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Immer just said Im playing bass on this one and held out an acoustic guitar for Millard.

Millard took the guitar, walked into Immys booth and spent the rest of the day just abusing Immys poor 1963 Goya Classical Guitar. He beat the shit out of the poor sad thing. Now it refuses to play anything but whiny ballads (which... we have plenty of). Young David Arthur Immerglck brought this song in from our friend Coby. I knew Coby because his brother Matt directed the indie film Ropewalk and we recorded some songs for it a few years back. I didnt realize Immy even knew Coby but he claims theyve played together for the past 4yrs (could be true - Immys very mysterious that way...like if Rasputin loved sushi & playedguitar). I always dug Cobys writing but Hospital floored me. When I heard it (and when we recorded it as well) I was in the worst part of 7 months of horrific drug withdrawals as I weaned myself off a number of prescription psychiatric meds. Theres no drug problem; it was just some medications prescribed me that the docs no longer wanted me to take. Nonetheless, there were a lot of them, some were very powerful and, as it turned out, rather unpleasantly addictive. During the worst of it, in June 2011, we were in the studio and I couldnt stop twitching & shaking. I shook so much I pulled a muscle in my shoulder. I was insanely focused and did some of the best arrangements of my life (see this song and Like Teenage Gravity) but you can freaking hear me physically vibrating around the room, especially on (of all songs) this one with the line Theres some pills that I shouldnt take (cue dry hacking laughter). Its probably best summed up by Immy, writing to me with some comments on all the mixes: My favorite trip on the whole batch? Your insane natural vibrato on the word TREA-EA-EA-EATMENT in Hospital -absolutely freaky...

Meet On The Ledge? Ive been playing this song one way or another since the mid 80s. Fairport Convention was a mythical band from the dim past that a lot of bands in the vibrant San Francisco underground of the 80s viewed with awed reverence. I believe Mick Freeman (drummer for contemporary scenestersX-tal) passed me my first copy of Fairports classic Liege And Lief, with a conspiratorial you oughta check these guys out. I dove deep and subsequently often found myself sitting in with fellow music freak Duritz preCrows band on a raucous version of Matty Groves, arrangement lifted shamelessly from the very same album. Bizarrely, a couple of years later, I found myself label mates with a later incarnation of Fairport Convention. Theyd been signed to Rough Trade Records, where I was ensconced with both The Ophelias and Monks Of Doom, and tangentially Camper Van Beethoven. One fine day the fabled Fairport came to play a rare show at SFs Great American Music Hall. Jonathan Segel (Campers violinist) and I went on a double date with a couple of hotties from the Rough Trade office to go meet the legends in their natural environs. We got to the club and were quickly ushered downstairs to the backstage rooms, which by this time had been converted to a proper bucket o blood backwoods British pub bottles flying everywhere, fiddle tunes echoing around the stairwell, a couple of guys fighting in the hallthese guys were SERIOUSLY drinking and carousing like it was the last night on earth. We spotted the bass player Dave Pegg through the smoke and rushed over likefawning teenyboppers to pick his brain about classic Fairport records, but the balding and jovial Pegg just wanted to offer us drinks and talk about our long hair (Jonathan and I both had waist length manes at the time) -- I LOVE your hair!!! I used to have THAT!!! I wish I still could -- and regale us with death-defying tales of touring with Led Zeppelin. Needless to say, we werent complaining! Finally they got on stage and played an extremely inebriated set that threatened to capsize at any moment but was saved from disaster at the last minute by a breathtaking version of Meet On The Ledge...which has been lodged permanently in my brain ever sinceI scurried home and dutifully relearned it, keeping it in the oeuvre on and off for decadesI actually learned Meet On The Ledge from a bootleg tape of a solo Richard Thompson gig, very stripped down, but the version we do now is based on the original arrangement from Fairports What We Did On Our Holidays album, which my cohort (and fellow music freak) Mr. Duritz favors good stuff! Yes, Mr. Immerglck, it certainly is.

Counting Crows Under Water Sunshine


BitTorrent Bundle Liner Notes

(sigh) Its gonna be what I remember too (ugh) even though the whole bands trip on the song was something to witness. Immy & Jim got fused into Millards pounding acoustic and, when I suggested an arrangement based around this specific set of crashes by the band in & out of the rhythm threesomes groove, you could tell Dan had been salivating over what Millard was doing to that acoustic because he tried to tear a very nonmelodic hole in his amp with his electric. Then Dave found this really pretty melody and Charlie added, of all things, strings (?). Its the weirdest freaking song. Hopefully theres no film.

Untitled (Love Song) written by Luke MacMaster


Strange Arrow Music (ASCAP) Recorded by The Romany Rye for the ep Highway 1, Looking Back Carefully (2009), the lp Quicksilver Sunbeam (2012), and a Daytrotter Session on April 13, 2010 Dave Mandolin Jim Drums Adam vocals Charley - Hammond B-3 Organ, Piano, BV Immer - right side Electric Lead Gtr Millard - Bass Gtr Dan - left side Electric Gtr, BV The 1st time I heard Untitled (Love Song) was the first time I saw The Romany Rye, in 2011 in a little club at South By Southwest. It was their last song and they were absolutely torching it. They swung a groove so deepthat I couldve stood there watching them pass it around until the place burned to the ground. Theres only one 4-chord pattern in the song. You make it work by feel. It was the end of the gig and they were just... LEANING into it. What can I say? It got good to me. All I could think was Ooooh man, I wanna spend 5 minutes doing this myself. Sometimes its as simple as that. Sometimes you just want to spend some time doing the thing the other guy was doing. Sometimes you just want to listen to it again, but sometimes...you wanna lean in and give it some more personal attention. We could all see each other pretty well standing around the room when we recorded this song but at the time it felt like we didnt even need to. We each knew what everybody else was going to do before they even knew they wanted to do it. On this and the Dawes song All My Failures, two songs most of the guys had never heard before, we lead and chase each other around the tune til were dizzy from the listening. We opened the record with this because this is what it really feels like to be in a band.

Meet On The Ledge Written by Richard Thompson


BMG/Chrysalis obo Warlock Music Ltd (BMI) Recorded by Fairport Convention for the lp What We Did On Our Holidays (1969) Dave - Acoustic Gtr Jim - Drums, percussion, BV Adam - vocals, BV Charley - Piano, Hammond B-3 Organ Immer - left side Electric Gtr, BV Millard - Bass Gtr Dan - right side Electric Gtr, BV Many lists of the greatest rock & roll albums rank Richard & Linda Thompsons apocalyptic 1982 swan song Shoot Out The Lights in the top 10, including Rolling Stones 1st such list, published only a few years later. When I first heard the record, I was speechless. All I could think was Whothe f#@% are these people? I read up on them and found out he was the founder of the seminal late-60s Brit band Fairport Convention and also made a series of albums with his wife Linda, all of which were completely out-of-print and impossible to find in the States. Great. I put them on my list. I had a list. We all did. When I was a kid, before everything got re-released on CD, there was a lot of music you just couldnt find. Records went out of print. Not just obscure records either; historic recordings like The Beach Boys Pet Sounds, The Modern Lovers, and the entire Big Star catalog were very hard to find. So I had a list. We all did. You had a list and you carried it everywhere so you could check out the used bins of every record store you ever passed. Every once in a while you found something but there were about 50 records I simply couldnt find. When my family took my grandmother to England a few years later, I had my list in hand. Id never been overseas before but I was pretty sure a different island meant different record stores so...I think I rifled through nearly every existing bin of black vinyl in England, Scotland, and Wales until I found every single solitary album on my list, the last (the then very obscure Thunderclap Newman album) on the last day in the last store I hit before heading to the airport to go home. Among those were 3 Richard & Linda Thompson albums and 5 Fairport Convention albums, including the 2 they made in 1969, Unhalfbricking & What We Did On Our Holidays. I washooked and, as I later discovered, I wasnt alone. Although we argued over which album was best -- I favored Unhalfbricking, Immy the more traditional Liege & Lief -- we agreed that we fairly worshipped the band. (Strangely, we have the exact opposite argument over Traffic with me favoring the more traditional John Barleycorn Must Die and Immer themore rock Low Spark of High Heeled Boys -- hmmm...kids, theyll argue about anything). Anyway, theyre really records everyone should check out. Beside having great singers (probably the best female folk singer of all time in Sandy Denny), Fairport had great songwriters in Denny & Thompson and, in Thompson, one of the 3 or 4 greatest triple threat singer/songwriter/gtr players ever, really only topped by maybe Jimi Hendrix or someone like Prince or someone else Im forgetting right now. But dont take my word for it. Let me turn this over to David Arthur Immerglck for his thoughts. He plays his ass off on the song. He should get his say:

Like Teenage Gravity written by Kasey Anderson


Handsome Mylent Music (ASCAP) Recorded by Kasey Anderson for the lp Nowhere Nights (2010) Dave - Elec Vibrato Gtr Jim - Drums, percussion Adam vocals Charley - Piano, Hammond B-3 Organ Immer - Acoustic Gtr Millard - Bass Gtr Dan - Lead Elec Gtr Ryan Spaulding raved about Kasey Anderson so I bought all the records and I really dug them. I really found out how right Ryan was a few months later when Kasey came down to Austin last year to play Smoke & Sand, Ryans Smashing Life (RSLblog.com) & Tyrannosaurus Records 2011 SxSW showcase. His big lonely rock songs are addictive but he crushed at Smoke & Sand with an acoustic set. Maybe thats why I chose Like Teenage Gravity to cover over songs like I Was A Photograph or Exit Ghost. I dont know. I love his recording. It has a sparse almost hymn-like simplicity. None of which made it any less of a nightmare when we tried to record it. You forget when you love someone elses song that you might have to ditch a lot of what you love about it if you want to record it yourself, and thats especially true with a quiet acoustic gtr/piano tune like this one. How to take such a fragile bare song like this and re-work it for a band without losing the delicate lonely song at the core? Good question. Before we got around to answering it, we spent some serious time one day just su-u-u-ucking. Now Im generally pretty kind with a saintlike patience but every so often when I feel we just unreasonably suck, I get frustrated and I might even start to slowly lose my temper. Its possible all of that happened while recording this song. This is Jims recollection of that day: We were really NOT getting Like Teenage Gravity. I dont know what we were doing but it wasnt working, and you were not happy, to say the least. I think that moment was the maddest I had seen you at these sessions. The discussing reached a really loud crescendo, then suddenly it grew eerily quiet. I tried to transfer the feeling in the room to a really quiet groove with the floor tom, nobody said a word, but everybody started playing, and the song just fell into place. Well...thats admittedly kinda how it happened. We were screwed til Jim started that groove. Everything is informed by that, from Dans dissonant snaky guitar opening the song to the way he & all the electric instruments disappear after the first verse to be replaced by Immy & Charlie on acoustic & piano to the way the band never rises out of that tom groove while Dans electric slashes at them during his solo all against the backdrop of Daves electric guitar vibrato.

Hospital written by Coby Brown


Round Hill Works (BMI) obo CBrown Publishing (BMI) Recorded by Coby & Immy as a demo (early 2011) for the album they just finished (2012?) Dave - Electric gtr Jim - Drums, Tambourine Adam vocals Charley - String Composition Immer - Bass Gtr, BV Millard - Acoustic Gtr Dan - Left side lead Electric Gtr

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