Profonde Musique
July 16, 2026
by Wil Masisak
Since we’re taking a one-week hiatus from the 300 Favorite Albums podcast this week (thanx so much for listening!), I received a rather detailed missive form the desk of producer/musician and all-around great guy, Wil Masisak, who, as you may remember from Episode 20, co-produced Dan Bern’s magnificent, New American Language – an album that is ranked #9 in my 300 Faves. Wil loved the episode, but had some additional information we did not cover. There is some cool stuff in here about not only Dan’s process, how the record came together, but behind-the-scenes stuff for music geeks everywhere. This was kind of my aim with Profonde Musique, so I turn the floor over to Wil for his deeper dive in what we couldn’t cover in the great episode.
Wil was kind enough to cite the parts of the episode where we touch upon an event or story, but do not provide the gory details. Following that is his take.
Dan Bern: “The only holdover from the Smarty Mine sessions was Wil Masisak. That was a total accident that he was in the band. He had been along as kind of touring manager, driver, just to make things easier on the road. And one day, we had done soundcheck. It was in a place called The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which coincidentally is where I played last night and where I’m still today. But we were in the green room and we heard some piano from the stage. And it was like, it was like really good. And a couple of us looked at each other and we started looking around to see who was in the green room and who wasn’t. And we were like, is that, that can be Wil, is that Wil? And we went out and there was Will Masisak playing the piano. And from that moment on, he was part of the band and he became not just part of the band, but co-producer of New American Language and really musical director, I guess he would call it. And so, he was a big part of that and he brought his friend, Eben Grace.”
Wil: There is a background to that story. I met Bernie in 1997 when he couldn’t find a cute girl to let him and Josh Zawaduk crash on her couch after a show in Nederland, CO. Out of better options, he and Josh spent the night at my tiny house in Boulder with me, my wife, and our dog. They planned on leaving in the morning but it turned out we had a giant surprise snow storm of around 36 inches and they were stuck in my driveway. Then their gig that night was cancelled because the snow caused the roof to cave in… and that’s how they ended up staying for three days! We got to be friends and competitive rivals from that. Then later in the year we went to a Rockies game and his manager Amanda asked me if I wanted to come on the tour to play accordion and also help drive and deal with the logistics. There was an actual tour manager, Tom Ianiello, but it was real DIY touring.
Sounded like it would be fun, except I very early on discovered that Bernie’s method of tuning from his harmonica and his ear for what constituted his guitar being in tune was formed over years of playing alone and was, in a word, idiosyncratic. Bassist Tige Decoster had decided to deal with the problem of Dan not being tuning to some actual notes by playing the fretless bass. If Dan was a little off, Tige could adjust. But playing accordion? There’s no fretless accordion! This, to use another word, was a nightmare.
Culmination of this was us playing at the Bottom Line and Elvis Costello being rumored to be in the house (he came to see the opener whose record he had produced and then left). Anxiety was high. Soundcheck was unsuccessful––in those days, Bernie had a lot of issues getting his monitors right. We basically ran out of time to do much. Show starts and I come out for the first song I’m going to play, which was probably “One Thing Real.” As soon as Bernie starts the song, I’m all–something is up: this is way out of tune. He was playing almost a quarter tone flat of E major. Making matters worse, Tige couldn’t hear him properly, knew it was a bit off-key so he was playing in Eb. I’m stuck. There’s nothing I can do that won’t make this train wreck worse. But, I am literally out in the front of the stage at a meaningful show and have to do something. Can’t walk off stage because I have to sing. So, I decide I will pantomime playing, sing my part and try to get us to re-tune after the song.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
The front of house mixer had no idea of any of this–he just saw a guy playing accordion and couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t hear it. I could see him fighting through it, moving knobs and faders frantically. I tried to shake my head to him to stop him but eventually he had my accordion mic cranked all the way up and at some point, my pantomiming resulted in what otherwise would have been an insignificant squeak but which was so loud in the house speakers with everything cranked up that it caused an unbearable feedback so bad everybody stopped. It was straight out of one of those nightmares people have about being in front of a crowd and something disastrous happening.
Bernie, of course, blamed me–– he fired me. He was actually going to send me home from the tour–bye bye smartie mine and NAL and swastika and Burbank and Fleeting Days etc lol–but softened into just no more playing.
That’s what led up to the story he told about soundcheck in Ann Arbor.
P.S.: just 5-6 years ago, I met a mixer at a studio here in Brooklyn where I had some gear and hung out occasionally. We were telling stories and he mentioned that he was the long time front of house mixer at the Bottom Line. I was like, did you mix Dan Bern there? And we started telling each other the same nightmare story. He said he’s been telling that story–from the other side of the stage– for 25 years! When I told him what had actually happened, his mind was blown. He had no idea.
Re: Sweetness
Dan Bern: “I had actually written it some years before when I was just living in LA. I may have been messing around with an electric guitar at that time, but I just know that it was laying there and sitting there in these songbooks. And we had finished the record. I was in the Boulder studio. I was basically living there. And so, everybody had gone home, and I was just there on my own. And I was just pounding through some old songs from these songbooks. It’s probably from, oh, early 90s, I’m guessing, with no particular idea about what I was doing or that this was going to be part of anything. I was just, you know, and this song came up and I was playing it. And I was like, and this happened a lot actually in making any number of records. Like you think you have the thing, and you think you’re done, and then something pops in. And I was playing this thing and I was like, oh my God, I’ve got to start with this.
Wow. So, I want to start, because we had had, you know, the title track, New American Language, as the start. And it’s a different kind of start.
It’s much gentler and it’s a slower opening and it kind of builds. But this is like, boom. You know, we had put so much work in all this and I was like, oh, no, how am I going to tell Wil – ?
Wil: He leaves out some good parts of the story.
We were at Velvet (my studio in Boulder) and I was doing editing and some pre-mixing in preparation for us going to Atlanta to mix the record. I think maybe there were 2-3 days before our flight and I was already pretty tight on time, especially with making a ton of “which of your children do you want to sacrifice” edits to background parts on “Thanksgiving Day Parade.” So, just Bernie and me in the studio, where he is basically just sitting in on perhaps the most repetitive sort of work on a record… and it’s just KILLING him. He wants to do something but there’s nothing for him to do but stew. First, he’s irritated, then mad, then frustrated, then becomes the cartoon where the guy’s head turns into a steam whistle… imagine trying to work in the control room with him like that. So, I for self-preservation, I came up one of the most accidentally great ideas ever:
I said, “Bernie, you know how there’s that foot locker of 14 songbooks up in the loft here and we’re always saying you should go through them and record them for posterity?” I set him up in the studio with an electric guitar, a microphone, a music stand, and a remote control. I routed his signal through a separate part of the mixing console and to the DAT machine he could see through the glass window into the control room, set to record but in pause. I said, “refresh your memory about the song (these are basically words on paper with maybe an occasional chord written down) and, when you’re ready, aim the remote, just press ‘play’, and record it. When you’re done, press ‘pause’ and go on to the next song.”
So, it gave him something to do, I was able to get back to work on my own tasks in the control room, and every once in a while in between edits, I’d check to see what his recording sounded like. Pretty good I thought and he seemed happier. Let’s just say he not only got distracted by this–he got OBSESSED with it. At some point, he had filled up an hour-long DAT, so I showed him how to get another tape started and gave him a stack of fresh DATs.
When I packed it in for the night, he was still going.
Next day, I come in and… he’s STILL GOING. He’s been awake for more than 24 hours straight, and he’s crazed. By the time I fiddle for a bit on editing, he’s accumulated EIGHT hours of actual recordings of songs, doesn’t want to stop, and I’m a little bit worried about his health.
When I come back from a dinner break, hours later, he accosted me and, with a wild man, The Shining kind of look in his eyes he says, “I FOUND THE OPENER FOR THE RECORD!!!” You know, the record that is done being recorded, is sequenced, and which we’re supposed to start mixing in another city roughly two days from now.
Suffice to say I was a bit skeptical, but he was insistent so I agreed to humor him by hearing the song. He played it for me and I thought, ‘great song’ and I said, “Listen, when we do the next record that should be the leadoff song.” Still, he was insistent that we had to record it before we headed to Atlanta–despite me pointing out that Colin and Brian were like 12 hours away–he was both out of his mind with sleep deprivation and dead certain. So, I said what I always say–my whole life when presented with a crazy, impossible idea, “OK, let me see what I can do.”
When I first heard it I immediately thought that, if it was going to be the opener, it needed to be styled into a rocker like the ‘Elvis Costello’ side of Dan’s 2×2 (Dylan-Costello by Springsteen-Guthrie). You mentioned Keith Moon, which is fair (and we’ll get to that), but the sound I had in my mind was Pete Thomas. The rhythm track I had in mind was like Pony St. from Brutal Youth, which I was listening to at the time. Listen to Pony St. for like 30 seconds and the drum and bass from Sweetness are there. The solo on “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding” is the direct ancestor of Eben’s solo and so on. Amateurs borrow, professionals steal, and artists homage.
I read that Nick Lowe told Elvis Costello part way through recording Brutal Youth that he wasn’t a melodic enough/technically gifted enough bassist to do some of the songs justice and that Declan should hire his nemesis, Bruce Thomas. In this scenario, I am a Nick Lowe sort of bassist and Brian Schey is Bruce Thomas… although the polar opposite of Bruce Thomas’s reported personality. Brian is the glue.
I had thought about making the connection between Jake and Bernie for a little while. Jake just had the right kind of juice to inject into the touring band and he was more of a rock drummer/wildcard compared to Colin’s tasteful and mostly understated playing. Brian Schey would say now that thing I like about Jake’s drumming is overplaying but I love the energy of that kind of thing. (The Who, The Attractions, Ben Folds Five.). And Jake has an unusually definitive groove, which a guy like Bernie needs, since it’s very hard for him to not be the orchestra and he had spent 10 years fighting drummers for control. If you know how much I value groove/pocket AND the unbridled energy of the bands I mentioned, you will understand why I really wanted to play with Jake and get him in our world.
I managed to get him, at least, for a session the next night and thought, you know, for the style and for what we were after, I could be a Nick Lowe sort of bassist for the session well enough. If we needed to have Eben overdub or whatever, so be it.
The session was a blast. Jake just raised the rock and roll cred of the record up a few notches and my playing didn’t hold us back that much. I did, in fact, have to encourage Jake’s drum fills on the outro–guys coming in for studio sessions always lean to keeping it simple and great ones generally have to be pushed into showing off or big personality parts. I may have mentioned “Keith Mooning the shit out of the outro.” lol. I overdubbed the organ, Eben cranked out some amazing guitar overdubs, and we knocked out the background vocals. One big night and it was going on the record in the opening slot it so richly deserved.
I am reminded of someone asking Chuck Plotkin what a Record Producer does and him telling a story about recording Shot of Love, the Bob Dylan record.
Story starts with Chuck making the studio fastidiously ready and getting everyone set up and ready–he’s going to produce his idol! Only, halfway through day one and there’s no Bob. Bob operates on a somewhat different timeline or a different planet, possibly. They finally found him late that afternoon, still home in Minnesota. “oh… was that today?”
Next day, the musicians in the studio are playing and Chuck arrives for the session. Bob walks in and picks up a guitar. Not really much is happening in the way of a song, but Chuck looks into the control room and realizes the recorder isn’t running. He goes into the control room and says, “Hey, you know we’re making a Bob Dylan record for the biggest record company in the world. We have a nearly unlimited budget… just roll tape any time something is happening!
A few days later, Bob is struggling to explain to Jim Keltner what kind of a drum part he wants Jim to play (despite the fact the only way Dylan can record is to be standing 3 feet from the drummer, facing him and using body language to indicate if he wants faster or slower or a fill or what have you).
Chuck sees Bob isn’t getting anywhere so he steps in to explain/translate for Keltner. As he’s explaining, he and Jim realize Bob is drifting over to the piano. Wait–it looks like Bob is going to play something impromptu. Chuck, anxious, looks into the control room, where the engineer gives the signal that tape is rolling. Then, Chuck notices in horror that Bob is playing and sure looks like he’s going to sing… only there’s no microphone there for singing.
So, Chuck grabs a microphone stand/mic w from the drum kit and lunges over toward the piano–he sticks the mic in front of Bob’s face, just as he begins to sing his one and only studio take of Every Grain of Sand.
Chuck, telling the story, says, “So, basically, that’s what a Producer does!”
Re: New American Language
Dan Bern: “I think it all just flowed. At the very, very end, there’s all kinds of, you know, it’s a pretty long outro, and there’s all kinds of stuff that is really Will’s doing in terms of… We were pretty wide open and experimental. We did a lot of stuff that you might not even hear consciously. You know, there’s, I don’t know, there might be some German in there. There might be some backward stuff in there.
There’s a lot of mixed up, linguistic stuff.”
Wil: More or less just borrowed from George Martin and the boys and did a digital version of ‘chop up all the random recording of stuff and then put the snipped pieces in a new collage in random order without even listening to it all until it was completely reassembled. Digital musique concrète. There’s definitely some German in there, forward and backward.
Re: Alaska Highway
Dan Bern: “I know that there was an immediacy to it because maybe more than anything else on the record, it was brand new when we recorded it. Like I had just been to Alaska, wrote the song up there, came back to where we were doing this, and it was the new song, and boom, we recorded it like right away. So, we were learning it, and it was, there was no, there was no artifice, it was just, it was just forward motion, you know.”
“For me, in a way, it’s a hat tip to the guys I’m playing with, because now I’m playing with the likes of him, ain’t never going to settle for less, my friend. Well, I’m not settling for less, you know, I’m playing with Eben Grace and Will and Brian and Jake and Colin and Paul Kuhn. And to me, these guys are on that level and in that pantheon. And I’m so lucky to be playing with these guys. And I’m not, yeah, I’m not settling.”
Wil: It think it was the very first thing we recorded when we moved from Kansas to Boulder, which is coincidentally the day the brand new ProTools system I’ve spent $15K on broke down, I was stressed and under the console trying to fix it, Hall of Fame Producer Chuck Plotkin is sick and laying on my extremely questionable faded pink divan which has recently been picked out of a dumpster, everyone is annoyed and itching to get going, and I have just discovered I have lumps all over my body and I think this will be the last recording session of my life because I’ve been so focused on it, I didn’t realize cancer was taking over my body*. So, suffice to say it was a lot of pent-up anxiety. When we finally got it rolling, it was like the start of the Kentucky Derby.
* – I lived with this for almost a week without telling anyone–stressed out of my mind–because I was afraid they’d send me home when they found out I was dying. When I went to my doctor, she was like, “Did you fight off a cold a week or so ago? (Yes). Are you experiencing stress (YES YES YES)? Turns out it was all of my lymph nodes saying, “hey, buddy: SLOW TF DOWN!” Crisis averted.
Dan Bern: “I don’t know, probably. I’m a bridge nerd. I love bridges as you do. Those early Beatles bridges, particularly, are just gold. And that’s the master class, really. And then Elvis Costello, same thing.”
Wil: Dude, I think one thing that unites music journalists, Songwriters, and producers is our love of bridges. I mean, really, they are little separate compositions that sneaked their way inside of other, almost unrelated songs. Subversive. They are like the film within a film. The thing that pleases me the most about my own songwriting is when a bridge finds its way into the song and exits seamlessly back into the next verse. Bernie had also just uncorked his “double bridge” manifesto at that point (where you have, say, a bridge-solo-bridge in the middle), a la the Beatles. I said that was pushing it and you were only really doing that because you loved the bridge so much you wanted to hear it again without having to rewind.
Speaking of ‘Cheech and Rae Dawn Chong-can’t we all get along’, my take on Dan Bern Songwriting secrets is:
1. clever bridges
2. putting the most ridiculous part of the rhyme couplet first and the more normal part second. For example, if you say:
Why can’t we all just get along
West Palm Beach and Cheech and Rae Dawn Chong
you’re a hack
but flip it and you’re a songwriting genius
3. build around universal images that everyone can not only relate to but interpolate into their own lives and thoughts–whether you use icons who represent something culturally that taps into the zeitgeist shorthand or just universal ideas like, “I would like to go back in time and change things only it’s stupid to think I could change anything”
4. fun with internal rhymes
5. the use of words just for the sound of their syllables and the cadence thereof, like the way rappers use them
Dan Bern: “And Will’s swirly stuff, you know? Well, that swirly stuff is like, sometimes he’s playing the organ, sometimes he’s playing the piano, sometimes he’s playing the mellotron.”
Wil: My secret is I have 8 arms.
Re: “God Said No.”
James: Let’s talk about this chord progression. Let’s talk about the melody, too. Do you remember when this all came to you?
Dan Bern: Yeah, I was in that house in Kansas. We hadn’t even started recording yet, but I’d been there, I don’t know, maybe just a few days. And I had been working on this idea of going back in time and making things right. I’d been working on that for probably a few years, and I hadn’t quite gotten myself around it yet. I hadn’t satisfactorily made that song yet, but it had been bouncing around in my mind. But it was one of those nights where you can’t sleep and you’re feeling really uneasy about everything. I think I was maybe nervous about going into this whole process. And I think I felt a fair amount of pressure maybe because I had been on this big label and then the whole industry changed suddenly, the whole Napster, whatever. And then my company folded into another one and they let everybody go. So, I was kind of out there on my own a bit. Anyway, that all somehow fed into just the anxiety of this. And it[…]”
He was beyond worked up the day before the night in question. He wanted to fire everyone (this is a running theme) and start over or even give up on making a record. There were a few times over the years I have talked him off the ledge–sometimes being on the phone with him literally all night–and he was in a pretty dark place. I managed to–I thought–get him picked up a little. And I went upstairs to sleep (This is when the two of us were staying in William S. Burroughs’s house in Lawrence, KS.)
I woke up a couple of times in the night and I heard the twinkle of a few guitar notes–I knew he was not able to sleep.
The next morning, I come down the stairs and he says, “Come sit and play with me––I think I might have written something.” Understatement of the century.
As good as you think the record might be and how much it might give you the feels, I had the best seat in the house for the best performance ever. Luckily, I recorded it on a memo recorder. You can’t quite get the same experience from the crappy recording but you too can hear it presented to the world.
Wil: The thing about Cobain & Burroughs… if you look at this photo, this is exactly the spot in the room where he played it for me. He was right where Cobain is and I am right where Burroughs was… only about three years earlier.
James: “You could ruin a really great song by making a lousy record. You could absolutely, now we said about the bones, but you could absolutely elevate a song the way this is elevated by making a great record. So even though most of this is just you emoting, the band really does lift you up. I’m assuming that’s Paul Kuhn on his famous cello caster, adding all of those ethereal sounds in the background to just give it that, we’re not quite on earth here. It has that whole Robert Johnson at the crossroads; you’re at the edge of town meeting with the other guy. He’s meeting the devil and you’re meeting God.
Dan Bern: It’s kind of like film acting versus stage acting when you’re making a record, and especially when you have this kind of musical bed to work with. The tendency, you just got to pull back, you got to keep pulling back, and that’s what I had to do. I think I must have done 50, 60 vocals of this, and I think finally the one that we, and maybe Wil comped it, you know, Wil did a lot of stuff.
He had a lot of tricks up his sleeve…”
Wil: I heard Chris Isaak’s recording engineer say once that Chris’ vocal for “Wicked Game” was comped from roughly 53 takes–out of a total of maybe 100 takes. “God Said No” wasn’t that wild but it was a comp from 37 of roughly more than 50 takes. I was pretty proud of the comp, too, because I don’t think you can tell and it still seems like the right choice.
Honestly, I’ve gone back and forth on the production of this record: did it all serve the song? Was there too much happening at times? It took me a few years to reach acceptance and hear it more as it might sound to the non-involved listener. I’m really glad that you and others like it–there was a lot of debate back then amongst the hardcore Dan Bern fans about whether he was better solo and whether they liked the “band” records. That was a pressure he felt a little but that I felt a lot.
And just wanted to clarify that (along with the lovely cellocaster of Paul Kuhn) the swirly, cloud-like chordal texture in the background–the thing that defines the sound of “God Said No”– is primarily Eben Grace playing electric guitar through a volume pedal and effects. It’s an absolutely genius thing he does that we’ve used a handful of times on various records. I’ll just be like, “you know, do the clouds thing in this part”. It makes producing easy when you have a guy like that who can do anything and who just spits out amazing musical ideas.
Re: Albuquerque Lullaby
Dan Bern: “I think it’s when Chuck was with us, and I remember he and Colin working real hard on that swirly brush thing that Colin’s doing on the drums, which he does so well and is a great example of what makes him really one of my favorite people to play with in the world. But yeah, when you have that kind of a bed on it, then that little picking thing I’m doing, it just reads so much more than if I’m doing it on my own. And for a lot of this, even at that time, I was still doing shows on my own.”
Chuck really pushed for a different arrangement we recorded that featured an arpeggiating 12-string Danelectro electric and was very much in Bruce territory. It might have been the only time Chuck gave input on something that we were like, “What? I don’t get it?” As special as the album version is, Bernie and I were talking one day a few years ago and we both agreed that the Chuck version was so good! I’m not sure where that alt-take lives but if I find it, I’ll send it someday.
James: “I’m going to give you the highest compliment I can. This chorus, don’t let your heart get broken by this world. It’s Buddy Holly good.”
Wil: Fuck yeah. Great pull.
Re: Tape
James: “Are you playing the Wawaw guitar on this?
Dan Bern: “I think that’s Eben. No, that’s Eben. Okay.
That’s really cool.”
Wil: First off, I love Eben Grace an unnatural amount. If he gets credit and praise, I am here for it. The little Dickie Betts/Steve Gaines solo he digs out of the dirt on Tape is just so indicative of his playing on this record. So many times when listening to this (heck, when making it), Eben played some part and I just had to go back and listen again. His solo proper in “Alaska Highway” is a neatly packaged beauty, his ride out solo on that song was100% first take, and you can always just count on him recording something with touchstones to the greatest players and licks of all time, but with his own voice. Magical sometimes. But.
There’s no wah wah guitar on Tape. It’s my wurlitzer 200A through a wah pedal (an idea Eben started me on one day, by handing me his spare wah pedal and saying, “I think you need this.” Me and wurlie wah are panned left and Eben and guitar are panned right.
Eben and I played a lot of gigs together: with Bernie, each others’ bands, with lots of different people and in different styles. We realized sort of early on that we were so much alike musically that we gravitated toward the same kinds of parts, but we were almost always on opposite sides of the stage, so sometimes didn’t know what the other was doing.
Funny story: we did both “Tape” and “Honeydoo!” on the same day, same setup. By sheer accident, on the winner take of Tape we couldn’t hear each other at all during recording. We went to listen to the playback with trepidation that maybe we were stepping over each other. Then we listened to it and it’s like a perfectly choreographed dance in the dark. So, we decided we purposely wouldn’t listen to each other in “Honeydoo!,” and that was even better in terms of the interplay.
Re: Honeydoo!
James: “And again, getting back to your sublime bridge, real quick, exactly. Just two lines, this one’s only three. “Drop by Albuquerque sometime when you need to.” You built on that better, even though I think your voice is magnificent on this record. But this song is the closest to like, foot stomp and Nashville sound.”
Dan Bern: “Well, I think of it as like early rock and roll, which is early country, which is, you know, it’s all, yeah, it’s exactly that. I think we did three different versions of this. There was one where we imagined it as early Beatles. There was one where we imagined it as early Stones. And I don’t even remember which of the three this was. Will could probably tell you, but I know it was it was just mad fun to do.”
Wil: As I recall we did three versions. Neat and tidy Early Beatles/Carl Perkins, messier early Stones, then a what-the-hell Ramones/no-holds-barred version. The album version is the last one. I have to confess a sort of a romanticized wish that we’d have used the less messy version––it was really good. But I suspect I mostly feel that way since it’s been 25 years since I’ve heard it!
James: “Ten minutes and twenty-seven seconds, my friend. How does someone write like something like this? How does someone write “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands?” How does someone write something this long, sweeping, but not it’s never boring? And I know, again, the way it’s arranged, that every music, it’s like the end of “Hey Jude.” I wrote about it, like everything George Martin does in that, where every na na, all 19 of them, each sweep around some new instruments added, some other thing.”
Wil: Have to admit, when he first played it, we LOVED the song but also we were like, “Is there any of this that could be cut?” Like, this is seriously long, man! The thing no one ever thinks about with a song like that is how long the process becomes. Every take is a regular take x 4. Every time you listen back or want to test eq or whatever, it’s x 4. When you review, edit or mix, three times through is more than a half hour. And we did A TON of takes, overdubs, edits, mixing, etc.
We did cut the Australia verse at first, but once we got well into the finished version, sadness was expressed that we ditched the Australia verse and I was like, if it’s going to be 10 minutes long, what’s another 45 seconds? So, we spliced bass and drums from another verse, overdubbed some banjo and whatnot and back in it went.
It took many attempts to get a take that in retrospect now feels effortless. My favorite of Colin’s drum tracks, because I know how we fought tooth and nail about the groove and where the beat should fall and it made nailing it perfectly feel like we’d won the Super Bowl.
To answer your question, not only was there no click track, we recorded two different versions of the song, spent a couple of months trying to decide which one to use, deciding we liked the basic tracks of one take and the candy and overdubs of the other. Since we couldn’t make up our minds, it was like, “Boy I wish we could have half of one and half of the other!”. I said, “Let me see what I can do.” (another running theme).
Despite no click track I spent a couple of days frankensteining and speed shifting it all together–a massive undertaking only a crazy person would even attempt.
We did make one edit to the song–cut out part of the musical interlude in the harmonica solo before the last verse. That was the only place where it felt like it dragged a bit.
Dan Bern: “The sequencing of it, oh man, it was so hard. And that’s, Chuck helped so much there, but it took, I think it took over a month just to sequence it. Wow. Like, like not casually, like, like actually like working at it, like steadily, because for that exact reason, you know, you want it to feel like it’s, I mean, to say it like it’s a story, I mean, I, I, you can’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t know how to like say, but you know, internally, there’s, there’s like it, you want it to hang together, and you want it to feel inevitable, each, each one, as you say, from one to the next. I, I always think of Will’s Mellotron starting this track, you know, before you hear anything else, you just hear this, and then I think the, and then I think the, the vocal comes in before anything else after that.
Yeah.”
Wil: We actually had a whiteboard on the first day in Kansas where we said, okay we’re making a record. I remember specifically saying New American Language was a two-slot track and Bernie telling me it was our leadoff number. But honestly, many of the songs on that first sequence didn’t make the record by the time we finished 18 months later. (“Nuclear Bomb,” “Feel Like a Man,” “Bike,” “Dress,” “Witness” (those latter two featured my personal favorite of my solos ever and then a track that was basically Massive Attack with me overdubbing every weird musical and noise idea I could generate. So much fun and so obscure now) and especially “Walking Through Glass” (maybe my favorite Dan Bern bridge of all time and a recording featuring our dear friend and the somewhat Walking through Glass-like… the late Lisa Donnelly).
Point is, sequencing was always a part of making a record. If you weren’t thinking about sequencing, you weren’t actually committed to making a record.
And if you think sequencing is hard work, in those days I was obsessive (actually obsessive is understating it) about the space between songs in the sequence. Give me a few minutes in the mastering session and I will convince you there is a magic spot for when the next song should start.
Dan Bern: “The tour we did right out of this one, like really the tour of this one, that fall, 9-11 happened. I don’t remember this, but Will swears that this record dropped the day 9-11 happened on that Tuesday. You know, within a week or two, we were on tour.”
Wil: The official release date was the following week I am told but I am certain we had promo copies out and the label was working the record on Tuesday morning, because that was when the new releases went out and when record companies (especially indies) had a chance to plug records with stores and radio. Regardless, the release date meant any momentum was thwarted.
The best thing that happened was not only that we played a show very soon after 9/11 in NYC with first responders in the audience who were moved beyond belief by God Said No among others. It really was a record that was tailor-made for the exact time it came out in.
As a giant fan of the A History of Rock in 500 Songs podcast, hearing the record discussed on your show was the second-best podcast I can think of being mentioned on. To paraphrase Chuck lol. I think it’s pretty unlikely Dan will be mentioned on 500 Songs (his spirit would just leave his body if that ever happens) let alone me, but I have been enjoying hearing the names of several people I’ve played with or met making appearances on the show. I’ll add being mentioned on your podcast to my most cherished honors.
Thank you again for being such a great supporter of Dan’s and for keeping this record in your soul and your heart unbroken by this world.
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