Digression #1 or How Little Miami Came into Being

Quotes:

“Gold Bond’s Powder? It’s like mint for your balls”

“I’m from Clinton County. A cocktail’s on a fucking chicken.”

And now for a digression.

On our last record there was a moment that still stands as my favorite ever making records and is in the running for top moment playing music. After we had pretty much finished the record we were in the rehearsal space and Chuck brought in the chords to “Pulverized.” We worked it up a bit but we weren’t necessarily convinced. Now the way we write some of our songs is that someone plays something just fucking around and everybody starts playing along with them. On a good night it turns into a song. The rule seems to be that whoever starts singing first then it becomes their song to write the lyrics for it. Well that night Lisa starts playing a chord progression that was super pretty and we played it for a while. The next week we work on “Pulverized” a bit more and decide that we should go back in and record it. Someone brought up the Lisa thing and we kind of screwed around with it a bit more but nothing really came of it.

We didn’t have a lot of time or money (Strawberry had already taken longer than any other of our records to that point) so we had to get “Pulverized done in one night. We were set up in a circle all facing each other and we flailed away at “Pulverized” for hours. We were sucking on a Dead Kennedy’s dick and at one point John Curley (JC from now on) said he hated the fucking song. After we’d given up, hoping we got something we could use Lisa said, “Hey, you guys want to try something? Remember that one song we were playing? Well I’ve been working on it.*” Within 3 takes we had arranged and recorded the version of “Little Miami” that went on the record. Somewhere along the way Chuck had played the wrong chords and it sounded so cool it became a feature of the song. It was the first song in the history of the band where we kept everything we recorded on that take. The feeling of connection between us, the feeling that something rare had happened was almost overwhelming. Even though everyone had made some little mistakes we told JC we wanted to keep it as it was. We’re still really proud of it.

OK, so the whole point of that digression was because it directly influenced how we wanted to make the new record. We wanted to record it as live as possible.