The holidays totally kicked our ass. I was supposed to go visit my parents in Milwaukee for two days and then spend the rest of the week in Minneapolis working on the Ruby Isle record and our latest elbo.ws track. The weather had a different idea. I was snowed out of Minneapolis so we didn’t get any Rubying done. Then I got snowed in at the Milwaukee Airport and was stuck there much longer than I wanted to be without my recording equipment. Then came New Year’s and Mark and I both had high profile gigs to attend to. The former of which resulted in this spectacle which has been making headlines. Bottom line, we are really, really late on our recent elbo.ws tracks. In the interest of economy and due to the fact that the M.I.A. track squeezed back into the top spot thanks to its ubiquity on year end top 10 lists, we decided to combine the Steven Malkmus track “Baltimore” which was number one two weeks ago with the track “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. which was number one last week. Hopefully we will get caught up this week.

Here is what Mark had to say about the tracks we blended up for this week:

“MIA raps over a sample from Clash’s “Straight to Hell” which clocks in around 100 bpm in tempo. The Malkmus tune, is really a couple songs, the first part in 3/4 time, linked together by some musical tendons of prog. So, if “Baltimore” were “Grindhouse”, then “Paper Planes” would be something like “Apocalypse Now”.

Since we were marrying the two songs, not only were we faced with issues of key and tempo, but also style and meaning. In previous covers, like “Shadow Falls”, it was simply a matter of making a slow song fast. Or in something like, “Tyrants”, flip it on it’s head by making it riff of “Sexyback”. Suddenly we were faced with two opposing styles and morales for songwriting and structure - as well as major minor key differential (minor won, btw). I felt the solution was to isolate the Malkmus tune for the verses and the MIA song for the choruses. Lyrically, they are both songs about oppression and fighting, one is about robbery and greed, and one is about love - but “Baltimore” is obviously about a city too - something like sirens and revving engines can happen in a city at war or a city at peace - hence, the sound effects.

Ideally, love triumphs over evil, and Malkmus trumps MIA, in a resolution of dreamy major key chanting “I’m in love with the people”. It was hard to leave my opinions out of this one, in this writing, and in the cover itself, due to my disappointed feelings against one of these 2 artists - which is inconsequential in this project.”

I don’t know what Mark’s “disappointed feelings” are all about, but I will say that Paper Planes was my favorite song of the year so it has been really fun getting to mash it into another track. I thought about using a different clash sample in here, but it just got ludicrous so I threw it out. Mark sent me he his vocals with some guitar and keys after he meticulously compressed what could have been an epic amount of material into a fairly coherent pop song. I wrote a bunch of hooks to the scratch tracks the most prominent of which became the intro synth run that I am actually quite fond of. I threw another loop I deconstructed from some top 40 fodder as the backing groove and wrote a noodley trade center type bassline. I sent the mess back to Mark and he worked his magic to produce this surprisingly lush “cover” of two tracks at once.

 With all that said, I guess you have to just hear it to get what the heck we are blabbing about.

Ruby Isle - The Planes of Baltimore (Steven Malkmus vs. M.I.A.).mp3

Posted by dan on 04 Jan 2008 at 01:02 pm