Silk Screens: Campfires – “Gone Country Dream (For Bill Doss)”
Posted under: 
Jeff Walls of Portland’s Campfires opens up about the fragmented recording process behind his (forthcoming) debut LP Tomorrow, Tomorrow and shares “Gone Country Dream (For Bill Doss)“, a brand new track from the release.
Recording alone is simultaneously a great and terrible method of making music. There are no outside hassles or distractions but it can get tedious setting things up and re-taking tracks over and over to get the instruments to sync just right. I still love it though, even if it takes a long time. The goal is to make the song pass through as few of filters as possible between what I hear in my head and what someone else will hear. So no verbalizing the “feel” of it or explaining the chord progression, no one improving it or changing it (for better or worse). Sometimes when things work out right the song just takes its own direction, and my job is just to follow it. I still use pretty much the same method I did when I started recording when I was in high school– Get an idea, strum it out, record a drum loop, layer all the guitars and vocals, and then re-record drums at the end so that it has more dynamics. Sometimes it can take an hour or more to make a minute of music, but sometimes it just tumbles out and I can’t get it down fast enough. My favorite part of recording is that its really just dozens of little moments all melted together to form something that becomes completely different from each of them on their own. It almost feels like it comes alive by the end.
The image I made (below) to help illuminate my process is based on that idea: that the moments all get pieced together to form something bigger.
“Gone Country Dream (For Bill Doss)” is one of the many aural creations on Tomorrow, Tomorrow that further represents the image and thoughts detailed above.
Curated by Speaker Snacks.
