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: Something Like Falling, a B-side from our 2010 LP Days in Automation. Even though SLF didn’t make it onto an official release, it’s a quirky and pretty little song that was pretty central to our identity for a few years, inspiring a few avant-garde composers, makeout sessions, and moms.

The Writing Process:

Pete: Let’s do a before-and-after. I’m gonna say, without having listened to it in years, that this song is sitcom-level awkward for me. I think it’s probably the least good of our professionally recorded output, which is why we didn’t put it on the album (Days in Automation). It’s like coming back to your parents’ house and finding a birdhouse you made in middle school, and they still have it for some reason, and you kind of look at it and go, “what was I thinking?”. It’s missing important features for a birdhouse to have, like a nice little dining room for them to eat dinner together, or a little den for them to watch bird TV shows as a family, and instead it has other unnecessary things like a disco-themed indoor bird tennis court, and superfluous faux-Egyptian bird sarcophagi. This song makes me uncomfortable. It’s the birdhouse version of a poop.

***PAUSE***

Hangin’ out at the disco-themed indoor bird tennis court.

Pete: Actually yeah. I just listened to the whole thing again and it’s better than I remember.

In all seriousness though, I think “Something Like Falling” is kind of representative of how a lot of trying to make music felt early on. Which is to say that there would be these moments of everything coming together, and you feel like you really have something, and there’s a lot of inspiration, and then long stretches of not knowing how to get to your next killer moment. And part of getting better is learning how to not need the Muse to come save you all the time. You work on craft so that everything you do at baseline is better, and you’re more prepared for moments where lightning strikes. You have a good chorus, and now you can do something with it.

We were like 19 or so when we had the first draft of this one, and it was our oldest song to be recorded in a real studio. I would bet that we could reliably write a better song than this now in an afternoon. A lot of the stuff we were trying to do here got pulled off in better form on our next album (The Longest Year on Record). Some of the color and vibe are the same. It’s cool that it pushed us into something more lush.

Dan: In terms of the actual musical content of this song, it’s mostly based around a pretty little bass riff that Harry brought in.

Harry: Well, I guess in order to talk about this song I have to talk about “Porcelain” first (editor’s note: NOOOOOO). Porcelain was one of the first songs we wrote together, and it had this little strummy bass part. One day while fiddling around in practice I came up with the main riff for “Something Like Falling” as some extension of the Porcelain part. It was almost like a game to myself, to see if I could stretch out a two-note part into something longer. We were pretty hard up for material at that point, so I must have shown it to the band and we all decided to write something around it.

Dan: Maybe we’ll write up Porcelain some other time. In SLF, I’m really proud of my drum part in the post-chorus sections, where I’m playing between the ride cymbal and open/closed hi-hat. I think it has a really nice “wide” sound which complements the lushness of the section.

Harrison Hartley and the superfluous faux-Egyptian bird sarcophagi.

The Recording Process:



Harry: Something Like Falling was recorded at Machines with Magnets as part of the Days in Automation sessions. The plan going in was to do it “if we have time”, which we…sorta did.

Pete: Ha!



Dan: The first 80% of the song was written out and pretty well-structured, but the last 20% is a kind of devolution into noise that we always improvised. While this worked out great for live shows, it’s not a great solution for studio recordings. Given our inexperience in the studio, we didn’t really have a solid roadmap prepared for how to navigate the noise ending. So we really struggled getting this just right. We weren’t recording to a click or anything, so we had to keep re-recording the whole 4-minute-long song over and over again just to try out different noisy endings. I feel like the other guys were doing pretty well, but everything I played kept falling flat, or sounded way too abrupt, or dragged on for way too long. I just couldn’t find the sweet spot.

It was getting late, and we were collectively ready to ditch the song and move on. The tracking engineer Seth saw the song’s potential, and didn’t want us to give up on it. He had a secret weapon: “The Vacation Machine” - a term coined by a Japanese band they had recently worked with. The Vacation Machine was a motor scooter which the MWM engineers let bands drive around on when they needed to relax and get their minds off of a song. We all took turns tooling around the parking lot and miraculously avoided wrecking the scooter or ourselves. The Vacation Machine had the desired effect, and we nailed SLF on the next take.

THE VACATION MACHINE

Pete: Yeah, that’s when we really dropped in and started hitting it. I remember this being absurdly hard to get right in the studio, which feels stupid because it’s a really simple song.

Coming out of the MWM session was a good motivator. We were like “OK, we went into a recording studio and didn’t fall apart and die. Now we need to know more about how compressors work. We need to understand mic technique. We’re gonna work on songwriting.” We got to escape our box, both in terms of practicing to the level you need in the studio and writing songs that don’t need to be played perfectly to sound good.

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

Something Like Falling was covered by The Conversation (Harry plus our friend Justin Brierley, who appeared in our first band-on-band interview) as part of their original soundtrack for the theater production Home/Run by Stray Creatives.

SLF also inspired the moniker “Something Like Banter” used by the very same Justin Brierley.

Something Like Banter actually named a piece “A Troop of Echoes.” So now there is “Something like Falling” by A Troop of Echoes and “A Troop of Echoes” by Something like Banter.

We recorded a longer demo version of this song with Joe Hartley, which was included on our 2007 mixtape Home Exxxperiments, which we hand-made 50 copies of and took with us on our first week-long tour. The album was all hand-drawn by Dan’s family during a 13-hour drive through rural Canada, and included such wonderful scenes as Kenny G farting and zebras taking poops. Of course, they sold out really quickly!

A Brown University dance student choreographed a dance routine to SLF for her thesis project, but it has unfortunately disappeared into the abyss.

Bird Nick at Bird Machines with Bird Magnets. Bird.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Harry: This one is the sleeper hit, around 2008-2009 there were always people asking us to play it at shows.

Dan: It’s our Freebird.

Pete: It reliably prompted slow-dancing and makeouts in the audience. Which some people would say is the goal of all music. High-five if it did for you. Maybe it’s not bad after all.

Harry: Oh shit, I forget where the fuck this show was but I definitely remember a couple making out hardcore to this song at a show in like 2008…[REDACTED] maybe? Could be just some randos-Memory is hazy…

Dan: Pre-Kerosene, this was my mom’s favorite Troop of Echoes song. As far as I know, she has never made out with anyone to it.

CREDITS

Nick Cooper - Guitar

Pete Gilli - Alto Sax

Harrinat0r - Bass Guitar

Dan Moriarty - Drums

Seth Manchester – Tracking Engineer

Keith Souza – Mixing Engineer

Jeff Lipton – Mastering Engineer

Maria Rice – Assistant Mastering Engineer