Rain: It’s so funny, because right when Rich actually writing it, back when he was filming ‘Old Henry’, he actually put a photo on his Instagram of the view out of that window into the car park from that actual hotel. And it looks so chilled. It's got, like, the whiskey bottle on the shelf and white, sheer curtains, and you've got an acoustic guitar on the bed, and the whole thing looks, like, idyllic. It looks like Wyeth. It’s a still life. And then the track comes out and it has this edgy energy. 

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Billy: Has everybody seen ‘Old Henry’?

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Rain, laughing: Well, yeah. Know your audience Billy.

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Billy: Now Rain, if you could ask Rich, how soon after the mud scene did he write ‘Layin’ Low in Leb’nun’. You know what I'm talking about? Was it after?

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Rain: Yeah, there's a great photo set that he shared. There's one photo of him all done up in his costume. Looking really dapper. And then there’s a picture of him where he's just covered in crap. Like, he's got crushed Oreos in his hair. His nose is all scuffed up, and he just looks, defiant.

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Billy: It's such a great scene, though. Such a great scene.

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Rain: And you can tell when you watch it. I mean, he said to me ‘When you see the movie, you're gonna know when it happened’, because I'd been chatting to him and he was ‘Yeah, I've kind of scuffed my face up somewhat’. And I when I was watching that scene in the movie, I was just, like, ‘Jesus!’ It’s pretty brutal.

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Billy, laughing: So good. So, knowing now…I watched the movie after recording the song, so I'm like, I have to watch this movie now because it's like, he's makes so many reference to this place. I'm like, okay, now makes way more sense. Like, some of the lyrical content. I get it now.

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Rain: So, Zack, there's a scene in the movie where it's a fight scene between Rich's character and Tim Blake Nelson. And when they were doing this fight, Rich’s character is thrown down in the ground, and they'd actually kind of dug out a hole for Rich to fall into with his face, and they'd put, like, soft stuff in there. Crushed up Oreos. So that when he kind of went down into that, he would be protected and just, like, get, you know, a face full of cookies. But when Tim Blake Nelson was throwing him down, he kind of overshot, and he threw Rich down into actual dirt, and just smushed his face into the gravel. And Nelson pulls him up, and then, like, Rich is there, with blood streaming down his face, and Tim Blake Nelson's like ‘You okay?’ and Rich is ‘I’m fine. We’ll go again. We’ll go again’.

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Billy: ‘Worst tasting Oreo cookie I've ever had in my life.’

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Rain: I've never found it. But when Potsy Ponciroli, who directed it, was on ‘Kings Of Con’ as a guest, he said that day Tim Blake Nelson had done an interview for the movie and was talking about what a trouper Rich was about that scene. I should probably just message Potsy and ask him where it was, because I've never managed to track down that interview, but I'd love to hear what Tim Blake Nelson had to say about that, because I think it'd be really cool.

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Billy: It was a great movie, Zack. I highly recommend it. And again, these songs will start to make a lot more sense.

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Rain: And I also asked Rich whether Tim Blake Nelson knew that he covered ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’ as well.

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Billy: Right, right. We've done that in Rome. 

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Rain: And obviously, Tim Blake Nelson was the original in the movie for ‘Oh Brother, Where Are Though?’ 

 

Kerry-Anne

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Zack:  Probably went through the most change of any song on the entire record. Like, the demo was a lot closer to ‘Readout’. Like, it was a lot more rigid. It was a little bit more new wave-y. It was a little bit more riff-y. And I think that all of us, when we listened to the demo, kind of agreed that this one has the furthest to go before it'll kind of feel like it belongs inside the context of this record. 
Was it me, or was it Zach Ross who said we should just make it a ‘Little Feat’ song?

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Billy: That was you. And I remember, when I was meeting with Rich for lunch we were well in pre-production and I remember being, like ‘I was like ‘Kerry-Anne’ a lot. There's just something I think it needs. Kind of needs to have that bump. I want to feel like I'm on the back of a horse or something, you know what I mean? Like, it has to gallop. It needs more gallop’. And I think that was the note. And then I think you mentioned ‘Little Feat’ and I was like ‘That's it. Yes, yes. Perfect’. You know, that really kind of helped set that the vibe for that song.

It was very R.E.M.ish, you know, almost a little like ‘That’s Nirvana’. I heard, like, Kurt Cobain, you know, singing that song. It was very punk rocky. I'm like ‘That's a little far. Let's see if we could kind of reel it back in.’

 

So, yeah, that one definitely had the most changes from demo to final version. Even lyrically. We kind of really refined that one in the room, you know, he did draft after draft after draft and finally he landed on something where we we’re all like ‘That’s it’.You know, but I love that song. And then that, you know, having Sasha doing the key part in the middle of it was just super fun. Remember, we're scheduling keys and he's like, Rich is like ‘We really need keys?’

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I’m like ‘Let's just go through with the keys. I think you'll be happy’, you know? And then after that day one, after day one, he's like, ‘Dude! Oh my God! I was not hearing any of that, but I'm so happy we did that, Sasha’. Sasha's just so amazing. And he's another one of those musicians that you just could sit there and say ‘Let's try a couple passes of this’. And everyone that he does is phenomenal. And you're just like ‘Okay, now we have to go through and pick our favourite of all these favourite performances’, and it was really just super fun. It's always fun to record with Sasha and just be in the room while he's just doing these.

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Rain: Was it a Hammond or is it a synth for the Hammond sound?

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Billy: Yeah, we tracked some Hammond B3. We tracked some Rhodes. I think that was the Wurly.

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Zack: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Billy: Toy piano stuff. Sasha is really fun. Those are some of my favourite times, tracking with Sasha. Funny little fact is, I met Sasha through my friend Freddie, who plays with Everclear, and he recommended Sasha to do…I think we did the Eskimo CD release party with Sasha way back in the day. And I've always known, like, I always loved playing with Sasha and then Zack, up until recently, like, Zack has been using Sasha on so much stuff, so it's just like, our world's collided again.

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Zack: I was pulling for other projects. If we were doing these other country and Americana things, just bring in esoteric instruments and just play, like, weird stuff. Like, he's the kind of player who you can give, some pretty deep cut, obscure notes to, and he'll just kind of run with it. Like, we've got a few songs where, like, I, you know, I told him, oh, let's make the verses kind of tango. And when you go to solo mode, it really has to turn into a Joe Henry/Tom Waits kind of thing. Just go full “Rain Dogs”. I don't want any notes. Like, have fun. And he just knows. He knows his way around and he is very familiar with some pretty fun and esoteric music.

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Copperhead Road

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Billy: ‘Copperhead’ was from that first session, you know? Like, that was one take him in the control room just laying down what he thought was a scratch vocal track, and it wound up being the one. Which is, again, one of Rich's best strengths is his ability to be able to do that, you know, the one-taker, you know? And that's the stuff that I loved watching, you know, just to see how quick he could he could pull stuff out of the air.

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Rain: I loved the whole thing with that track because that had become such an SNS thing. And a lot of fans expected when the first album came out that it was just going to be all the tracks that we've heard Rich do at cons before. You know, it was going to be ‘Take It Easy’. It's going to be the power squat ‘Copperhead Road’ that we know. And I like the fact that it defied expectations by being a ‘Copperhead’ that is completely different. That is very, very slow and dark. It's got a real mood to it, and I appreciate it has that thing where you're kind of waiting for it to kind of erupt…’It's going to kick in. It's going to kick in’. No, it's really not going to kick in. It's just going to keep going with this moody groove, and that kind of gets more and more intense and I love that. I love it that it was so unpredictable. That it took that risk.

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Billy: Are you familiar with Jeff Buckley?

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Rain: Very. Yeah. ‘Grace’ is one of the best albums ever.

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Billy: It is. So, this reminds me a little bit of ‘Dream Brother’, where you're expecting it to explode at the end of it, but it just keeps kind of just building and building until it just dissolves. And that's kind of what ‘Copperhead Road’ was to me. You know, it was that it just keeps going and going and going and going and going and going. And that was that was the ride, you know? That was the ride you were meant to be on. So that one.. I'm pretty proud of that. How about how that one all came out and I had very little to do with that one at all, so that was just as the fan listener, I really enjoyed that song, you know.

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Rain: Zack, what about you and ‘Copperhead’?

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Zack: What did I have to do? I can take full responsibility for this. No. So, like, we, like, Billy was saying, like, we had ‘Copperhead’ done in pretty much two takes. Like, second take of that everyone went 1 or 2% spookier than the first take, and everything just got a little bit strained and subdued, and we never really hit, like, an eleven for energy level. Like, it all just stays very tense the entire time. And, like, we could all tell immediately ‘Oh, that was the take. I mean, that's the take. The song is done’. And then we did three or four more takes, and then we brought in another drummer to do drum overdubs, try and make it go double time, and do the kind of thing that they do on SNS a little bit more. There were a whole bunch of other overdubs that we threw away. We added a bunch of guitars, and took a bunch of guitars away. There were a ton more vocal effects. 

And I think that's really the reason why it didn't make the first record. Like, even though it was done, by the time we got ready for setting things to mastering, it just didn't… no one felt, like, 100% confident with it, even though we spent probably more time working on that than any of the others. So it was kind of a pleasant surprise when we opened that really old, like, five year old session at that time, back up.

Like, when we were in the studio and listened down to it, the band was all pretty much the same. Like, it was Rob and Coop and Zach, and, like, we just, played everything top to bottom and listened to it once, and all of us kind of went like, ‘Yeah, we really caught the magic on that one. Why didn't we ever finish this song?’ And the answer was, because we kind of over-finished it. And that's the reason why it didn't quite land right the first time.

And so we changed very little between that version that we listened to on the first day of us going back in the studio to record album two. And when everything got sent off to mastering, like, I might have changed a couple things in the mix just to keep it cohesive with everything else on the record, but we weren’t re-recording lines, we weren't editing new parts. We didn't add a bunch of instruments. We might have added, like, one big guitar stab just to, like, make a bit more of a statement in one of the verses, but that's it.

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Billy: Yeah, it was pretty much done. And, that song needed that time for folks to realise that it was done earlier, you know? I mean, it's a weird thing Because I've been in that mode, you know, where you're just like - You start to chase better, but it was already as good as it's going to get, you know? And then you wind up kind of chasing your tail, you know, and you just needed that time You needed to step away and let time go by and then open it up like we did, and we're like, ‘Yeah, that's great. There's nothing really else to add’, you know?

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Rain: Yeah, sure. Is it a hard decision, though, when you've got something like that? ‘Right, we're going to just knock this on the head for now and see if we can come back to it later.’

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Billy: Yeah. Happy we did. I'm happy album two came around, you know.

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I Liked Your More (When I knew You Less)

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Billy: This is another one that was, like, in the vault for a while, and we brought it out and I forget… there was something about it that needed attention. And we didn't know what it was until we started to kind of play with a little bit. And we did a couple vocal passes, which was kind of cool, actually. There were some lyrics that he wanted to kind of change up. And we were basically replacing a take from, like, five years ago, you know, and we were, like, inserting a word here. And I remember we did that and we looked at each other like, oh, my God, it sounds like we did it that day like that. Because there's here's always a risk that you're going to get a slightly different vocal quality or, like, texture or, like, the EQ might sound a little different, you know, if you're going to punch in from five years ago. But we did it and within a matter of seconds, we knew, it’s inaudible I can't even tell the difference, that that was not done at the same time. So that was that was a fun note on that one. And then we just kind of took our time with the guitar stuff. The little leads that we had in there originally.

We tried a couple new things, but I think overall, we kind of kept it how it was. Yeah, that's a fun one.

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Rain: Definitely.

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Billy: I think, Zach, you made the suggestion to replace Gucci with Fendi back in the day, and that was one of the punches.

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Rain: The F is what makes it funny.

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Zack: So, like, you know, I think that was an important lyric change, and I think the rest of the song kind of comes off as kind of funny and light, and, like, all of us were kind of very conscientious about, like, the idea that, you know, we want this to be a song about rich having a terrible date and not to come off as, like, aggressive or hostile or sexist. It's got to be just things aren't connecting between the two of us, and not I don't like these qualities.

 

Rain: It's almost like, to me, kind of a generational thing. You know, Rich is my generation, and it’s about how we’re baffled by that kind of Instagram generation, influencers, that vibe.

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Zack: Definitely. Yeah, yeah.

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Billy: Something funny, too, because even at the Whisky show, when Rich was introducing it, he's like ‘Yeah, here’s a song I wrote about Rob’ and in Rome last weekend, Rob's like ‘I can't believe he wrote that song about me.’ So like, Rob has been thinking for the whole month that the song was about him. And we're like ‘Buddy, no, it's not about you, man. It was something that was said, but it wasn't about anybody. And specifically, it was just about, ‘Like, that's a funny line that we should make a story around.’ And we wrote this funniest story, Rich wrote the funniest story about this date that he was on from hell. And it was just, to me, it was like, it was so great. But it's just so funny how many people are like, ‘That's about so-and-so, did you know?’

I don't remember rich going on a date with Rob and having Rob take pictures of his feet and putting them on Instagram. So it's to me, it's like, it's not about anybody. That we know of. We don't know if maybe that date did take place.

Rain: With Rob? Yeah, but, no judgement, you know?

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Billy: It is so funny, though, all the attention that we get from people like, what is this song? ‘Who's it about? I need to know who the song’s about.’ And it's so funny. Like, it's constant.

I mean, I remember, like, we were sitting there in Rome, and I'm like ‘Rob, for the last 30 days, you were probably stewing about the idea that you thought that this song was really about you. And, like, that, to me, that's the most funny thing in the world’.

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Low Bar

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Billy: What do we know about “Low Bar”? We know that Rich had a very specific thing in mind when we recorded it. This was the one I feel like was easy to do. But also, there's very specific guidelines we needed to stay within in order to make sure that it felt the same way that, you know, Rich was hearing in his head You know, another one of those things where we had Coop doing a bass solo.To me, that was like, again, watching Coop do that bass solo in real time.  And I think that was take one, you know? And it was on his upright, and it was just like… I've seen Coop do that a number of times, and I get blown away.There was a show that we did at Rockwood Music hall in New York City with ‘The Station Breaks’, and I remember, he wasn't ready for this at all. Well, he was, but I said, “Coop, take a solo.” And he just ripped into this solo. I'm like such a huge Coop fan. Just to be able to witness that and be on the same stage and watch him do that…

He did it again in the studio. One take on the upright, and we're like ‘Okay, that's staying in the song somewhere. We don't know exactly how we're going to get into it and get out of it, but we know that that solo's got to stay in there.’ And then it was just, the rest was history, you know? But that was a really fun song to kind of do those overdubs, you know, and do the piano solo with Sasha.. We wanted to make it feel drunk. 

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Rain: It fits that remit. 

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Zack: Yeah, it is the country-est and the drunkest. I think, like, there was there was a ‘Station Breaks’ show in maybe, like, 2017 or ‘18 or something like that where, like, the boys are playing ‘Cripple Creek’ and, you know, usually after the first verse, you know, Jason sings one, Rob sings one; Billy takes a little solo or something. And like, Jason looks like he's gearing up for the next verse, and instead, he picks up the microphone and shoves it in Coop's face and makes him sing a verse. And doesn’t save anything for Rob. And, like, to me, it kind of gives a lot of that energy. Like, the spontaneity and goofiness of it is absolutely hilarious. Like, like, why are there so many solos in it? I don't know. Because it's fun.

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Rain: It's got a real Rockwood Festival vibe. You know, that whole thing where it could be, like, three in the morning and everyone's just there doing their thing. We're all a little drunk. Everyone's a little hoarse, but it's just about the vibe and the love of the music, and to me it's absolutely got that feel to it.

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Zack: Oh, I think, like, the gang vocals are one of the most fun things to record on that, too. Cause it's truly like everybody is on the gang vocals for those. And I think we tried to sing one of them good, fixed layers of, like, everyone on there. So there are probably, like, 45, 50 different, tracks of singers. And, like, by the end, by the time we get out to, like, layer number three or four, like, you know, everyone's just like, yeah, just don't really sing notes anymore. Like, let's just shout this one. 

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Billy: A funny little fact with the sequencing of the record was we knew that ‘Knew You Less’ was going to be there and we knew that ‘Low Bar’ was going to be there to kind of close out the album. And for the longest time, we had a bunch of, like, bar noises at the end of ‘Knew You Less’ that were like, this doesn't make any sense, you know what I mean?

Like, we had the clinking of the glasses and people cheering and clapping and Rich is like ‘We should lose that since we have ‘Low Bar.’

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Billy: And then I remember thinking like ‘No, I think that's how we start ‘Low Bar’, because it's like, it's the bar, you know, so we, unintentionally, I guess, intentionally created the bar atmosphere at the end of ‘Knew You Less’ which I thought was really fun, you know? It just made so much sense, you know, loose bar to drunken country, you know?

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Rain: Well, that brings us to the end. That's the whole album covered.

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Billy: Well, thanks for doing this. I can't wait to see the final.

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Rain: And Beth's already underway and a really, really kicking piece of art for it, so, yeah, it should be a great one. It's going to be gorgeous.

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Beth: We have a bit of a competition between you and Rain, Billy, on who is the biggest perfectionist when it comes to freelance. Because, honestly, I didn't think anybody could be more of a perfectionist than Rain until I met you, which is a compliment.

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Billy: Yeah, Rich is up there, too. That's one of the things that, you know, overall note for this whole album is that Rich and I really realised, and Zack as well, that we're all very meticulous when it comes to these sort of creative details.

 

And I prefer to work that way.

I mean, I know that some are just go with the flow and just let it go. I like things to have purpose, you know, and every, every kind of decision has a purpose, you know, whether, everyone loves that or not, I don't know, but I tend to kind of always go that direction
All right, everybody.

 

Thank you guys for this. Looking forward to seeing the final thing and give everyone my love.