Inside the Song: Discussing "Good Luck With That"
Inside the song: Discussing “Good Luck With That”
Wolcott Curran Collective co-founder Sean Wolcott goes inside the song with a long time musician friend Matt Jewett. Their discussion on the new single and what is in the works is as follows.
Matt Jewett: The new track sounds great. Really glad more tunes are coming. How many songs have you guys put together?
Sean Wolcott: We have about 20 solid foundations in this vein of music.
MJ: That’s really awesome.
SW: We spent a lot of the last year really just building up the studio and getting better at doing what we want to do / how to do it… so, the tracks should be arriving more regularly now. The new one is all fleshed out and written, we are working on recording the basic tracks now.
MJ: That’s great. The production is sounding pretty amazing. High-quality vintage.
SW: Great – happy to hear it! Yeah its been a lot of work – just hours and endless hours to crack the code of why those old records sound like that, and how to get in that same vein ourselves. Kind of shocked we finally figured it out, and we were able to get stuff sounding better than some old records I admire even in some cases – but its hard work, lots of trial and error.
Lots of people have done the 60s garage vibe, but I don’t really hear stuff hitting that peak that happened around 67-68 of writing/recording quality… and that’s what we’ve endlessly aimed for.
MJ: I was gonna say. It sounds vintage without sounding “old”. I know it’s been a LONG journey to figure out that secret sauce.
SW: Way too long – we kind of just gave up on it for a while and just did different things, but in the last few years, we have been gunning hard to nail it.
MJ: I recognize a lot of the tones and how you got them. Cool that it comes through so well outside a live setting.
SW: The answer is deceptively simple, really it’s all about not doing one thing, or having one piece of gear – its about lots of tiny things and a general mindset. Yeah, just stripping stuff down and aiming for fewer + better sounds really makes stuff stand out on its own, I don’t really have to do anything to “mix” it, other than just set levels.
MJ: Yeah. There are a million little things from equipment, to placement, to levels, and yeah…not trying to make any one thing do too much. Leaving space and separation goes a long way rather than trying to bring any one thing up and out. Then you start making things compete with one another and it loses that spacious/minimalist quality that actually makes it more powerful.
SW: Absolutely – the idea of making sort of little soul/funky orchestras of things is much more exciting to me as a listener.
MJ: Yeah. It’s really well orchestrated. The music comes across as pretty effortless and deceptively simple as well. It’s catchy without being at all cheesy. That is an extraordinarily tough balancing act.
SW: That’s the goal – it’s quite hard to get right. Sounding effortless takes the most effort actually.
MJ: Exactly.
SW: It helps that a lot of music we like comes from that place though. Like how can you hear just those three notes of Green Onions and it totally dominates and you know it right away?
MJ: I hadn’t really thought of it like that before but now that I do, it’s a million little things. None of which are too remarkable on their own. The groove, the clean but dirty guitar tone, and rakes and space between. I haven’t thought about that song in a long time.
SW: Beethoven’s Fifth – just those four notes, the whole world knows it – kids too. Not that four-note music is necessarily some sort of goal, but just that spirit of things… always chasing after that. Its a lighting in a bottle type thing that is impossible to chase after.
MJ: Yeah. Doing the most with the least.
SW: It’s less about that, and more knowing what to look for when it shows up. Our new track is very ornate when you get down to it, but there is a vein of simplicity holding it up.
MJ: Recognizing and catching it when you stumble upon it. That’s really cool. Thanks for sharing that. I love that stuff. It’s what inspires people to create.
SW: I think embracing ambiguity is a big part of it too – blues but not too blues, funky but not too funk, jazzy but not too jazz, etc…
MJ: Each of those genres came out of other things. Once something like that becomes established it’s easy to become a caricature of the original. It’s always important to blend in order to have something that feels new and has soul.
SW: That’s absolutely it – once it gets too settled and knows what it is too much, it gets boring.
MJ: Yep. I think you’re really on to something with focusing an ill-defined “vibe” than any genre. That approach is probably freeing when creating the music too.
SW: It totally is – almost always the thing we are making is quite different than how we envision it at the start. If you embrace that rather than resist it, it’s very freeing and exciting. You become just as surprised to the twists and turns of the creation as the listener in a funny way. It all comes back to that notion of “capturing something” versus “manufacturing something”, that we were talking about earlier – which is actually key to the recording process too.