J. Butzer – ‘I was asked by an American record label to record a 22 minute album to be released as a 3″ mini CD for a “toy” box set earlier this year, recorded mostly (if not all) on toy instruments. I’ve sort of moved away from that in the past two years, and have moved into writing more “serious” music (whatever that means?)
But, I liked his concept and I had a handful of songs written on toy piano that I have never released or recorded.
I decided I would record this all on a Tascam cassette 4-Track, using no drums. And play everything myself, like I did on my first album.
(I ended up doing one song with drums and recording it on a 16-Track recorder)
In the middle of the production I really started liking the album more than I had initially thought I would, and before I knew it, I had fifteen or sixteen tracks and I decided to whittle it down to twelve and release it as a full length.
“Little Dark Eyed Love” was the second to last song I recorded, and the most recent I wrote, and it turned out to be one of my favorites from the album. I consider it to be the main theme for the heroine of the album’s untold story arch.
I recorded it by doing a live to tape take of left hand toy piano, right hand melodica, then over dubbing accordion and resonator bells.
That was the basic method for the entire recording process. I did less takes per song than I have ever done before and recorded most of it very late at night after my son Francis went to sleep.
About the cover:
I doodled a cover concept of our octopus woman my wife designed, that has appeared on my second album and on random things I have been associated with, I drew her split in two, like an out of frame movie.
I then re-made the cover with cut out construction paper.’
To find out more about Jeffrey Butzer, go to his MySpace page HERE, or visit his FaceBook page HERE…. And be sure to see him at his next show at the Drunken Unicorn September 7th, doing an original score to a short Buster Keaton film…