Strangers Almanac - Background and Production

Background and Production

Throughout 1996, Whiskeytown recorded new material in Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina. Two separate recording sessions - dubbed the "Barn's On Fire" sessions and the "Baseball Park" sessions - produced several songs that were later re-recorded for Strangers Almanac. And while praising everyone involved in making Strangers, principal songwriter Ryan Adams once remarked in an interview that he preferred these earlier songs to the final album. Tracks from these sessions would later be released on the reissues of Faithless Street and Strangers Almanac.

The road to making Strangers was a rocky one - in late 1996, bassist Steve Grothman and drummer Skillet Gilmore left the band on the same day, suddenly placing the future of Whiskeytown in doubt. It was then that violinist Caitlin Cary also considered leaving the band, while Adams toyed with the idea of signing as a solo artist with A&M Records. But in the end, the remaining band members soldiered on and, in February 1997, Adams, Cary, and guitarist Phil Wandscher traveled to Woodland Studios in Nashville to record their major label debut. Drummer Steve Terry and bassist Jeff Rice were also added to the lineup. Producer Jim Scott was selected due to his previous work on Tom Petty's Wildflowers album.

The sessions featured plenty of give-and-take between the young, scrappy band and the older, more-polished producer. Said Adams later: "He wanted to make something flow. He wanted to make our record work, whereas we wanted our record to get damaged." And for his part, Scott points to a particularly raw-sounding guitar part in the song "Everything I Do" and says, "I listen to that and go, oh my God, we should've redone that guitar because it just is a little rough on such a beautiful song. But that's maybe what they liked about it; they were like, 'No, that's cool'... Maybe that was the bruise on the apple that they were looking for."

The first notes heard on the album - Adams picking out a slow acoustic guitar line at the beginning of "Inn Town" - were played using an Alvarez guitar purchased for $100 at a Nashville pawn shop. Adams had arrived in Nashville without a guitar because of an unfortunate mishap: on the day they were leaving for Nashville, the band met in a parking lot to load their gear into a van for the trip. After loading their gear, everyone hopped in the van and drove off. It was only later that they realized they'd left Adams' guitars behind, still sitting in the parking lot. The title of the album's opening track is a reference to fellow North Carolinian/Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan and his band Wwax, who released a song with the same title.

The song "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight" features Alejandro Escovedo on vocals. The band had previously covered Escovedo's True Believers song "The Rain Won't Help You When It's Over", which is featured on Disc 2 of the album's 2008 reissue.

The understated piano accents on "Avenues" were played by Adams. Producer Scott believes that this was the first time that the young songwriter had ever played piano on a recording.

About the song "Losering", Adams says: "I love 'Losering' because I think it makes a beautiful statement with only about six words. I coulda put more extremely well-written, musically perfect songs on the record but decided not to because I was proud of the fact that there was finally some experimenting going on in the band. And 'Losering' was one of them -- 'Losering' was originally just about a six or seven-bar little hymn that I was writing, like Sun Ra or somebody might do -- like A Love Supreme, you know, where they just mumble that in succession at the end of that Coltrane record? I kinda wanted to do something like that but maybe with an influence from The Byrds, you know. And I was really proud of that; I really thought that was amazing, so I love listening to it."

After a month of recording at Woodland Studios, the band finished recording and mixing at Ocean Way Studios in Los Angeles.