Thoughts on the Album:
"It's 5:55 am on Monday, August 7th. The sun is rising. I can hear the traffic starting to wake up on the 5. The early birdies are beginning to sing.
I pull the fifteen passenger van into the driveway and kill the engine. I let the silence sink in. Inhale. Exhale, slowly. Inhale. Close your eyes. Breathe. It's been a long trip. I am home. Home.
And the record is done.
And the record is done.
Breathe. We've been up there for a while. Too long probably. Hotels, friends houses, couches, commuting back and forth- last night we slept on the floor of the studio. I woke up and just started walking.
Walking.
I need some distance. Maybe a drive up the coast. Alone. Forget the music. Forget it. And I remember something else. A faint memory of something. someone. distance. distance.
I feel very confident in saying that this record is the best recording that I've been involved in. I feel like our blood is still up there on tape: spinning around on a half inch machine on Santa Monica Blvd. That's the goal, I suppose. A piece of someone. The best part. Sacrificed for the others to consume. In stereo.
In stereo. Along with the highs come the lows. And now I let go. I'm done. To try to tell you where this record has taken us is an ridiculous task. The story tells itself I suppose, and the journey is to simply listen. To listen. To listen to the journey spinning around on the half inch right now somewhere in the city of angels.
My God, I hope that it moves you!!! I wish I could see your face as you listen. To watch the corners of your mouth."
--- Jon Foreman
The Recording of Oh! Gravity:
"The tracking of this record has three distinct phases in my mind, Fields, Lillywhite, and Palmer.
First: Fields. In between Nothing is Sound tours we tracked 5 or six songs with fields in a studio a few minutes away from where we live in San Diego. No pressure. No hype. No real reasons to be there other than for the love of the song. I really feel like this sort of creative freedom really allowed us to look at these songs with fresh eyes. Dirty Second Hands and Let Your Love Be Strong changed immensely during a short amount of time. Circles, a song that we had tired of a few years back, gained new life in the form of sean and sarah watkins of nickel creek. I love Fields, he has an incredible ear for melody and has a passion for the song. His input on the previous two records was amazing. Yet we all wanted to try out a few new things for this record, to take our songs places where they might not have been.
Second: Lillywhite. In many ways, Steve Lillywhite produced my childhood- so to track with him was truly an honor. His approach really revitalized how I look at the song. How does it make you feel? Pitch, timing, chord progression, music theory... Yes, yes, important indeed, but how does it make you feel? We spent far more time rehearsing and refining the song than we did actually recording it, which felt really great. Don't press record until you get things right. Then just track a few until you get it. Five guys in a room playing music. pretty simple. just focus on how it feels.
Third: Palmer. Again, a legend of a producer. From Pearl Jam to U2, from ozzy to bowie, he's been involved on some incredible moments in rock and roll. He was incredible at reading the situation- understanding when to take the wheel and when to let us chase our own ideas down. He has great instincts. Steve had him at the top of the list of people for the record. We talked to a handful of producers and I felt like we trusted him more than anyone else we met. There are a lot of great producers out there- the only way to find out whether or not their style works with your music is to produce a record. I suppose one of the hardest jobs for a producer is to get everyone out of their skins, where you begin to forget that the mics are there. Palmer certainly did just that as this was one of the most enjoyable records we've ever made. I feel that his mixes are among my favorite mixes we've ever had, they sound unlike anything I've heard in a long time. He really brought the record to a place that we wouldn't have gone on our own.
--- Jon Foreman
Song Stories
Oh! Gravity.
Oh! Gravity. is a conversation with a well-known law of physics. The question is this: If in the physical world things naturally move closer together, why are we falling apart? War and rumors of war, divorce, hatred, violence, and everything else on the evening news seems to contradict gravity. This song is a fun happy-clappy tune about a grave matter: "Sons of my enemies, why can't we seem to keep it together?"
American Dream
I am proud to be an American. Proud of my grandfather who was shot down in world war two. Proud of some of my best friends who are in the Marines. I believe in a nation that is serving a higher calling than a TV. I have nothing against the material world. I have nothing against consumerism as a social structure. Certainly we are consumers with physical bodies, but if that's all we are we've lost what it means to be human. When success is equated with excess the ambition for excess wrecks us. As the top of the mind becomes the bottom line when success is equated with excess.
Dirty Second Hands
The machine. the clock. our own hands. The dirty second hand of time is always ticking – bringing us and all that we have worked so hard to achieve closer to the grave and the second hand store. In my fight with depression, lust, pride, and boredom I have found that the biggest challenger is often within me. The very machinery that I loathe and have fought so hard to defeat stares back at me from the mirror. This mechanism is always ticking. And in my spiritual life I have found that this is a part of me that has to die everyday if I am to be truly alive.
Awakening
How quickly I am lulled back to sleep! How quickly I forget. In one of my favourite Wilco songs Jeff Tweedy sings, "You know I would die if I could come back new." Perhaps to be truly reborn death is not optional. Here's a firsthand story about new life, it always starts at the bottom.
Circles
Here's a tune that had its roots in the past. We actually played a version of this song a few tours ago while we were gearing up for the recording of "nothing is sound." It's an ecclesiastical song about the modern machine. We tracked a previous version of this song while we were tracking 'stars'. But something about the song was never quite right. When Sean and Sarah Watkins (our friends from Nickel Creek) came in, the song took on a new life and became something truly special. The end of the song represents one of my favourite moments we've ever had on a CD.
Amateur Lovers
Oh that we knew how to love each other well! Here's a song that elaborates on the title track with another set of social-physics questions. We all need love so badly – it's how we were made. And yet we're so bad at loving one another. It's our attempt to put another matter of grave consequence in the skin of a pop tune.
Faust, Midas, and Myself
Two mythologies and the truth. Or more specifically, a man who makes a deal with the devil, a man who has a touch of gold, and my own personal struggles. C.S. Lewis had a lot to say about mythology. On one occasion he said that he writes fantasy to get past the watchful dragons of religion. That's why I write music, because our minds are often so closed that even the truth can't fit in to set us free. This is a story about following the fantasy and seeing where it leads. Sometimes the dreams turn into nightmares... In a million ways, I know firsthand that the taste turns sour very quickly.
Head Over Heels
This is an honest love song. Love is not a silk flower – always bright, with artificially whitened teeth and a fake tan. No, love is a fight. Love is what happens when you've been hurt and you want to quit. Love is what happens when you decide not to. Love is not the beginning of the story but the ending. Perhaps the thirty-minute sitcom has done a disservice to the sheer magnitude of what love is.
Yesterdays
I wrote this with my brother. The song is very straightforward. I have hope in this life and beyond the grave.
Burn Out Bright
One of two tracks on the record that is a command. Seems like every story I can relate to starts off with a broken heart, broken dreams and bleeding parts. There's a story I know about a man named Israel who wrestled with God. From that day on he walked with a limp. I guess in a lot of ways I don't trust a man who doesn't have a limp. The future is yet unwritten. Write it well.
4:12
Another musical thesis on the subject of materialism. I've heard it said that we are souls and we have bodies. And yet our physical world is always hungry, always thirsty, always watching, always listening. It gets to the point where I begin to believe that all we are and that all of our dreams are nothing more than material. That love and fear and pain and justice are material? It's nonsensical.
Let Your Love Be Strong
My wife's favourite song. This one means a lot to me. "Maybe I'm just idealistic to assume that truth could be fact and form, that love could be a verb, maybe I'm just a little misinformed." I wrote this one after a long walk in the early morning before the sun came up. I was sitting out by the train tracks halfway between the ocean and the freeway. When everything in your life falls apart you begin to realize what's worth holding on to and who's got a hold on you. Let the world fall apart... all of my life rests upon the love that created every breath I have been given.
*a footnote:
I have a hard time explaining what I do for a living. I sometimes wish I played the role of inventor: purposefully creative, a wizard with notes and words. But in fact my occupation is much more like an archeologist. Always digging. Always sorting. And occasionally I feel that I stumble across something truly remarkable. Like a hidden city buried in the ground, the notes and words seem to have been there long before me – as though the song would exist without my involvement. Or maybe it's more like farming. Preparing the soil, planting, watering, pruning and caring for these ideas hoping to see a bumper crop yet knowing that the outcome is almost entirely out of my hands.
With that in mind, this collection of songs then is something that I can only partly take credit for. Most of my favourite moments on the record represent the times when my fingerprints are the lightest, where my own self-conscious second-guessing is absent and the buried city can speak for itself. I suppose to some extent I'm talking about honesty – allowing a song to be itself rather than forcing your own will upon it. This was a goal not only in the writing process but in the studio as well. Many times on this record we deliberately went back to the first take and the rough draft to find our direction simply because the first response to the song is often the most honest. Your first instincts might be poorly played or incomplete but they were honest.
I am so proud of these songs, like I am proud of my friends or as I imagine a father would be proud of his son. I truly feel like there is only so much credit that be given to the songwriter, for the buried city was waiting there all along.
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