Dogs Running Free (a new project)

Dogs Running Free is the musical project that Nick Gill, Spencer Walker and I are launching next month. We’re going to spend three days at my parents’ house to write and record some music. Part of the process will be to figure out how to release it. Do we live stream some of it? Maybe make videos instead of just audio tracks. I like the idea of capturing the live performances on video, Pomplamoose style.

The session is happening in September, but I want to put this out there in case any of you musos have done similar projects and might have some cool ideas. Let me explain roughly what we have planned, and then we can talk about it.

Nick, Spence and Ben

Nick, Spence and I have been playing music together on and off since the mid nineties, but in the last five years our musical tastes and styles have diverged. Gone are the days when the three of us would obsess over Queen scores and Ben Folds Five bootlegs, or jam BareNakedLadies tunes before hopping in the Volkswagen camper van and blasting Deep Purple’s Burn out of the tinny speakers. We’ve all grown and matured, and we’ve all been playing music separately for a while now.

Nick has recently been described as “the William Morris of Peckham”. This is probably mostly to do with his love of letterpress printing and bookbinding, but his music reflects the same values of careful hand-crafting, building things from scratch and being intentionally awkward and specialised. Nick’s band The Monroe Transfer, whose latest album was sealed in hand-stitched cloth bags, is a 7-piece instrumental group that creates beautiful, brooding tunes that seem like the soundtrack to a really long, bad day. I mean that in the best possible way. Nick also plays guitar (and more) in Fireworks Night, releases occasional recordings of twinkly noise as Lights and writes music for weird and wonderful plays.

Spence is the drummer in A Silent Film, an epic indie pop/rock group from Oxford who are unexpectedly huge in Portugal and edging onto the alternative charts in the USA. He’s a loud drummer, but also comes up with consistently interesting and difficult beats. He also occasionally plays (in quite a different style) in Jont‘s band, where he’s known as The General because he has a habit of taking charge of rehearsals when tensions are running high. Spence ended up with the good voice in the Walker family genetic lottery of musical talents (along with the double bass skills), and our voices sound otherwise eerily similar.

Since we last played together (on the ill-fated Groove On album, 2000) I’ve been doing a bizarre combination of geek pop comedy songs, tiny songs, 60s covers, Hammond and piano as a sideman and a Beatles cover.

We’re three musicians who know each other very well, but have wildly different musical experiences, taste and ambitions. I think that’s going to make for a very interesting session.

The Project

We don’t want to give ourselves too many boundaries before we start, but I can’t help thinking of interesting ways we can approach the recording and creative boundaries we can use to keep it on track and get it all finished in three days. Here are a few ideas:

1. Limit the recordings to what we can play live: no overdubs.
2. Do the whole session with the same line-up, eg. drums, piano, guitar, vocals
3. Make all the tracks 3 minutes long
4. Make one track for each of the words Dogs Running Free
5. Record short musical ideas instead of long tracks

We’ve been batting ideas back and forth for a couple of months now. We have a collaborative playlist set up on Spotify where we can throw reference tracks so that we don’t have to spend the whole time playing each other new music during the writing process. Nick recorded an insane guitar riff through a home-made fuzz pedal. I sped it up, changed the key and wrote a song on it. Spence spent a 36-hour van trip to Portugal writing an epic track in his head. I wrote half a song called Dogs Running Free. We may not use any of these things, but at least we can hit the ground running.

I would also love to release Dogs Running Free as a series of live videos like this, but I’m not sure I’ll get that idea past the others. Except maybe the sheepskin coat. ;)

Tagged with: dogsrunningfree, nickfuckinggill, plans, recording, spence

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