Song Exploder - Sea Wolf - Kasper

Episode Date: March 1, 2014

Alex Brown Church of Sea Wolf breaks down Kasper, a song from the album Old World Romance. He talks about his songwriting process, collaborating with his bandmates, and the evolution that comes with learning the difference between making something that's good, and making something that's perfect. 

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. In this episode, Alex Brown Church of Seawolf breaks down Casper, a song from the album Old World Romance. He talks about his songwriting process, collaborating with his bandmates, and the evolution that comes with learning the difference between making something that's good and making something that's perfect. I'm Alex Brown Church from the band Seawolf. Today we're going to listen to Casper, which is from the latest Seawolf, old world romance. That came out in September of 2012. Traditionally I sort of just sat down with acoustic guitar and come up with ideas until you know something clicked with me and

then I would just stick with it until it became a song. But this time I wanted to be a lot more productive. I just wanted to have a lot more songs to choose from at the end. I would just record as many ideas as I could in a day on my iPhone. I'm starting over again. Here we go. And then every few weeks I'd go back and listen to those recordings and then whatever jumped out at me that's what I would I would kind of like set aside to be a song that I would end up working on so a lot of this record I use my Martin and I would send it through like a Fender Twin reverb amp and just you know mic it and then also have the amp in another room and

mic the mic the amp as well and then kind of blend the two I sort of wanted to like pull back on the on the folk like kind of influences for this album that's part of the reason why I chose to go with a sort of non-traditional acoustic guitar sound on some of the songs. I wanted to change up what I normally do, which is write with an acoustic guitar, and I just felt like I'd kind of developed a sort of thing that was sort of my default in terms of rhythms and like the style of song. So Seawolf drummer Joey Ficken let me this Oberheim DX drum machine, which is an old drum machine

from the 80s. He was like, oh, I have just the thing. It's under my bed. But I'm definitely not a drummer. and when I sit down and program beats, I don't think as a drummer would think, you know, I don't think, is this something that's real

that would be playable at all? Yeah, this one's kind of not humiliantly possible. Although Joey's, like, pretty amazing at, like, getting it very close. The live drums were essentially just to kind of double the drum machine. It took me a little while to get the vocal melody for the verse down.

And the vocal melody that I came up with, for some reason, I just wasn't that impressed with it. I just didn't think it was that cool. Eventually, I just thought, like, okay, forget it. I'm just going to write words. I'm going to record it, and then I'm just going to forget about it, move on. I kind of gotten frustrated with it, and I felt like I didn't want to,

I didn't want to beat it into the ground, so I felt like I'm just capture what I have now. So I did, and like two weeks later, I came back and listened to the song. I think the sky is going to clear, because the hills turn green as summer nears, but a lightning storm, a lightning storm could even happen when the air is warm, And I could hear that nothing calling out to me. I could feel that nothing reaching out for me. I don't know. It came out sounding almost like somebody else had written the song.

And the significant thing is that this was the second song that I wrote for this record. And it was a real lesson to me. So I kind of took that with me. Just sort of letting things be, just capturing first instincts and being a little less critical. and a little less of a perfectionist about getting things to be just so. That's what I kind of took away from the experience of doing this song,

and I feel like it's definitely been a good thing for me in that I sort of know that I don't have to get things perfect for them to be good. I feel like it's had a big effect on my creativity. I feel like more inspired than I've felt in a long time. That's actually Zach Ray playing that part. He did some additional production on the record,

and he's kind of a Swiss Army knife player, he can play pretty much everything. He threw down a lot of keyboards on this record, and on this song, he actually came up with this little arpeggiated guitar part in the chorus. Ted Lissinski played bass. He's sort of the longtime Seawolf bass player. Ted just came up with his part, like, kind of immediately, and I just was like, oh yeah, done, perfect, okay. For whatever reason, I've always struggled with getting a good bass sound. I really like warm, sort of beetlesy bass sounds, but that's kind of like what I usually try and do, but it ends up never sounding that good in the mix.

It just sounds like mush. And I think it's probably because of the nature of my songs and the bass, you kind of have to tailor the way the bass sounds to the way everything else sounds to get it to cut through the mix but still sound like a bass and sound good. Zach brought in like a 1957 P bass, like an actual 1957 P bass and an old amp-15-inch speaker flip top

at least 40 years old or something. And I was like, yeah, this is generally pretty good a combination. We just plugged it in. It was like, oh, okay, done. Lisa's piano part was something that she was kind of just noodling around with when we were first trying to come up with ideas for keyboards for the song. I was like, oh, that's it. I'm like, just keep that. And she's like, that's not even a part. I'm like, that's it. It comes in after the first chorus. Yeah, so this song is basically just about accepting your adulthood and your responsibilities, issues that you may have had in the past that you kind of just have to move on from, and that transition being a little bit scary,

but also a little bit empowering and exciting. I don't know if seeking out perfection is necessarily a younger man's pursuit, as opposed to an older man's pursuit. I just think we get to know ourselves a little better as we get older, and we see our own strengths and weaknesses. And I think as we sort of evolve as artists, we get closer to sort of knowing where it is that we want to do, you know, or like, I should say, We get closer to knowing what we don't want to do.

So for me, I know that I have a tendency to try and make things perfect. You know, not necessarily to other people, but for my own definition of what it would be if it was perfect. I know that that's an issue of mine, and I know that it's something that has slowed me down in the past, and I feel like I don't want to be slowed down anymore. Yeah. And now, here's Casper by Seawolf in its entirety.

To learn more about Seawolf, including a link to buy this song, visit Songexploader. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists,

and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuckus, Josh Molina, Minjin, Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now.

You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of SongExploder at SongExploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.