Never underestimate the power of the songwriter, is a lesson well taught by indie-pop outfit, Ed Ghost Tucker, as three of the group are accomplished songwriters. The four-piece based out of San Diego have made a splash in the California music scene. Earning two San Diego Music Awards in 2013 and 2014 for ‘Best Pop’ group. The band is no stranger to making waves. Recently, the band went behind the scenes of their newest EP, Channels, in our most recent Track By Track. You can also check out the video for their hit song “Sofia” below.
“Kids on the Block” (lyrics by Rutger Rosenborg)
This song actually started out as a joint venture between myself and a friend that used to play music with us. At one point, it was quite a bit jazzier and it even had a sax solo at the end, but after we parted ways with him, we sort of had to give it our own identity as a four-piece. The rhythmic pulse and production style spawned from songs like Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” and the West African “glitch” of David Longstreth and Annie Clark (especially when considering their guitar playing). I did take a “page” out of Led Zeppelin’s playbook by tripling the same guitar part using different amps and pickup settings for a majority of the song. I deconstruct this at the end as the chorus effect splits apart into a glitchy call-and-response between these three different guitar tones and an effected bass. In my mind, it creates a sort of communal solo. From a lyrical standpoint, a large part of it channels the playful nonsense of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” or Lennon’s “Come Together.” There are also, whether I intended it or not, a lot of puns and classic biblical allusions, which, more than anything, serve a surrealist purpose and not a symbolic one (not that the two are mutually exclusive). If one wanted to, one could find plenty of numerological symbolism in the time signatures. All of this conceptual “pomo” blather aside, it’s also a very personal song about a group of young people struggling to have some meaning or hope materialize for them. It wasn’t until the EP was nearly complete that the idea popped into my head — partly inspired by a music video concept that Cameron came up with — of this song being like a pilot to a sitcom about the lives of mischievous neighborhood kids.
“I Do” (lyrics by Michaela Wilson)
“I Do” had a couple different forms and was written during our band’s transition from a more folk-jazz driven sound to whatever eclectic pop genre we are using to describe ourselves now. There’s folk and funk and other stuff. I remember being in our rehearsal space and having a good time trying to figure out where this song could go. It felt like we had endless possibilities, and maybe we used all of them on this song at once, but it turned out to still flow and happily combat my somewhat depressing lyrical content. This song was a personal one written from the perspective of a good friend of mine who has watched me most of my life going in and out of relationships and his possible view of how I do and view things. Quite exaggerated and also untrue in how I actually feel about love and life, but all my anxieties and self-conscious thoughts about how I was perceived were able to be somewhat let go of in writing this song. The week I was going into the studio to record vocals I had watched this Feist documentary that showed her recording in this French chateau, living where she was creating “Reminder” and I was really inspired. I read that her engineer recorded some of her vocals through tube amps, and I have always loved the way her voice sounds on record. So, Rut hooked it up and we did that. (I believe that Rut had this exact idea during the recording process and it was one of those ah ha moments of “let’s do this,” “ok yeah, that’s what I was thinking, let’s do that”.)
“Mom Got Fat” (lyrics by Cameron Wilson)
This song came to me in the shower – dare I say, “stream”-of-consciousness… Anyway, I have one foot planted in filmmaking, so with songs I often combine narratives from my life with characters and themes from movies I’ve seen or imagined. This one’s details have less bearing on personal experience, my mom is skinny and I have yet to storm out into the big city full of resentment or anything; I’m still on A-OK terms with the folks here in the suburbs so it’s mostly just a catchy fiction with the melody driving these simple lines where each one tells its own mini-story. I remember tapping and stomping out the rhythm of the lines as they came to me to try to figure out how we were going to write everybody’s parts to the glitchy turnaround in the verses. I struggled and got a lot of people involved (once I got out of the shower) with varied opinions on what the time signature was (11/4 there in the verse, as it turns out, I think). It’s strange how songs can get enriched and confused as collaborators process what you share with them, but although nobody in this band fluently speaks any legit music language, we have our methods of communicating that tend to work out.
“Likes of You” (lyrics by Cameron Wilson)
This song for sure has a personal aspect to the lyrics, probably… I think every line either speaks of “I” or “You” at least once, so in a way I’m as convinced as anyone that it’s probably actually me in there being this ‘petulant child’ attempting to absolve himself of all these criticisms because, like, ‘I already know it all, duh’ but I’m also convinced that songwriting can speak for any of us and this is another song where lines came more from thinking thematically than taking real account of personal details (at least thats something I tell myself). I’m sure I have been called ungrateful and all those other fine adjectives by some small handful of people in my time, to my face or otherwise, but I wouldn’t call it a regular or defining occurrence. I don’t know what to say about how the music developed over the long course of time between first writing it and recording it for Channels, except that I can remember quite a few versions of those island rhythms bouncing me through my weird narcissistic poppy party. As always, we back each other up through the moody lyrical stuff with music thats fun and felt enough to lift the thing almost clear out of whatever depressing holes we’ve dug ourselves into.
“Sofia” (lyrics by Michaela Wilson)
This was one of the easier songs to come about. It kind of just vomited onto the page during a studio session we had in the early days. The boys were tracking in this amazing live room on UCSD’s campus and I was sitting on the floor in the studio with our friend and engineer who happened to have keys to the space after hours and was recording a series of demos for us. The rhythm came first and then the melody and easily the words took shape. I was reading “Good Morning Midnight” by Jean Rhys at the time and there was an excerpt about this girl going down to the Seine to drown herself and I ran with that. Slowly it took its own shape as far as my own personal meanings go, but as cheesy as it sounds, it really wrote itself. It’s a pretty tragic song however you want to look at it, which I tend to view from multiple angles. At the time I was losing a close friend to pain killers, ending the longest relationship I had experienced to date, and moving back to my childhood home after being on my own and living abroad. It was a transitional time, not to minimize it to the cheapest sense of that phrase. So that song is very much about all those things, as well as made up characters that either exaggerate or equally play down my own emotional investments with fictional scenarios that are definitely more metaphorical than not. The boys embraced the melody, adding their parts and making it into a real moving song. I had written it in 3 but didn’t really want it to feel like a waltz, and the boys were eager to work with me on that. In the studio, Rut created this hysteria intro that, for me, makes me feel like the obstacles being faced are totally over your head. Like you’re being swallowed. A feeling I’m familiar with. I don’t know what he intended, but it worked.
“Rest Your Bones” (lyrics by Rutger Rosenborg)
Piecing this song together was a nightmare. There were so many tracks and plug-ins running on the project that CPU overload was a given. As I’d rather not revisit those snags in production, I’ll just talk about the song itself. At base, “Rest Your Bones” is a love song in somewhat of a duet form. The lead boy and girl parts are split for the verses in the upbeat first half, joining together in the more morose second half with the tempo and time change. As a result, I suppose it makes for a rather wistful love song — a sort of “coming to terms.” I rewrote parts of it many times and often at the last minute, but I like that it ends with all three of us singing together. Sure, it’s bouncy, surfy, and tropical sometimes, but there are definitely modulations of sadness, longing, and regret peppered throughout. Cameron says I always write about death, and you could argue that case here too. Whoops.
Ed Ghost Tucker – Sofia (Music Video) from SnowGlobe Studios on Vimeo.
