This week's #ThisDealInHistory is from the final night of our three-show run at New York's Bowery Ballroom in support of our "Gone Gone Gone" release.
As I've mentioned before, New York has always held a special place in the New Deal's heart and we always did (and do) our best to make our NYC concerts a memorable experience, above and beyond the usual memorable experience that a tND concert usually was/is!
This cut starts off with a more experimental version of the "Back To The Middle" intro, which mirrors the headspace we were decidedly in at that time. As 2003 wound to a close the band was taking its improvisation more frequently into darker places, both sonically and creatively. When we returned from our 2004 hiatus we picked up where we left off and continued to explore new sounds and improvisational approaches, some of which are highlighted in these late-2003 shows.
A couple examples found in this week's track:
1 - The first 90 seconds of the BTTM intro is pretty much a delay pedal solo with me dramatically adjusting the rate and repeat to create some angular and jagged notes and rhythms provided by some short random bursts from the Moog synthesizer.
2 - At 2:28 we start the half-time jam of BTTM, but the bass guitar is anything but mellow and halftime - it's plowing right through with all systems go (both sound and rhythm). Dan eventually softens the tone but continues to push the envelope with that energetic bassline until around 4:00 when he finally releases that tension (brought on by pedalling on the same note repeatedly) and starts playing different notes underneath to help create an interesting chord progression that wasn't there before.
The ambient bit that follows with the spacey organ, bongos and repeated bass is another example of us stretching our ideas and searching for musical landscapes that we weren't particularly familiar with 12 months earlier - my obsession with early-era Pink Floyd (1967-1970) was definitely shining thru.
We're quite patient with keeping the groove going with the same two changes, slowly building in intensity until it naturally unfolds into a Moog solo at 8:00 - all the while playing those two same chords. While we were never strangers to the two-chord jam, we now were looking for ways to make it more interesting to us as well as to the listener.
The cue to return to BTTM is triggered by Dan at around 9:10, at which point we take our sweet time to get back to the track (another thing we were consciously experimenting with - examples abound from this time period where a particular cue might get triggered but we wouldn't end up getting to that track for another 10-15 minutes!).
The build back to BTTM is a continuation of the ideas mentioned above - notice that as we speed up the song i also speed up the rate of the LFO on the Moog until it's just a giant wobbly mass of noise with the lick getting played somewhere underneath. -Jamie
