Songs Out Loud

“The Big One” is a reflection about forecasting fear that cannot be known. There’s a story about an earthquake. There’s invented open tunings, and open hearts, there’s crying in bed at night in the woods of a military base. There’s a multidude of studio musicians, artful scoring and arranging, and a smart, eager protagonist ready to face her fears. This song, along with a few favorites on Lizzie Weber’s new album Fidalgo, goes super cinematic folk rock.

For this episode, Lizzie provided the demo she and her guitarist used as the foundation, plus, ten isolated instrument and vocal groups from recording and mixing engineer Sheldon Gomberg, executive producer.

Season 3 of Songs Out Loud episodes are taped in front of a live audience. For this one, we gathered in the upstairs lounge of The Royale Food & Spirits. Weaving isolated instrument and vocal tracks in and out of personal narratives, Songs Out Loud Breaks it down: instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, and beat by beat.

The 442s did something special last month. They removed the precious from a genre widely endangered by pretense. Yes, they’re a chamber band: a folk-leaning classical and jazz hybrid. But their new album can accompany a Mother’s Day brunch just as well as a 4-20 afterparty. If you wanna hear John Denver, you will. If you wanna hear John Cage, you will. Need some Praire Home Companion vibes? Have a seat. Busta Rhymes? Travis Barker? Right this way. .

For this episode, "The Mess" by the 442s, Adam provided the 14 page score plus his phone recording from an early version. Shock City Studios recording and mixing engineer Sam Maul broke me off twelve isolated instrument and vocal groups to play with, and he joins the conversation too.

Season 3 of Songs Out Loud episodes are taped in front of a live audience. For this one, we packed into historic Judson House in Grand Center. Weaving isolated instrument and vocal tracks in and out of personal narratives and original demos, Songs Out Loud breaks it down: instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, and beat by beat.

On Halloween weekend 2022, a small group of us gathered in a lounge above The Royale Food & Spirits to hear Stan Chisololm deconstruct his single “Smitten.” Later that night, Stan would play an all vinyl DJ set. To help set the scene, you might picture Stan sitting on a black leather couch wearing the Bjork swon dress from her Academy Awards appearance in 2001 back in her Vespertine days.

[“Hi I’m Stan aka 18andCounting…”]

[Theme]

Stan Chisholm, aka “18andCounting” is an experimental DJ and emcee. He’s also a graphic artist and muralist with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from The Art Institute Of Chicago.

[I’m a grimey art kid]

He’s co-founder of open concept arts venue Blank Space on Cherokee St. and a Board Member of the New Music Circle arts collective. He’s won numerous academic scholarships and music awards holds DJ residencies at places like The City Museum, The Royale and Spark and occasionally performs and records under the name “The Only Ensemble”, notably at Loufest 2017. Mid pandemic, he landed a track on fellow artist Nathan Cook’s afrofuturist compilation entitled AfroFuturism St. Louis. Last summer, his album Some Sort Of Future cemented 18andCounting as lyricist and emcee in the most complete way to date.

For this episode, Stan provided 61 individual instrument and vocal tracks (and 26 AUX buses) AND a track laying around from 2015 that would eventually become verse one.

Songs Out Loud breaks it down, instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, and beat by beat.

Retro Champ is a heavy metal singer and MC who’s 2022 EP No Mercy is the third such release since 2019. “Truth” is one of the heaviest songs on the album, which he recorded with producer & songwriter Ben McGuiness. For this episode, I received seven instrument and vocal groups from that song’s multitrack session and talked with Retro about his creative process. In addition to the stem files, he shared two voice memo files from initial stages,

Songs Out Loud is independently produced, engineered, designed and mixed by Aaron Doerr. Photo by Harry Boston. Theme music and graphic design by Aaron Doerr.

Classically trained electronic musician and singer Syrhea Conaway composes and performs under the name Syna So Pro. This is the story of how one song became two new songs. It all started with cutting up “The Pretty One”.

~~~

Cover Design by Aaron Doerr, Photograph by Tiffany Sutton

Kevin Koehler is a multi-instrumentalist singer and songwriter as well as live sound engineer and owner-operator of Lucy SoundLab. When he’s not playing guitar for the rock band iLLPHONICS, Kevin writes and performs under the name Obviously Offbeat. It was July of 2021 when he released an album of folk-inspired indie rock & pop music. The song “A Conversation With God” is from that album, “Infinite Will”, and for this episode, he shared nine multitrack stems of instrument groups and two phone recordings of the early stages of the song’s origin.

Photo: Brian McClelland

Tree One Four is a reggae rock jam band with two albums to their name. Their most recent album, 2021’s Exhilarama, solidified the band’s official lineup. And just so you know, the song we deconstruct on this episode references personal struggles with depression. Like many artists, guitarist, singer and songwriter Brad Millabeats finds utility in songwriting when dealing with life’s hardships.

For this episode, Gabe Usery at Encapsulated Studios provided six multitrack session files of instrument and vocal groups. The band recorded this song “Hell” and another song “Amen” as two songs with a gapless transition which confused the term “intro” between Brad and I at first. Anyway, shout out to Gabe for splitting all this up for me in the first place - we figured it out.

To begin, we’ll get a quick tour of the basement studio where Tree One Four rehearses, aptly called "the Treehouse". Songs Out Loud breaks it down, instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric and beat by beat.

Guitarist Daniel Horrell aka “Monkh” epidimizes the hustle of a modern musician. His band Monkh and the People rocks funky R&B on big stages and his solo stuff grooves just as hard - even when it’s just him and an acoustic guitar.

He’s got a playlist on Soundcloud of thirty three guitar hooks like “Monkh 144BPM G#m Lead 3” for producers who might be browsing, and his latest single is a minute long track for sale as an NFT on Opensea. A compilation of all nine of these tracks - Levels - was just released on bandcamp.

The music for Level 1 - Astro is a combination of twenty six separate files of instrument and vocal tracks --well, twenty five if we exclude one titled “Classic electric piano don’t use_1” which we definitely got into. At the end of the episode we’ll play the finished song, which was composed deliberately alongside animation. You can find those videos on instagram. For this episode, I talked to Monkh about composing the music for Level 1 and we’ll hear the isolated tracks alongside his narrative. Songs Out Loud breaks it down. Instrument by instrument. Lyric by lyric. And beat by beat.

The dramatic new single from Katarra Parson finds the singer/songwriter self-producing alongside a familiar roster of fellow musicians. Together, they explore a tension and release format that delivers dopamine rush after dopamine rush. With Andrew Gibson on drums, Tilton Yokley on bass, Joey Ferber on guitar and Jahi Eskridge on trumpet, “Loathe A Rose” escalates something that begins as an easy, latin, groove-based piano-jazz number into an embattled tango of emotional psychedelia. Somewhere along the way, a vulnerable protagonist steps through a restless soaring ballad to embrace a righteous and powerful sensuality. The sheer aesthetics of it all make this full length debut (the radio edit is two minutes shorter) fly by a lot faster than the eight and a half minutes it actually measures out to.

This song was recorded by Daniel Merhman at Midtown Studios and Katarra granted me six multitrack session files of individual instrument groups that constitute the final master. On this show, you’ll be hearing those isolated instrument tracks alongside Katarra’s narrative. She sat down at her piano to walk us through her creative and technical process. Songs Out Loud breaks it down instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric and beat by beat.

Things got serious for Daemon after moving back to St. Louis from Los Angeles in 2016. Since then, his music has landed alongside everyone from Bernie Sanders to DJ Shadow. His brand new single “Turn The World Around” was released last week and is featured in the XBOX exclusive open world racing game Forza Horizons 5. For this episode, we’re going back to 2017 for a deconstruction of his song “With The Gang” co-written and produced with his longtime collaborator Adrians Beats of the former Jupiter Studios in St. Louis.

Along with Daemon’s personal reflections, you’re about to hear the individual parts of the song that make up the whole. For this episode, I’m using seven individual files from the original multitrack session to bring us augment Daemon’s narrative about the creative process behind this song. We’ll hear clips other stuff that comes up along the way too, like his new single Turn The World Around which was just released last week.