Song and Meaning
FISHWAGON PRODUCTION NOTES
Urban Zamboni started out as a pure solo project by Brian Holmberg, with virtually all of the songs compoosed as instrumentals. However, writing instrumentals is really tough; you don’t get any filler - you have to keep the energy constantly with the music alone, and that can be a real challenge. With the addition of Jeff Zender on vocals, entirely new directions and possibilities were opened. Writing songs with lyrics was not only a new addition, but also an opportunity to span several styles as well - with the versatility of Jeff’s vocal ability.
The use of the Keyboard for drums and bass on many of the songs had its positives and negatives; mostly negatives, with significant limitations in terms of tempo changes, accents, stops, pattern variations, timing changes, etc. etc. - it would have been a million times better to have a real drummer. But the Zamboni philosophy is not to wallow in limitation, but do the best you can with what you have, and that’s essentially what we did. The postives were that you could simply program the song in the memory, and whala, you have instant rhythm section, everything mixed, and ready to go. In many ways, I see the songs with the keyboard rhythm sessions as demo versions that, hopefully will one day be re-done with a live drummer.
EQUIPMENT / PRODUCTION - CDs you buy in stores are generally recorded and produced using very expensive amps, guitars, computers, processors, etc, using a session producer. We had none of this, this is basically home brewed product, using a 2 X 12 Crate guitar amp, a Les Paul, and Cool Edit recording software and a $100 Yamaha keyboard. We actually started recording this on a 350 MhZ computer, but later switched to a slightly more powerful Pentium II when sonic problems were discovered on the old computer. This set the project timeline back a lot, as we had to re-do many of tracks from scratch. Fortunately we caught this in the early stages, but I decided to use the original tracks from LOST IN THE NIGHT, since there were so many Keyboard parts, and I was not into starting from scratch on that one. HILLBILLY PEOPLE was another casualty of this situation as well - we re-did the vocal tracks, but kept the others. But the songs that were recorded later - HOWLIN BLUES, BLAKE RAIN, THROUGH THE POURING RAIN, SMOKE FILLED ROOM, FISHWAGON, LIVIN IN PRISON, GOONGLOW came out pretty well sonically.
Without doubt, there are many things I would like to have done over - I was feeling a bit rushed with the whole project towards the end, since it was about 8-10 weeks beyond my anticipated timeline. But all in all, I think it was a good learning experience in the overall production of of a CD. I won’t let songs pile up for recording, but rather record them through time as they are ready. And I’ll certainly keep backups of the tracks, since I lost so many tracks during the production of this CD, and had to re-do them. (I think I re-recorded the lead to LONESOME ROAD like three times!) I also double tracked most of the leads I played as well, since they were fairly basic.
And finally, the "work" for this CD was not really work, but really a lot of fun. It’s a lot more laid back to record at home - and a lot less expensive too. All of us had a blast with this project right from the start, when we started with LONESOME ROAD. It was great to get everybody involved, and pool our collective talents and ideas for the songs. In a way the completion of the CD was bit of an anti-climax, since it marked the end of this creative cycle and all the fun associated with it. We are already starting on the next CD, and hopefully the the things we learned from making this CD will benefit us in the new endeavor.
THE NEXT CD
Fishwagon from the start was designed to be an "experimental" type of CD, meaning that there was no consistent theme stylistically in terms of genre (by choice). So we did blues, bluegrass, folk, polka, country, funk, college rock, prison songs etc. The next project will probably lean more towards the rock genre, but I can’t say so exclusively. What will be missing are the country style songs for sure. Thematically, I am sure that the mystical, non-dual allusions will find a way to "infest" the next CD as they did on Fishwagon.
