It passed me by at the time, but a little earlier this year marked the twentieth anniversary of, theoretically, my first genuine studio experience – recording a four-track EP in a recording studio in deepest Co. Down.1 I cannot remember the number of days involved (it wasn’t loads), but a few memories stand out: late nights, early mornings, generally being cold, great pieces of old music gadgetry being everywhere; and watching huge amounts of Futurama in between concert films, as we tagged in and out of the recording booths.

For whatever reason, Incubus: Alive at Red Rocks (2004) was on rotation, and the band’s musicology came under close scrutiny as we tried to figure out the sound we were attempting to produce. It clearly had little or no impact. The EP in question, Solitude, remains a source of some frustration, some 20 years on. For some reason, we convinced ourselves to mix it ‘flat’ – there’s little to no dynamic range in the mastered tracks. I think the idea was it allowed you to crank up the EQ settings on your ow sound system and play around. But I later recall an utterly deflating experience when visiting an acquaintance, an experienced radio DJ with his own basement studio, who ran the tracks through his desk and immediately made them come to life. “Why didn’t you just do that?” he said with some exasperation. Answer: I don’t know.

Unlike that experience, Incubus certainly make it slap. Drive is an incredibly satisfying little riff to play on guitar, and the production immediately sounds like the year it was released. I suppose Incubus more typically sit at the intersection of grunge and alt-rock for popular release, but this is all pop really – and pop it does.

This song is forever connected to that primary memory for me – but despite that, it more widely represents all those great bands that people were sharing around at college – Death Cab for Cutie, Wilco, Bright Eyes – that marked a person out as a Serious Muso, and not just a regular listener.2

  1. I recently re-found a low-res set of clips I put together at the time. Images from another world, set to a terrible live recording we carried out for a sound test. ↩︎
  2. Sitting with someone and listening to their CD copy of Transatlanticism from start to end… these are things you can only do when you’re 18 and studying a humanities degree. Let’s add Title and Registration to our 40×40 playlist. ↩︎