Slow Burn

Demo, Summer 2009

Notes: Paul on acoustic guitar and vocals

It's no secret that I'm a huge Neil Young fan. I also have a special fondness for his recordings (and performances) with Crazy Horse. For me, there's just something so raw and emotional about they way they play together. For some reason, Neil's long guitar solos just make sense to me. Anyways, I realized that some of long NY songs were actually quite short if the extended solos were taken out. I also was listening to One Big Holiday by My Morning Jacket and realized that they had fit a really short song (lyrically) into a 6 minute opus. This was to be Slow Burn's destiny. It took a bit of effort to convince the rest of the band that I wasn't some mad-scientist-songwriter. I had a vision and we started putting together the pieces of the song at our first ever rehearsal.

Rehearsal, January 28, 2010

Notes: Dave B on electric guitar, Paul on electric guitar, Dave O on drums, Steve on bass

Slow Burn is put together like this: intro, song, outro. After we had played it a few times in rehearsal, we came up with the idea of having a harmony guitar bit in both the intro and outro to somewhat "tie" those pieces together. It took us a while to get it right, but we were planting the seeds. This version of the song features me screwing up the harmony guitar part pretty badly, but it shows where things were headed.

Rehearsal, March 25, 2010

Notes: Dave B on electric guitar, Paul on electric guitar and vocals, Dave O on drums, Steve on bass

At this point, Slow Burn was clocking in right around 8 or 9 minutes long. When Ben joined the band, this quickly moved up to 10+ minutes. I remember telling the band, "It doesn't matter how long the song actually is, it's how long it feels. If we make the whole thing interesting, no one will even notice that it's ridiculously long". My next crazy idea was to have dueling lead guitars in the outro (with a special shout-out to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Drive-By Truckers). Again, I think the rest of the guys thought that I was crazy, but I didn't care at that point.

Rehearsal, October 10, 2010

Notes: Dave B on electric guitar, Paul on electric guitar, Dave O on drums, Steve on bass, Ben on electric guitar

So, Slow Burn grew to epic proportions. It generally clocks in around 12 minutes and we have a ton of fun playing it live. We recorded it for Ghosts and Pride (in one take!), but we're not quite ready to post that yet. Here are two live versions. I'm not sure that the recorder really captures the energy of the live performance, but they still sound great.

Live at the Berkley Front, February 12, 2011

Notes: Dave B on electric guitar, Paul on electric guitar and vocals, Dave O on drums, Steve on bass, Ben on electric guitar

Live at the Magic Bag, March 11, 2011

Notes: Dave B on electric guitar, Paul on electric guitar and vocals, Dave O on drums, Steve on bass, Ben on electric guitar