It didn’t take us long to settle into our first Schubas Residency this past February. Perhaps there is nowhere else we are more comfortable playing than on that stage – the first ever BMA show was at Schubas late 2005. And as with all the bands privileged enough to have been asked to play the 4-night Residency, we wanted to make it special.
Discussions of different setlists that would separate the book of music we’ve created and have continued to create was just the beginning. With the parting of ways with our previous bassist at the turn of the New Year, January was spent defining different moods we wanted to create. New tunes emerged from Matt’s mouth that helped create a sense of rebirth -- not to over-dramatize it, but that’s how we all felt. The possibilities were seemingly endless. This documentation of tunes from each of the four weeks stands as a testament to those possibilities.
Take the performance of Underground, from this series. Setting aside the glam-rock tendencies of the studio version, a more delicate but equally driving arrangement we dubbed the ”Ennio Morricone Underground,” came about with the help of Josh Shapiro’s upright bass.
Josh was just one of the guest musicians that appear on these recordings. Our long-time friend and all-things-music guru Alex Hall graced us with his presence adding his keyboard musings for two of the sets. Nate Lepine was also summoned to provide yet another timbre, that of his saxes and flute. And these were the debut performances of our now current bassist, Jon Ozaksut, who fit in better than anyone could have imagined.
We realized that if it were not to sound like a royal racket with all these people on stage, we would need to play more subtly and with more space. Something we continue to think about more and more -- the idea that we are all there to serve the songs rather than serve ourselves, to service the melody and vocals without fearing the silence between notes. Sharing our music with each other.
We chose these six tunes (with accompanying Thax Douglas poem) to represent what we did this past February. There was plenty more usable material, especially new songs that were born of preparing these sets. But we chose to keep these for our own and enjoy them as they are on tape: found yet still searching. We have included a couple staples of our live set that have yet to appear on record along side tunes from our out-of-print EP and the Amateur Lovers LP.
There are beautiful moments throughout. And there are flubs, too. The sweet and the sour. Nowhere did we overdub, fix, or apply other studio trickery like autotune (some level adjustments were made, obviously). This is what we sound like live. And we hope you enjoy it.
- Jim Tuerk
