These Clouds Are Real: A Cover of The Flaming Lips' 1995 "Clouds Taste Metallic"

I began this recording project in March 2017, in an apartment on Commercial Street in Trinidad, Colorado. I was two thousand miles away from my home studio, but had brought with me my desktop PC and recording interface. In my travels, accumulated some interesting gear: a Yamaha PSS keyboard, a Roland DG100, and an Akai MPC2000xl. I constructed the basic backing tracks for five of the thirteen tracks featured on the Flaming Lips' 1995 album Clouds Taste Metallic. Like other creative projects, producing my cover version of this album has been educative and experimental, but primarily recreational: the act of creating complex new recordings is, for me, a hobby of endless fascination. 

I have long been fascinated with Clouds, as it represents the Lips on the edge of a new era of creativity: after gaining success through the song "She Don't Use Jelly" in the early 1990s, the band took on Ronald Jones as lead guitarist, and released an EP making clear the extent to which their sensibilities disagreed with their mainstream recognition ("Due to High Expectations... The Flaming Lips Are Providing Needles for Your Balloons"). Clouds features Jones' inventive and extensive electric guitar work, before he literally disappeared from the group (and life: Lips frontman Wayne Coyne speculated in a comic book in 2016 that Jones was abducted by aliens). Like other Lips fans, I had come to believe that the Clouds album contains some magic derived from this mystery: through the elaborate sonic landscapes, Coyne's songs wail for understanding, acceptance, forgiveness, agape. Unique electric guitars circulate around the drums and bass as Coyne's lyrics digress and refocus, seeking understanding, "constantly risking absurdity" (Ferlinghetti) as he seeks understanding from God, animals, other people, a silly weapon, the US Mail. The band's previous work held these epistemological themes lyrically, but never to such an explicit extent as on Clouds. The work that would follow-- the 1997 experimental release Zaireeka, and 1999's The Soft Bulletin-- each couch universal metaphysical and spiritual questions within pop song constructions, but with a more careful attention paid to musical production and pop sensibilities. The original Clouds Taste Metallic album is raw, youthful, strange, and surprising. I did not expect to re-create the original recording, but rather make an attempt and see what kinds of energy would flow. 

My original tracks were characterized my the limited gear I had with me. I was very green to using the MPC2000xl (and still am, relatively). I learned enough about the process of finding, isolating, and capturing percussive sounds for use in drum programming, and created a virtual digital 'kit' using samples from the original Flaming Lips' 1995 "Clouds Taste Metallic" album, They Might Be Giants' 1986 self-titled debut release, "I'm The One Who Loves You" by The Millionaires, "Book of Love" by The Monotones, and "I Love You" by Dauphin Williams. “When You Smile” contains an excerpt of Bob Dylan and The Band performing “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread,” as released on the Basement Tapes Raw. These tracks were selected from among those I happened to have on my hard drive. The most complicated iteration of the MPC's manipulation of the tracks above can be heard in the latter section of "When You Smile," in which the clip from Dylan's Basement Tapes can be heard as a percussion break. 

In late March 2017, I used my Tascam digital recorder and multiple microphones to capture vocals inside a closed theater, singing along to rough mixdowns through headphones. These vocal tracks were incredible brash, capturing not only the reverb of the old hall but also the cooing of pigeons high atop the rigging backstage. Additionally, I recorded piano tracks on an upright located in the parlor of a defunct hotel. The piano was in tune to itself, but horrifically out when set inside the mixdowns. "Evil Will Prevail" was recorded on this piano. I found a small Yamaha PSS keyboard at a shop in northern New Mexico, and used its limited filter controls to manipulate its PCM waveform sounds, creating some synthy backgrounds for the bombastic drums and punchy vocals. I tried (in vain, mostly) to create bass tracks. I mixed what tracks I had over three weeks, and in haste published what I believed were final mixes to YouTube in April 2017. These recordings were faulty in a number of ways: trying to tame the vocals, I over-compressed them. The MPC drum tracks were interesting but grew tiresome with each track. There was no bass, and the keys were thin. 

In the summer of 2017, I embarked on “part two” of this project, tackling songs I had omitted during the spring (including “Lightning Strikes…,” “Bad Days,” “This Here Giraffe,” “Christmas at the Zoo,” and “They Punctured…”). I was back in my home studio, with more time on my hands that I had even expected. Using the MPC (but not nearly to its capacity), other electronic drum machines, a Modal synth by Craft, and a Kurzweil K2000, these tracks received the heavy gloss of aimless home studio attention through the fall of 2017 and spring of 2018. During this time I realized how flawed the original tracks were, and began to recover and remix (and, add additional keyboards, bass, and drum kit) my previous work. Instruments included multiple Steinway tracks, Hammond organ, mandolin, and electric guitar. 

I invited longtime collaborators and friends Joseph DePasquale and Tom Stepsis to contribute to these mixes: Tom recorded incredible bass on "Kim's Watermelon Gun," while Joe provided extensive electric guitar for a number of tracks, as well as acoustic drums on "This Here Giraffe." These tracks were recorded in their respective home studios. Thanks to them both!

By the late spring of 2018, I had rough mixes completed of all tracks-- though volume levels and mixes were disparate and, at times, annoying. In July 2018, again back in my home studio with fresh ears, I mixed and mastered the complete album. This effort was tremendous, and could still be continuing today: the consolidation of multiple tracks of one instrument into a mixdown for further processing is time-consuming, but the results are always interesting (to me). Thus, multiple vocal tracks, or guitar tracks, or synth tracks, can forever be tinkered with and remixed, without meeting the goal of producing a durable artistic statement: it is akin to one forever mixing two colors of oil paints to create the exact desired tint and shade-- but never applying it to the larger canvas. Unlike visual art, creating a quality and accessible final mix of a track is subjective, not just to individual listeners' ears. Sound amplification technology varies so widely at this point, and is so critical to the reception of sound recordings, that one cannot exactly determine what will sound best to the most listeners. I knew this album would end up being 'published' on YouTube, and burned to compact disc in limited edition. I tried a variety of mastering chains, some including a Berhinger compressor, a Sansui spring reverb unit, and my Tascam digital recorder as master recorder. The final mastered mix of this album, which is 'mostly' pure digital, sounds good to me through my home stereo (rebuilt JBL Decade 36s and a Denon DRA-395) as well as in my car (a stock 2001 Subaru head unit and front speakers). My mastering chain in Reaper included a compressor, an EQ, a multiband compressor, and a limiter, in that sequence.

Have a listen to the complete album!