Sprinkles (Demo Version)

TV en FRANÇAIS, The Demos 📺🇫🇷

Good morning, if it’s morning where you are! Fuck it, good morning to you regardless. Today, in honor of the 10th anniversary of TV en Français, and with great reverence, we continue the TVeF: Demo Drive Toward Doom. Remember that doom foretold is not doom realized, and, broadly speaking, this demo drive is about having fun.

Before we jump in, and lest readers of this wordcast get whiplash, YES, we just announced a run of Brain Thrust Mastery-shows in November, and YES those shows go on sale this week. We’ll have a presale link in this space on Wednesday morning (10 BST) for most of the shows; and if you sign up here, someone will email you a presale link for the “secret” London show, also on Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Now! Back to the matter at hand.

Today we will listen to the demo for “Sprinkles,” track four in the TV en Français table of contents. A fan favorite and frequently performed live track (at least by us — not sure how often Adele does it), “Sprinkles” was not a single. Of course, singles are a dumb game played by the chart-obsessed and the art averse (and people who would like to someday own their own home), but WE believe every song on an album should be excellent, and indeed must be at least capable of capturing a listener’s heart. And “Sprinkles” has captured more than a few. 😉

This recording was made in January of 2012, several months after the early performances and recordings we discuss in the conversation below. Hang on to your hats.

KEITH: I think I mentioned before that my original vision for TV En Français — my fantasy predating any of the actual hard work of, you know, songwriting — was that the record would sound like The Lemonheads’ It’s A Shame About Ray. God knows why I thought that would be a viable genre for the likes of BBC Radio One to embrace in 2012. We actually did have some jams in our rehearsal space on North 14th street that fit that Lemonheady mold, but nothing that really found much purchase, and I couldn’t hum you any of those tunes now. I do recall that one of the songs had working lyrics that went:

Hot buns, hot meat
Thems the kinds of things I likes to eat
Hot burgers, hot sauce
Thems the kinds of things I likes a lots

To truly understand why this song didn’t move forward, it might be helpful to know that, in this refrain, “burgers” was pronounced “boigers.” Once these lyrics took root, it was impossible to imagine singing anything else to the melody, and so the whole thing had to be thrown into the dustbin.

But anyway, after that initial spate of misfires, we finally hit on “Sprinkles.” I imagine that part of why it became a track that we glommed onto so quickly was that it had that catchy ”Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh” refrain from the outset, so we could all happily sing along to without any pesky joke lyrics undermining the fundamental seaworthiness of the tune. Yeah, the title is a little goofy, but it’s named after an ice cream shop that I occasionally passed while riding from my apartment in north Brooklyn to our writing studio off of Prospect Park, so I was writing what I knew. No jokes here, just clear-eyed reportage.

As fair as I can recall, the first time we played it was in Bali, at a crazy-ass party thrown by a bunch of British, Australian, and American ex-pats who had opened up a motorcycle garage/surf shop/art studio/bar-restaurant. We were killing a week between shows in Jakarta and Singapore, and these mavericks offered us hospitality in a nearby villa for five or six days in exchange for one performance in the courtyard of their compound for like 300 of their closest friends, not one of whom, to my recollection, was actually Balinese. Anyway, the party was lots of fun and the Anker lager was flowing freely, and so we figured why the hell not. I don’t think the song had any actual permanent lyrics at that point; I may have just sung nonsense and counted on those “oohs” as a hook. Anyway, I have no idea how it went over, but it seems like we were heartened enough to press forward with the song. Do you have any more specific sense of how we felt, after that debut performance?

CHRIS: I think the audience showed a lot of enthusiasm for “Sprinkles” at that show in Bali. Maybe I’m letting my memory be influenced by the event poster — I just unearthed it from gmail…

The place was, in a way, a “temple of enthusiasm.” (Though I do not remember anyone using the phrase “lyrical letcher” that week.) They loved nothing more than beautifully photographing each other riding custom/restored Honda motorcycles, and they had tremendous enthusiasm for the genuinely middling sushi prepared by San Diego expat Tyler, but yes I think there was plenty of love for “Sprinkles” at that show. And we were able to springboard off of that right into Jacknife Lee’s home studio in the Hollywood Hills, where we cut a demo of “Sprinkles” plus one other tune (do you remember which?).

For our two days (?) with Jacknife, we rented a secluded little house ten minutes down the canyon from his spread, and we rolled up there on the evening of July 27, 2011, more tanned, perhaps, than we had ever been in our lives (particularly if you had taken an average Tan Score from the three of us). I believe there was a cute-as-hell little bitty grocer a short walk from our front door, from which, on the evening of our arrival, we were able to procure a 48-pack of Tecate and a couple other sundries. So far so good.

Actually, I said we were very tan, and that’s true, and a robust tan is often taken to connote hearty good health. But our two weeks in Asia, salutary as they were, had sewn malignant seeds, as we would shortly discover. Our first morning in LA, the California weather glistening all around us like in a movie, we emerged from our rental cottage rattled. Well, I didn’t; I felt great. But poor Andy hadn’t slept a wink, and you were in the first hours of what was to be a pretty intense 48-hour tummy collapse. Why don’t you walk us through the next two days, working with world-famous producer Jacknife Lee (REM, U2, Snow Patrol), as you remember them.

KEITH: Well, Chris, I went into that Los Angeles recording session feeling on top of the world. I’d just spent a couple of weeks exploring some of the most gorgeous locations in Asia, surfing, swimming, and partaking of Tyler’s sushi, which was almost good enough to be sold at a 7-Eleven. To top it all off, I had what I knew was a shit-hot banger of a song in my back pocket — good old “Sprinkles.” Boy oh boy, was Jackknife gonna flip out when he heard it. He was gonna curse the name of Snow Patrol, he was going to delete Michael Stipe’s phone number from his phone, he was going to tear up all of his U2 posters when he heard this sucker.

But then we landed in LA, and something funny happened - something funny in my guts, I mean. I had a case of what my gastroenterologist later designated “The Shits, Real Bad.” I don’t know how it happened. We’d been traveling all over Asia for the better part of a month and I felt just great, except for, you know, being hung over every single morning because of the great time we were having. I’ve often joked that I’m allergic to Los Angeles, but Chris, this was ridiculous. From the moment we landed at LAX, I was, to quote my gastroenterologist, “all torn up like a rotten bastard, spurting like a geyser, acting like [I’d] eaten a bad oyster with dookie sauce on top.” I’m guessing that after eating such delicious food in Japan and Indonesia and Singapore for so long, my body simply could not take the entrée they served on the transpacific flight. My tummy flatly rejected it.

Needless to say, when we arrived at Jacknife’s beautiful hilltop studio, I was incredibly pleased to see that it was as well appointed as one could hope any high-end recording facility might be. I am of course not referring to any of the magnificent equipment that he had or the beautiful acoustically-treated tracking rooms, nor to the wall-to-wall windows showing off the gorgeous canyonside. No, I’m talking about the en-suite bathroom-plus-guest bedroom that abutted the recording facilities. Apart from the brief moments during which I recorded my (presumably) one-take guitar and vocal tracks, I spent the entirety of the session dozing unhappily in Jackknife’s California King bed or emptying my innards into his hopefully A-grade plumbing facilities.

Meanwhile, for reasons of his own, Andy was experiencing a brutal bout of insomnia. Who knows what provoked such an episode, (I’m a seismologist, not a sleep pathologist), but I think it was largely because our Asian adventure was rife with moments that would reasonably make a less-cocky (ie, less-American?) man than you or I feel less than secure. 

On our second day in Japan, as we soundchecked in the cavernous Yokohama Arena, we experienced an earthquake. It was minor enough to pose no real threat to our immediate safety (I’m a trained seismologist, Chris), but it shook the room, causing the half-erected production girders and lighting rig to sway ominously above Andy’s head as he sat trapped behind the drum kit. You and I thought it was a wild moment that would make for a great anecdote. 

Then, in Jakarta, as we soundchecked for our festival set later in the day, the entire production took a pause so that a phalanx of men in full military gear (which included machine guns impressive enough to titillate the two Americans in the band) took to the stage and began a (routine?) bomb search. Large, mean-looking dogs were trotted out to sniff around, and telescoping mirrors were pointedly swept beneath — you guessed it — the very drum riser upon which Andy sat. He didn’t like it. Plus then later we had to watch 30 Seconds To Mars play a set, which was traumatic for everyone within ear-shot.  

Though we always request them, Java Rockin’ Land in Jakarta was the first festival to provide us with machine guns for soundcheck.

Finally, as we entered Bali, we were pulled aside by customs, taken to a ramshackle office far from the public eye and shaken down for cash. Now, we’d been forewarned about this — our promoter in Jakarta had advised us to have a chunk of Indonesian Rupiah on hand, as we were almost guaranteed to be told that our visas were no good and tariffs were to be levied or whatever. Perhaps this is a totally legitimate thing. I’m a seismologist, not an Indonesian customs official. It sure felt delightfully illicit. We were marched away from the baggage carousel into an office straight out of a 1980’s action b-movie. The place was a riot of papers and threadbare furniture. The officers were all wearing vaguely mismatched uniforms. Everyone, to the man, was smoking at least one cigarette. The ceiling fan was wobbly, the desk fan had those little plastic strips to demonstrate that, despite the untamed heat in the room, it was in fact working. We were all sweating like hell. Andy was sweating the most, but it wasn’t the heat that was getting to him. Or at least not the temperature, anyway. He was convinced we were going to spend the rest of our days in a Balinese prison. Which, honestly, given how rad everyplace else in Bali is, probably wouldn’t have been all that bad!

Bali is every bit as bad as they say.

Anyway, I don’t know if it was the stress or the heat (it was the dead of summer) or the jet-lag, but Andy didn’t get a lick of sleep between Singapore and Los Angles. So, at our session with superproducer Jacknife Lee, Andy was on like Hour 120 of sleeplessness, whereas I was blasting my colon out, whenever I was conscious. So really, YOU should describe how the Jacknife session went, seeing as how you were the only member of WAS who was truly present over those couple of days.

Andy, continuing to experience sleeplessness but not exactly “awake,” in Jacknife Lee’s Los Angeles recording studio.

CHRIS: Keith, I flunked every seismology class I took at Pomona College — as well as every last one I took while getting my PhD from the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas, Austin — but I reckon that the session with Jacknife registered a 0.0 on the Richter scale. No bumps! Indeed, speaking as a total dilettante when it comes to seismic activity, albeit a heavily credentialed one, there’s no way those two days in Jacknife’s studio were anything but a “I” on the Mercalli Intensity Scale, the measuring system attuned to observed effects on people, buildings, and the Earth’s surface, which — as I certainly don’t need to tell you — runs from a I at the low end to a staggering XII for “total destruction,” as when Rick Rubin decides he wants to personally mic the amps on a project he’s “producing.”

No bumps, that is, outside of your bread basket and Andy’s hypothalamus.

Yes, after the whole band laid down a foundational set of of tracks — you and Andy at heroic cost to your own energy reserves — Jacknife and I proceeded to enjoy a very pleasant and leisurely 48 hours of tinkering and dicking around, mostly in his room of synthesizers, which was itself the size of a New York City apartment. I dare say we put a little bit of every synth in that room on “Sprinkles.”

Jacknife himself was a great hang — as every successful producer seems to be — and it would have been a lovely thing, making a record up there in his mountaintop hideaway. Once we got back to NYC and had time to recover our wits, though, and you your gut biome, and to look long and hard at the finances of making the record, we decided that Jacknife was simply too world-class a talent for our indy project, which is to say that the man commanded an impressive price, and we were — and remain to this day — cheap bastards. It didn’t hurt that we had begun speculative talks with our old buddy Chris Coady, the man who arranged the mics and twisted many of the knobs on Brain Thrust Mastery as its engineer. Coady had been on a hot streak during the intervening five years, applying his expert hands and owl-clever wits and pretty good ears to projects by Blonde Redhead, Beach House, TV on the Radio, Yuck, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Now he was ready to come home, back to We Are Scientists, the guys who had taught him everything he knew and quite a bit he had failed to absorb and forgotten. (Just kidding — the only thing we ever taught Chris Coady was who Jason Statham is.) And, crucially, Coady didn’t yet know what he was worth 🙌, so we could afford him. We thanked Jacknife for his incredible hospitality and a taste of his formidable talents, assured him that one of us would always remember our weekend together, and started laying plans to record TV en Français (the working title of which was then Taco) in New York City with Chris Coady. Which meant booking ten days in one of the most expensive recording studios still operating on the East Coast, The Magic Shop.

Maybe we’ll save the great "Saga of The Magic Shop (or: The Difficulty of Finding Good Bars in Soho)" for coming weeks. In any event, that’s not where this demo was recorded. Do you recall the circumstances surrounding our demo session at Seaside? My recollection has less in common with the Brooklyn seaside than it does with the one in Britain — that is, permanently choked with a cement-thick bank of fog.

KEITH: Huh, yeah, I have almost no recollection of the Seaside sessions, myself. Like, what the hell was this studio? How did we book it? I recall that when Andy first lived in Brooklyn during the Barbara era, he was down in Park Slope, the neighborhood that housed Seaside. Maybe he knew of it because he walked by the studio every day, or maybe he’d done a demo for his project I Am Arrows there, or (probably) he met the studio owner while out for a sneaky pint at his local bar? I have no idea!

Anyway, we booked a single day there (January 12, 2012, according to the metadata of the sessions on my hard drive) and proceeded to slam through live instrumental takes of “Sprinkles,” “Don’t Blow It,” “Slow Down,” and “Take An Arrow.” Then we slapped scratch vocals onto all the tracks and, as icing on the cake, Andy took an improvised pass on (as far as I can tell) every single keyed instrument in the studio — we have typically mind-bogglingly-accomplished Burrows performances on piano, Farfisa, Fender Rhodes, and Wurlitzer across these four tracks. Not a bad day’s work, I’d say!

All four of the tracks from the Seaside sessions are remarkably close to their final forms. And these performances are pretty fun — the low stakes of a demo recording found us noodling around and gleefully breezing through errors and just generally playing without the restraint that I usually associate with the stifling formality of a studio session. Just three scrappy guys hashing it out, over there.

CHRIS: Truly we were three chaps sauntering affably along the seaside, salt air in our lungs and a cool breeze causing the beaded tassels of our custom cape-wear to click and clatter like hail stones on a boardwalk somewhere far, far away, such as England.

Three guys talking a whole load of shit at a press junket for the Tiger Translate Festival in Bangkok, April, 2011.

TV en Français: Deluxe (10th Anniversary Edition) is out June 28th. To preorder the double-vinyl, the zine, the keychain —  click on through.