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Jun 20, 2014 Amen Dunes By Damon McMahon

A song is a chance overlapping of countless variables in an artist’s life. Anatomy of a Song is a place where those variables can be dissected and examined. In this edition, Amen Dunes’ Damon McMahon discusses the track “Lonely Richard” from their new album, Love.

All my songs kind of just come to me from somewhere else, but this one more than all the others. It’s hard to talk about too much, but it was transmitted from elsewhere, from the melody to the lyrics to even the voice I first sang it in. It was like a different person was singing it. It would be too weird to get into it here, but the lyrics probably explain some of it.

The song is pretty much a self-portrait of my self here and my self from out there, things like me, life on the horizon, sometimes being out there and other times attempting to get out there, with whatever means available. Kind of about getting off, just need a second and there it’s done…but also about other ways of moving out there. Something I’ve spent my whole life trying to do, and something this song tries to do.

The melody I thought sounded like some 60s girl group melody, it felt addictive to me, which I really liked. In the studio the vibe was kind of dark, and the recording of this song, this particular take, was the first time we felt any kind of relief during the process, the first time anything clicked, and I think you can hear that in the recording.

We (me, Jordi, and Parker) often care more about feel than anything else, and this take had the perfect feel. Parker’s beat sounds simple but is actually really hard to pull off. And Jordi’s slide part was kind of amazing too. I’ve been obsessed with this sound in an Einsturzende Neubauten song called “Fiat Lux” for a long time, and wanted to incorporate it into this record in some way, and amazingly that sound was what Jordi came up with for this song. His part made the whole thing come together. I remember on playback feeling like the song floated, like putting your hand out the window in a moving car, like narcotics.

The final component was when Elias from Iceage came in to record vocals at the end of the song. Once again it sounds like the simplest part, but most people wouldn’t really be able to pull it off. But Elias nailed it on the first take. He had been tripping all night by the time he came into the studio, so he was quite out of it and tired, and I think it added a perfectly voided out feeling to his vocals. They just rolled out of him super gently; the engineer and I were kind of blown away. He was pretty funny too. After finishing vocals for another song, a duet we did together on “Green Eyes,” we suggested he go back in and sing something for the outro. He was still in kind of a weird state at that point, and instead of singing something, he got in front of the microphone and proceeded to bark and howl like a dog for the final minute of the song. Most people would just go like, “Ahhhh”...ha. It was amazing. When he came back in to listen to the playback he sat there quietly for a few minutes until he looked up at me and said, in kind of a pleased but surprised way, “sounds like a real dog.”

(www.sacredbonesrecords.com)