Au Revoir Simone "We would talk about keyboards and crossword puzzles."
We recorded our first official song with Thom Monaghan , All Or Nothing, in a studio with enormous rat traps that were too small for the rats that ran by them at night, but we moved our recording operation to our practice space, which is a tiny, windowless glorified closet, wallpapered in funny ballpoint-pen drawings we made of each other and random tour posters. Only minor problem was that the only thing we had for Thom to sit on was a tiny chair we had lying around. So there were the three of us on these high stools and Thom on his shrimpy chair. He kept complaining that he felt like he was on trial the whole time and we’d say in funny deep judge voices with unplaceable accents (you have to really imagine that or it’s not funny), “WE COMMAND YOU TO RECORD US!” And he would. So I guess our plan worked.
After we did the drums we ended up in Erika’s apartment, which was quite nice. It was always clean and airy and had lots of sunshine coming through the windows. That was really cozy and fun and right by Bedford Avenue, which was nice for running out to get coffee and cookies, or yarn for knitting, or lip balm as one needed to. We also tried about half of the lunch specials on Bedford during our time there. The weather was great and from time to time a friend would stop by.
We needed some more space because we were renting some lovely old keyboards from Thom’s friend Ken (who did our sound at a venue in Park Slope about 4 years before and is really nice), so we rented a room in a music studio that made music for commercials. That was fun because we had a nice water cooler environment, where we would hang out with the real employees and talk about keyboards and crossword puzzles.
After our week there, pretending to work in an office, we went back to Erika’s for a spell, then took a little break and flew to Thom’s house in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles. He’s got a nice studio out there in a large converted garage that feels like a lovely little living room filled with random Russian guitar pedals and musical children’s toys from Tel Aviv. Every night at Thom’s studio as we packed our things to go at the end of the night, he would put on 1 side of a record for us as our “departure soundtrack.” And it was always so good, that even though we were exhausted and had been in the same small room for 12 hours or something, we never wanted to leave because the music was so enchanting. Kate Bush, Throbbing Gristle, Angelo Badalamenti, Kraftwerk.
Au Revoir Simone’s new album, Still Night, Still Light, is out in a few days.
