Here we are at week 3, and we have a killer Indio Girls song, "Tried to Be True".

I grew up listening to Indigo Girls, because my mom would put them on when she cleaned on the weekend, though I never really dove deeper until I was an adult. I had mostly heard the live version of this song, but eventually went back and listened to the whole self titled record, which the studio version appears on, and thanks to Adam Scott and Scott Aukerman's REM podcast (RU Talking REM Re: Me?) I found out that Mike Mills, Bill Berry and Peter Buck were the backing band on the recording.

It's funny, and kind of sad, that Indigo Girls get kind of shrugged off as only for a niche audience, but holy hell, they're just amazing songwriters. The lyrics to this song hit me straight in the heart when I looked them up to record the vocals, especially the bit at the end that weaves between the other two hooks. I felt so moved that I'm including them here:

"I bought my love a hunger
more precious than a stone.
All these fatal flowers,
did I misguide you?"

This one was the first of this project that I needed an acoustic guitar, and i used some tricks from a recent recording to simulate a 12-string, because I don't own one, with the help of the Octave up feature on the Boss MD-500.

I added the dreamy key pad at the beginning, well, because it sounded dreamy and i liked it, and I needed a little atmosphere. From there I just kinda kicked up the rock a little bit, because the energy just got moving once I got into it. I got to use my new bass head (a Mesa Bass 400+) for the first time while tracking this song, and just the warmth of the tubes and the really tight pocket of the bass lines in this song (Mike Mills is a beast) made me really happy on how it came out. For Emily Saliers' fun little lead part, I used my recently rennovated BLM Pride Drive (a pedal that rhymes with Pull Chive, but without the bigotry) into my Slick-18 with my SG holding it down.

I gotta say, Peter Buck is one guitar player that is fairly difficult to mimic. I don't know if it's just his instinctual way of playing being different than mine, or he's a wizard, but his little picking parts were the hardest part of this song; a song that was really easy and breezy to record. It's also the first song I sent to Kevin to listen to that didn't have a need for an adjustment. It made me really proud.

Thank you guys for checking these out, it really means the world to me, and the fact that we can to a tiny bit of good with the musical tools I have, makes me think buying all this gear wasn't for naught (HA).

Funds from this song, like all in July, goes to the Movement for Black Lives. See y'all next week.

Much Love,
Rocky