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The recording studio that we had built in the house was called The Kiva. We both had a fascination with Hopi Indian culture. Kivas are underground chambers that the Hopi have that are their holy places. It's where they pass stories down in their oral tradition as well as a place for performing various rituals. The studio had French doors that opened onto a courtyard. There was a little fountain just outside of it with Koi in it. The patriarch was a big fish we called Whitey. Whitey was quite old, and I thought that perhaps he actually enjoyed hearing the music coming out of the studio. Sometimes we would work with the doors wide open.

When we returned from Kauai we went straight to work on some musical ideas that had popped up during and right after the trip. Joan had come up with a new guitar tuning that was an open D major with a ninth thrown in. That became the tuning for the album. She had written the music for this new song, and pretty quickly had also written the lyric, which was a concise gem centered around our Hawaiian adventure on the Fourth of July. I had a strong feeling that it might be the centerpoint of the next album.

Joan was a night owl, and often the best writing would come to her while working far into the night; smoking American Spirits, sometimes one or two still burning in the ashtray while she smoked another. Her nocturnal writing was also caffeine-fueled. She loved drinking powdered instant cappuccino all night while she scribbled lines down on a legal pad, playing with different chord sequences.

Many times I would hit the wall at about 2:30 or 3am, but she wouldn't be alone after I would fade now, as we had a new companion in El Cafe, the little cat that we had brought back from Kauai. El Cafe was the archetypal street cat. She had a bit of a Damon Runyon spirit. She'd eat anything; pizza, popcorn, anything that was sitting around and within reach. She was also a lithe little cat. She was given to clawing all the way up to the top of the drapes with something in her mouth, then dropping whatever it was, and racing it down to the floor, seeing if she could beat gravity. Quite often I would see her running through the house with a cigarette butt that she had snatched out of one of the many ashtrays in her mouth.

As I remember it, the lyric for Night Ride Home popped out pretty quickly for Joan one night. Like so many songs that I love, it starts with the chorus:

Once in a while
In a big blue moon
There comes a night like this
Like some surrealist
Invented this Fourth of July
Night ride home

Vivid and concise. Then the verse comes in over the same chord sequence. I always think of that as "the chorus is the verse". I love that structure.

Hula girls
And caterpillar tractors in the sand
The Ukulele man
The fireworks
This Fourth of July
Night ride home

A great little tumble of images from that night on Kauai. Then a heart-centered B Section that's a great release. I love "overkill, overload":

I love the man beside me
We love the open road
No phones 'til Friday
Far from the overkill
Far from the overload

Then comes another pretty programmatic verse with more images splashed around from that memorable night. We had stopped in at the Tahiti Nui at the end of the night as a last stop for a drink. We had periodically talked about living part-time over there on Kauai. That bar would be one of our joints if we did. Every time I went there my conversation with a regular would be centered around how beautiful the sunset was. I realized that this aspect of life over there would be tough for me. No discussions about Beckett or Camus, or any other grim existentialists. Conversation would almost exclusively be about how the waves were that day.

The poem leads us into more imagery from the mystical wandering that was our drive home that had no intent of being a direct drive to our destination. We'd get home somehow...

Back at the bar
The band tears down
But out here in the headlight beams
The silver powerlines
Gleam
On this Fourth of July
Night ride home

Round the curve
And a big dark horse
Red tail lights on his hide
Is keeping right alongside
Rev for stride
4th of July
Night ride home

"right alongside, rev for stride". What a great line and rhyme! Then a repetition of the B Section followed by a reiteration of the chorus:

I love the man beside me
We love the open road
No phones till Friday
Far from the undertow
Far from the overload

Once in a while
In a big blue moon
There comes a night like this
Like some surrealist
Invented this Fourth of July
Night ride home

The Cricket and...

As we were setting things up to record the new song, we heard the loud chirping of a cricket. At first we couldn't figure out where it was. Was it outside in a bush? No, it was somewhere inside. It's good luck to have a cricket fly into your house. A good omen. We roamed around the control room trying to find it. I finally found it behind a curtain. We put up a U67 right next to the opening between the curtain and the wall and instantly had an amazingly detailed cricket recording.

At this point in 1989 the only digital samplers were the Fairlight and the Synclavier, and I had been working with the Fairlight, braiding in sequenced material with played, and experimenting with that blend of loose and tight, as well as with the earliest way of creating digital "instruments" out of sampled analog material.

We sampled our lucky cricket recording, and decided to use it as our metronome. It was another bit of magical synchronicity to add to a song that was in a sense all about synchronicity. I put together a little group of hand-drums as rhythm elements on the Fairlight to play to, and Joan and I put a basic down together on guitar and bass. She put a vocal on it, and we had the core of the track. The hand-drums and cricket being sequenced against the slaps that were part of Joan's guitar groove on the track gave it a nice blend of precision and elasticity. Finger slaps flamming here and there against the drum pattern, it had both consistency and some spread to the groove. Even in retrospect now, the sequenced percussion elements have a certain un-thought-out innocence about them; the product of just putting things together quickly and intuitively in a pattern that felt good to us in that moment.

Bill Dillon and The Billatron

Some people come into your life seamlessly. I have a lot of those people. I have a LOT of musicians who are. These people seem like they have always been a part of your life. It seems like they've always been there. In most cases I can't even remember how we first met. They are usually of a kindred aesthetic, and have a combination of heart, humor, and humility, the trinity that Joan got from Rinpoche Chogyam Trungpa. You can see them and work with them for a period of time, then not see them for years, then when you see them or play with them again you just pick right up from where you were before. Somehow naturally connected; beyond time and place. Theoretical physicists say that particles can be connected, even if they're from different galaxies. Perhaps that's a fanciful metaphor to use in conjunction with people, but there is something that can exist between people connects them in a mysterious way. It was this way for me with a Canadian musician named Bill Dillon.

I think that I might have met Bill through working with Robbie Robertson, as we both were a part of Robbie's musical sphere. I first met Robbie when I got called to play on the incidental music for Raging Bull; the music that occurred in the scenes that took place in The Copa in the film. I think that Bill entered Robbie's sphere on his first solo album, which I also played on. Dan Lanois was also a part of the story, as he produced that album, as they already knew each other. Things lead to other things. I know that when I heard Bill play, what he was doing was both stunningly fresh in a new way and familiar to me on a deeper level. He had great musical intuition, a vast musical vocabulary, a way of using pedals and effects that was his alone, and he played both guitar and pedal steel guitar. I knew that he had to be a part of the musical language that we were going to use on this next group of songs, and Joan was of the same mind.

We had Bill come in to play on a few songs on Night Ride Home. His pedal steel is the other main element on the song Night Ride Home. The floating elasticity of what he did along with his way of manipulating old pedals (he had a penchant for Electro-Harmonix pedals that had been around for a long time) was the perfect element to give the song the dreamlike quality that it needed in order to create the right underscore for the feeling of the poem. Nostalgic memory without sentimental sweetness. A vivid dream. Memory without attachment.

I ended up taking short samples (the Fairlight could only accommodate samples a few seconds in length) looping and blending them, and in doing so created many Fairlight-based instruments that we grouped under the label of "The Billatron", in reference to the early tape-based keyboard called the Mellotron, best known for it's role on Beatles records. We worked with Bill on 2 tracks besides "Night Ride Home", but also used the Billatron on other tracks.

The Rough Mix and The Final Mix

We had two Otari 24 track tape machines in The Kiva. Though some early digital tape machines had come out, nothing was comparable yet to analog tape for both Joan and I. After putting Bill Dillon on "Night Ride Home" we moved on to work on other songs that Joan was writing. Sometimes we just went into the studio and started experimenting. We had done a very good rough mix after we put Bill's pedal steel on Night Ride Home that we had lived with for months.

Analog tape machines have to be aligned before every session in order to be accurate. This involves doing both a record alignment and a playback alignment. The area on the tape reel that is used for the record alignment (called a record pad) is either at the beginning or end of the reel. It's separated a blank material called leader tape. It separates areas of the tape, putting a buffer between the record pad area and the first song on the reel. When an engineer does a record alignment they record onto the area of tape that is in place for that use. The reel of tape that Night Ride Home was recorded on had the record pad and alignment tones at the beginning of the reel ("tones at the head" in engineer-speak), followed by leader tape that would take about 10 seconds to pass over the heads of the machine. That leader tape gives the engineer some time to come out of record before either going into a song or having the tape run off of the spool if the tones and record pad are at the end of the reel. Having the tones and record pad at the beginning was a relatively standard practice, although many engineers would put the record pad at the end of the reel.

When we got to a stage of the album where we were beginning to prepare to mix, the assistant that was aligning the tape machine got distracted and let the machine, which was in record on all tracks, cross the leader and remain in record for about the first 12 seconds of Night Ride Home. This was a catastrophic turn of events, as there was no way to go back and reconstruct the first part of the song. When Joan and I found out that this had happened we were in a state of shock.

You hear the stories of this kind of thing happening, but you never think that it will happen on a record that you are working on. I remember us sitting across from each other speechless, wondering what in the world to do to assuage our sadness. My mind raced, trying to think of any way that we could salvage the situation so to be able to do a detailed and thoughtful final mix. Nothing. There was no way around using the rough mix as our final. We decided to go out to a cafe to eat something and drink coffee. This song that had been full of synchronicity and magical coincidence from the very beginning was now going to be a track on the album that we would have no choice but to use a rough mix for it's final mix.

With time I came to realize that the rough mix was just simple and beautiful, and that perhaps, just perhaps, we might have over-thought the mix had we gotten into the minutia that one gets into in the mix process. It was possible that what seemed to be a disastrous turn of events was actually divine resolution. Stranger events have been responsible for great records that possess timeless beauty. That rough mix changes me when I listen to it, and that is after all, to my mind, the reason that we make records. We try to make something that changes us. If we are successful then maybe it will change other people. Maybe it will make people a bit more human for those five minutes, an hour, or even a day. If we're even more fortunate it might become something that people come back to over the course of years to get back to their heart.

I heard a story about Leon Russell. Someone asked him whether he tried to make a hit when he wrote and recorded a song. His response was "Hell no! I wanna make a classic!"