Band:
Hometown:
Curated By:
Faces On Film
Boston, MA
Marissa Nadler
Song: Waiting for GA
Length: 4:03
Faces on Film abandons traditional narrative for blurred imagery. Centered around an ambitious vocal hook, "Waiting for GA" kept us hanging on each note.
From the start of Day 1, Fiore, the soft-spoken and unassuming Bostonian, showed bold creative talent. By the end of Day 2, we couldn't believe an artist with his vision and skill was still largely a secret to the wider world. Brought to us by curator Marissa Nadler, Fiore visited Miner Street Recordings for an unseasonably warm weekend in late January.
Alongside Nadler, Glenn Forsythe of Brooklyn's St. Claire, and our very own Brian McTear on drums (also the session producer), Fiore and co. recorded the intensely atmospheric "Waiting for GA" illuminated by a sea of incandescent bulbs.
Fiore's first foray into music was as a teenager, playing guitar on porches in his hometown of Rochester, NY with neighborhood friends and their parents. A foundation in folk and traditional American standards laid the groundwork for his evolution as a songwriter, but realizing songwriting didn't have to be about precise storytelling freed him to develop his music's identity. "When you relieve yourself of the burden of telling a perfect story in an arch, you get a glimpse of the words and imagery and language that come naturally," he says. "There's a layer of reality that is stripped away and it's as if a mechanism is exposed, and you can see into someone's mind."
“I have this weird superstition that if you can identify the source of something and too perfectly pinpoint it, it can go away. It loses something you had before you could describe it.”
That approach guided Faces on Film's first two releases, The Troubles (2008) and Some Weather (2010), which earned Best of Boston acclaim and praise from outlets like NPR and PopMatters. Like "Waiting for GA," Some Weather captures more of a ethereal sense of existence without unnecessarily descriptive details. His reluctance to explicitly divulge the meaning behind his songs is central to his songwriting philosophy. "I have this weird superstition," he explains. "If you can identify the source of something and too perfectly pinpoint it, it can go away. It loses something you had before you could describe it.”
“Mike is one of the best songwriters I've heard. I think his ear for melody in his songwriting is what jumped out at me. It has the potential to appeal to fans from a lot of different types of music.”
“When you get people together with good ideas, good things tend to come out. Keep good company that's what I'll take out of this.”
Like many Shaking Through artists, Fiore never had the experience of collaborating with a separate producer. But after singing on Marissa Nadler's recent EP, The Sister, which was produced by McTear, he came to embrace the back-and-forth of ideas and how each song could evolve into something bigger. "It felt healthy. It felt therapeutic," he says. "When you get people together with good ideas, good things tend to come out. There wasn't a lack of that with Glenn, Marissa and Brian. Keep good company—that's what I'll take out of this."
"Waiting for GA” revolves around a simple guitar and vocal, leaving a lot space for the swirling, ambient effects that are common in recent Shaking Through episodes. Building the lush landscape around that core melody turned the song into something transformative, expanding the Faces on Film sound to explore the outer reaches of Fiore's unique perspective. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do—and that this will be the first step towards building Faces on Film the wider audience it deserves.
The demo for Waiting for GA was simple. We didn't investigate it much morethan that; instead, we took that basic impression —guitar and vocal—and headed for the experimental ambient effects.
Fiore didn't have a drummer in tow. One option might have been to record the song track by track with a programmed kick pulse; however, everyone has become accustomed to Shaking Through recordings having ensemble performances at their core. The solution—with a bit of trepidation—was to
have McTear play drums. For the basic take, he played with Glen Forsythe on the Korg MS-10 synth bass and Fiore on the studio's Rickenbacker 330 with flatwound strings. Since long stretches included no percussion, the three played to a click track. As simple as the beat was in the choruses, McTear was a
little rusty, so it took a handful of takes. They persevered nonetheless, and after quick lair of cymbal swells for transitions, they moved on to vocals.
“Before vocals, the video crew assembled what we dubbed 'The Circle of Purity,' around our U67.” says McTear, "it was meant to inspire a riveting vocal performance. For all the jokes that ensued, it might have actually worked!”
Since we would eventually run effects on almost everything in the mix, it's like the final stage of recording was half-way between tracking and mixing.
Mike sang into a Neumann U67, a Pacifica preamp, Massive Passive EQ and a Distressor. Curator, Marissa Nadler doubled up Fiore's vocals through the same chain in the choruses and added a few calls and responses in the second verse, as well as haunting improvised vocals on the outro.
It was then time for Forsythe to step back in. McTear recalled that while making her own records, Nadler performed basic vocal and
guitar tracks at the same time while he manipulated and recorded outboard analog effects to tape. We decided to attempt the same approach for Forsythe's Juno 6 synth and vibraphone track. Engineer Joe Bisirri set up the now familiar chain of effects used in recent Shaking Through sessions - a Roland Space Echo, a Memory Man and PolyChorus with exaggerated chorus and flange, and a pair of guitar amps with the reverbs cranked.
Acoustic guitars were left for last. The question all along was "could 'GA' do without them?” The answer was NO. The song was so smooth and liquid, and we felt it badly needed the texture by the end. Two were tracked; one for the right, one for the left, and that was it. Finished!
Mixing began early the next morning. Outside it was unseasonably warm and damp. Fog was rolling in as the band was down the street at Penn Treaty Park recapping the previous day's experience. This was Bisirri's first mix at Miner Street in several years, so he took his time compressing the synth bass and the drums, setting out to create a simple, straight forward mix of what took place in tracking.
When McTear returned with the band, the effects and amps were turned back on and subsequently added to the cymbal swells, the chorus vocals, the verse vocals, and Nadler's vocals. We recorded each of them in separate passes, which is perhaps the key to this mix: from afar it just sounds like reverb, but listen closely and it's more of a hazy mass of swirling eddies, each trailing this way and that.
