Our All-Analog Dream Come True

Going all the way with our new LP

Our new record, Impossible Songs, was announced last month. Last week, we released its third single, “One Horse.” This song is one that felt different to us from the get-go - lots of opportunity in open spaces. We really wanted real strings and horns on the song, which was also unprecedented for us, so that goal kept us excited.

What wasn’t unprecedented was the use of tape machines for recording the album. Future Crib has mostly been a tape band from day one, starting with 8 track and graduating to 16 track. In the past, we’ve live tracked to the tape machine, overdubbed until we were out of tracks, then moved the audio to the computer to finish up the work. This has its advantages, but it also prolongs the process with infinite digital decisions to be made while crafting a record.

While the majority of the record was tracked in October ‘23, “One Horse” was one of the earlier attempts (July), and we were still figuring out what the record meant to us, what was different about it from all the others, etc.

We hit an impasse at the end of the tracking day. We were listening to takes, not wholly satisfied with any full performance, but noticing we had an outro that would sound nice spliced onto the end of a previous take. There was talk of dumping to ProTools and splicing it digitally, but we really didn’t want to jump over to the computer just yet.

Johnny: Jim O’Rourke has for many years been a huge influence on how I record music and think about arrangement. I read an interview in Tape Op with Jim from 2000 where he discussed recording and mixing the Aluminum Group record Pedals. The band said when Jim delivered the tapes they had been cut up to death - he had edited the mixes by hand. Around the same time, Bryce and I had read Geoff Emerick’s book Here, There, and Everywhere, in which he describes editing together different takes of Beatles songs to accomplish a desired effect (“Strawberry Fields Forever” is probably the most famous example of this). I had been practicing my editing skills on 2-track 1/4” tape, making tape loops of interesting sound effects I’d found in record stores on tour, which later ended up in other songs on the album. When it came time to make this decision on “One Horse,” I felt confident enough to give a multitrack edit a go.

We figured the worst that could happen is the whole thing gets screwed up and we go play another take, so we might as well try something new. First we found the outro we wanted to keep, marked where we would make the cuts with a wax pencil, cut with a fresh razor blade, and played it off to another reel. Then we put an empty reel on to find the front part of the song we wanted to keep. Rinse, repeat. Once we had our two segments marked and cut, we put the other reel back on and taped them together. When the splice ran across the heads for the first time we all lit up! It was exactly what we wanted, and we had a take of the song we were really pleased with.

This immediately filled us with confidence, and we started thinking that we may not need a computer at all. A friend once said if it can’t fit on 16 tracks, it shouldn’t be there in the first place, and after we discovered we could edit takes as we wished, we felt unstoppable. On top of this, we knew someone with a cutting lathe - used to cut vinyl records. That day we decided we would make this new record without using any computers, and would follow our analog intuition all the way. Thanks for visiting!