Vinyl

Vinyl was the first recording we did with Mike and Greg. Mike had probably been with the band about a year by now and Greg had been jamming and sitting in with us for months. Greg would come to shows with his horn and sit in and we liked what he was doing, so we started to invite him to rehearsals and finally we invited him to officially be in the band.

Liar and Violence represent a few new things at this junction. First, they were the first songs that we wrote with two horns (Trent started playing trumpet too at this point, hence the 2 trumpets at the beginning of Liar) and the arrangements reflect that: it’s not just Trent’s part with an octave or harmony, but he and Greg worked out parts together. It was a pretty exciting time.

This recording also marks a point where we really headed into harder terrain. Having started as jam band, we always had a certain laid back and groovy vibe going on, but here the 20-something angst and frustration takes the foreground. It’s also our most blantantly political record. We had always been a group of socially conscious guys, but for the most part (with the execption of Trent) we were pretty apolitical. We got dubbed “benefit whores” at one point because we played at so many of them, and this came out of a sincere desire to help and make a difference. This album is a little more pointed in terms of an actual stance on things aside from single issues. The new songs (Liar and Violence) were written during the Gulf War and we were pretty fed up with 11 years of Republican rule; we’d had enough, and the anger came through.

We flew through the recording of this. I think we mixed the whole thing in about 10 hours. We obviously were broke, otherwise we would have done more songs. I think it’s strange that we re-recorded “Soap Opera” instead of doing a different tune that hadn’t been put to tape. In retrospect, there are at least 10 songs that never got recorded that I’d love to have done, but I think a lot of those came later, we obviously were thinking something!?

Webmaster’s note: Unfortunately, the Internet Archive does not have a copy of the liner notes and artwork for this album from the original website. If you have them (or a cassette of this album), please e-mail me!