Our latest recording "Basti Made Me Do It!" is probably my favourite Animal Nation album to listen to. It doesn't necessarily contain our best material, (although the songs did turn out very nice,) but it was more so the process of creating the songs that makes them seem so special to me.Last summer our good German friend, Sebastian Hochstein, traveled out to Canada and spent nearly three weeks with us in our home, just a couple hours North of Vancouver.
Sebastian brought with him a CD that had over 30 completed beats that he wanted us to turn in to an EP by the time he left. We ended up making 3 brand new songs, and re-working 3 songs that Mike and I had previously tried to record during our 'Understanding...' sessions.
It was so much fun working with Basti. We clicked. We'd hung out before (Mike and I traveled to Germany a few years ago to do a couple shows out there, and to meet up with people we'd worked on our TimeZone album with), but this was the first time Basti and I got to work together behind the boards.
Back in Canada Sebastian was more than willing to spend countless hours behind mixing boards, tweaking tracks, playing with fx, recording and re-recording vocals in really unorthodox ways, and trying out all sorts of new things that occasionally worked in our favour.
We must have spent a solid 9 hours over 2 days just working on the bridge for 'Reason'. It didn't work out the first 8 times we tried recording it, but what I loved about working with Sebastian was that we would try it over and over until it did work. Not until it was 'good enough', because for the most part 'good enough' is the same thing as giving up. We'd try it again and again until our house had mics in the bathroom and the kitchen, wires covering all our windows and exits, and I was screaming through a cardboard tube. All in an effort to get something that we loved, rather than something we deemed 'good enough'.
I learned more about production in those 3 weeks than I had in the previous 3 years.
Thank you Sebastian.
I can't wait to head over to Germany to start work on our next project with you.
Check out one of the tracks "Pillow Talk" below.
It's a song about what it's like to be a pillow.
Or, steam the whole album at CBC Radio 3 here.
Then head over to iTunes, or CamoBear Records to purchase this little ditty. It's the only album we haven't given away for free. It's just that good.
Oh! ps - The incredibly talented and beautiful Paige Harley did the art work for the album. Read her interview with us here, then email her at floating.down [at] hotmail.com to hire her for your next project.
She's amazing.
