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| From | Joanne Hodges <joanneh42@yahoo.com> |
| Subject | Re: Thorns? |
| Date | Mon, 17 Mar 2003 13:32:34 -0800 (PST) |
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Matthew Sweet, Pete Droge, and Shawn Mullins are The
Thorns. The new CD is scheduled for a 5/20/03 release.
Go to:
http://www.vh1.com/artists/az/thorns/artist.jhtml
for more information and to listen to the song "I
Can't Remember."
Following is the complete article on the band:
"It was good timing that brought the three of them
together in the spring of 2002, good timing and a
shared desire to stretch out after being turned inward
for so long. Matthew Sweet and Pete Droge had just
finished typically intensive solo album projects,
while Shawn Mullins had recorded a sizable batch of
demos for his next Columbia album. Because they played
a variety of instruments and knew how to operate the
recording hardware, all three were in the habit of
doing most of the work themselves. Each of them, then,
was up for a break from introspection and a taste of
interaction when the idea for the experiment came to
them through the artist grapevine.
So it was that three resolutely self-contained and
single-minded solo artists found themselves face to
face, and voice to voice, in a room at Hollywood's
Sound Factory, working on a song. Sweet, Droge and
Mullins didn't know each other particularly well, but
there were countless connections among them—common
managers, producers and sidemen, mutual friends, a
history of bumping into each other along the
circuit—more than enough connections to bring them
together to conduct this experiment, which is best
presented as a rhetorical question: Wouldn't it be
cool if several first-rate writer-singers managed to
blend their sensibilities and their voices into a
distinctive sound and style? That's hardly a new idea,
obviously. But Crosby, Stills & Nash formed in 1968,
the Eagles in '71; Buckingham and Nicks joined
Fleetwood Mac in '74. Isn't it about time something
similarly ambitious and audacious was attempted in
this century?
Quite separately, all three of these unlikely
collaborators had thought about singing with others,
with Sweet even giving serious consideration to
putting together a male-female harmony group in the
manner of the Mamas & the Papas as a side project.
Concurrently, Droge realized how much he wanted to
jump off what he describes as "the solo-artist
treadmill," with its endless cycle of
demo-record-wait-tour. And Mullins was simply antsy to
do something different. So their antennas were out;
still, they never expected to work together—or with
anyone else—on an equal basis.
At first, the going was slow as they tried to come up
with a collective methodology. They spent a couple of
days on an idea of Droge's called "I Set the World on
Fire," approaching it as an uptempo rock track. On the
third day, with the "Fire" demo finished, Sweet
suggested they try something more acoustic and threw
out an idea for a ballad. The three of them had just
begun playing around with it when a rep from
Aware/Columbia, who'd been sufficiently intrigued by
the experiment to underwrite it, suggested they take a
break and go out to eat.
"We had just started working on this song, which
became 'I Can't Remember,'" Droge recalls, "and we
said, 'We're gonna stay here and finish the song.'"
It turned out to be the best meal they'd ever skipped.
"We were sitting in the room, singing the song
together," Droge continues, "and it was very clear to
me that our voices, just out of pure dumb luck, worked
great together. Once we started working on 'I Can't
Remember,' just singing together in the room with
acoustic guitars, that's when I knew this was
something special. By the time he came back, we'd
finished the song."
"We all got excited when we were singing it," says
Sweet, "because something happened emotionally, and it
had the sound. I thought, 'We have something here.' We
played him the song, pretty much as it is now, and it
was like a chills-type vibe. When we do that—when the
three of us are singing real organically like
that—that's when people seem to flip out."
Adds Mullins: "All of a sudden it just really locked
in there. We found the place where our voices fit the
best. There was immediate musical chemistry, and it
got even better."
Five days later, Aware/Columbia offered the newly
formed trio a record deal.
When they got together again, spending two weeks at a
ranch in picturesque Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa
Barbara (where they would come up with the Thorns as
their name), Mullins, Droge and Sweet were writing
with a sense of purpose. During those informal
sessions, which Sweet jokingly refers to as the
nascent group's "first golden period," the songs
tumbled out one after the other: "Think It Over,"
"Thorns," "Dragonfly," "Such a Shame," "Long Sweet
Summer Night," "I Told You," forming what Droge calls
"the cornerstones of the record and of the band's
sound."
"I'd never worked so fast and come out with such good
stuff," says Mullins.
Droge again: "It was hot, middle of summer, and we'd
just sit out on the back porch all day and work on
these songs. Then at night we'd put a microphone out
on the back porch and cut the demos right outside,
with the crickets chirping, the wind blowin'. We'd
have two mics, one on the guitar, one for the vocals,
and we'd track it into Matthew's laptop."
"We had to demo right away because of so many details
on everything—all those backgrounds," Sweet explains.
"We did all that live together. That's the magical
thing."
After some growing pains as they got to know each
other (more on that in a minute), the second "golden
period" took place in a suite at L.A.'s Montrose
Hotel, where the trio came up with "Runaway Feeling,"
which opens the album, and "Among the Living," which
closes it.
The Thorns immediately thought of Brendan O'Brien to
produce; O'Brien had done three records with Droge and
two with Sweet, including each of their biggest
sellers, Matthew's 100% Fun and Pete's Necktie Second.
But he was an in-demand producer—he'd finished Bruce
Springsteen's The Rising, was mixing Pearl Jam's
latest, Riot Act, and had the follow-up to Train's
breakthrough, Drops of Jupiter, on deck. So it was a
long shot. But when Droge, who's worked with Stone
Gossard and Mike McCready, visited a Pearl Jam mix
session, O'Brien asked him about the Thorns demos, and
Pete replied that he just happened to have them in his
pocket. "I knew Brendan was going to love it," Droge
says. He was right.
After a shakedown session in L.A., which resulted in a
pair of basic tracks, O'Brien cleared eight weeks in
the fall of 2002 to produce the Thorns' debut album in
Atlanta. "Until Brendan came on board, it never
crossed anybody's mind that this could be a commercial
radio record," says Mullins. "We just tried to write
songs we liked."
Tracking live in the studio, the three band members
and O'Brien played the bulk of the instruments, with
the legendary Jim Keltner on drums, the E Street
Band's Roy Bittan on piano and string wizard Greg
Leisz providing accents on a variety of stringed
instruments. And then they turned to the group vocals,
which would be the album's centerpiece. When listening
to The Thorns, you can't miss how precisely organized
the harmonies are. The song structures and the massing
of those voices in the choruses seem totally
integrated, resulting in what amounts to a physical
affect on the lifts.
Droge has a theory about what makes the Thorns sound
so distinctive—and so breathtaking: "With a lot of
great harmony bands, people would individually bring
songs in and they'd work up their harmonies—CSN,
Fleetwood Mac, etc. I'm not really aware of a band
that has been this focused on the harmonies from the
conception of a song. On our demos, very often the
vocals were identical to what ended up on the final
record because, as we were writing the songs, we were
tailoring the melodies for the three-part harmonies.
That process has everything to do with the sound of
this band. There are places in the record where I
swear I hear my voice and I know I'm not singing. It's
that X factor. You can't tweak it in with an expensive
equalizer or the right compressor. It either happens
or it doesn't. I have to give Matthew credit for
getting us in the mindset of thinking this way. He was
adamant about having harmonies all the time. It was
good that we pushed ourselves that way."
"There was a lot of tension too," Mullins admits about
the evolution of the Thorns. "It was three songwriters
from totally different backgrounds. Until you figure
each other out, how to be around each other, you never
know if that kind of thing will work out."
"It took a tremendous amount of letting go of all of
our power issues," Sweet adds.
Mullins picks up the thread: "Once we got that over
with, our egos were set aside and here we go. It was a
blast. We really did become friends through this
process".
"At the beginning, nobody knew how it was going to
work, or if it's going to work, or when it could
implode," Droge reflects on the Thorns experiment.
"Because really, in theory, it's a disaster waiting to
happen—three guys who are used to generally being
dictators, used to having their name in bold print on
the front of the record, trying to be a band. It's a
miracle we actually made it happen."
Says Sweet, "No one told us what to be like. No one
gave us a model. We created what it is. It was more
about our solidarity than anything else."
"I haven't felt this juiced about anything in years,"
Mullins enthuses. "The immediacy and the spontaneity
we had is a lot of what's so great about it. There
were several times during the process of writing and
demoing—especially out on the porch at the ranch—where
we'd all look at each other and it was like, 'Wow,
man, this is why we're here.' At those moments, I was
feeling that this music is going to touch a lot of
people."
It won't be long before the Thorns are doing exactly
that."
Joanne
--- "Lc." <lanegcampbell@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Could someone please elaborate on this Thorns CD?
> Is
> it a Matthew Sweet side project? Strange that
> they're
> covering "Blue", I remember seeing Juliana Hatfield
> do
> this years ago at First Ave, and I am seeing the
> Jayhawks tonight!
>
> Lane
>
> --- "Billy G. Spradlin" <bgspradlin@cablelynx.com>
> wrote:
> >
>
> =====
> "My step-dad's a cop"
>
> __________________________________________________
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