The Broken Guitar

Today The Library is on Fire went up to Glen Cove to record at Pie Studios with Perry Margouleff and Elias Gwinn for Benchmark Audio's Masters from Their Day series. The series takes a band into a professional recording studio for one day, hearkening back to the days when bands had only a handful of hours to cut a single. Cory Race stepped up and flew in from Ohio as Pete had double-booked and had to play a show in Manhattan. 

We'd like to thank Elias for giving us this opportunity and for being a great producer, Erica Lorentzen for introducing us to Elias, Isaac Deitz for the video, Perry Margouleff at Pie, and Jeremy Johnston for the co-engineering. The experience was one of the best of our lives. The episode should air within the next few months.


I wrote a new song for the session. Its called "The Broken Guitar". I've been thinking lately about the fallen poets of my day - Jay Reatard, Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain, Rachel Wetzsteon, and my friend Tyler. I've wanted to make something honoring the people I've so admired - those whose personalities, inner flames, and ways of life have lead to tragedy, and left us surviving in their wakes.

Last night Cory and I got home from practice and watched Patti Smith's "Dream of Life". The documentary put me in a languid state, and as I fell in and out of sleep in the dark of the loft, I thought of how Patti has carried on her charge of poetic lightning throughout such darkness - fearless lashing out against the Bush administration, the sadness and pain enduring the loss of her friends and loves. She is a true soldier of the artistry of freedom. A true soul. I thought of the song I wrote this week and felt content that I'd written something honoring those people - the good ones.

Today's recording session was an exultation of the spirit of rock'n'roll, the spirit of freedom. I was honored and grateful to play with Cory and Mark, our spirits aligned and created an air of wonderment. All three of us were humbled to be surrounded by the tools that legends had used to create their art. Cory played through a Ludwig that Ralph Molina (of Neil Young & Crazy Horse) had given Perry, the studio's owner. There was a Fender Tweed marked "Record Plant" that Jimi Hendrix played through.


The most humbling experience I've ever had in a recording studio was playing Keith Richards' 1950 Butterscotch Blonde Fender Esquire, replete with missing low 'E' string and open tuning (which I instantly tuned up without thinking). The guitar didn't want to leave my body. 

Seriously. It was a very strange occurrence. It was like a seductive cat who won't leave you alone when you visit someone's house for the first time. The guitar sunk into me, demanding to be played. The gnawed neck edges and worn-down fretboard stared at me with thousands of silent stories, old ghosts of dark stages and echos of streams of energy that the guitar shot forth like shadows, like an undertow of a petrified current. The edges of the body were worn and smooth - this was an instrument which, through years of constant playing, had been molded by human hands into something created by a higher collective power. It felt like my hands were meant to be on it.


It gets better.

We got in there and were looking around and Mark goes, "Whoa. Look." pointing to an old maroon colored amp. "Made by Ray Butts special for Scotty Moore. He was Elvis' guitarist."

It was Scotty Moore's Echosonic Amplifier, the exact same amp that Elvis would often use as a P.A. before Presley and his band became popular, Elvis singing through it while Scotty played guitar at the same time. It was the same amp used to record "Jailhouse Rock" and pretty much every other Elvis hit thereafter. There's actually a tape echo built into the amplifier, which Perry turned on. Like crystals dropping into pristine water. But then a strange ghostly decay (Elvis?).


We used this setup to try a technique that I don't think has ever been used on a studio recording - what I, by default, call the "raindrop technique". I certainly didn't invent this technique, but learned of it while playing in Rhys Chatham's Crimson Grail for 200 guitars last summer in Lincoln Center. The idea is that a multitude of guitars simultaneously play, arbitrarily and arhythmically, single notes picked in a certain set of scales in any octave, then are allowed to decay, throughout a landscape, to give the effect of rainfall. Imagine a storm, but all the raindrops are in key.


To do this, we tracked the Fender Esquire through the Echosonic. All three of us played this setup, so Cory and Mark were able to experience the sound and feel of these instruments as well. All three of us were humbled and amazed to the point of being shocked. I wanted Cory to record guitar tracks as he had no actual knowledge of guitar-playing. Even he said the guitar wouldn't let go of him. For his parts I saved the notes with black dots on the fretboard, above the 12th fret. None of us listened to the playback of the song while recording our parts. We just got to sit in the huge silent tracking room and play this amazing guitar through this amazing amplifier by ourselves while the tape was rolling.

The Broken Guitar

Found yr broken guitar among the shoreline rocks

The violent waters once raging now stilled

among your missing hands and all is quiet now

The wood and wires tangled round

where your sunburst heart had smashed it down 

down down down

Where all your noise is silenced now

The blazing watts that fizzled out out out

I wanna unleash the storms again

out from your blazing head

Burn out the wind in all its winding grace

to fall on down

To find the face in your lost sounds

I sat and watched the drywall skyline

bleary crystallized and numb

bearing down upon your memory the place

the place where you had run

Where all your noise is silenced now

The searing feedback fizzled out out out

I wanna unleash the storms again

out from my aching head

Burn out the wind in all its winding grace

to fall on down

To find the face in your lost sounds

To find the face in your lost sounds

To find the face in your lost sounds