Search - The Leif Arntzen Band :: TLAB

Laid back spooky acoustic grooves, soaring etheral folk rock poems and melodies inspired by Scandinavian, Wales, Canadian, West Coast and New York City. This music was conceived, written, arranged and eventually recorded during an endless series of late night rehearsals in Leif's basement. The transition from "Chet Baker tribute jazz quartet" to "original-acoustic-slightly-psychedelic-folky-rock-band" being somewhat unprecedented, the band spent countless nights in the workshop massaging Leif's moody melodies into different musical landscapes, searching for a still point between our two passions as improvising musicians and as lovers of song. (You can take the band out of Chet but you can't take the Chet out of the band?) Arrangements were labored over, rehearsed, tweaked, discussed, discussed, discussed, and trashed. Ideas were encouraged, considered, noted, and rejected. Four-part vocal harmonies were attempted. Jazz chords were auditioned with the most rigorous standards for relevance, purpose and aesthetic pleasure. In the end, all that remained from the beginning were Leif's vocal melodies, their precious emotional cargo frightened, but intact. Having spent so much time working on this music in such an intimate and now familiar setting, we all agreed, eventually, that we would rather record here in the basement, with whatever equipment we could scrape up, than to try to relocate our delicate muse in the sterile, sound-proofed, pay-by-the-hour isolation chambers of the modern recording studio. So, we rounded up a few ancient microphones from Leif's mysterious past, placed them around the room, and just played, the idea being to capture the sound of the music as it was in the room, the sound we had been listening to all along, rather than the sound of each isolated instrument pieced together via computer. Leif sang through his old PA system. I played Leif's guitar. Vito made runs for tea and chocolate. Will tried to keep his f-hole near a microphone. I tried, less successfully, to keep my mouth hole away from a microphone. It all went just according to plan. Now that it's done, one of the most satisfying things about playing these songs is hearing the echoes of those early versions float harmlessly by in the air, like slowly passing by the scene of an accident, and knowing that, while we may not have gotten it right, we took the time to make things a little better.