Behind the Kit on Frank Meadow's "Dead Weight"
Breaking down my drum parts on three songs from the record
In my last letter I mentioned that I would be writing from the west coast, Seattle in particular, where I was on assignment to cover Northwest Terror Fest for a magazine. As you may have noticed I did not end up sending a letter during my trip. In addition to being busy with the festival itself, I was simply having too much fun spending substantial time in a city other than New York for the first time in years. I’ll have more to say about my trip, the festival, and the city of Seattle next week. This week I’d like to take you behind the scenes on an album that dropped while I was out of town, one that I am proud to say that I played some drums on.
On July 1st, my friend and frequent collaborator Frank Meadows released his latest album Dead Weight through Ruination Records. Frank has made a lot of music over the years, so it wouldn’t be true to say that Dead Weight is his debut. However the album feels like the opening of a new chapter in Frank’s career. Typically an instrumentalist and instrumental composer, Dead Weight features Frank’s first stab at being a singer/songwriter. From my understanding these songs have gestated for years, some dating back from before Frank moved to New York and others coming later in a song-a-day project, each waiting patiently on a hard drive while their author helped other musicians finalize their own tunes.
After one such session, for Next of Kin by Bellows (which you can read about here!), Frank asked me if I’d like to play drums on his album. I probably said yes before he finished asking. I may be an asshole, but I’m an enthusiastic and supportive asshole. We hunkered down in our practice space, the same one you’ve seen in my Drumming Upstream videos, and worked over a handful of tunes. From the jump Frank let me know that the parts I wrote might not end up on the record proper. The goal was to try stuff out, experiment, see what worked. We moved fast. After only a couple of practices, Frank brought his mics and we tracked three songs in a day.
Over the next year Frank continued tinkering, adjusting melodies and arrangements as he played Dead Weight songs live added new collaborators to the recording. By the time he slipped me final mixes for the record this spring the songs had transformed to the point where I barely registered that I was the one playing drums on them. Still, despite this dissociation, I’m happy to provide whatever insight I can offer into how this trio of tracks came together. Let’s dive in!
Everybody’s Birthday
As you will likely be able to tell seconds after hitting play, “Everybody’s Birthday” is a country song. This meant that my number one goal was to stay out of the spotlight and keep it simple. For the song’s first verse and chorus this meant not playing at all. By coming in during the instrumental break after the first chorus with a full backbeat I gave myself the headroom to move down to a cross stick in the second verse. This feels like a comedown from the first verse even though the first verse had no drums. Arranging is all about tricking the audience into having a good time.
While I largely kept to a straight forward groove with no syncopation and few fills, which turned out to be a good call considering all the tasty stuff Aaron Dowdy and John Wallace added after I recorded my part, Frank and I couldn’t resist a few minor complications. There’s one persistent off-beat accent that comes around at the end of each phrase. At the song’s climax these accents make up the whole rhythmic grind. In order to build to that climax I tried to emphasize the off-beat a slightly different way each time it looped around. Then when we finally got to the crescendo I ripped out some fills that would probably get me kicked off the kit in Nashville. Frank seemed to like them though, and I think the business is earned by the rest of the song’s restraint.
Light In My Room
Of the three songs that I ended up playing on, “Light In My Room” went through the most revisions. I first tried something along the lines of the meat & potatoes drum beat that I played on “Everybody’s Birthday”. This did not work. I tried playing the part in half time. No dice. “Light In My Room” called for a lighter touch, but also a nimble one. Inspired by Frank’s fondness for the Rhodes electric piano sound, I switched to a nervy beat built on cross sticks and tight hi-hats. Frank, being a fellow Radiohead fan, encouraged me to pursue this idea further.
The trick was to keep the energy high without getting too cluttered too soon. I picked two spots to get busy. First the instrumental bridge, where I switched to 16th notes on the hi-hat. Here the speed of the drums makes up for the relative sparsity of the arrangement. The hi-hat part is a bridge of silk connecting two sturdier parts of the song. Second, during the final chorus I let my right hand get carried away with some notes between the rest of the groove. Believe me when I tell you that I tried adding these extra cymbal hits earlier in the song, but doing so left us no where to go by the end.
“Light In My Room” also had the most dramatic changes in the rest of its arrangement since I tracked my part. In the intervening time Frank added two short ambient bookends to either side of the song and got Winston Cook-Wilson to layer synthesizers over the second half of the song. I love that stuff!
Saturday Night
You might think, looking at how short “Saturday Night” is, that this song took less work than the other two. Not so! I’ve found that short songs have a way of magnifying every decision you make. There’s no time for autopilot. Every moment needs to justify itself. The plus side is that this means I could try out a bunch of different ideas as long as they were short enough. In the first 20 seconds I cycle through three different drum beats to match the arc of Frank’s melody. The bridge that kicks in about fifteen seconds later features a fourth distinct drum part, this one an old fashioned faux-Latin groove that makes me think of black and white footage of late night television.
While working on this song Frank and I joked that this was his Frankie Cosmos tune. The song contains a short narrative about a mundane experience, told precisely and concluded unceremoniously. I was a big fan of the drumming on Frankie Cosmos’s Zentropy back in the day, so I tried to reach for the tight minimalism of that album in the way I played each of the four grooves in this song.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you take the time to check out the rest of Dead Weight. Also, if you’re interested in seeing Frank and I play music together live, you can catch us across the continental United States playing in Bellows. Here are the tour dates:
7/22 - Brooklyn, NY @ Wet Spot
8/2 - Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA
8/3 - Richmond, VA @ The Dark Room at The Hof
8/4 - Asheville, NC @ Static Age
8/5 - Nashville, TN @ DRKMTTR
8/7 - Dallas, TX @ Double Wide
8/8 - Denton, TX @ Rubber Gloves
8/9 - Austin, TX @ Hotel Vegas
8/11 - Tucson, AZ @ Groundworks Tucson
8/12 - Phoenix, AZ @ Trunk Space
8/13 - Los Angeles, CA @ Silverlake Lounge
8/16 - Oakland, CA @ Elbo Room
8/17 - Arcata, CA @ Outer Space
8/18 - Portland, OR @ Turn! Turn! Turn!
8/19 - Seattle, WA @ Vera Project
8/22 - Duluth, MN @ Prove
8/23 - Minneapolis, MN @ Icehouse
8/24 - Iowa City, IA @ The Close House
8/25 - Chicago, IL @ The Hideout
8/26 - Cleveland, OH @ Cleveland Art Workers
I’ll be back next week with my collected thoughts on Seattle, and then I should maybe possibly potentially have a Drumming Upstream ready for the week after that. Talk soon.