Princeton
Making New, Wavy Dreams
Jan 30, 2010
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Stunner Shades In Heaven
original version appears on Cocoon Of Love
This daytrotter session was the first time we ever attempted a live version of this song. The version that appears on the album was very slow and melancholy, and for this session we thought we would showcase the songs dancier moments. The track is about close friends and sustaining one mood throughout an entire song. The title alludes to a solo album I recorded in college that was never released. The album was called 'Stunner Shades' and 'Stunner Shades in Heaven' is all about nostalgia and the power of memory and loss.
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The Wild
original version appears on Cocoon Of Love
There was a point on this tour, about a month and a half in, where things started to go horribly wrong. We were ill, driving through the desert, hallucinating, taking seven hour days in the van, drinking too much cough medicine, sleeping on couches and floors, wondering when the end would come, wondering whether or not we could get through the 7000 miles we still had ahead of us. It was kind of a helpless feeling. We felt sick. The inside of the van smelled sour and dead. It all crystallized one morning at the end of October, waking up someplace in Oregon. We realized that we had to reach Ohio in three days and that made it all kind of snap. Tired, listless, lost and dejected we drove onward and just sort of went numb. Three weeks later we arrived in Rock Island for our last show of the three-month tour. We picked 2 songs from our album "Cocoon of Love" we had never played before and spent half of the session setting up every keyboard, guitar, distortion pedal we could find. Luckily the other bands who were supposed to come in for the day had cancelled, so we used up both of those sessions. We played the songs for as long as we wanted, the whole thing took about 6 hours. 'The Wild' was done in a single take at the end of the session.
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Sugar Cube
unreleased
Yo La Tengo is one of our favorite bands. We had started playing the song a few weeks earlier. We had been listening to 'I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One' a lot in the van and everyone liked it, so it seemed like a nice idea to play the song. We could never be as loud as them though, their amps must be crazy because they're one of the loudest bands I've ever seen and most of their songs only have guitar, bass and drums.
The last time the boys from Princeton were featured on Daytrotter - not even a year ago - I wrote about how they made this scholarly sort of indie rock and roll and alluded to a hypothesis that very well seemed to be an exact certainty, that they had read serious books, ones that made you feel smarter just by holding them and tracing your fingers across the imprinted title font on their covers. None of those thoughts have been replaced, and while the band has maintained these mannerisms and proclivities of style and substance (not at all bad things), making a different variety of the efforts that the current chart-toppers Vampire Weekend are making, the California band has led us into a slightly reformatted place with its latest record "Cocoon of Love," and an encore session that carried with it new rules and desires. They came into the studio, with their ragged and dying boat shoes sticking to their feet, and they insisted that they basically wanted to mess stuff up a little bit. They wanted their songs to not sound like their songs so much, but to be reworked and spacey, owing more to psychedelic rock and roll of old, than to any specific kind of sweet, modern-sounding music. It has its share of nautical feels - with thick skies that are known to the aristocrat sailors and boats still tied up in the quiet bays at dawn - but there's also that hint of the rambling soul, the cross country movement of a bunch of kids seeking answers or an old, homeless hobo, tucking himself into the back of a train car with a tattered paperback and an old dog for a companion. It's all of these things, plus so much more that are presented in the wonderfully complex and beautifully drowsy medley of "Stunner Shades In Heaven" and "The Wild," both songs from the new long-player. For the session, it was the band's wish to have the time to meticulously remodel their songs into drastically different versions of themselves, leaving distinguishing characteristics, but changing everything else - not at all sticking to what they were comfortable with, what they always played. Over the course of nearly five hours, they continued to play and mess around with these three songs until they felt as if they had the right combination of then and some unknown now, reshaping the songs into extreme reflections of their former selves. The two songs and their transition into one another feels like a willingly ravaged sea, with the waves just acting as wrinkles crashing over with time and the drums, keyboards and guitars acting as witnesses, as if they were at the most gorgeous wedding imaginable. Waves becoming waves, like a series of real-time, impressionistic paintings - the paints wet and mingling together like party guests. We try not to fawn too much over these sorts of new dreams.
Princeton Official Site
Princeton's Debut Daytrotter Session
Kanine Records
