Silk Screens: Jackson Scott - “Evie”
Posted under: In our latest installment of Silk Screens, Asheville, North Carolina’s Jackson Scott details the creation of “Evie”, a new single from his TBA LP, Melbourne.
So I’ve been in Asheville, NC for a couple years. Started living in this house with some friends back in June. There’s no cable and we didn’t have internet until a few weeks ago. Really the only thing to do is listen to records and make art and well, gosh anyway, I’ve been into recording music for a while but started to really get obsessed with it a few years back. I haven’t been going to college since last spring because my parents wanted me to take a year off and work and get in state residence in NC, but I’ve basically been spending my college funds on avoiding getting a job, thinking about music, writing songs and other things…
My roommate got this Tascam 4-track cassette recorder last summer and I started to dig the idea of recording to tape. In September we saw Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees in Nashville, which was really sick, been a fan of both of them for a good while now. During the show, I found Ty and asked him how he recorded his album “Melted”. He said that he did it all on an 8-track.
So we got back to Asheville, and the campus bookstore I was working at fired me. So I started spending every day recording to the 4-track in my basement. Every time I grabbed an acoustic guitar I just wanted to sing creepy campfire songs so I decided to make an album’s worth of them…only a few ended up sounding like real campfire songs though. I think I got inspired after this campfire I was at last year, during which my friend put an empty liquor bottle with the cap on into the fire. I tried to take it out and it exploded in my face, I almost went blind in my left eye…
I think “Evie” sounds like a campfire song, it’s supposed to be about religion and different things associated with religion like Adam and Eve…it’s also supposed to be about evil and innocence, it’s not our fault humans are so fucked up you know. I started by recording the guitar with this kooky little nylon I have, then added bass, drums, tambourine and all that stuff…I also added this creepy old toy piano for the intro. I used a compression sustain pedal through the 4-track for pretty much everything, and then an echo pedal for some of the guitars and vocals. Then I played back all the cassette tracks into Garageband and converted all of them to mp3.
