We are so pumped to bring you our new featured artist A Million Years. My Audio Bio has recently relocated to New York and it is only fitting that we feature one of the truly great local acts from Brooklyn.
For being only a few years old, A Million Years has developed an amazingly original and unique sound… that said, if you like Wilco, Radiohead, MGMT (all in my top 10)- you’ll love these guys.
We want to thank Keith, Nick, Andrew and Andrew for putting together some really compelling stories about their music. We had slotted AMY to be featured a few weeks ago, but we were delayed by the release of the MAB iPhone app. We hated to delay because the tracks they provided us to feature in the MAB player are SO good, and we couldn’t wait to share. So please check out the tracks in the player, read the stories behind them (below) and check out the A Million Years MAB profile as well as their official My Space Page for more AMY content, pics and to buy songs. You can also get their album Mischief Maker on iTunes.
California Smile
We have a few different styles when it comes to writing songs. Sometimes
Keith will
send out a demo and everyone will take some time at home and work on parts and we all come in to rehearsal with some ideas of what direction we want to take the song. Other times we’re in the studio and a song gets written spontaneously out of a jam. California Smile definitely falls into the latter category. One day in rehearsal Nick just started playing the guitar riff and I remember being instantly blown away by it. At the time Nick was still pretty new in the band too, so I was so happy to hear something so awesome coming out of the new guy. I started playing the first drum beat that came to my head and with the exception of a few fills here and there, that’s the exact beat I ended up playing on the record. Andrew Samaha also had this beautiful, melodic bass fill and wasn’t sure how often he should play it, or where to place it and we worked through some options and ultimately decided that we would get the most out of it if he only played it once and holds off of playing it until the final chorus. So now it’s like the whole song is building to that moment for me and every time we get there it just feels perfect.
Fortune
Contrary to a song like California Smile, Fortune comes from a demo that Keith sent us. I’ll never forget sitting at my computer listening to Fortune for the first time. I was at a complete loss for words. I felt like I had just listened to one of the most beautiful songs I’d ever heard and I had absolutely no idea what I could possibly contribute to making that song any better than it already was. To me we just needed to figure out a way to play that song so we didn’t mess up what was already so perfect about it. That’s when we decided that we should all step outside of our comfort zone a little and try something new. So I decided to get away from my drums and arrange an organ part. I definitely feel like that was the best decision I could have made. It was a pretty special moment recording that song too. We decided that Keith and I would try to play the song together in one take, completely free of a click track and just go for it, so that’s what we did. And the result is quite possibly the song I’m most proud of ever being a part of.
Incandescent
This one always reminds me of dusk, or twilight and there are a few really good reasons for this. When I first wrote the song I had been cat-sitting for my friend Milena’s (of the band Pin Me Down) family. They had this tiny, but amazing apartment in a 6 story walk up in the West Village. I was sitting in their living room watching the sun go down and just messing around with the piles of guitars they have in their house and within minutes the entire song came to me and I started to record the first demo for it. About a year later when the band was in the studio recording our Incandescent EP, this particular song was the last one we were mixing and in the middle of a long session decided to take a break. We headed up to roof of the studio and discovered that the clouds started taking on these weird shapes and the sky had changed to this bright orange color. It was definitely a byproduct of New York City pollution, but beautiful nonetheless. Coincidentally it was sun-down again and to me at least, the recording ended up sounding the way that sky looked.
Suspicious
This one probably started out as me trying to rip off MGMT and instead turned into something else altogether. The reason for this would be that a Mr. Nicholas Werber had recently become the band’s newest recruit. Suspicious might have ended up tossed in the trash pile had it not been for one particular rehearsal session where Nick, Andrew S. and I started working on the idea for the last section of the song. Nick was making all these amazing technicolor sounds come out of his amp and effect boxes. Prior to his introduction to the band I don’t think we had anything like that and very quickly we knew, or at least I knew, that the direction of the music was going to change. For me, that moment is probably the beginning of Mischief Maker’s conception.
Dirt in the Ground
A lesson in trusting your first instincts. This is the oldest song on Mischief Maker. Written when I was in college and all my friends from home seemed like we had gotten sick of one another and were ready to go our separate ways. I had just finished reading John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, and became obsessed with the main character’s desire to keep moving away from everything familiar to him because he felt trapped. This is something that probably everyone wants to do and I struggled with the idea that maybe the guy was right for actually going through with it. I still don’t know. The original form the song took was similar to the electronic, echoey sound on the record but before coming to the conclusion that this was the best interpretation it had gone through some pretty awful arena rock arrangements. Just bad. In fact, I’m going to go burn those
tapes right now.
