It started with a broken kick drum pedal somewhere outside of Austin. We'd been driving for six hours, the van smelled like old coffee and ambition, and Al had just snapped the spring on his favourite DW beater mid-practice at a gas station parking lot. The nearest music shop was forty minutes in the wrong direction. The nearest bowling alley with rental shoes and, as it turned out, an inexplicably well-wired back room - was eight minutes away.
We were only supposed to be there for an hour.
The Room That Shouldn't Have Worked
The back room at Lucky Lanes was used for storage and the occasional private party. The ceiling was low, the walls were covered in that textured foam panelling that hasn't been fashionable since 1987, and there was a decommissioned ball-return machine humming in the corner that we could not figure out how to turn off. It became the first track.
"The hum was in E-flat. Everything we recorded that night wanted to resolve to it. We stopped fighting it around midnight."
The ambient noise of the lanes - pins scattering, the low rumble of balls, the muffled sound of a jukebox two rooms over playing what we're fairly sure was a Fleetwood Mac deep cut - bled into everything we tracked. On paper, it was a disaster. On tape, it was a revelation.
What We Actually Recorded
Over three days, eating vending machine sandwiches and sleeping in the van, we tracked the bones of what became six songs. The kick drum issue, ironically, was solved by mic'ing the actual bowling ball return. The thud it made when a ball dropped into the cradle had more presence than anything we'd recorded in a proper studio.
- Track 1 started as a field recording of the humming machine
- Track 3 uses a bowling pin as a shaker - you can hear it if you listen close
- The bass on Track 5 was recorded through a PA speaker running in reverse
- We have no explanation for the whistling on Track 4
The owner, a retired postal worker named Dennis, didn't charge us for the room. He said it was the most interesting thing that had happened there since a local news crew filmed a segment on competitive seniors bowling in 2019. He also asked if we'd dedicate a song to his late cat, Pretzel. We did. It's Track 2.
Some of the bowling alley recordings will appear on the next record. We're still deciding which ones. Some things are too good - or too strange - to explain with liner notes.