White Denim

Album by album with the Texan four

FULL TIME HOBBY, 2008

The energetic, raw debut, selfproduced in an old caravan on the most basic of digital equipment STEVE TEREBECKI: The caravan’s almost mythical? It’s been so long it seems that way for me too. It was out in the hill country in Texas and it was surrounded by a cedar forest. It was real secluded, there was nothing around it except for [drummer] Josh’s cabin. That’s more or less where we recorded everything up to and including Last Day Of Summer. There was a Dell laptop, with Cakewalk, or maybe Cubase, I can’t remember. There was a Soundcraft eight-channel mixer and a couple of compressors that we sprinkled in throughout the first couple of years, some basic mics, there was a Leslie speaker that we used for probably all the bass stuff. Josh’s mid-’60s Gretsch kit, James’ Casino – that was about it. We stretched that gear out quite a bit, for sure! JAMES PETRALLI: We did sessions at a couple of studios in town, but we ended up liking our stuff more. We weren’t into paying the dayrate and watching the clock, and prioritising one thing over another. Like, we couldn’t spend a whole bunch of time getting a delay exactly right in the studio, so we pushed harder to have our own space so we could take time with effects. We used it as an opportunity to learn how to produce and write. At that time we were really listening to a lot of XTC and The Dukes Of Stratosphear. And that Squeeze record, Argybargy. We had lofty aspirations… We had “Let’s Talk About It” EP, and Full Time Hobby really liked those songs, so we put those on the album for the UK. [US debut] Exposion was the record we’d been making, which didn’t include the EP songs, so that’s how that ended up being two different records.