Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie, The Microphones) (Guest Host: Bob Keal)

Well, I sort of chose three songs that are in chronological order from the early part of my life.

So like pretty early childhood, teenagehood, and young adulthood.

Those were like the three kind of early eras that I divided up.

So the first song is Be My Baby by the Ronettes, which I probably heard for the first time in like Gremlins or something.

I don't even know if it's in Gremlins, but I remember the opening of that starts with Darlene Love, a Phil Spector Christmas song.

And just that like wall of sound, 60s girl group, like bombastic, melancholy, joy.

Yeah, like that hit me.

I mean, it's designed to be effective to little kids and or, you know, teens, adolescents.

And it really worked on me.

I remember that feeling, that kind of like sweet sadness, being a kid, I don't know, eight years old or something like that, and hearing songs like Be My Baby.

I think Be My Baby is the most iconic of that.

But, you know, I also felt that way about Leader of the Pack and Then He Kissed Me and these, yeah, these like That sound, that sound of just like high-level emotion, so theatrical and, yeah, melancholic, but really loud about it.

And then, yeah, the production.

So I think the emotional part is what grabbed me as a little kid.

I wasn't thinking about studio production at age eight, but I think those sounds got in there.

It's almost like distorted.

It's almost like My Bloody Valentine or something.

It's just this combination of softness, beauty, and also just mashed together distortion where you can't really pick out what's happening totally.

I love that in music and I love trying to do that.

And I, I love the stories of the psychopathic killer, Phil Spector, um, uh, doing that like with, you know, the huge studio system and major labels of the day, just calling it all in, having like 70 people in the studio, all clapping and, and singing along.

Um, yeah, doing it manually on like a three track recorder or whatever.

In my early times of recording at Dubb Narcotics Studio in Olympia when I was like 19, 20, it was all old equipment, so I kind of went for that.

I was like, oh, this is a chance to do that.

We could get a bunch of people in the studio and all use just one mic and record it straight to the two-track.

No multi-track recording, just do it live and get everyone together and do it in a chaotic way.