I teach music in Ankeny School of Performing Arts and Ames Music Studios. I was living in Ames at the time, and I came back from Ankeny after a day at work. I had been working on teaching a few drums students a specific drum beat that day. While I'm working with a student it's nice to give them something to play to, so I had been messing around with this specific chord progression in the key of D minor. The first chord of the song is actually one of my favorite chords to sit down at the piano and just play right away. D minor 9. A few of us Liberty House boys were living together on South 2nd Street, and so I asked Phil if he'd be up for recording something I had been working on that day. It was sort of late, but we went to work on it. He gave me a click track and first I just played the drum part and ad-libbed the feel and changes on the drums. For a lot of the drum tracking on this album we only used two microphones. I'm sure Phil might be able to remember the specs on those mics. The room we were recording in (my room at the Liberty House) had a decent high ceiling and a hard wood floor. Let's just say it was a nice warm and big sounding room. So was the living room for that matter. A lot of great Iowa music was captured in those rooms.
After the drums were done we moved on to Piano. Kate Kennedy had spent some time fixing up the piano we had brought into the house earlier that year. It was a dream come true for me to have an acoustic piano in the house I lived. Her efforts really helped me continue work on this album so I owe a big big thanks to Kate! As you can hear at the beginning of the track I hit the D minor chord and mention that "My seat's so squeaky." That piano bench was a piece. I think someone in the house accidentally broke it later on and then apologized right away to me. It was fine with me. It was impossible to record live piano sitting on that thing. I believe I played the piano part only once and just kept rolling with it.
The fun stuff happened when we brought out some synths for this song. Included on this track is my Yamaha DX-7 for synth-bass tones and manipulated and delayed settings from one of Phil's old school Casio's. One of my favorite parts of the entire album is at about the 1:43 spot of this song. The drum build up along with the arpeggiated distorted casio chords really made me feel like a sexy Ben Folds. In fact, I think we kept joking around calling this song the "Sexy Jazz Song" for a while. I ended up calling this instrumental piece "Stop" because it seemed like such a good piece to end a movie (or album) with. After dropping to D for "OK Computer" esque guitar parts (recorded with Phil and Garret Lorensen's Telecaster) and some fat mixing and production from Phil we have "Stop."