Mister Fusty

Over the Rocky Mountains

Ladies and Gentlemen let me introduce you to the third album by Mister Fusty, “Over the Rocky Mountains”. It’s now available for you to listen to and download in the Fusty Emporium, Or you can listen/download/share from the player below..

It’s been mastered with expert precision by Jimmy Ether, top man of the rather marvellous Headphone Treats label, of which I am thrilled to be now part of. There will be more info to come about Headphone Treats and their lovely new website later in the year. Stay tuned!

I’m very proud of this album, it was a tough one to do as it’s the first I’d attempted with vocals. I do hope you like it. Below are some, probably quite tedious, ’sleeve notes’ I wrote about each track on the album.

“Rocky”

The title is a pun really, it’s a ‘rocky’ track, i.e. it ‘rocks out’ a bit, but also the chorus refers to being, “Over the Rocky Mountains”. I got married last year and went on honeymoon in Vancouver and fell in love with the place. We’ve been to Canada a few times and we keep dreaming of moving there. To get to Vancouver you fly over the Rocky Mountains, coming from the UK anyway, so that’s where the title comes from. Also it’s a double meaning, the phrase ‘Over the Rocky Mountains’ could also mean you are over a particularly bad or rough patch in your life. So it’s a place everyone would like to escape to at some point in their lives.
There’s a totally different version of this song which may appear at some point.

“Make a Stand”

This song has had probably the most changes and fiddling about (that’s er..a technical term by the way) of all the songs on the album. It’s had several different choruses and different arrangements until I finally settled on something I liked. I don’t know why it took so long, but I got there in the end! It’s a bit of a environmental song but it’s also about people just joining political groups on social networking sites and then feeling they have done their bit. I’m basically saying don’t just join a Facebook group, go out and protest on the streets or write to the powers that be if you feel strongly about something. Not that I ever do, though.

“Talk”

This just started out as a drum sequence and bass line then developed from there. The vocals were done really quickly (it probably shows) there’s a hushed and low feel to them as my wife, Andrea, was in the house and I was a bit embarrassed that she’d hear me! With the lyrics I was literally making them up as I went along. I don’t really know what they are about but I guess my subconscious might.

“Airport Lounge”

This is part love song, part travelogue. All the places in the song I’ve been to and the events are real. For instance I did nearly choke on the Champs Elysee in Paris, it was a chocolate bar that went down the wrong way! You’ll notice that after I sing “Barcelona…”, it goes backwards and weird. The lyric goes, “Barcelona, Sagrada Familia Fantastico!” which is a reference to the wonderful unfinished cathedral by Gaudi there. But I had trouble singing it as it’s a lot to fit in to that line. So I just reversed it and added spooky reverb, so no one will know…until now that is. “Don’t forget Berlin“, that’s where I asked Andrea to marry me.

“Black Rain”

I had the idea of having a song just based on the same chords in a cycle and seeing how I could build it up. I thought of a couple of mantra-like vocal phrases, that I made up on the spot, again I don’t know what my subconscious is saying – perhaps I was particularly depressed that day!
I was determined to include a mandolin somewhere on the album and it’s on this track. Although I can’t play it very well, it adds a bit of texture.

“Exit”

This is another song about escape and wishing to move away from the country you live. It was originally a song I gave to friends of mine (Gaz & Daniel from The Heavenly Spheres) who were going to add their own input, although I don’t think they’ve ever got around to finishing their version yet, so I thought I’d do my own. I suspect should they finish it, theirs will trounce mine.

“Thirty Seven”

This song was pretty much written, recorded and finished on my 37th birthday (hence the title).
Originally it had vocals and lyrics but at the last minute I decided I didn’t like them, also I thought it’d be good to have an instrumental track on the album in reference to my former instrumental past. (I’m a recovering instrumentalist.)

“Grumpy Like Me”

This is the only song on the album where I came up with the melody before writing the song. Usually I write a song around a set of chords or arrangement but the chorus of this song came into my head, lyrics and all, one day and straight away I tried to create a song around it. I wanted to have a funky, disco-like feel. The end features Andrea and me clapping and chanting, which made her laugh. I thought I’d leave the laughing bit in. It’s a bit of fun really. Although it’s true though, my wife and me are a pair of grumpy buggers…

“Blankety Blank”

This is one of those occasions where I came with a tune and arrangement I really liked one afternoon but had no lyrics to go with it. I was keen to finish the track but my mind was totally blank on what lyrics to have, so I came up with the daft idea of writing a song about not being able to write a song. Incidently it’s also the name of a, sadly long gone, British game show.

“Wake Me Up When The Future’s Rosy”

I managed to coerce my wife Andrea to sing some backing vocals on this. It’s a quite melancholy song about sometimes wanting to shut the world out. I think I must have written it after watching the news in an “oh-isn’t-the-world-terrible?” kind of moment. Musically it has 1980s fey indie band feel.

“A Balloon Flies Over Ruskington”

This album, and indeed this song, is dedicated to my friend Ian who sadly died of cancer last year. He was only about the same age as me. At the funeral his children let go of two balloons at his graveside that flew into the sky, and I remember watching them fly off into a beautiful blue sky. It was a moving moment and inspired this song.
You may or may not be interested to know that this album starts and finishes on the same chord, a Dmaj7.

It was my birthday recently (hooray) and I turned 37 (oh…). You can see in this picture I’m wearing a rather nifty t-shirt bought for me by my wife, it’s not that clear in the pic but it says “I Need To Score” and features pics of several movie soundtrack heroes of mine, like Morricone, Barry, Mancini, Williams etc. A perfect gift for music nerds like me! I also got a microphone stand, so this is manna from heaven for idiots like me who try and record vocals holding their mic and the pop screen at the same time.

So I thought I’d have a go at recording stuff with the new gear. I basically finished the backing track on my birthday and did the vocals the day after. That’s fast even by my standards! It was one of those moments where everything falls into place and it just works. A series of happy accidents and inspiration has made  (hopefully) a great song. This is a rare moment of self belief, folks. Maybe I’ve turned over a new leaf .

It started from a guitar doodle, recorded for the first time using a mic (and the new mic stand of course) instead of directly plugging it into the computer. I think it sounds better this way so I shall be recording acoustic guitar like this more often in the future.

The song is called Thirty Seven for obvious reasons. The lyrics are the usual made up on the spur of the moment bollocks. I’m so pleased with it I just have to share it with you, listen below.

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So it’s 2009, wow, doesn’t time fly? I daren’t think how long I’ve been messing around with songs for this third album.

Mind you I only record a bit at a time, sometimes there’s weeks where nothing happens – laziness, business with other things or mental block takes over. If you added together the total time I’ve been working on it I guess it could be a couple of weeks, which is not long really, it just seems like it’s been a long time!

Where are we at this stage, January 2009? At the start of the year I had a very productive afternoon and created a song in almost it’s entirety, bar a verse melody/lyrics.  It has quite a radically different sound then some of my previous stuff. I wanted to do a song with a bit of ‘ooomph’ and distorted electric guitar. This is the closest you’ll get to Fusty rockin’ out. I’ve now more or less finished the track called, “Rockies” and I’m very pleased with it. I may even make it the album opener as think it would be a good track for the starting gun. I was going to post it here but that would spoil the surprise…all will be revealed (eventually).

I’m currently working on a track that involves a slow bossa-nova beat, a synthy moog bass, and a spooky sounding organ. God knows how this one is going to turn out…

So I’ve decided to write a blog on the making of Mister Fusty’s third album. That difficult third album, even more difficult as I’ve decided to add vocals this time and as I’m discovering it makes things a lot more time consuming!
This blog is not going to be a ‘this is how I did this & did that’ kind of technical discussion. I won’t be going into great detail of how I achieved that ‘wowee wowee’ effect or how made that guitar sound like a tractor. There are other blogs and websites that do that kind of thing far better than I ever could. No, this will be a look into the creative, possibly deranged mind of Mister Fusty and hopefully a few humourous tangents will be found along the way.
First a little background. I’ve made two albums, Honest Blundering and Sparkle Darkly, which were both instrumental. For the third album the reasoning behind adding vocals was that I really wanted to write pop songs. A lot of the music on the previous two albums were pop songs albeit without singing. I could have added vocals then but I had a terrible microphone, which probably cost about £10, and I had no confidence in my voice. Of course I’ve now bought a new microphone (a Samson one, I forget the model, I could go and find out for you but I suspect you don’t really care) and my thinking was that if I spend some money on a mic, than surely I’d have to give singing a go. I was secretly hoping that really it was the cheapo mic that was making my voice sound terrible to my ears and that with a ‘proper’ microphone I’d suddenly be able to sing. It hasn’t really worked out like that. Although a better quality microphone has made me a bit more confident. So vocals are go go go!

The way I’ve always recorded is in small chunks. I’m not like a real musician that books studio time and then goes in for a month or two (or years in some cases). I record at home, (yes, I’m one of those ghastly home recording musicians you read about) which means I can work whenever I have time or dash into the studio (ok, it’s actually a spare bedroom) whenever I have an idea for a cowbell sound. It’s usually a couple of hours here and there, usually at weekends. I guess you could say that the work on this album started around the summer, the (misguided) hope was that I’d have it finished by the end of the year. Although getting married certainly holds things up, as I have done recently, not that I’m complaining – it was a wonderful day. So it’s looking like it will be a spring release, but who knows? The good thing about being an independent musician, free of the constraints (and money) of record companies is that you have no deadline. So you can work at your own place, which is good when you have to work for a living in a full-time job.
It also means you can throw out EPs and such whenever you want. Which is something I may do prior to this album, as a free taster of what’s to come. Who knows, there maybe an EP in time for Christmas!
So far I’ve got one finished track called, “Closing Time”, which is the very first track I’ve done with vocals, you can hear a rough mix on the myspace page. I also have several half-finished, nearly-finished and sketchy ideas. More about them in the next part as I’ve realised I’ve probably taken far too much of your time already…