Old Friends – The Expos

The Expos - Old Friends

The Expos

Old Friends (2006)

This was a funny record to make. I had seen and adjudicated the Donuts at the Brass In The Grass festival along with Christine Bougie (who I met for the first time and was to play on their second CD). Although the band was rough playing outdoors through a truly underwhelming sound system you could hear that they were moving towards this first record. I was hired to record them in Mich’s basement as I was only set up at an office space and they wanted to keep the budget reasonable.  They were still the Donuts when we recorded and the CD was released under that name until the re-released it through Stomp Records in Montreal and decided to redress everything. I’ll come back to that.

I met up with the band to get a feel for what they were doing and how they played at this point. It was at this point that they told me they were ditching a good percentage of their material and would be writing a lot of new songs while we tracked for the week in August.

It was a week fueled by pop/ a tracking chart (which they marked up energetically as we went) and the impending deadline which was the end of the week. The band was splitting off to go to school so we were under the impression that this would be it. We did get most of it done in that time, but booked several sessions to track upright piano, backing vocals and some final touches. Then there was the inevitable rush near the end in order to get it pressed for the CD release show. We put the final touches on the last mixes and stayed up through the night to master the dics using a pair of Neve pre-amps to shape the sound. What shape? Shittier. Odd as that was, we were using these lovely 1073s to pull up the crap and make it a hair nastier. By 7am, we had achieved just that.

That was a recurrent theme during the process. The vocal microphone selection was based on that. We tested several and went with the EVs that I’d received as a gift from The Cheapsuits.

vocal mic of choice

This microphone here was their secret weapon. It had a unique tone which I’ve never used with any other artist. Not on vocals anyway.

The week was mostly a blur. I had set up as best as I could in the basement within smelling range of the cat’s litter, mostly relied on headphones. I have a clear memory of helping Adam M. with his trombone solo and then running upstairs to help write a line if I could and then run downstairs to continue on the next part of the solo…etc… that was the pace.

For this recording we got to experiment with the drum tones (which I like to do to open up the flavours) by deadening the skins for the reggae interludes (White Gunn/ Black Gunn). This would be the album where I used the my spring reverb the most. It’s a small Boss until that I picked up in a shop in Ottawa. Very distinctive tone.

When the CD was released I had completed 2 others around the same time – The Cheapsuits and I An Eye. I sent the CDs out together to a few labels and this basement recording was the one that got the attention. They eventually re-released with Stomp and used that as a chance to change their name/ re-mix (de-shittify some of the tones) and re-master with my favourite mastering engineer, Richard G. Benoit. They also used this opportunity to create some striking artwork.

The Expos