Overambitious Expectations

Have you listened to the the River Jumpers debut EP? If not I'll wait.......

Amazing right? yeah I know, it was on constant repeat for most of my 2012 and as first recordings go I'd say it's round about perfect. It was largely because of this that I decided that I would get back in the game and fire up my strumming arm again. In the back of my mind I thought "goddamn yeah I'm gonna have a Debut EP that sounds as good as this.

Then at some point last year whilst getting very heavily into acoustic punk written by guys who used to be in more established bands I came across a split album called Acoustic featuring Tony Sly and Joey Cape. It pretty much blew my mind with regards to what I expect of an acoustic album and is now easily one of my favourite records of all time.

So with these two points in mind I kind of got it into my head that in order to be in any way successful I needed to make this super epic perfect production incredible demo otherwise it wouldn't count. In my mind this equated to having a tonne of junk going on in every track. I scoured my shoddy memory for everything I could do musically and ended up with bass, keyboard, violin, drum, harmony and in some cases ukulele parts for every track on the EP. Not to mention I decided I wanted a clip from a Louis Theroux show to be included on a track just like the Ataris are wont to do. So in my head I was totally set to make the acoustic punk recording of the century.

Now a few reality checks came into play once I started piecing this epic undertaking together, namely that I can't play the drums for toffee. Also not in my favour was that I have never played the violin and it turned out that just buying one and expecting to pick it up with no instruction straight away was a stupid idea (also the violin I bought had no strings). The last issue was that I am also terrible with harmonies so slowly but surely the amount of junk on each track started to diminish.

One of the last things to make me realise I was being a bit ridiculous was when Demon Smiles unleashed their demo on the world. It's raw and beautiful and doesn't give a good god damn about whether it's highly produced. It's sounds exactly as it should and sounds like it was produced on pure excitement and love of what the guys were doing. That really helped pull my head out of the clouds and again I cut back on extra airy fairy junk on my own offering.

Last came when actually recording the thing. Whilst listening back to the base instrumentation it finally struck me that, just like DS demo, it sounded just how it needed to without anything too over the top going on. I even cut out a whole song just because it didn't seem to flow on the day. What came out of that effort was something that worked on just the right level for who I am as an artist and I'm pretty proud of having had that revelation before I started filling up peoples ears with superfluous junk added just for the sake of it!!

Anyway keep your ears peeled for the second Red Rag demo (the first was a cassette Tazz and I created for someones Birthday and is currently lost to the mists of time) it'll be up on every concievable online media outlet soon.