The Making Of... The Tracks
Tony: “One of the songs, Caledonia which I recorded in 1986 is the actual recording we used on Chicks and Guitars. At the time I did the recording on a Fostex X-15, a cassette recorder, which had 4 tracks, was real cheap and very much outdated, but that’s all I had.
I was listening to a lot of Jimi Hendrix , I think it was the Crash landing Album. And I came up with that song, Caledonia. Actually I got the name from a Robin Trower song called Caledonia. I was trying to think of a girl’s name and was listening to a lot of James Dewar (the original singer for Robin Trower) which I really like for his lyrics and a lot of Jimi Hendrix music at the time. So I recorded that song and I took the cassette tape out of the X-15, flipped it upside down and recorded the guitar and turned it back over, backwards; what Jimi Hendrix used to do with a big tape machine. When I presented that song to Greg Morrow, who was co-producing the record with me, he said “Do you want to re-record the song” and I said “Yeah, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recreate the backwards guitar, ‘cause we recorded it digitally.”
He said: “Let’s just use that recording, it sounds so crazy, so let’s use it!”
And I said: “Well my time is not so good, ‘cause I recorded it without the drums or the click track. He said, “we can put it on the computer and if the time is wrong, we make it all sink up as far as your time, slow it down at first and speed it up. So they did that and the only thing they added was the shaker to keep time good. That was kinda neat and I’m glad that I got to use that song. It was recorded late at night and I never thought anyone would hear it. I did it for myself for fun. So that’s nice to have that one on the cd.”
Concerning favourite tracks on Chicks and Guitars Tony really likes Turn It Up, because it’s a simple, straight forward rock song, As Good As It Gets because it sounds very natural to him, which is good. Love don’t take time came out really well, it’s a very simple song, not a big thought behind it, but Tony really likes that. Besides, it was nice to have a piano on the song. Although he came up with a couple of songs, Tony can’t really say that he has a favourite, yet!
Recordings:
The songs Never Meant To Hurt You, Faith, Hope and Love, As Good As It Gets and Lovesick have been recorded at Paul Gilbert’s studio in Las Vegas... [read more]