As readers of this page will know already, I've recently remastered my first band's live album and am in the process of unleashing it on the 21st century stream-o-verse. This very week is the 25th anniversary of the night we recorded the music - March 29, 1998!
The first single, My Boots Are Achin' For Your Love, came out last week. And the second, Galaxy, will release next Friday (April 7). Which reminds me, you should totally pre-save Galaxy if you haven't already.
The full album goes live on April 21.
Define 'Remaster'
For those longtime fans who already know the songs well, I want to give a rundown of what's changed and what hasn't in the streaming version. This might be a long post, since I'm giving myself permission to just go ahead and nerd out about this project of mine that has been 25 years in the making. I hope somebody finds it interesting!
Also: It's possible that, even for superfans, many of the changes might be imperceptible upon listening - unless you really have the original version deeply burned into your brain like I do. But, for posterity, here's what I did…
Slicing and Dicing
I made a number of edits in order to separate things that had been joined in the CD release and make them into their own tracks. The content and the flow of the album is the same as before; the track listing just has more entries on it (21 as opposed to 16).
For reference, here's a scan of the old one:
For example, the final song on the album, A Capella Techno, was originally a “hidden track” on the CD; it was tacked onto the end of The Casper Song with 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence in between. All this was just one big audio file.
So I split these into two tracks and got rid of most of the silence (with all due apologies to John Cage). However I did keep a few extra seconds of silence at the end of Casper Song to preserve the feeling that A Capella Techno is an extra thing appended the end of the album, and not just the final song of the show.
On the other end of the album, I split off the opening "tune up" sound at the beginning of the first track, Georgie Porgie, into a separate track. So Georgie Porgie is now track 2.
Likewise, there is a lot of between-song stage banter throughout the album. On the CD release, I put each piece of this at the end of the track preceding it, even if we were talking about the next song. So, for example, on the CD, the introduction to Dream of the Meat was at the end of Best of Advice, and JonWa and Michael's discussion about “Wham covers” while Johnbo was tuning up the banjo for “Boots” came at the end of Who is Silvia.
In the CD world, this grouping made perfect sense. (In fact, I just now remembered that in designing it that way, I was consciously imitating Nirvana's MTV Unplugged album). I think that's because you wanted the music on any given track to start immediately as soon as somebody pushed the play button; and because people were typically going to listen to the songs in the track order on the album, it didn't matter that there was extra stuff at the end of the song.
But in a streaming/playlist world, it's annoying to have these unrelated bits of audio spliced at the ends of the songs. So, I separated them out as “interludes” that you can play or skip as you choose.
Volume Fixes
I boosted the volume of some sections that were very quiet compared to the louder bits. For example: the first half of The Casper Song is a capella, and it got much louder when the instruments came in; I just raised up the volume of the first part to be closer to the rest.
I also boosted some of the between-song stage banter that was hard to hear; and I subtly increased the volume on a couple of the song intros that start with just a guitar (Shenandoah and Missing the Sun).
Frequencies and Stereo
I lightly remastered the whole album by adjusting the overall EQ balance. That means, in this case, boosting the lower frequencies and cutting some of the higher ones, to make the songs sound fuller and less harsh.
I also used fancy modern tech (Izotope RX and Ozone plugins, for the curious) to reduce some digital clipping and clicks that were present in the original material, and to "stereoize" what was mostly a mono mix and give it a wider feel.
Taken together, these changes have the effect of making the overall performance sound more present and bringing out separation between the instruments (especially the bass) in a few places where they weren't as clearly audible before.
I'm not sure it will be noticeable unless you listen back-to-back with the original release through headphones - but if you do, I think you should be able to tell a big difference.
What I Didn't Do - Mix or Fix
I mentioned in previous posts that, at one point, we considered really digging in and remixing the album, or even partially re-recording it, though we didn't end up doing this.
This kind of remix is a superpower we can bring to bear in 2023 that we didn't have in 1999. The original recording was just a single stereo file, so the live mix was the only mix we had. Now (using Izotope RX) we have the ability to actually unmix that stereo file into separate stems for bass, vocals, drums, and other sounds, and rebalance them - or even, if we wanted, replace them with new performances. Black magic if you ask me, but pretty f'in cool.
Another, less hi-tech option would have been simply to nip and tuck the songs here and there. Maybe that harmonica solo at the end of Fall Dance goes on a bit long? Maybe the missed note in the banjo solo on My Boots Are Achin' For Your Love can be edited to become a not-missed note?
There's a strong case to be made that Bottom would benefit from all these interventions, but we decided not to do it. Partially this is because it would take a huge amount of time and effort for probably marginal improvements. I know me - I would spend a year getting it just right, and it still would sound like a bootleg.
And maybe that's the more important point: the whole charm of the album is that it captures DLF's live performance verbatim, with flubs and laughs and surprises, and that's what made the show special to begin with. If this album works, it's not because of technical perfection, but because you feel like you are in the audience for a really fun show by a band who's giving it their all. More artifice would just risk erasing what made it good.
If the new Bottom gets a million streams or something, maybe I'll think about digging back in and re-remastering it. But not this time around.
Some New Names (and Artwork)
I already mentioned the new interlude tracks, which didn't have names on the original CD - but now they do. In addition, a couple of the song names are different:
Eva is now called “Eva (Sweet Godmother)” for reasons that will make sense to anyone who knows the song.
For the remaster, I just spelled out “Five Prime” instead of writing it 5'. Sometimes we were too clever by half.
The Casper Song … this was a cover of the end-title song from the New Casper Cartoon Show that aired in the 60s and 70s. When we played it on stage, we didn't know what it was really called, nor did we know how to look it up in 1999.
But now I do know: the actual title is “Come Along Now and Join the Party” and it was written by Winston Sharples. Also, I guess we were being funny, but it isn't a dub remix. Whatever oomph that particular joke might have had in the days of CDs, I don't think it translates to the stream-o-verse. So the new track listing will say “Come Along Now and Join the Party (Michael's Last Show Version)."
Last but not least, the album title itself is slightly different from what it used to be. But I'm going to save the explanation for that until a future post, when I'll talk about the new cover art.