Tell Them They Can Leave a Brochure


For a number of months back in 2001, I drove every weekend to a bungalow in the hills above Malibu to record a single song. It was "Take Me Away," a very wordy, tricksy piano-based number I'd cooked up after a lot of listening to Rufus Wainwright (attentive ears may catch distinct traces of both "Foolish Love" and "Beauty Mark" in my song), and the bungalow belonged to a producer named Chris Irwin, who also went by the name Chris Julian. (That's apparently what he goes by now.) That year I was putting together a solo record, in part with the band Millhouse, which I had essentially broken up over the issue of creative control—I wanted them to be the Attractions to my Elvis Costello, and, though they were an exceptional group of musicians I loved playing with, they weren't really up for that kind of explicitly subservient arrangement.

But they did join me in the studio to capture some of our best work, with the help of crack producer Jimb Fisher, and I supplemented the Millhouse tunes with a few other tracks I recorded with other musicians at Mark Wheaton's Catasonic Studios in my neighborhood of Echo Park. I was essentially producing, or co-producing with Jimb, all of it, but "Take Me Away" was a song I really wanted an outside producer's ears on. I tried it out at a few record-for-hire places, and Irwin/Julian had the take on it I most jibed with. He mostly took me away from the showtune piano sound of the original, built a cool beat by hand from samples (if memory serves), and added cool meta-theatrical effects. I wish we'd recorded with a real trombone rather than a synth one. But I liked the results well enough that I closed the record with and took its title, i hope it's me, from its lyrics.

In all I probably spent more out of pocket on this one song than I did either at Catasonic or at Tommy Norton's home studio in Venice, where Millhouse and I recorded. Was it worth it? As I sing in the song:
When you take stock
It's naught but paper and string
And gumballs and Turkish rugs
And jars full of lightning bugs
Corkscrews and horseshoes
And phones that don't ring
Whoa if true.

Comments

Popular Posts