Track By Track: Le Loup's Family

Recorded in a remote basement in their home state of Maryland, Family finds Ragged Words favourites Le Loup follow up 2007's very fine and mouth-fillingly titled Thron of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millenium General Assembly. Swelled this time to a five-piece, band founder Sam Simkoff gives a detailed track by track guide to album number two  

1. Saddle Mountain
We wanted to start the album with something familiar, something stylistically similar to the older songs, in order to build a sense of continuity between the two LP’s.  So ‘Saddle Mountain’ utilizes a lot of the production techniques prevalent in the first record- watery, overdubbed vocals, sampled sounds reminiscent of all those bleeps and bloops from ‘The Throne…,’ chopped and re-shaped acoustic instrumentation, etc.  At the same time, we were hoping to alternately pull away from the old themes in order to cleanse the palate.  ‘Saddle Mountain’ is generally a lot more optimistic than anything you’ll find from the first go-round, dealing less with big endings and more with new beginnings.  This song is about a series of images that have stuck in my mind since childhood- everything from sweeping landscapes to a trip to the coast to a single broken gate in front of a house- and about how, when put together, they seem to make a sort of patchwork quilt, all connected in some fundamental way.  There is such a place as “Saddle Mountain,” but in reality, it’s not so grand- it’s just stuck with me so long that it’s taken on a greater meaning in my mind, become kind of a symbol of everything of some import that’s stuck with me throughout my life and meant something to me.

2. Beach Town
Throughout recording, I was fascinated by the idea of the fundamental interplay between a strong rhythm and a basic melody- those two ingredients seem to me to be what makes music so entrancing, and so we tried to stress that relationship as much and as strongly as possible throughout the album.  Beach town is mostly just drums, percussion, atmosphere and vocals for the chief portion of the song.  Instruments only burst through at the very end, to give it a sort of cathartic release.  Although the first half is incredibly sparse and repetitive, I find it entrancing, and oddly more engaging than the second half.  The song is about an old decrepit beach town near where I grew up- it used to be a big resort town with a fairground and arcade and fancy restaurants- that’s been continually falling apart up to present times.  There’s something, or a lot of things, really, about the town that strike me as very sad.  But even when a place is falling back to entropy, there’s a real beauty there- just because something is disintegrating and no longer as useful and polished as it once was doesn’t mean it’s ugly.  We tried to mirror those images of decrepitude with obscure production- heavy atmospherics that threaten sometimes to drown out the main point- because sometimes I like having to dig a melody or particularly nice instrument line out of the murk more than I like the melody itself, if that makes sense.

3. Grow
This song is about the possibility of starting a family.  The lyrics are pretty simple, but only because I couldn’t quite wrap what I was thinking up into a tidy bundle.  There’s a distinct tension between the joy of considering having kids and settling down, and the terror of losing your own youth and independence.  Kind of hard to put into verse, I guess.  It’s ultimately supposed to be an optimistic song, though.  I’m pleased with this song as a whole, I think it’s the one of the most immediately accessible on the album.  There are very specific parts within the song, however, that make me especially happy.  The first time the group vocals kind of spill drunkenly out of that ordered, mannered first verse, the bell-like guitar lines that rise through in the end, and the drums, drums, drums.

4. Morning Song
A lot of these songs take one instance in time or one small object or tiny space, and blow them up, suspend them, magnify and crystallize them.  This song is about a perfect point in the morning, waking up at just the right time and seeing the beauty of the world and just wanting to hold onto it forever.  Nothing lasts forever, though, and there’s a certain poignancy to the song that tries to touch upon that.  The song was originally a much darker arrangement, but like a lot of the songs on the album, it twisted and grew from its original form as we played around with it as a live band.  I love the start, which grows from one quartet of acoustic instruments to this spinning, spindly orchestra of them.  We recorded each take live, and then just put all the takes (about five or six of them) on top of each other for a wider, more chaotic sound that constantly falls apart and reforms as you listen. The song is constantly in a state of flux, using the same instruments for the most part, but never resting on one theme for too long, with the vocals trading between present/dry and really wet and distant, and finally just falling into hums spiked with percussion.  It strikes me as very dreamlike.

5. Family
Christian wrote this one.  As a band, we found great pleasure in all the spaces in between the notes and phrases and halves of the songs, this one above all.  So much is going on at every point- sometimes it’s hard to grab onto any one thing given all the atmospheric flutterings in the background, and we found those elusive parts really satisfying.  Then, halfway through the song, when the beat kicks in, there was a different, more traditional kind of satisfaction there.  Some friends who have heard the album have remarked that they wish the second part lasted longer, but part of the reason I like it is that it’s so fleeting.  Most of this song was created from just improvising as a band.  The beat, the boisterous refrain, the overall tone, all of it was more or less accidental.  I like to think that sometimes our surprise at what was happening during recording comes through in the final version of the song.

6. Forgive Me
Speaking of surprise, this song was completely unexpected.  We recorded it as kind of a band exercise on the very last day of recording the entire album- it was never supposed to be there.  I’d written it a few weeks earlier, and we’d never gotten around to playing it as a band.  What you hear on the album is maybe the second or third time we’d ever played it.  As soon as we heard the result, though, we were convinced we needed to put it on the record somewhere.  For all the editing and careful composing and hours and hours of production that we put into every other song, this song was recorded and edited in a matter of a few hours.  We barely touched it in terms of editing- the whole process was much more reactive than carefully planned.  I think it comes through in the music in a really nice, powerful way.

7. Go East
This song, I think, has a lot in common thematically with ‘Beach Town.’  Again it deals with a particular town, and treats it almost as a person with human qualities.  The places we grow up, like people, change over a lifetime- physically, they shift, become more beautiful or fall to disrepair; in terms of personality, they change incrementally until they have a completely different flavor; emotionally, the way we deal with those towns changes as well, until we might perceive a place to be entirely foreign to us, even if we knew and loved it dearly as children.  Only a little of this comes out in the sparse lyrics, but I think we conveyed a certain sort of weight just in the dark, murky instrumental arrangement.

8. Golden Bell
After so much heavy arrangement, we wanted to take one last breath and give the listener a moment to relax before going on to the end of the album, which is maybe even denser than the first two thirds.  “Golden Bell” is a very simple tribute to Christian’s infant niece- he wrote it for her birthday, I think.  Again, there was a focus on something very simple- her voice- and an attempt to just suspend it as a single perfect object free from context and untouchable by time and the outside world.  I think it’s a nice breather in the middle of the album, and a very nice sentiment.

9. Shepra
This was another one that grew primarily off of improvisation- early on in recording, we held the conviction that no song should sound so studio-produced that it became sterile or clinical sounding.  Somewhere along the line, that notion fell apart, because a lot of these songs were messed with a lot.  But this song held its loose, open vibe straight to the end of production, and I love it for that.  I’m happy with the lyrics for this one.  It’s about how complex human beings are, and how an individual can’t be so tidily summed up in just a few sentences, and how we’re constantly shaping and being shaped by our experiences and surroundings, until we’re no longer the same people we were a few years ago.  Kind of like “Go East,” but a more optimistic take on it.

10. Neahkahnie
Obviously the same lyrics as “Beach Town,” plus a final verse.  We were interested in taking those words and the general melodic structure, though, and changing the emotional weight of it all just by changing the surroundings.  In this way, the words are the same on a basic level, but the meaning shifts completely- it’s a lot more sentimental, not as dark and pessimistic- suddenly looking back fondly on something that passed away, and accepting what it’s become.  Same words and melody, but it’s an entirely different song.  It reminds me of being on the beach at night.

11. A Celebration
We really overindulged in this song, and I couldn’t be happier about that.  The lyrics are overly simple, because we wanted it to be something that could be easily learned and sung along to with minimal time and effort.  We wanted it to be a party, all-inclusive and over the top.  Sometimes I wish there was a wider breadth to the sonic spectrum, or that our ears were more sensitive, or something was in place that would allow us to hear more sounds than we physically can.  I want to pack every beautiful sound I ever heard into the same song, all at the same time, and just float in the noise of it.  We threw a lot into this song, and there are beautiful things that will never be heard because they were buried in the mix, but it’s as close as I can get to that immersive sound right now, and it makes me happy just knowing those sounds are in there somewhere.  The shift to the final third of the song is maybe my favorite part of the entire album.  The way the drums punch back out of all that spinning, chugging mud- it really snaps the ears back into focus and clears the air for that final push.