MORE YOU BECOMES YOU
DRAG CITY/DOMINO, 1998
One seamless suite of swooning, Bacharach-style piano bar wizardry. Not as effortless as that might sound…
The expectation from the people around me was that we do some more recordings in a similar vein to the single. I felt that was going to be a very big undertaking, and also one that I wasn’t really sure if I had the infrastructure in place to pull off. We had major-label A&R people coming out to some of the shows, and it all started to make me really look at what I was doing or why I was doing it. The concerns were that I didn’t necessarily want to play to expectations, and also losing creative control. These were big things that I had to look at and think about, and I guess I just kept thinking about it and thinking about it until it became less of an issue. So intentionally or not, I moved away from having to follow up in a way that would have made those concerns more pressing.
With More You Becomes You,
I felt like I was able to pull it back to where it was more manageable or within my grasp. However, that said, as much as it seems like it’s just a piano and a vocal, it’s a very produced record – just not in an overt way. I actually have a hand-truck full of tapes… there were so many different sessions, so many different takes. And different pianos!
I guess if you’re really into pianos, you could probably hear when it’s the 12-foot Steinway or if it’s a smaller Bösendorfer or whatever. But we were able to take all these different sessions and different moments and put them just where they needed to be to create this effect of a tape machine being turned on and songs being played.