Femmes Fatales – John Layton

John Layton

Femmes Fatales

John Layton

John Layton is an artist I met through the Coffeehouse nights at the Renaissance Cafe (r.i.p.). John has a way of weaving slightly off-kilter stories within the pat-pat of his picking on the garbage picked dobro. It’s as if they are one and the same thing,  maybe the stories couldn’t exist without the music or vice versa.

With this CD I wanted to get as much of his performance as possible. So it’d be fair to say that this is a fairly accurate document of one week together. Every night John would drop by my old office and sing his songs in the small booth. We rented a pair of Neve 1073s from Reaction Studios (r.i.p) and with different microphone combination John would do several hours of takes each evening. I didn’t want to weigh down his performances with too many overdubs, so we kept it to only one overdub on certain selected tracks only to pepper the album slightly. Morgan Doctor was the first thing I thought of when I first heard him singing Land Of Nog at the Ren. So I set up minimally at Morgan’s space to track tablas to  bring out the comical exotic flavour of the lyrics and his odd have capo tuning. After that we recorded kit for Paulette’s Brush to accent the bounce of his take and used the cajon to drive Metropol Hotel. There was one harmonica overdub that John played and I added upright bass to The Band Played On.

To find out more about the man, the myth click here.