Apollo 18 (album) - Production

Production

After the major success of Flood, Elektra sought out Elvis Costello to produce Apollo 18; however, John Linnell and John Flansburgh elected to produce the album themselves as they had originally planned. The album was recorded at The Magic Shop in New York City. Apollo 18's production is much less sparse than previous releases. This is reflected in the fact that the album's associated tour, the Don't Tread on the Cut-Up Snake World Tour 1992, was the band's first to utilise a live backing band, rather than a tape deck playing backing tracks. John Linnell commented on the complicated rehearsals this led to in a 1992 interview:

Now for the first time we're taking out a live rhythm section and a keyboardist/saxophonist. So we're now a five-piece. But we've never done this before, so this is kind of a major thing. This is partly why we've having such an elaborate production rehearsal, to make sure all the bugs are working.

"The Guitar (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)" spawned from a jam session of The Tokens song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and was originally intended to simply be called "The Guitar". Due to the legal ramifications of including the "Lion Sleeps Tonight" motif, the record label required the band to add the title of the original song to the track. "Fingertips" is a series of 21 short tracks ranging in duration from 0:04 to 1:01 seconds, totaling 4:35. The liner notes, in reference to these tracks, include the message "the indexing of this disc is designed to complement the Shuffle Mode of modern CD players". According to John Flansburgh, listening to the album on shuffle made a collage of songs, with the short fingertips interspersed among tracks of regular length. Due to a mastering error, the European and Australian issues of the CD include "Fingertips" as one continuous track, while on the US edition, it is split into twenty-one tracks.