Return the Favor (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

They’re/We’re/It’s back.

They = We Are Scientist’s blog, S.D.I.R.

We = us, Chris & Keith Scientist

It = the TV en Français demo dissection, returning today with “Return the Favor,” track seven from 2014’s finest long player.

“‘Return the Favor’? As a demo? Nah, that one sprouted fully formed from the skull of Zeus [Keith],” you’re probably thinking.

Not so! And here’s the proof…

On the set of the “Return the Favor” video shoot.

KEITH: "Return the Favor" is one of those songs that justifies the ridiculous expense of peripheral equipment. I’d love to pretend that all of our songs could (or even WOULD?) have been written if my songwriting method were to just sit down on the couch with an acoustic guitar and strum a few apposite chords. But, man, I’m a guitar player, and we’re dumb bastards who need sparkly toys to keep our attention on the task at hand. I need to buy all sorts of dumb effects pedal that make your guitar go all wobbly or echo evocatively or make squishy noises or whatever. A good new pedal will keep me interested in playing the guitar just long enough to stumble upon some nice combination of notes that plants the seed of the song. It kind makes me wonder about a guitar player like The Edge — given how utterly submerged beneath a panoply of effects his parts always are, the dude must truly hate his instrument.

Half of the time, I get all excited about a pedal and then I use it maybe once and it never contributes to a song. That’s almost a win, though. The worst case is when I buy an exceedingly specific effect that becomes part of a big song (like the octave pedal on "Rules Don’t Stop”) and then i have to keep that pedal on my touring pedal board for the rest of my life for the benefit of that one song. The MXR Phaser pedal I use on “Return The Favor” was that guy for a while, although it slowly crept onto a few more songs (it’s on the solo of “Buckle” and I deploy it on “Lethal Enforcer” even though it’s not quite the right sound).

When I wrote “Return the Favor,” I had clearly just picked up this new phaser and was taking it for a walk in the writing studio. I’d probably sucked down a bunch of Coors Light tallboys (our workday drink of choice, in that era) and was just blissing out to some finger-picked, chorus-n-delay notes. Likely, it was at 2am, and I was lying on the floor with twinkly christmas lights going around me, just playing that opening guitar part over and over for an hour. That’s how the Edge writes all of his parts, I’ll bet.

CHRIS: The Edge — this is well known — writes his parts “on the can.” (I’m putting that in quotes not because The Edge said it, but because I’m saying it with a lordly remove: I know that’s the phrase the people want, but I can’t pretend it feels comfortable on my lips.) Anyway, The Edge, it is known, can’t even decide what he wants for dinner until he presses his cheeks against a doughnut seat above a lil’ pond of gray water. If you’re wondering whether this ever caused a problem in the early days of U2, when the boys shared a single budget hotel room while on tour, and The Edge would hog the shitter or no songs got written, then you’re right. To this day, Bono, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullens consider unfettered access to a washroom the apotheosis of luxury. 

I hope you won’t find it too tangential if I list a couple of the other odd brainstorming contortions we’ve come across during our encounters over the years with some of music’s greats; I think readers will be interested:

- Adam Duritz of Counting Crows: Only comes up with songs while in a coma. The first couple times, the comas were unplanned and their artistic harvest a silver lining, but in later years and to this day, if he wants to write a song Adam Duritz must pay doctors to administer a cocktail of pentobarbital and thiopental in order to induce a comatose state. 

- Snoop Dogg: likes to write rap lyrics while or just after smoking weed. 

What’s the average utility of the effects pedals on your board? And what’s the range (lowest and highest)? My average is pretty dang high these days, since I just have two distortions — a Big Huff and a Fuzz Wars (plus tuner and a compression pedal that’s always on). I use the Huff or the Wars on all but a tiny handful of songs, making the average utility something close to n/2 (where n=the number of songs in the set). In terms of range, although Fuzz Wars was my go-to for many years (maybe starting on TV en Français, actually…), the advent of The Big Huff changed everything, and that’s now my gooser of choice 75-80% of the time. 

KEITH: Oh, man. I could talk all day about my pedal board — the function of each pedal, the usage stats, the shoe-gunk that’s accrued upon each one, etc. The problem is that I can’t not talk all day about them. If you get me started on the subject, you’d better have a very comfortable chair at the ready plus maybe a snack, because we’re going to be here awhile. So, how about this: let’s shelve the pedal-talk for now and bring it back in the next installment of the substack for a post that’s laser-focused on very exciting nerd talk? If I get going on pedals now, we may never mention "Return the Favor" again.

Oh, yeah, "Return The Favor!" Am I correct in recalling that this was the first single from the album? It’s funny, because I don’t really consider it a “single” — when I think of TVeF, I guess I think of the singles as “Make It Easy,” “Dumb Luck,” and “Sprinkles.” But we made a video for this fella, and it was done very early on while we were in Miami taking the album artwork photos with Dan Monick, so we certainly knew that it was going to be a key song. But there’s no way that we went to radio with this one, right? I mean, I love it, but it’s a bit of a weird one, as far as singles go — pretty moody, largely atmospheric. The band doesn't even really come in hard until like two minutes into the song. So, I guess we sort of wanted to kick the album cycle off with a palate cleanser? What about the song do you think made it work as our initial statement of purpose for TV En Français? Unless, of course, I’m wrong about it having been the first song we’d released for the album, in which case I guess my question is: why would it have been an effective first song for the public to hear in advance of the record’s release?

CHRIS: “Return the Favor" was baaaaasically the first single off of TVeF — an astute historian might quibble that it was actually released to promote Business Casual, the e.p. appetizer that precursed TV’s 10-course meal. That same historian would have it shoved back in his face that Biz Cas was essentially a promotional predecessor to TV, and that “RTF” thus transitively falls under the TV umbrella, and that would be clear and fair, and the historian would probably nod his head appreciatively, accustomed as he would be to the savage blood sport that is music history. 

In my mind, John Pardo’s passion for this song played a big part in earning it the “opening salvo” slot on our promo calendar. John, our U.S. manager at the time, ranked this TVeF’s top track, unless I recall incorrectly, and I never do. The video is noteworthy for being the first time we stepped away from the Creator’s chair and allowed ourselves to be reduced to animated puppets in another guy’s play. That other person was, of course, Dan Monick, whom we engaged as photographer/videographer/Creative Director for TVeF (not for the last time). I distinctly recall the thrill of abandoning ourselves to a concept we grasped only weakly, replacing confidence in the idea with confidence in the man (Dan), like Indiana Jones replacing the idol with a bag of sand. Here’s the pitch Dan emailed to you, me, and Pardo on 4 August, 2013, less than a week before shooting was to begin: 

Two members of a Kennedy like family leave the political life and move back into the world of bootlegging/enter the world of black-market thinking they will find more integrity in it as it is base and true. The problem is that with crime comes shadiness no matter how much you try to be honorable.  Our characters are inherently good guys, they are just mixed up in crazy shit. The characters believe that they are providing for true needs with their services and are fighting from the inside. Yet the conflict has become evident as they realize the whole thing is totally fucked.

Mic drop. "Any questions?” Keith, is it time for us to return to something that is base and true? 

KEITH: Chris, I think we’ve never stopped steeping ourselves in truth, at least in the sense that Hemingway liked to regard it. Our writing is clean and unfussy. Our character as a band is presented unadorned, even when you happen to be wearing a fake goatee or have become a werewolf in a music video. Also, like Hemingway, we love cats and will involve ourselves in fisticuffs and will drink smuggled Cuban rum until our livers visibly bulge from our abdomens.

At some point, we should probably create a South Floridian visitors' guide to the locations included in our collected music videos. Talk about base and true! Talk about descending into shadiness no matter how much you try to be honorable! Talk about totally fucked!

Two men, scarcely aware that they’re creating history.

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) came out digitally June 28th. To order it on double-vinyl, or get the zine, the keychain, the other stuff — simply click here.