Serious fans, or ‘musos’ as my British friends would call them, often want to know where the ideas come from. How do you get from a lyric sheet to the finished product? How do you start with ‘a pile of notes’ and end up with a slick recording? Where do the arrangements get hashed out? It is one thing to research these old tunes, but just how do they turn into something like ‘Lukey’?

It is often a round-about journey. By way of explanation, and as a half-assed way of plugging my latest outside project, I figured I’d use a song I produced and arranged on the new Shanneyganock album, Fling Out The Flag.  Shanneyganock share some similarities with GBS, but they are also very different. The biggest fundamental difference is that band has neither played nor taken any interest in pop music. Their whole thing has been about making folk based music, just bigger and louder then what would be possible without electricity. Figuring out new ways to create pop music is not part of the picture. They are an accordion driven folk rock band, one of a handful in Newfoundland who tour nationally. And they are very conservative, much like their hardcore audience.

 I didn’t really like any of their previous albums. They always sounded half done to me, as if no one had cared enough to really dig into the material, or as if there had been some economic constraint that forced a one-take maximum on everything. Live, they were a much better band; too much better, really. Only an early live album managed to capture their physical presence. They are big men, and their sound and playing reflects that. Their albums sounded tiny to me, and I wondered why. 

 The world of serious accordion players in Newfoundland is a small one, so I have known Mark Hiscock, the accordion player and co-lead singer for longer than I care to think about. I met the band’s other leader Chris Andrews when he was a teenager, fronting his own pub band. Some time ago, we decided that at some ill-defined point in the future we would work together.  When my booking agency took Shanneyganock on as a client, we all decided that a fresh and innovative album was going to be a very necessary part of a new and improved package. Unfortunately, I was (and am) rather busy, so it took us over a year, with a day here and there, to get the job done.

 My approach for the album was to treat every song as an end in itself. They get a lot of airplay hereabouts – we were going to make the album as if it was a collection of singles. And they were going to sound as eclectic as possible. Offstage, they were listening and enjoying a wide variety of music. This was not reflected in their recordings. I wanted to define their sound as something modern, but also very traditional in its mindset. GBS is constantly striving to reinvent itself; this is not the Shanneyganock approach. They wanted, to quote David Lee Roth ‘more of the same, only different’. And, although no one was saying it, the playing, writing and actual sounds - everything - needed to get a lot, lot better.

 We had most of the album done when Chris came to me with the song ‘The Flag of Newfoundland’. One of Newfoundland’s most explicitly patriotic songs, it was lyrically suited to the band’s strong nationalist sympathies. Unfortunately, it was rather slow. While the song was an anthem, it sounded instead almost funeral hymn. Somewhere along the way Mark and Chris had decided to do it as a duet. This was not helping – their voices are nothing alike, and the contrast between their different approaches to the lyric was not working for me. I took the idea home and thought about it.

 First, we agreed that Chris would sing it. Although the higher parts would be a strain for him, his burly growl was better suited to the songs’ passion. Then I started listening to weird records, trying to find a good idea, something that would pull the song out of its banal hole. Somewhere along the way I dug out a compilation of glam rock from the UK, circa the early 70’s. This is a period close to my heart, and I have often found inspiration there. David Bowie’s early hit, ‘Rebel, Rebel’ almost leapt out of the speakers at me – it was the perfect model.

 Bowie’s song is an anthem, which is where we needed to begin. Obviously, the lyrics and tone have nothing to do with obscure Newfoundland songs. It did have a killer drum hook though, with a slamming downbeat. It was nothing at all like the country shuffle the band favoured, but slowed down a little, it was perfect for the song. I figured out a tempo, and got the band to record a rough demo. Later that night, with just a drummer and the engineer in the studio, I got him to lay down a new back-beat for the song, one based entirely on Bowie’s song. Over the next few days, we re-did all the band’s parts so they would sit better on top of the new back- beat. We added a key change at the end, and I played some low whistle and fiddle to darken the choruses, making them a little moodier and angrier. We then layered some background vocals, several parts each, until the chorus had the male choir effect I thought the piece needed. Now it was a powerful folk rock anthem, a song utterly unlike anything they had ever played before, but one that was a logical extension of their earlier work.

 To say the least, the band was dubious about it at first. The ‘Rebel, Rebel’ groove felt weird to them, slow and sluggish. This is one of the harder things about being a producer – you have to be able to see and hear what the final outcome will be even before a note has been recorded. If you can manage that, it is like putting the pieces into a puzzle. I knew the Bowie model would work for the song, but it was hard for the band to appreciate my vision. When they heard the final product, they understood.  And to the degree that bands like Shanneyganock have hits, ‘The Flag of Newfoundland’ has come to define their new sounds.

 Not many Newfoundland bands have looked to Bowie for inspiration. But if you are going to go ‘forward into the past’, you need to use every trick in the book.

 www.shanneyganock.ca