i wrote "Curacao Blue" in the fall of 2006. i wrote it in the same couple of days that I wrote "I Told a Lie," and i assumed that no one would ever hear either song. they were both just too personal. but then i played them for a couple people who really responded to them, so i ended up using them as real songs, and im glad i did. we we first started going through the songs for the record, i remember sapone saying that he loved the way the vocals sounded on the demo. its kinda funny though, cause the reason for the super-hushed vocals was that my roommate was asleep when i first wrote the song, so i had to be super quiet recording it. i liked the sound of that, so i had recreated it in the following versions, and it ended up sticking all the way through the final one. this song went through a bunch of different versions, including one where it was combined with "i told a lie," but eventually, after listening to a lot of pedro the lion, it turned into a kinda sparse acoustic guitar, bass and drums kinda song. obviously in the final version theres a lot more than that going on, but that was the kinda inspiration for the vibe. the drums were the first thing we recorded when we got up to long island, so it was a nervous and exciting time. anthony used brushes but still played a real solid and groove-based part, which i thought was cool. sapone was playin around with having a mic upstairs in his kitchen, which we ended up using on all the songs, and it made me super excited about how everything was going to sound. he knew exactly what kind of drum stuff i wanted. i remember we had a lot of discussions about the drum pause after the first chorus and how long it should be. its like my favorite part in the song, which is cool because i totally never wouldve thought of it myself. according to my notes, we didnt do anything else on the song until day 8, when we did like everything else. the acoustic guitar was done in his kitchen, which was sweet whenever the fridge wasnt humming. the lead parts were my gibson nighthawk through a vox ac50 and doubled with this awesome old gibson acoustic that felt like it was gonna break in my hands. i remember that was kind of a last minute idea, so i was standing up like 6ft from the mic in the kitchen doin it. it was a real hard guitar to play but sounded amazing. the bass is actually sapone's synthesizer run through a bunch of pedals. we just thought itd be cool to mix it up and do it with synth instead, and i think it worked real well. then while we were doing the bass, we came across those other weird pianoish-keyboard sounds that we used in the pre-chorus and bridge. those parts were run through an electro-harmonix memory man delay, a deluxe reverb unit, e-h POG, pulsar tremolo, a chorus pedal, and the vox ac50. whew. tonz of stuffz. this song was a cool experience cause it went from just to drums to almost finished in like one day. instant gratification is rare and awesome. also, anthony came up with the drum outro when we were practicing back in louisville. he basically just kept playing once everything else was done, but it was sweet and made me wanna freestyle. when sapone was sending me mixes of this one, we kept fighting over the bass level. i was all like, "GIMME MORE BASS!" and he was all like, "srsly? theres tonz!" and then a few days later i realized that i had the bass turned down in my car. whoops! my bad!
