Recording of "Sunday Mornings"
Despite the band initially intending to release a single album under the "Saturday Nights" concept, Duritz began contemplating a companion piece for the record as they were finalizing their existing material:
| “ | When we came back to finish it, my life had changed a little bit by then and I started thinking about another set of songs and a possible different album that might work as a companion piece to this one that would fit together, but I wasn’t sure what it was. The further we sort of started to explore it and we started to demo some of those songs, we set up a studio in the lounge where we were recording what became ‘Saturday Nights’ and we started sort of trying some of these songs out and trying to think of ways to arrange that kind of music ‘cause it was very different. I didn’t want us to do an unplugged record. I think a lot of folk music has become this unplugged thing and it never was intended to be that way. It was a very creative art form at one point, making folk records. As we started to explore that, I started to realize there was a whole other record there. Then I realized I wanted to do it with someone totally different and not like ‘Satellite’ but totally separate. Then I sort of thought of the title and the fact that there were two records there and then we started looking for producers and I started looking into who was making the best indie folk music ‘cause that’s where the really good stuff is. | ” |
Duritz claimed the band's decision to draft Brian Deck as the producer for the "Sunday Mornings" half of the record came out of frequent Internet research:
| “ | On my computer, I had iTunes, Allmusic.com and Amazon all up at once and I was going through all of those and reading about different bands and different records and listening to them in iTunes, clips of them, and then downloading them or buying them or ordering them if they weren’t available ‘cause a lot of them were really indie so they weren’t available on iTunes. Then I read about the band or I read about the band’s influence and who produced it and look at other records that he produced and sort of chase it around. I was running all the branches of this tree, sort of following them all over the place. I started to realize this name that was popping up all over the place, which was Brian. So I went to allmusic.com to find Deck and the guy made like 50 records since 2000, so I listened to all these records that he made and felt like he was doing a lot of really, really creative work in this sort of genre. Not just unplugged records that were just a guy with an acoustic guitar, but that were really creatively arranged, interesting records. I called him up and he came out and hung out with us and listened to what we were working on and we decided to do it with Brian and that’s how it all developed. | ” |
After some initial studio sessions and brainstorming, Duritz then realized a thematic significance and cohesion of the two records:
| “ | ‘Sunday Mornings’ is mostly about failing and getting better. When it’s time to change your life, you don’t necessarily know what it takes to get it right, right away. So you mostly fail, but you’re still different from heading downhill. Most of ‘Sunday Mornings’ is about failure, but like I said, it’s mostly different from still heading downhill. Even the last song, ‘Come Around’ is about getting dumped or losing a relationship. It’s also about not letting that ruin your life and deciding to go out and play some rock and roll anyway. Whereas on ‘Saturday Night’ in songs like ‘Sundays’ or ‘Hanging Tree’ there’s a huge amount of bitterness or ‘Cowboys,’ the loss of someone and the attachment and the untethered feeling that comes with it is very angry and bitter and it drives the person getting out of it. It’s also like ‘well, it happened,’ and I go get on a bus. It began in ‘Washington Square’ which takes about leaving home. It’s a very sad thought, and there’s suffering for it, but it’s still a decision to go out there again. | ” |
Duritz also described the recording process for "You Can't Count On Me":
| “ | The acoustic demos we cut at my apartment while we were finishing Saturday Nights all sucked for the same reason my original demo sort of sucked: they were too pretty. So when we went out to Berkeley to record Sunday Mornings, we took a different tack.
We started out electric, figuring it would make a jarring centerpiece to the latter album. It didn’t work. The drums and bass made the song too bombastic. It wasn’t jarring at all. It was just turning into an arena rock power ballad. Which sucked. So then we took the drums and the electric guitar out and went back to playing it acoustically with a dobro, an upright bass and some percussion but that just had no balls at all so we had to abandon that as well. Because that really sucked. Finally, after singing about 20 versions of the song that day, I went out to dinner and most of the guys went home. I came back a few hours later to find our drummer Jim and our producer scurrying around the hallways excitedly between our studio and one down the hall that was empty. They’d had an idea. They set up a really stripped down drum kit in the small square room with only three mics: two over heads about 3-ft above the kit and one kick drum mic about 6-7 feet away from the kick (as opposed to inside the drum where you’d normally put it. By setting it up this way, you could beat the living crap out of the drums and they never sounded big or bombastic. They’re violent but they go 'crack' instead of 'boom'. We called our bass player Millard, woke him up, and made him run back to the studio with this little Hofner Beatle Bass. Then, with everything we’d recorded muted (except the piano track so we had something to play to), Jim, Millard, and me played the song as hard and as loud as we could play it. We had Jim keep his high hat open so it sounded really sloppy and we just beat the crap out of the song until we had this insane aggro version of it. Then we went home. The next day when the other guys came in, Brian had them set up to play the pretty acoustic version but made them play it to these insane drums, bass, and vocal tracks. And that didn’t suck at all. It worked. The song would seem really pretty and then it would blow up in your face. You could hear all the violence and the edge in the drums and bass without overwhelming piano arpeggios or picking acoustic guitar. The last step was finding the thing to go on top. I’d always wanted someone to slash at it with a distorted electric guitar like a Replacements song and Dan had been trying out just that sound on some other song so I had him play it on this song instead. We made him play as hard as he could because we wanted mistakes and bad notes and some dissonance. Dan just killed it. He was inspired and a little disturbing. We actually got more than HE wanted. Brian and I loved it but we had to talk Dan out of fixing some of it. |
” |
From mid-March through mid-April 2007, the band recorded "Sunday Mornings" in Berkley. After Duritz took a two-week break, the band would reconvene with their engineer James Brown to mix the "Saturday Nights" half of the record from late-April to mid-May, followed finally by over three weeks of intensive mixing of "Sunday Mornings" throughout the remainder of May 2007. By early June the album was mastered.
Read more about this topic: Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings
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