I improvised maybe two takes and just cut them together a bit. It really came together when we had this very downcast, rainy day in March or April and I went over to his house again and was really depressed that day and didn’t feel like working at all, but wasn’t going to waste the time we had, so we set about really just fleshing out that middle section of the song and came away from it with the Auto-Tune, which Sean sang through the T-Pain app on my iPhone, and then doubled with proper autotune in Logic, and the keyboard solo, which Sean loves to make fun of me for because I played it with one hand while just looking at my phone, bored, he says. I waited about a year to record it, until Sean Mercer, the drummer, joined the band for the last stretch of the album, and I went over to his house one day and we played it through maybe two or three times, and then tracked guitar and drums for it live in about two takes, which is crazy to me still.Īfter that, we just kept adding to it and deciphering new parts of it bit by bit for the next couple months-we’d do vocals and some mixing one day, add guitars another, pianos when we were in the studio one night. Originally, I wrote that weird kind of angular riff and the opening part with the time changes when everyone in the band was steady listening to that Ava Luna record “Electric Balloon” nonstop-incredible record, listen to it if you never have before it’ll blow your mind. SAM RAY: So this was the first track written for the record but the last song actually finished for it.
So, so, so many things happen: vocals are normal or hollow or pitched-up or Auto-Tuned some songs are just dusty piano, while others have full bands, and some have only synths, or are almost house tracks, and yet others-my personal favorites-somehow combine all that into some of the best sample-based rock & roll in a decade. The 26-track It’s the Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir The Honeypot is aptly titled: said to be Teen Suicide’s final album (or maybe, again, just the last under this name), it is an all-inclusive, incredible LP basically only bounded by its running time. Or a similar range of sounds: frontman Sam Ray’s many remarkable projects always seem less like distinct entities and more like overlapping blobs on a weird Venn Diagram that encompasses every genre. I've never really understood the difference between Teen Suicide and Julia Brown, a band with a similar lineup and a similar sound. They always say they’re going to, but they never do-one of a few confusing, even frustrating, things about them. Teen Suicide should really change their name.