Mark Nowlin's video: The Gland Rovers - Radio Dedication

Radio Dedication: I had the basic chord progression worked out in 1989, when I got my first cheap Casio keyboard, but it all came together with a profound rush of creativity some years later. I was playing “Songwriter” on this one. Not The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer,” and not The Cyrkle’s “Red Rubber Ball,” but instead Prince’s “Raspberry Beret” was the primary inspiration for this track. I was noticing that on the local alt rock radio station, more and more songs featured female singers, which can bring a certain sparkly presence to a tune. I asked the wife to sing lead on it, and I remember coaching her to take unnecessary breaths during certain phrases, so she’d sound more like Elizabeth Fraser of The Cocteau Twins. I think she did a great job on “a song she didn’t know.” My brother-in-law brought over his Telecaster and his Fender Twin Reverb and played the lead parts. The fun studio memory is of being down to one open track left on the Fostex, and squeezing the lead vocals, the lead guitar, and the tambourine onto it. It required sharing one mic but “live mixing” all three parts onto it. So the song ends with my lying on the brown linoleum floor rattling the tambourine under the mic stand that the wife was singing into, with the Twin Reverb near but not too near. When it was all in the can, the unthinkable happened. I accidentally recorded over some of it. So the three of us had to do it again another night. Each time, Baby Evan slept down the hallway, undisturbed by the whole racket. Composed: January 1993. Recorded: January-February 1993, 1623 Melrose, East Lansing, MI ------ The Gland Rovers - For Collectors Only Liner Notes The songs in this volume all were recorded on a Fostex X-15 four-track multitrack cassette deck between 1990 and 2002. The bulk, however, were recorded between early 1993 and early 1996, a period of substantive personal upheaval and loss for The Gland Rovers. This three-year period saw a marriage end, one serious, live-in relationship dissolve, and my mother die. The material was recorded in five different locales, three of which were my homes over this period. Needless to say, the personal turmoil and coming to grips with mid-life changes are central themes in nearly all of the original songs. In the early 2010s, I decided to transfer the analog cassette master tapes containing these songs to a digital format using Audacity. I transcribed each of the four tracks in each master sources separately, and then manually synched the audio tracks together. I cleaned up some tape hiss and tried carefully to overcome areas of degradation of the source material. My guiding principle when starting out was to stay true to the intentions of the original production, while taking only prudent liberties to use the newer digital technology to overcome certain technical limitations of the original four-track cassette format. As such, throughout the album there are instrumental tracks in some songs that are doubled and slightly delayed, to provide more richness and depth. Guitar breaks that had been dubbed onto the same track as the lead vocal were extracted and placed on their own digital track, to be able to mix them more effectively within the entire song. However it must be admitted that, once knuckles deep in the source material, I couldn’t resist using a few more of the available tools to enhance certain aspects of a few songs. “Radio Dedication” was doctored the most. Some extremely annoying closed high hat fills were painstakingly eliminated and effects applied to the lead vocal. Pitch correction was used sparingly in certain places in that song and some others, although it could be argued that it could have been used wholesale. There are other similar augmentations and fixes that will probably be obvious upon listening. All of the latest technological advancements cannot step around the fact that these tracks were recorded on a cassette recorder with non-professional grade equipment. The knobs on the “mixing board” were tweaked by non-professionals, and in the original masters some of the choices of performances to “bounce” together to a single track (such as lead vocal together with bass) were regrettably impossible to do much with during the digital remastering. In all, it is pretty obvious that this is not professional output. With some background about the production out of the way, a few words about the musicianship and songcraft. The Gland Rovers were amateur but enthusiastic musicians. The playing was very much inspired and a part of the “DIY” ethos prevalent in alternative rock music in the early ‘90s. Except for a few tracks, a real drummer or even a real drum is not to be found. As The Gland Rovers had no drummer, they used drum machines o