Surprise 7"
Souvenir Stand is led by Stephanie Cupo who is someone I was interested in working with because she shares similar tastes in music. She had done previous releases with her band, but fell victim to a problem I encountered in the past when trying to get your music recorded. All of the recordings I enjoy generally have some unique signature on them. I'm not as interested in making something recorded clean and transparent versus going for a unique sound. The problem is that most commercial engineers aren't going to work with you if you are looking to "mess up" a recording. So if you walk into a session asking for a Phil Spector sound, they'll nod their heads and be like "Yeah, yeah, Be My Baby, I can nail that."
Next thing you know, they are isolating every instrument, putting six mics on each drum, sending the drums down to 12 tracks ("don't worry, we can leave out the extra tracks, but we'll have them for mixing if we need them"), and comping vocal performances from 85 takes. You end up with something sounding like the Honeydrippers instead of the Ronettes. Not to trash Souvenir Stand's previous recordings, but I think they fell victim to this approach. So Stephanie was up for recording using the limitations of 60s recording techniques to get that sound.
So this 7" is the result of that process. They were recorded to tape, bounced down to lay down more tracks, and attempt to capture that organic sound of a mid-60s recording. As we were tracking the songs we ended up shifting directions a lot so the songs evolved in the studio over time. You can hear remnants of some of the previous directions that left their echos on the tape.
