Introducing: Taxidermists’ “Needles To Say”

Winter 2023/2024 was the era of one microphone and a space heater. We had dialed in the position for this one decent condenser microphone in my garage and started recording what we thought were demos. After a year of reckoning and personal growth, the songs kept showing up.

We had a general list of song scraps in our word-search/sentence-matching way of writing. Work on the new album truly started one night in late November ’23, when we quickly recorded “Let the Music Save Them,” “Does The Wind Know,” and “2099” (a classic LUCY song reimagined rock band style). This off-the-cuff recording approach set the precedent for what would become the flow for the rest of 20247, while still being “demos.”

“Needles To Say” was part of the second batch of songs finished in one night, alongside “Grow Up.” Parts of both of these songs had been floating around since 2020. What I like to call “the hippie part” (instrumental) of “Needles To Say” was originally paired with the chorus of “Does The Wind Know.” By then it was orphaned, but Cooper had cooked up this cool repetitive chord progression for which he had a simple vocal melody. We put it together ABABA arrangement style and found the pocket.

The songs were recorded with that one decent mic through a Mackie mixer plugged into a TEAC 1/4” reel-to-reel that had no counter and got the instrumental take. I was convinced I could do an overdub on the other channel, but this is when I learned that due to the fact that the two tape heads only recorded and played back, we were out of luck. Fortunately, we had a little bit of a reel of 8-track 1/2” tape and my Tascam 38. We used one of those tracks for a transfer of the gritty quarter-inch mono track. Then overdubbing a vocal track on track two, a vocal and tambourine track on track three and we did a duo guitar part on track four. This left channels 5-8 for the same process with “Grow Up” while saving tape. We bounced the four-track into Logic and did a very simple mix in there. These songs were done by about midnight or 1am on this special December night.

— Salvadore McNamara

(Photo Credit: Harry Wohl)