You know the band Deerhoof? I've been a fan since their album Reveille, which was in 2002. When I hear it I think of a short New England tour with The Billy Nayer Show, when the CD was in heavy rotation. (The other big albums on that trip were The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and the first Silver Apples record. Not that that has anything to do with anything, except that the three albums went strangely well together.)
Zooming up to 2008: Deerhoof were releasing their album Offend Maggie. And they had this promotion where they posted sheet music for their song "Fresh Born" and invited all comers to record a version of the tune, before their own would be released. A pretty fun idea. So I went ahead and did a version. I was getting close to finishing up my album "Fresh Twigs" (lots of freshness in the air, summer '08), and was in a good recording routine anyway. I spent a Saturday evening, most of the day Sunday, and some of Monday morning on the track, from soup to nuts. I had a hard time getting going on it, but I powered through. The surprise was that I liked it, and I still like it fine.
I posted a link to the track on CASHmusic.org's Deerhoof page, with all the other takers, and there it's been since. It still gets downloaded frequently; sometimes through the Cashmusic site but not exclusively from there; I don't know how else people might be accessing it, but they are.
Before presenting it here on Workbench, I remixed "Fresh Born" and sent it to Masterdisk where Scott Hull mastered it, and put "the icing on the cake", as another Masterdisk engineer, Tony Dawsey, says.
This week's cover art comes from a photograph I took in Inwood Hill Park last summer; I was probably lucky that I escaped with the picture, and my sanity. That was a freaky morning. Too much coffee, maybe.
One extra bonus this week: since the Creative Commons license "Fresh Born" is protected under prohibits sale of the versions of the track, this week the FLAC file is a free download. A good chance to try out the FLAC format if you haven't yet. I hope you enjoy my take on "Fresh Born". -- James Beaudreau
