Due to a variety of health- and geography-related issues, we haven’t been very active recently. But we’re still best friends, and we’re still super proud of the music we’ve made together. To keep the fires burning, we’ve started a monthly series in which we dig into our catalog to tell the story of a song from our past. This month: Broadway Ghost, the second-shortest song we’ve ever released. One of the deeper cuts from our 2015 album The Longest Year on Record, Broadway Ghost is contemplative and airy, but packs an explosive finish.



The Writing Process:



Pete: Broadway Ghost actually started out as a solo guitar song Nick was writing. Before I moved to Toronto, we used to live together in a funky little house on the west side of Providence. One night, I heard him strumming the basic chord structure down the hall somewhere, and was immediately captivated. The thing is, Nick is almost never working on just one project at a time, and is often in a couple of bands simultaneously. So I heard this happening, thought it was awesome, and in about ten seconds became obsessed with playing on it. I ran downstairs to see if we could use it before anyone else had a chance to jump on it or before it got filed away for some non-Troop of Echoes purpose. Total song-embryo poaching. I tried to be cool about it, like “do you think this is maybe something we could work on, if you don’t have other plans for it?” He was like “Yeah, sure.” Nice.

I think Nick had most of the harmonic architecture in place before the rest of us did much with it. It had a pretty strong identity from the beginning, even if some things developed as we went. The rest of us got to work trying to figure out what we could bring to it, and that kept evolving right through the recording session itself.

I tried to write a sax part for the beginning of the song; I kept bringing them to Nick and he justly pointed out that they weren’t sounding right. As a group we decided the sax parts I was writing had too much stuff going on, so we kept cutting material until the opening part was just one-note-played-at-a-time. By this time it had become kind of the modus operandi of the album anyway, and almost became like a dare between each of us, like “see how much you can cut and get away with it.” “Fuck it! It doesn’t even have to be a real melodic line! Just play two notes per measure!” The sax part developed more later, but all I had at first was that beginning part. So the idea of playing “honk” *wait* “honk” *wait* seemed really silly at that point.

But as things took shape, Broadway Ghost started to become pretty magical. This one is a personal favorite of mine because the guitar sounds are so evocative. It sounds nocturnal and roving and mysterious to me.

Dan: In addition to the guitar parts, Nick also wrote some super rich trumpet harmonies for Broadway Ghost, which ended up playing a huge role in shaping the mood of the song. We were incredibly lucky to have Doug Woolverton record the trumpet parts for the album, and he absolutely killed it. He really understood what we were going for, and actually had a few ideas of how to maximize his harmonies.

Nick: Yeah, so the majority of the trumpet arrangement was worked out beforehand. After we recorded an early demo of Broadway Ghost, I dubbed the harmonies on guitar with a volume pedal to mimic trumpet swells. When Doug came to lay down his tracks, he had some great ideas for all of his parts, including adding a high harmony line to the end section that makes for a great climactic moment.

Doug Woolverton killing it in studio.





The Recording Process:

Pete: As we started the TLYOR sessions, I had a framework sax part in place, but the rhythmic delivery wasn’t solidified. Dan, Nick, and Harry had laid down the bass, guitar, and drums for the album over the previous few months, and once they were finished up I came back from Toronto for a week for a marathon saxophone session. By the time we got to Broadway Ghost, we had been tracking sax parts nonstop for a number of (very long) days, and I needed a break from the grind. So we took most of the day off, set up the studio so it could be kind of like a gallery space, invited some friends over and lit the room with a bunch of Christmas lights. We recorded that whole sax session in near-darkness just hanging out with everyone and it was beautiful.

We got a few decent takes, and there was one that I thought felt better than the one that made the record. But everyone else disagreed with me, and Graham (our recording engineer) didn’t even let me listen to the alternate take. He was like “nope, that’s the one.” Executive decision. That was the best vibes and the most fun I’ve had in a recording studio.



Harry: That was totally Graham’s recording style, he liked working with first takes and complete playthroughs, instead of lots of fixes, overdubs, and piece-work. It definitely helped the album retain a super “live” feel.

Pete: In terms of the saxophone approach, I wanted to do something kind of loose and breathy. Tenor sax can end up sounding more like a brass instrument than a woodwind sometimes, and I wanted to see if a tone closer to Dexter Gordon’s or Coleman Hawkins’ could work in the context of this band. I was not comfortable with it. It was a stretch.

Dan: From what I remember of the saxophone tracking for this song, we kept feeding Pete whisky and telling him to “keep it g r e a s y.” I think it worked.

Pete keepin’ it G R E A S Y.

Harry: I was totally prepared to leave Broadway Ghost bass-free. But that obviously didn’t end up happening. I was away when most of the recording for this track happened, but apparently Dan had a tiny, minor, near-silent drum part he wanted to put down. A few days later, Graham made me sit in the chair and listen to the track with the drums absolutely cranked (which, from the reports I heard, took something like 20 takes to get right?). Graham pressed play and when I heard Dan’s drum part, I *heard* my part note-for-note in my head. That’s only happened twice to me.

Dan: Yeah, recording the drums was a pain in the ass. Originally the song was just supposed to be guitar and sax. As it was kicking around, I had the idea of having a quiet, almost imperceptible drum part come in near the end of the song, basically sounding like someone was air-drumming to the song half a mile away. We tried recording the drum part with a single room mic out in the hallway, but it sounded really off. The balance of the kit wasn’t coming through well, the toms got swallowed up, and it made all the fills sound super janky and disruptive. Graham had the idea to flip the switch on the drum part, turning on ALL the mics and cranking it up to 11 in the mix. One take later, we knew we had it. I think this is a really interesting example of what can happen to a song in the studio. 99% of the “musical content” of the song was completely written going into the session, but it didn’t really find it’s identity until that last 1% was figured out. Messing with the dynamics of the drum/bass parts as we recorded really put the finishing touches on the song and gave it this kind of badass blast of power to cap the whole thing off.

Pete: I think the dynamics of this song almost defied the mastering process. It’s very quiet and then VERY LOUD and it took us a few rounds of revision to get it. I hope Carl Saff (our mastering engineer) wasn’t cursing us from his lab in Chicago over this.

“Broadway Ghost” live at AS220, recorded by our main man Freddie Ross, who also shot the cover art for The Longest Year on Record.





Trivia, or, What You Never Knew You Needed to Know About This Obscure Song Written and Recorded by A Troop of Echoes:

Harry: Continuing our tradition of ripping off and repurposing little nuggets from entirely unrelated bands, the bass part is inspired by “Ceres Walk” off of the soundtrack to “The American Astronaut.”

Dan: Also Freddie shot a sweet video of us playing this at our album release show at AS220. Pete drops the mic. Then we have to start the song over. Rad As Hell. (see above)

Nick, nailing takes 1-4 of Broadway Ghost. Dude is a machine. A machine that has learned to love.

Critical Reception

Pete: At shows before the album was recorded, we included Broadway Ghost a few times, just to try it out. I remember kind of getting a ‘meh’ reception at the time, but we knew that we were still working on it and were moving towards something, so I think we were ok with it. Immediately after recording, once we had the explosive outro in place, it killed at every show we played it at.

Dan: Broadway Ghost earned a few mentions on some of the blogs and magazines that wrote us up over the years. Here are a few of the highlights:

A Closer Listen: “The finest moments include the drum chorale that closes the opening track; the light explosion at the end of “Broadway Ghost”; and the finale of the title track, which is where the singers finally come in. The more dynamic contrast, the better.”

The New Fury: “The shorter songs on the album, “Kerosene” and “Broadway Ghost” could be easily looked over since they seem only to be breaks from the craziness that A Troop of Echoes brings to the table on their album, but these songs have just as much thought put into them as the longer ones…“Broadway Ghost”, however, is much softer, and the ambient guitar chords in the background support a low and slow saxophone. This song also features a very soothing trumpet that accompanies the sax, and the song goes from slow jazz to rock in a second. The trumpet screams with power, then drops out, which leads into the title track of the album.”





Credits:



Nick Cooper - Guitar

Pete Gilli - Tenor Saxophone

Harrison Hartley - Surprise Bass Guitar

Dan Moriarty - Surprise Drums

Doug Woolverton - Trumpet Choir

Graham Mellor - Recording Engineer

Andrew Schneider - Mixing Engineer/Molar-Going

Carl Saff - Mastering Engineer