Earwig made a few trips down to The Recording Workshop in Chillicothe, OH. prior to actually starting work on ‘Center Of The Earth’. The sessions are run by the students and the bands get free recording time in exchange for serving as guinea pigs to their progress. We mostly used the sessions as rehearsals and often never even heard the final mixes. Most of the songs never even saw the light of day. The Workshop keeps the files around on a hard drive though and students can pick from their catalog for their final mix projects before graduating. Recent RW grad. Ralph Miller has posted his mix of Used Kids on his Myspace page . It’s funny because I don’t even remember recording that song there. He did a very good job on this alternate version. This is an early demo of Used Kids and it’s interesting to note the differences from the final album version. Check it out. If you dig it, leave him a comment.
I remember being very excited to play CD101 Day at the LC in 2007. Pretty unbelievably, our song “Used Kids” was being played on the radio like crazy. 400 spins in 6 months. You do the math. We got our own dressing room and were generally treated like conquering kings. Earwig got the second to last slot, which was great. The place was packed and the audience was incredible. Despite our nerves, we actually didn’t screw up and played pretty well. It was one of the biggest and best shows we had played up until that point. Then FOX TV called and asked us to come in for an interview and to play the song on their morning show ‘Good Morning Columbus’. We had planned on doing the tune as a full band but, as usual, things went awry and we ended up on-air as an acoustic duo, just me and Matt. It was a happy accident though, since I don’t know if we would have been able to deliver fully functional rock at 7am. I bet the soccer-moms probably liked the stripped down version better anyway . Next, we somehow landed the headlining spot Friday night on the main-stage at Comfest. Despite technical difficulties (with my brain) we did an admirable job and went over well with the massive audience that’s a cross-section of free-music fans and beer lovers from the Midwest. We capped the summer off with another show at the LC, this time outside, and then a short tour (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York) to promote ‘Center Of The Earth’. At the end of October, a week after we got back from the tour, we went into the studio and put down basics for 14 songs that should comprise our next full length album. All in all, it was a fantastic year. You can see clips of Earwig at Comfest, The LC, CD101 Day, FOX TV and several stops on the tour in this new video for ‘Used Kids’, superbly edited by Matt Parker. Enjoy.
*BONUS* Look for the scene where I have Matt in a headlock and then throw him to the ground. We were playing in Cincinnati. I broke a string mid-song and, disposing of my guitar, finished the tune by flailing around the stage like an aerobics instructor on PCP. I guess that I got a little caught up in the moment. Matt, if your out there...I’m sorry.
I like the sound of tape hiss. It’s warm and fuzzy. I like it when you fall asleep on the couch watching a movie. And when you wake up, the tv’s gone off and your left with a warm blanket of pixilated static (but not like in Poltergeist, that would be bad). There’s just something comforting about analog artifacts. Sometimes, with music, it helps blend everything together. Make it mushy. Like cake batter before the cake. It works in movies too. I loved how in Grindhouse (the movie by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez) they went to great lengths to make it an authentic tribute to B movies and exploitation thrillers. Right down to all of the fuzzy, out-of-focus camera work and stray hairs on the projector lens. My pal Matt Parker makes movies. He let me watch some cool exploitation style trailers that he tacked onto the front of a short horror movie of his called “Hack”.
I dig all of the after effects, the coming attractions, 70’s movie styling, the funky music and the foley sound work. It all makes me feel like I’m back at the drive-in. This is just stuff Matt does for kicks, he also edits video professionally (www.mattparkerproductions.com). Matt is working on a music video for Earwig. It’s a lot of rough live footage that I collected over the last year cut together to the song Used Kids. Matt has a great eye and he’s a very talented cat. It’s coming out better than I had expected. Some of the footage is well shot, glossy, bright and clean. While some of the other raw video I gave him is pretty low quality. Matt found a theme to tie it all together and used filters and other effects to get the footage to all work well as a video. He sacrificed the quality on the pristine footage to give it all a lo-fi feel. There are a few other neat tricks too. I like it. I’ll post the finished video here as soon as it‘s ready.
I like to write. But staring at a computer screen too long hurts my brain. The internet is digital and harsh. I think that coffee in the morning must be somehow analog. The more coffee I drink, the longer I can stare at the computer screen. They seem to almost cancel each other out.
