Make It Easy (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

THWACK!

Hooray! The hatch at the top of the demo sluice just opened! And what’s this?? Not one but TWO demos slid out? (Along with a bunch of torn up wet notebook paper and some empty cans of hairspray and like forty sticky pennies.)

Well, okay! Prepare to get OVEREXPOSED™️ to “Make It Easy,” the third track on 2014’s TV en Français. (We know what you’re thinking: don’t try it. We do indeed own the trademark, and we feed our lawyers a special cereal made out of Adderall and lean.) First you will hear Keith’s initial demo of the song (okay, there’s an older demo, but it’s not as good and lots of the lyrics are missing and stuff), then you’ll listen to one of several full band “live” demos we made over the course of 2012 and perhaps even into 2013. This one was recorded at DNA, a now extinct subterranean studio on 2nd Street in the East Village. Finally, there will be a discussion.

***First, a quick note for those who hadn’t heard elsewhere: the deluxe re-release of TV en Français has been bumped from May 10th to June 28th due to a *bad test pressing.* The test pressing is what vinyl manufacturers send their customers to make sure everything sounds good before churning out a full order, and, well, ours sounded like junk. Anyone who ordered physical merch should have received an email from our store, but to those of you who were watching Spotify in vain last Friday, we do apologize.

And now… let’s get demo crazy! ( <— origin of the word “democracy.")

Here’s the early Keith demo:

And that Band demo:

KEITH: “Make It Easy” was a big one for us. I think it was the moment that we kind of knew we had an album. After MIE, we threw out a handful of the songs we had written and started honing our focus on what kind of album we thought TV En Français should be (before this, I really wanted it to be The Lemonheads’ It’s A Shame About Ray). We got pretty excited about MIE almost immediately, and demoed it every chance we got. I have no fewer than five separately-recorded demos for it on my hard drive — my songwritng recording, two “live in the studio” proof-of-life versions, one *other* demo I did alone in my writing space for some reason, and one that we did with Ariel in Vampire Weekend’s old studio in DUMBO, when we thought he might make this record with us (his manager had a different opinion, and thought that Ariel’s time would be better spent on Snoop Dogg’s reggae record and Usher’s “Climax,” and, you know, fair enough). My data filing system is a shitshow, though, so we may well have done even more demos than that. I think we may have done one at Strongroom in London, but I can’t find that.

I distinctly remember the idea for this song beginning with the guitar drone that plays throughout. I’d been doing that kind of drone at our live shows for a minute — I’d started going out into the crowd during “Textbook,” and to keep some guitar vibes in the mix I’d crank the feedback on my delay pedal all the way up, which pretty much just keeps the guitar signal looping over itself indefinitely. It’s an annoying sound, but I loved it enough to want to base a whole new song off of it, weirdly. It’s almost a miracle that a song written as an excuse for a guitar drone turned out as good as this one! 

That foundational drone became a real bugaboo for us, though. It’s fairly hard, using my dumb method, to create a drone that’s not too shrill, or too wobbly, or that doesn’t build and build and build until it becomes atonal noise. I eventually had to take advantage of Ariel being in NYC to mix Vampire Weekend’s third record to meet up with him and steal the drone recording from our session a year earlier. I could never nail the drone as well as I did that day, despite having wasted hours of our expensive studio time trying to replicate it during the final album recording sessions with Chris Coady.

CHRIS: And just think, now all you have to do is tell your AI to “make dat drone, kid.” The times, they are a’changin! 

I was in Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California last week, and therefore was listening to U2’s album Joshua Tree, and it occurs to me that The Edge? That guy can probably generate some goddamn drones. Whatever his pedal setup is, drone manufacture is surely a chief capability. 

But yeah, “Make It Easy” was a “Eureka!” moment. I felt like Daniel Plainview hitting a gusher the first time I heard your demo. In fact, I rushed home and told my wife and son that neither of them would work another day in their lives, and that they should immediately go online and “start picking out drip.” Unfortunately, now both of them spend long 12-hour Zoom shifts toiling in the same online coal mine, while I perform excruciating mental lifts in Logic and here on Substack. 🤷‍♀️

It’s fun to juxtapose the placeholder drums in the Keith demo with Andy’s drums in the DNA demo. Would you say that studying that difference would provide a "masterclass in drumming” for the untrained ear? 

KEITH: Well, I mean, I don’t know about that. Both of those drum approaches have their charms, you know? I mean, mine is simple, yes, but it’s what a great drummer would maybe recognize as having an “essential” nature. Sure, sure, Andy’s drum take involves finesse, it demonstrates a keen ear for groove, it begins the song with an expertly-ratcheted tension that explodes in a way that adds an extra dimension of passion to the chorus lyric. But mine does some good thumping, too. I think people who listen to both would, yeah, probably say they were given a masterclass in the many viable approaches to delivering an all-time classic drum beat. 

But, yeah, okay — Andy is a real “yes, and” kinda drummer. I mean that only in the most positive sense and don’t at all intend to compare his drumming, a zenith of mankind’s artistic achievements, with improvisational comedy, human culture’s nadir. He’s a master at understanding the pencil sketch of the vibe a songwriter is going for and then exploding that into technicolor. I’d say that his approach involves catching the gist of the original feel and saying, “Got it; now hold my beer,” except that Andy isn’t going to hand his beer to anyone, and, anyway, he can play drums just fine with a bottle in one hand.

One skill of his that especially blew our minds was his mastery of the triangle. We were in the studio with Ariel, just fucking around with little ways to add some variety to the track, when Ariel espied a triangle in VampWeekend’s percussion bin and (maybe joking?) suggested we add it to the breakdown chorus after the guitar solo. I’m pretty sure you and I just snidely chuckled and went back to mixing Tommy margaritas or whatever, but Andy snapped up the triangle, positioned himself before the microphone, and delivered a hot-shit triplet vibe to that part that perked it up very nicely. A triangle! Huh.

I do recall that part of what drove us to demo the song so many times was our chase for the most explosive chorus possible. What was the chorus missing in those early demos? And, Chris — Jesus Christ, did we manage to crack it?!

CHRIS: That’s right, we were worried about the chorus being a letdown after the merciless escalation of the pre-chorus (“you make it eeeeeasaaayyyyyy…” etc). Of course, as is often the case, the chorus here functions as a tension release, a satisfying answer to the tense melodic question of the verse and pre-chorus. What’s rare about this situation is just how tightly the pre-chorus winds you up — especially the second, extended time you hear it, which prefaces the first chorus. Tis the rare pre-chorus that puts the listener in quite as desperate a state of agitation as this one does. I think we were worried that the chorus’s salve would be insufficient, and people would drive their cars off of cliffs in search of relief. 

Listening to the album version of “Make It Easy” just now, it seems to me that we did solve the problem, and we did so by making our mixer, James Brown, really twist the hell out of the volume knob when the chorus hits. “This part has to be LOUD, James!” we kept begging him. And it is. What was the chorus missing in the early demos, you ask? The professional mixer’s combination of audacity and finesse, applied to the volume knob. James Brown has both in spades. 

The triangle thing is no joke. People can check out this video to get a sense for the particular sleight of dexterity that's required. I feel like the instrument Andy was playing was also smaller and therefore needed to be suspended by a string in order to ring, which made the muting action even trickier than what’s shown here. The guy’s a wizard! Andy, I mean, not the Irish fellow in the video — although he’s pretty impressive, too! 

I have two questions for you, one concerning each demo. The Keith demo closes with a 15-second cat fight between overdubbed guitars trying to find the end of the song, and I have a vague sense that we sometimes ended the song that way live when the three of us sensed that one or more had lost track of where we were. Of course, instead of guitar battling guitar, it becomes guitar v. drum v. bass. The question is this: Should we be deliberately ending the song that way? It sounds pretty cool. Very Pavement. 

Question two is what did you screw up in the Band demo? I can’t even tell. 

KEITH: Yeah, the ending of that “Keith demo” does have a Pavement vibe, you’re right. The thing is, that’s the sort of controlled chaos that Pavement had to pay the likes of producer Nigel Godrich ungodly sums to provide, whereas *I* casually toss that genius off on an unremarkable afternoon in my office. If Stephen Malkmus is reading this (and he ought to be — he’s a top-tier subscriber to SDIR!), give me a call. I can reintroduce that “Pavement sound” to your solo work at a very reasonable price.

As for our live delivery, I’m fairly sure we’ve played the ending of “Make It Easy” in that style at least once or twice, albeit unwittingly. There’s one SXSW show in particular that I’m thinking of — a midnight set following a day of multiple earlier shows and way too many drinks with our record label — that I suspect featured an outro lamentably similar to the one in my demo.  

As far as the band demo goes, I’m assuming that either we overdubbed whatever I’d messed up after that performance or else flew the guitar track in from another take altogether. My expression of concern was picked up in the drum mics — we were all standing in the live room together, although the guitar amp was likely set in a separate soundproof space to maintain isolation between the instruments on the recording. So I probably whiffed a chord or changed to another part of the song too early or whatever, without you or Andy even noticing. Either that or I was just being super-professional, as usual, and was regarding that take as sub-par because, despite being played note-perfectly, it lacked just that little bit of emotional sparkle that you guys deserve, even from a demo recording.

CHRIS: I seriously doubt it was that last thing.

Anyway, I’m sure glad we’ve left behind the era of repeated demoing of songs. Nowadays we meticulously build a tune from the ground up, only rarely doubling back to make a drastic change. This is the kind of hard-won craftsmanship that the newbies simply can’t fathom, a sort of multidimensional expansion of the carpenter’s adage to measure twice and cut once (or is it ninjas who say that?).

Am I remembering correctly that the video for “Make It Easy” was inspired by 2011 Indonesian brawl-fest The Raid? Where did we get the extraterrestrial ingredient? Was this also the period when we were pressure-cooking our concept for a TV show about terraformers? 

Keith savages a peaceful member of another species on the set of the "Make It Easy" video.

KEITH: While I understand how more cynical film historians might find it suspect that The Raid: Redemption was released two years before the video for “Make It Easy,” I tend to think of that as just another of those great cinematic coincidences — proof that the best ideas are simply part of the collective unconscious. Just as Michael Bay and Mimi Leder knew in 1998 that the time was right for a competing pair of “Earth-vs-asteroid” movies, so did we and Gareth Evans simultaneously intuit that the world of action cinema was in need of a major shake-up and that wall-to-wall, close-combat, hyper-realistic fistfights were the way forward. His film turned out to be the popcorn-selling crowd-pleaser, a la Armageddon, whereas ours, like Deep Impact, was the thinking man’s art film.

The less said about Terraformers, the better. That’s still a billion-dollar piece of intellectual property for whichever production company is brave enough to shell out it’s astronomical budget.

Those who did battle over a bag or two of spilled mulch: Keith Murray, Danny Lee Allen, Dave Nugent, Chris Urbanowicz, Ken Cook, Mike Pace, & Chris Cain.

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) is out June 28th. To preorder the double-vinyl, the zine, the t-shirt — any of that good scran — click through.

⛅︎

C/K