Letting go of the past, Cat Martino immerses herself in the moment with “I Promise.” With help from Sufjan Stevens and Man Man's Chris Powell, the song takes a dark, electronic turn.
Ever since meeting Cat Martino during our first Shaking Through session with Sharon Van Etten, we've known she's a woman with a powerful voice. Since then, we've watched her collaborate with an incredible repertoire of artists (Sufjan Stevens, The Shins) as she's developed her solo career. Now, two years later, we were thrilled to bring her back to Philadelphia for another go in the studio—this time, with her work as the focus.
While many wrapped up their SXSW trips, Martino visited us from Brooklyn for a weekend in the middle of March. Enlisting the help of frequent collaborator Sufjan Stevens and Philly drummer Chris Powell (Man Man), she set to work on “I Promise,” an electronic-influenced slow jam about letting go of past relationships.
Martino got her start in Long Island basements during high school, where she spent hours with friends experimenting with different sounds and styles. But after heading to Rutgers University on a singing scholarship, she turned toward the freedom of dance, finding the rigors of music academia too confining. Studying both disciplines transformed the way Martino worked creatively, making her music an intensely physical art form. “I could transfer the same choreography concepts to making music,” she says. “It was like by studying dance and creating choreography, I was making rhythm with my body.”
“A lot of difficult things have happened. But through making this song, it was a process of letting go, of recognizing certain changes and then also recognizing, here I am just moving, singing. We're in the moment of creating something.”
“Making music was painting the sounds, or making physicality with sound—it's all the same really.” After college, having moved to New York, Martino was beset with an undiagnosed, painful illness that constrained her physically for the first time in her life. She was forced to break the inspirations around her down to their core elements of beauty, an experience that has fundamentally affected her style. “I felt like what it would be at the edge of mortality,” she explains.
Martino's creative process reflects those experiences, beginning with a stream of consciousness as she experiments with melody and lyrics simultaneously until something starts to feel good. “If something feels potent, I'll just be repeating it over and over again when I find that thing,” she says. “I'll find that one phrase that was the nugget of the song and then I'll edit, I'll build and structure once I find what that core is.” For “I Promise,” that core phrase came toward the
end of the songwriting process: You can never go back. Yet the creative process itself was a continuously changing experience, as the song's direction shifted several times going into the recording process. “You go through so many emotions when you are writing a song,” Martino says. “For me it was finding a balance between having fun in the studio and telling the truth, which isn't always fun.”
Like Martino's songwriting process, the recording session for “I Promise” was an evolving process. With only 48 hours to record and mix a song that was written just days before the session, Martino, Stevens, and Powell embraced experimentation and let the song develop as they worked. For Martino, the quality of the company made all the difference in turning a potentially stressful session into a great experience. “There is something about the studio, the people involved, that makes artists want to come back. The vibe is good and the work is good. They are all about the right things,” she says. With so much incredible talent in the room, the song came together in great form as the three entered a mindset of “concentrated playing.”
With so much incredible talent in the room, the song came together in great form as the three entered a mindset of “concentrated playing.”
“It's sort of like being a kid, playing with figures in a castle or building legos,” Martino explains. “They are so focused on what they're doing, but it's playful. I want that energy between the other people in the room—the communication that we are all there for the same purpose.”
Cat wrote “I promise” in the five or six days before this session. It was so down to the wire, that even as the recording was starting we had no idea how the song would be produced.
The first great irony of the session was that we had an incredible drummer and an amazing custom C&C drum set mic'd to the gills, yet we didn't know if the song would have drums! Then Sufjan arrived with, of all things, a duffle bag with a new drum machine in it. The stage was set for an interesting basic track, with Cat playing keyboard while Sufjan and Chris sat side by side, index fingers poking at drum machines. The only thing making an acoustically audible sound in this basic track was Cat's scratch vocal!
After the trio played the song a few times live to tape, exploring different tempos and a still evolving arrangement, a final basic track was selected. The majority of overdubs had Cat, Sufjan, and Chris playing together at the same time: Cat, her Casio SK-1 and an Omnichord, Sufjan the Roland Juno-6 through a Memory Man, and Chris more percussion on the MPC.
“Cat was a little
pre-occupied with Sufjan's keyboard playing”, says McTear. “Singing together is what Cat and Sufjan do, yet their only singing here happened in the final moments before he left.”
The two took one pass together singing into a pair of Telefunken C12s at the top of the steps on his way out the door, but besides the outro vocal hook, nothing else was keepable under the circumstances.
The song was transferred back into ProTools and Cat returned to record her vocals. For her voice, the newer Telefunkens were a little too strong in the high mid-range. After auditioning several options, we chose a U67, the D.W. Fearn VT2 and LA2A for her voice. It was finally time for Cat's hallmark vocal looping. Into her string of pedal and Boss looping stations, she patched a handheld Telefunken M-81, which actually sounded amazing on her voice—we should have used it for the lead! After matching the tempo of the song, she improvised layer upon layer, along with individual passes of ambient vocals through her pedals. Next morning, there was still the issue of that beautiful drum set, mic'd and ready. Powell proved himself to be special among even the best drummers by playing in the pocket to the song in reverse! It was a small touch to the song, but incredible to watch him doing it.
“Once we flipped his drums back around,” says engineer Jonathan Low, “it was kind of astounding how perfectly tailored even the decays were to the tempo and feel of the song!”
In mixing, the majority of vocals and keyboards were sent to generate separate passes of reverbs. Signals were sent from ProTools through the Roland Space Echo into a selection of Z.Vex pedals that rotated among the Tremorama, Ooh Wah II and Ringtone, to a Memory Man and PolyChorus, and finally through a pair of Ampeg Geminis with the reverbs turned to the top. At one point Jon manipulated a Crybaby Wah on the lead vocal reverb. The pair of C12s and the D.W. Fearn VT-2 brought the amp signals back into the session.
To Cat, the lead vocal in the mix was too clean for her liking. Jon ran it back through the Electronaut M-63, pegging the meters, which created a heavily distorted but elegantly smooth vocal effect, despite the violence that appeared to be happening inside that pre-amp!
The final decision of the night, as Cat was leaving, was to allow the mix to run its full nine minutes. We knew we'd slim it down eventually, but it was a perfect way to capture the tireless, unabridged spirit of this long two day session. Perhaps someday we'll put that out there!
Director
Peter English
Executive Producer
Andy Williams
Producers
Brian McTear
Peter English
Engineers
Jon Low
Band
Cat Martino
Sufjan Stevens
Christopher Powell
Director of Photography
Josh Goleman
Editors
Peter English
Larry DeMark
Audio
Joe Bisirri
Still Photography
Josh Goleman
Peter English
