RECORDING | january 2010
CROSSING TOGO
Do you think the unorthodox nature of you two coming together – meeting on Craigslist – fueled the collaboration?
Ko Nakamura (vocals): We both have our overlaps, but our musical tastes tend to differ a little bit, and I think that really helps bring these two different worlds together as far as putting the music together. But from the first time we met up, we hit the ground running as far as songwriting. I mean we had our first song after like a week and a half.
Scott Spencer (guitar): I would agree, and I would think that we came at this very differently. I think early on when we were writing together one of the things that I noticed from a musical standpoint – Ko’s voice just struck me. The first time we got together it was apparent to me that he had a very unique sound, and my compositional writing is such that it needed something to differentiate itself musically, and his voice was the perfect foil for it.
When you guys first started playing together and you were realizing you had something, were your efforts more geared towards a recording project or were you thinking about getting out and playing live?
Ko: Well, when we first started we were playing some covers and throwing in our songs here and there, but I think a studio project… I think it was just two projects that sort of blended together because I know Scott was working on an instrumental project at the time and I had started writing lyrics for his songs and that’s where the two projects merged.
Scott: I’d say that early on we were doing a combination of both – just playing out to get the feel of how we sounded together, and we just started writing songs pretty much immediately. But I went into the studio with the intention of doing an instrumental project of songs I’d written over the course of several years and what ended up happening was Eric Jarvis, our producer, and I would initially start by laying down a track and several of them we thought were instrumentals and then we brought Ko in just to give it a try and see how this would sound, and we were really blown away when literally on the first or second take of every song that Ko did, he nailed it. So we weren’t having to go back and forth in the studio labor-intensively there. It was a very effortless project there. So when Eric and I realized what Ko was adding – I think one of the first songs we did in the studio was “Near Dusk,” and we got Brendan Buckley from Shakira’s band on percussion for that one. It’s a really heartfelt song about my ex-wife and leaving the relationship, and that’s all I told Ko – what it meant emotionally for me – and from my perspective, when I heard it, it just hit me in the heart. It just really conveyed what my song meant to me emotionally from a musical standpoint, and from that point forward, I would tell Ko “this is what the songs means to me.” He has a very poetic quality to his writing style, and if you read his lyrics, it’s not just literal, hitting you over the head with the obviousness of it all. I like the ambiguity and this impressionistic perspective he brings in lyrically. It allows people to kind of go where they want to and bring what they have into the song themselves, and I really appreciated that from his perspective.
About the East/West thing – I can hear some alternate tunings on there and there’s definitely a hint of the Eastern scale in there as opposed to just Western notes. Is that something you developed as you guys were writing the songs or is that something you’ve always worked with?
Scott: I’ve worked with alternate tunings for a long time, and of the 10 tracks on the album, 8 of them have alternate tunings, each different from one another. I do think that lends itself to more of a unique sound. You’ve got these automatic scales you go to from an open perspective, but I like the alternate tunings because it allows me to go to much broader places as opposed to just staying on the neck most of the time. So I’ve incorporated that for a long, long time and I’m still trying to tweak it and do different things. That’s something I will always do, and hopefully we’ll continue to evolve within that space.
So you guys played on Debra Duncan’s television show. How alien of an experience was that?
Ko: (laughs) You nailed it, man! We had a song picked out that we really wanted to play, “Near Dusk,” and we really got versed on it and they told us they wanted a minute clip of another song and so we did a version of that and it ended up being the only clip that they played.
There’s this total deer in the headlights/American Bandstand feel to the clip, like it’s 8 o’clock in the morning and you guys have no idea where you woke up.
Scott: Exactly! It was an alien experience. We were waiting there for probably two hours to play, just doing nothing. I think the hostess of the show was interviewing a comedian, and when she saw the title of the record Of Love Scorned & Insecurity, she didn’t even wanna touch the name. And when we played I couldn’t hear my guitar so I was leaning way over into the monitor…
Ko: The TV audience was I’d say a bunch of maybe 11-year-old kids and a bunch of 70-year-old ladies.
Everybody’s gotta tap into a market, you know. You guys should consider this.
Ko: That’s it. We are it with the geriatric set.
By Lance Scott Walker
Photography by Anthony Rathbun
