On Safe-Cracking and Rubella

The opening track on The Philosophy of Velocity is actually a minimalist piano version of a crazy psyche-freak-out song that didn't make the final cut for the finished product. (It's a shame because I listened to it earlier this afternoon and was blown away.) We wanted to set the mood from the get-go with an introspective Amelie-inspired etude that also established the Author theme. The typewriter was recorded at a farmhouse in rural Indiana with a condenser mic over the top of a Woodstock brand typewriter from the 1920's (it was an ebay find) that looks like this:



It's unbelievably heavy, and I sometimes use it as a door-stop or to keep the trailer from rolling. I bet it would also really mess up your car if you ran over it. There's a point on the track where the clicking stops longer than usual, and that's where a bunch of keys got stuck together and I had to reach in and get them back to normal as smoothly as possible. And for you audiophiles with $200 headphones, you can hear Aaron's ghost guitar murmuring underneath it all.

I remember writing this on my laptop one freezing morning in Ottawa, Ontario. The actual version on the record, however, was recorded using a real flesh-n-blood piano and I'm honestly a little disappointed in myself because I played the part in two passes – one for the right hand part, and one for the left hand part. (Nic, virtuoso that he is, has since learned to play both parts with both hands).

And now you know…the rest of the story.

Yers,
Jonathon Christopher Newby of Brazil