Fiach Moriarty

Many days and evenings were spent pre-producing this album. We would listen to demos of the songs, or Fiach would play them to us live on acoustic guitar. We jammed some songs out as a band, where Fiach felt the live version had something special. Many tunes got stripped back to their very basics: melody, chords, rhythm. We did this to move them away from their singer/songwriter origins and allow then develop into something of a much grander scale. Guitar songs became piano songs. The interplay of kick drums and bass guitar were crucial.

We worked out most of the sounds used in advance – guitar, keys, even vocal processing. We also listened to a lot of references. Simon added many new layers of colour to the songs with his piano parts, taking apart some chords and reassembling them in new guises, adding new intros, hooks, motifs. I worked with Fiach on guitar lines, hooks, some bass lines, and some of the electronic stuff. Fiach would then take away bounces of the demos, write new parts, talk to us about harmonies, and the process would continue that way.

I recorded the majority of the album in Bay Studio, Wicklow. Drums, bass, nearly all of the guitars, some keys, and all of Fiach’s vocals were tracked there. I recorded Simon’s piano part for “Mount Street Bridge” in Windmill Lane, on their lovely Steinway grand. Wallis Bird recorded her vocals for “Oil & Water” in Berlin and sent them over for us to mix, and Pat Daly recorded some fiddle and backing vocals in his own studio.

Drums and bass went down first with Fiach singing and playing along; we were careful to retain the ebb and flow of the songs’ pace by avoiding rigid click tracks. We went for full takes as much as possible, given that drummer Dave Lawless and bassist Phil Daly made for an incredibly talented, tight, and dynamic rhythm section.

For the acoustic guitar parts, a key element of Fiach’s music, I opted for more vintage style tracking with Mid-Side mic-ing, plate reverbs, vintage compressor emulations and older formula tape driven pretty hard. We were going for something between Neil Young, Simon & Garfunkel, and Suzanne Vega.

For the electric guitars we relied mainly on my collection of amps and guitars. We usually went for a single mic on whatever cabinet we chose, except for a deliberately nasty digitally distorted DI on “Nightingale”. I like to get the sound I want coming out of the amp first, and then based on the characteristics of the sound I have 4 or 5 mic/preamp/compressor combinations that I know will work to get that sound coming out of the monitors.

Main vocals were all done with a Blue Bluebird, using the Apollo’s Neve 88rs channel strip, and some combination of the various 1176s, Teletronix compressors, the Fatso JR, down onto the Studer with Ampex 456 loaded in running at 30 ips. I know, too much information right. BVs were something similar but using either an AKG 414 or an Audio Technica 4033. Whichever worked best.

Simon’s electric piano parts were sent out to my Hiwatt DR103 amp and Vox cabinet, which we mic’d up. All electronic programming was done in Whitespace, Dublin, as was all the mixing.