by Tina Whelski
Dr. Dog has its day with We All Belong, the imaginative follow up to Easy Beat. Working with better recording equipment allowed the Philadelphia band to unleash more layered vocal harmonies and textured instrumentation, giving songs bigger bark and a more dynamic sound. But upgrades presented Dr. Dog with a unique creative challenge: Songs initially sounded “too good.”
“We got all this new stuff and it was awesome,” says Scott McMicken (woof + mud distortion guitar and voice). “I certainly realized a bit into making the album that we were in a little over our heads. I think we had taken on too much at one time. So we started removing a lot of things and just pared down to using our new tape machine and the console for it and basically one microphone. It was weird. We stepped into the situation aware that it was a whole new phase for us in recording and I think that initially I turned off too many of my reference points for how to do what we’d always done. It was sort of a lesson to learn that a lot of the ways that we used to work, even though we were trying to make improvements on what we’d done in the past, were still really valid…It was definitely an awesome, challenging experience. We have always wanted to have more substantial recording equipment to just try out ideas.”
Working with 24 tracks felt infinite to the band against the mere 8 they used on previous records.
“There’s really no reason why we should ever have 24 tracks,” says McMicken. “It’s kind of like an endless amount of tracks.”
But once Dr. Dog figured out how to avoid going overboard and restored familiar attitudes about the process, the fun flowed.
“As a band, we’ve always loved what you can do with stacking up voices and that awesome feeling you get when you hear yourself in a harmonious relationship with some other singer or even against your own voice,” says McMicken. “Just that really weird, magical thrill you get when you put your own voice on top of itself. That unrealistic scenario that’s exciting to hear back in the speaker. We could also get different tones out of instruments. Double them. Take one part and make it come out of two instruments. That’s stuff we’ve always wanted to do.”
Traditionally Frank McElroy (multi-string guitar, full-grip chords, harmonies), Juston Stens (trapset and harmonies), Toby Leaman (finger bass, vocals), Zach Miller (organ) and McMicken take songs into the studio before learning them as a band. It just ends up being a little more exciting because no one’s necessarily attached to any particular part or sound.
“You can just start from scratch and allow these accidents to occur and sort of shape a sound of a song that you could have never particularly crafted ahead of time,” says McMicken.
McMicken initially pictured an old country ballad for “The Girl,” but the song wanted something different.
“It was just me and Frank in the studio and of all of us he’s probably the one who’s least savvy with how to run things on the board,” says McMicken, “which is good because he stays pretty objective as a listener. He always has really great insights and perspective because he’s not there to think about turning things on and getting the EQ straight and stuff. But he was forced to run the board while I was on the other side of the room to do piano and he mistakenly turned the mic on with the volume completely cranked. So I hit one note on the piano and it just nearly blew the back of my skull out. It was this really distorted sound. At first I just screamed and ripped the headphones off, but then I was like, ‘Just leave it like that and we’ll just turn it down in the headphones so I can survive this.’ We wound up with that really heavy sound you hear. Like I said, from that mistake, it completely shaped the fate of that song. So that’s one of the most fun things about the studio is you can go there with really no sense of what’s going to happen and wind up with these treats. These things that just present themselves to you, as opposed to you having to feel so connected to every idea that you come up with.”
Watch Dr. Dog perform "My Old Ways."
and "The Girl."
and "Ain't It Strange."
Interview originally published in The Aquarian Weekly.
“We got all this new stuff and it was awesome,” says Scott McMicken (woof + mud distortion guitar and voice). “I certainly realized a bit into making the album that we were in a little over our heads. I think we had taken on too much at one time. So we started removing a lot of things and just pared down to using our new tape machine and the console for it and basically one microphone. It was weird. We stepped into the situation aware that it was a whole new phase for us in recording and I think that initially I turned off too many of my reference points for how to do what we’d always done. It was sort of a lesson to learn that a lot of the ways that we used to work, even though we were trying to make improvements on what we’d done in the past, were still really valid…It was definitely an awesome, challenging experience. We have always wanted to have more substantial recording equipment to just try out ideas.”
Working with 24 tracks felt infinite to the band against the mere 8 they used on previous records.
“There’s really no reason why we should ever have 24 tracks,” says McMicken. “It’s kind of like an endless amount of tracks.”
But once Dr. Dog figured out how to avoid going overboard and restored familiar attitudes about the process, the fun flowed.
“As a band, we’ve always loved what you can do with stacking up voices and that awesome feeling you get when you hear yourself in a harmonious relationship with some other singer or even against your own voice,” says McMicken. “Just that really weird, magical thrill you get when you put your own voice on top of itself. That unrealistic scenario that’s exciting to hear back in the speaker. We could also get different tones out of instruments. Double them. Take one part and make it come out of two instruments. That’s stuff we’ve always wanted to do.”
Traditionally Frank McElroy (multi-string guitar, full-grip chords, harmonies), Juston Stens (trapset and harmonies), Toby Leaman (finger bass, vocals), Zach Miller (organ) and McMicken take songs into the studio before learning them as a band. It just ends up being a little more exciting because no one’s necessarily attached to any particular part or sound.
“You can just start from scratch and allow these accidents to occur and sort of shape a sound of a song that you could have never particularly crafted ahead of time,” says McMicken.
McMicken initially pictured an old country ballad for “The Girl,” but the song wanted something different.
“It was just me and Frank in the studio and of all of us he’s probably the one who’s least savvy with how to run things on the board,” says McMicken, “which is good because he stays pretty objective as a listener. He always has really great insights and perspective because he’s not there to think about turning things on and getting the EQ straight and stuff. But he was forced to run the board while I was on the other side of the room to do piano and he mistakenly turned the mic on with the volume completely cranked. So I hit one note on the piano and it just nearly blew the back of my skull out. It was this really distorted sound. At first I just screamed and ripped the headphones off, but then I was like, ‘Just leave it like that and we’ll just turn it down in the headphones so I can survive this.’ We wound up with that really heavy sound you hear. Like I said, from that mistake, it completely shaped the fate of that song. So that’s one of the most fun things about the studio is you can go there with really no sense of what’s going to happen and wind up with these treats. These things that just present themselves to you, as opposed to you having to feel so connected to every idea that you come up with.”
Watch Dr. Dog perform "My Old Ways."
and "The Girl."
and "Ain't It Strange."
Interview originally published in The Aquarian Weekly.
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