Episodes
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“The Big One” is a reflection about forecasting fear that cannot be known. There’s a story about an earthquake. There’s invented open tunings, and open hearts, there’s crying in bed at night in the woods of a military base. There’s a multidude of studio musicians, artful scoring and arranging, and a smart, eager protagonist ready to face her fears. This song, along with a few favorites on Lizzie Weber’s new album Fidalgo, goes super cinematic folk rock.
For this episode, Lizzie provided the demo she and her guitarist used as the foundation, plus, ten isolated instrument and vocal groups from recording and mixing engineer Sheldon Gomberg, executive producer.
Season 3 of Songs Out Loud episodes are taped in front of a live audience. For this one, we gathered in the upstairs lounge of The Royale Food & Spirits. Weaving isolated instrument and vocal tracks in and out of personal narratives, Songs Out Loud Breaks it down: instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, and beat by beat.
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The 442s did something special last month. They removed the precious from a genre widely endangered by pretense. Yes, they’re a chamber band: a folk-leaning classical and jazz hybrid. But their new album can accompany a Mother’s Day brunch just as well as a 4-20 afterparty. If you wanna hear John Denver, you will. If you wanna hear John Cage, you will. Need some Praire Home Companion vibes? Have a seat. Busta Rhymes? Travis Barker? Right this way. .
For this episode, "The Mess" by the 442s, Adam provided the 14 page score plus his phone recording from an early version. Shock City Studios recording and mixing engineer Sam Maul broke me off twelve isolated instrument and vocal groups to play with, and he joins the conversation too.
Season 3 of Songs Out Loud episodes are taped in front of a live audience. For this one, we packed into historic Judson House in Grand Center. Weaving isolated instrument and vocal tracks in and out of personal narratives and original demos, Songs Out Loud breaks it down: instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, and beat by beat.
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Episodes manquant?
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On Halloween weekend 2022, a small group of us gathered in a lounge above The Royale Food & Spirits to hear Stan Chisololm deconstruct his single “Smitten.” Later that night, Stan would play an all vinyl DJ set. To help set the scene, you might picture Stan sitting on a black leather couch wearing the Bjork swon dress from her Academy Awards appearance in 2001 back in her Vespertine days.
[“Hi I’m Stan aka 18andCounting…”]
[Theme]
Stan Chisholm, aka “18andCounting” is an experimental DJ and emcee. He’s also a graphic artist and muralist with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from The Art Institute Of Chicago.
[I’m a grimey art kid]
He’s co-founder of open concept arts venue Blank Space on Cherokee St. and a Board Member of the New Music Circle arts collective. He’s won numerous academic scholarships and music awards holds DJ residencies at places like The City Museum, The Royale and Spark and occasionally performs and records under the name “The Only Ensemble”, notably at Loufest 2017. Mid pandemic, he landed a track on fellow artist Nathan Cook’s afrofuturist compilation entitled AfroFuturism St. Louis. Last summer, his album Some Sort Of Future cemented 18andCounting as lyricist and emcee in the most complete way to date.
For this episode, Stan provided 61 individual instrument and vocal tracks (and 26 AUX buses) AND a track laying around from 2015 that would eventually become verse one.
Songs Out Loud breaks it down, instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, and beat by beat.
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Retro Champ is a heavy metal singer and MC who’s 2022 EP No Mercy is the third such release since 2019. “Truth” is one of the heaviest songs on the album, which he recorded with producer & songwriter Ben McGuiness. For this episode, I received seven instrument and vocal groups from that song’s multitrack session and talked with Retro about his creative process. In addition to the stem files, he shared two voice memo files from initial stages,
Songs Out Loud is independently produced, engineered, designed and mixed by Aaron Doerr. Photo by Harry Boston. Theme music and graphic design by Aaron Doerr.
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Classically trained electronic musician and singer Syrhea Conaway composes and performs under the name Syna So Pro. This is the story of how one song became two new songs. It all started with cutting up “The Pretty One”.
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Cover Design by Aaron Doerr, Photograph by Tiffany Sutton
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Kevin Koehler is a multi-instrumentalist singer and songwriter as well as live sound engineer and owner-operator of Lucy SoundLab. When he’s not playing guitar for the rock band iLLPHONICS, Kevin writes and performs under the name Obviously Offbeat. It was July of 2021 when he released an album of folk-inspired indie rock & pop music. The song “A Conversation With God” is from that album, “Infinite Will”, and for this episode, he shared nine multitrack stems of instrument groups and two phone recordings of the early stages of the song’s origin.
Photo: Brian McClelland
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Tree One Four is a reggae rock jam band with two albums to their name. Their most recent album, 2021’s Exhilarama, solidified the band’s official lineup. And just so you know, the song we deconstruct on this episode references personal struggles with depression. Like many artists, guitarist, singer and songwriter Brad Millabeats finds utility in songwriting when dealing with life’s hardships.
For this episode, Gabe Usery at Encapsulated Studios provided six multitrack session files of instrument and vocal groups. The band recorded this song “Hell” and another song “Amen” as two songs with a gapless transition which confused the term “intro” between Brad and I at first. Anyway, shout out to Gabe for splitting all this up for me in the first place - we figured it out.
To begin, we’ll get a quick tour of the basement studio where Tree One Four rehearses, aptly called "the Treehouse". Songs Out Loud breaks it down, instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric and beat by beat.
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Guitarist Daniel Horrell aka “Monkh” epidimizes the hustle of a modern musician. His band Monkh and the People rocks funky R&B on big stages and his solo stuff grooves just as hard - even when it’s just him and an acoustic guitar.
He’s got a playlist on Soundcloud of thirty three guitar hooks like “Monkh 144BPM G#m Lead 3” for producers who might be browsing, and his latest single is a minute long track for sale as an NFT on Opensea. A compilation of all nine of these tracks - Levels - was just released on bandcamp.
The music for Level 1 - Astro is a combination of twenty six separate files of instrument and vocal tracks --well, twenty five if we exclude one titled “Classic electric piano don’t use_1” which we definitely got into. At the end of the episode we’ll play the finished song, which was composed deliberately alongside animation. You can find those videos on instagram. For this episode, I talked to Monkh about composing the music for Level 1 and we’ll hear the isolated tracks alongside his narrative. Songs Out Loud breaks it down. Instrument by instrument. Lyric by lyric. And beat by beat.
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The dramatic new single from Katarra Parson finds the singer/songwriter self-producing alongside a familiar roster of fellow musicians. Together, they explore a tension and release format that delivers dopamine rush after dopamine rush. With Andrew Gibson on drums, Tilton Yokley on bass, Joey Ferber on guitar and Jahi Eskridge on trumpet, “Loathe A Rose” escalates something that begins as an easy, latin, groove-based piano-jazz number into an embattled tango of emotional psychedelia. Somewhere along the way, a vulnerable protagonist steps through a restless soaring ballad to embrace a righteous and powerful sensuality. The sheer aesthetics of it all make this full length debut (the radio edit is two minutes shorter) fly by a lot faster than the eight and a half minutes it actually measures out to.
This song was recorded by Daniel Merhman at Midtown Studios and Katarra granted me six multitrack session files of individual instrument groups that constitute the final master. On this show, you’ll be hearing those isolated instrument tracks alongside Katarra’s narrative. She sat down at her piano to walk us through her creative and technical process. Songs Out Loud breaks it down instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric and beat by beat.
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Things got serious for Daemon after moving back to St. Louis from Los Angeles in 2016. Since then, his music has landed alongside everyone from Bernie Sanders to DJ Shadow. His brand new single “Turn The World Around” was released last week and is featured in the XBOX exclusive open world racing game Forza Horizons 5. For this episode, we’re going back to 2017 for a deconstruction of his song “With The Gang” co-written and produced with his longtime collaborator Adrians Beats of the former Jupiter Studios in St. Louis.
Along with Daemon’s personal reflections, you’re about to hear the individual parts of the song that make up the whole. For this episode, I’m using seven individual files from the original multitrack session to bring us augment Daemon’s narrative about the creative process behind this song. We’ll hear clips other stuff that comes up along the way too, like his new single Turn The World Around which was just released last week.
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Beth Bombara writes, records and performs folk rock with the backing of three other musicians, one of whom she’s actually married to. Since moving to St. Louis in 2017 she’s accumulated seven albums including 2019’s Evergreen. Ideas for songs on this album originated in part from time she spent at a cabin in Colorado, which is where we’ll begin rebuilding this song. For this episode, Beth supplied two personal phone recordings and also an instrumental mix and a vocals-only mix from the studio.
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Looprat is a jazz & hip hop collective made up of musicians, producers and emcees who write and record music in a wide combination of members - almost a dozen total. Their name pays homage to their University City origins and their style celebrates the diversity they’ve found together. For this episode, producer & emcee Nate King aka “Nat King Flo” supplied eighteen files for their track “Still Saucin”. It’s number fifteen (out of sixteen) on a compilation of sorts they put together during the coronavirus lockdown aptly titled “Locked In The Lab”. The album is streaming exclusively on their website while the band releases tracks as video singles.
“Still Saucin” features a verse by emcee Armani Abomb who was unable to record for this episode. So this is Nate and fellow producer and instrumentalist Sam Katz as they remember their way back to pre-pandemic times for this collaboration.
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The 7 current members who makeup the Midwest Avengers are equal parts treble clef and comic book, skate park and gospel choir, drumline and beat box, headbanger and hip hop. Their latest single “Love On Fire” started off in rehearsals as a funky little messing around diddy and became a full blown rap-rock centerpiece after it just sort of clicked for everyone. For this episode Alex Saint Cin, at Lighthouse Studios, gave me every last file he had from his sessions (just to punish me i guess) everything from the mic underneath the snare drum to the uncompressed vocal ad libs - we’re talking over 125 tracks total. (I used about 70. More on that some other time.)
This podcast is a song deconstruction documentary about songwriting. What is a song deconstruction documentary? It where an artist picks a song of theirs, shares all the files that make up that song, and talk about the varies pieces. It’s a detailed look at the writing and recording of a song and the creative process behind it. Using isolated instrument and vocal tracks called multitrack stems, supplied by the recording studio, along with personal reflections from the artists themselves, Songs Out Loud breaks it down -- instrument by instrument, lyric by lyric, and beat by beat.
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Brian Owens sings soulful Motown inspired R&B songs with his band the Deacons of Soul and his community outreach centers around giving underserved youth the opportunity to experience music making. His latest album shares cowriting credits with some of them but for this song we’re going back to twenty seventeen when it was Brian Owens that did the learning -- from none other than Doobie Brother substitute vocalist turned full time lead singer Michael McDonald. The two revisited a song Brian Owens and the Deacons of Soul first recorded some years back on what Brian calls his ‘demo album’. That song got the proper treatment on the two thousand seventeen album “Soul Of Ferguson”. They both grew up singing gospel music in church in Ferguson, Missouri and they both went on from there to reflect messages of their faith in careers as singers and songwriters.
For this episode, Brian shared nine multitrack session files and we’ll start by hearing him shower Michael McDonald’s vocal performance with some much deserved praise for inspiring Brian to step it up. Here’s Brian talking about the singing that changed it all for him.
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Dan Rubright is a jazz guitarist and composer who plays and records with various St. Louis based ensembles - his latest collaboration released an album called Dan Rubright Group and features nine original compositions with fellow musicians bassist Chris Turnbaugh, pianist Nick Schlueter, and drummer/recording engineer Steve Davis --who wasn’t able to get the stems for the recording, but Dan happily handed over a bunch of practice recordings he made on his phone when he was working out the parts during the writing process. We'll hear comparisons between the work and the result in this debut instrumental episode.
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Leponds is the musical creation of artist Lisa Hudei. In this episode we’re taken on a ride through the making of her song “The Hollywood Baby” from her most recent album “Lean To” from 2019. It features the same imaginative and expressive songwriting and performances that earned her past two albums (2016’s “Heat” and 2018’s “I Was Dancing With My Dream Team”) universal praise. Our talks were taken from two separate recordings I had with her and she supplied seven stem files to help tell the story.
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The new single from alternative rock band Foxing was released approximately ten days before it was released. It was about two weeks ago the band began retweeting recorded renditions of their new song by fans who hadn’t heard the song yet --because it hadn’t come out yet. But, we found out, the song’s chords and lyrics could be uncovered by completing a round of clever text-based gameplay on the band’s album release site.
I didn’t know any of this at the time of my chat with lyricist and singer-instrumentalist Conor Murphy mostly because it had only just begun.
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The funk, soul and hip-hop fusion band iLLPHONiCS are aligning with moon cycles in 2021 to release new music written during the pandemic. The song "Kobe" illuminates the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant's inspirational affect on the band who idolized him in their youth as an example of excellence and achievement. In this episode, emcee Larry “Fallout” Morris and keyboard/backup vocalist Keith Moore examine lyrics and personal contributions to this passion project.
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Adopting fundamentals from reggae, soul and hip-hop, the six-person ensemble Mathias & The Pirates command our attention to social injustice today with the same conviction as they did in 2017 when their song “The Panic Button” was released. Founding members and emcees Mathias and Ms. Vizion unravel their musical activism from two separate but equal perspectives. They share their musical objectives and creative process with this song and we hear from engineer and producer Matthew Sawicki who contributes regularly to the group.
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Rapper/producer Mvstermind was a very young father and husband during the writing processes for the song that would become “his fight song”. “SQUARE UP” was released on the first of the three-EP-series BEGREATFOOL. “BE” came out in November of 2020. Part 2 “GREAT” is due out any week now. I talked with Mvstermind and co-producer Owen Ragland about making the song and they supplied me with 12 stems and a bunch of rehearsal recordings and early concept demos.
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