Mark Nowlin's video: The Gland Rovers - Bring You Joy Gasoline Fire

Bring You Joy: A song of welcome, inspired musically by The Cramps and The Pixies. I realized many years later that the opening guitar figure was nicked unconsciously from the horn riff of Ray Charles’ “I’m Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town.” At 1623 Melrose, there was a small bedroom at the end of the hall with a floor of brown linoleum. It was a place in the tiny house that I carved out as what you might call a “man cave” today, although in the early ‘90s I am not sure that phrase had been coined yet. There was a spare bed, a stereo system, my records, my guitars, a keyboard, my Fostex 4-track tape recorder, a TV, a hi-fi cabinet, and a small bong. I spent a lot of time there during my first marriage. That room, and my need to have an hour or two of solitude in there from time to time, was the inspiration for “Bring You Joy.” Later, and later in the song, I kinda made my own head a clumsy metaphor for that room and my need to be alone in my thoughts at times. At the end of the song I find myself warily agreeing to admit entrance to my head and my next house to the next girlfriend. I recorded the vocals through my Fender Princeton guitar amp with the gain turned way up to distort them. Composed: circa 1990-91 and Feb-March 1994. Recorded: April 1994, 6021 Hughes Road, Lansing, MI. Gasoline Fire: Vaguely I remember staying up late, curled up in the wedgwood blue mother-daughter chair in the living room of my next house at 6021 Hughes Road, while the next girlfriend slept in the adjoining bedroom, writing the lyrics and thinking up the riff. Maybe just a tad too wincingly confessional, but in the early stages of my divorce, and already shacked up with another, I guess I could be forgiven for some mixed feelings about everything. I was trying to figure it out and not yet really ready or willing to take all of the blame but feeling horrified at what happened, all the same. I have always known that this song was to be joined at the hip with “Bring You Joy.” Composed: Late Winter 1994. Recorded: May 27, 1994, Hughes Road, 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 from the 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