you do at baseline is better, and you’re more prepared for moments where lightning strikes. You have a good chorus, and now you can do something with it.

 We were like 19 or so when we had the first draft of this one, and it was our oldest song to be recorded in a real studio. I would bet that we could reliably write a better song than this now in an afternoon. A lot of the stuff we were trying to do here got pulled off in better form on our next album (The Longest Year on Record). Some of the color and vibe are the same. It’s cool that it pushed us into something more lush.

Dan:  In terms of the actual musical content of this song, it’s mostly based around a pretty little bass riff that Harry brought in.

Harry:  Well, I guess in order to talk about this song I have to talk about “Porcelain” first (editor’s note:  NOOOOOO). Porcelain was one of the first songs we wrote together, and it had this little strummy bass part. One day while fiddling around in practice I came up with the main riff for “Something Like Falling” as some extension of the Porcelain part.  It was almost like a game to myself, to see if I could stretch out a two-note part into something longer. We were pretty hard up for material at that point, so I must have shown it to the band and we all decided to write something around it.

Dan:  Maybe we’ll write up Porcelain some other time.  In SLF, I’m really proud of my drum part in the post-chorus sections, where I’m playing between the ride cymbal and open/closed hi-hat.  I think it has a really nice “wide” sound which complements the lushness of the section.

Harrison Hartley and the superfluous faux-Egyptian bird sarcophagi.  

The Recording Process: Harry:  Something Like Falling was recorded at Machines with Magnets as part of the Days in Automation sessions. The plan going in was to do it “if we have time”, which we...sorta did.

Pete: Ha! Dan:  The first 80% of the song was written out and pretty well-structured, but the last 20% is a kind of devolution into noise that we always improvised.  While this worked out great for live shows, it’s not a great solution for studio recordings. Given our inexperience in the studio, we didn’t really have a solid roadmap prepared for how to navigate the noise ending.  So we really struggled getting this just right.  We weren’t recording to a click or anything, so we had to keep re-recording the whole 4-minute-long song over and over again just to try out different noisy endings.  I feel like the other guys were doing pretty well, but everything I played kept falling flat, or sounded way too abrupt, or dragged on for way too long.  I just couldn’t find the sweet spot.  

It was getting late, and we were collectively ready to ditch the song and move on. The tracking engineer Seth saw the song’s potential, and didn’t want us to give up on it.  He had a secret weapon:  “The Vacation Machine” - a term coined by a Japanese band they had recently worked with.  The Vacation Machine was a motor scooter which the MWM engineers let bands drive around on when they needed to relax and get their minds off of a song.  We all took turns tooling around the parking lot and miraculously avoided wrecking the scooter or ourselves.  The Vacation Machine had the desired effect, and we nailed SLF on the next take.

THE VACATION MACHINE

Pete:  Yeah, that’s when we really dropped in and started hitting it. I remember this being absurdly hard to get right in the studio, which feels stupid because it’s a really simple song.

Coming out of the MWM session was a good motivator. We were like “OK, we went into a recording studio and didn’t fall apart and die. Now we need to know more about how compressors work. We need to understand mic technique. We’re gonna work on songwriting.” We got to escape our box, both in terms of practicing to the level you need in the studio and writing songs that don’t need to be played perfectly to sound good.

Trivia, or, What You Never Knew You Needed to Know About This Obscure Song Written and Recorded by A Troop of Echoes:  

Something Like Falling was covered by The Conversation (Harry plus our friend Justin Brierley, who appeared in our first band-on-band interview) as part of their original soundtrack for the theater production Home/Run by Stray Creatives.  

SLF also inspired the moniker “Something Like Banter” used by the very same Justin Brierley.  

Something Like Banter actually named a piece “A Troop of Echoes.”  So now there is “Something like Falling” by A Troop of Echoes and “A Troop of Echoes” by Something like Banter. 

We recorded a longer demo version of this song with Joe Hartley, which was included on our 2007 mixtape Home Exxxperiments, which we hand-made 50 copies of and took with us on our first week-long tour.  The album was all hand-drawn by Dan’s family during a 13-hour drive through rural Canada, and included such wonderful scenes as Kenny G farting and zebras taking poops.  Of course, they sold out really quickly! 

A Brown University dance student choreographed a dance routine to SLF for her thesis project, but it has unfortunately disappeared into the abyss.  

Bird Nick at Bird Machines with Bird Magnets. Bird.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Harry:  This one is the sleeper hit, around 2008-2009 there were always people asking us to play it at shows.  

Dan:  It’s our Freebird.  

Pete:  It reliably prompted slow-dancing and makeouts in the audience. Which some people would say is the goal of all music. High-five if it did for you. Maybe it’s not bad after all. 

Harry:  Oh shit, I forget where the fuck this show was but I definitely remember a couple making out hardcore to this song at a show in like 2008...[REDACTED] maybe? Could be just some randos-Memory is hazy…

Dan:  Pre-Kerosene, this was my mom’s favorite Troop of Echoes song.  As far as I know, she has never made out with anyone to it.  

CREDITS Nick Cooper - Guitar Pete Gilli - Alto Sax Harrinat0r -  Bass Guitar Dan Moriarty - Drums

Seth Manchester – Tracking Engineer Keith Souza – Mixing Engineer Jeff Lipton – Mastering Engineer Maria Rice – Assistant Mastering Engineer