Let’s celebrate healthcare reform passing with one of my all-time favorite Swim Herschel Swim songs, Montero.
This song features music written by me and the bass player, Kent. Words by Rod. I remember buying an Ensoniq EPS 16+ sampler in 1991 and it changed my life. It had a couple of megabytes of RAM and allowed for enough samples to be loaded in that I could write and arrange all the parts without it sounding too horrible.
After Kent joined the band, he came over and shared a bass line and we sketched out the verses and the builds. I was in the full Fishbone circa Truth and Soul/Tower of Power horn love and wanted to write a song with a wall of horns sound. I sat on the song for a bit and one day after class, wrote a horn line for the chorus that so pleased me I immediately called every single person in the band to play them the song over the phone. Not one of them were home so I left a lot of messages that probably sounded like a crack freak with distorted horns and a bouncy eighth note piano part. At the next practice, I taped what Kent and I did to bring the song in. Rod did not like the bouncy piano as it was very poppy (which is part of what I wanted us to do; write a pop song that might get some label interest) so we scrapped that. But the horn line stayed. And all these years later, it’s still one of my favorites.
This song was recorded very early in the morning and you can tell. Rod sounds like we’ve been beating him up (but only a little) and the horns are a little pitchy in places. We stacked a shit ton of horns in the studio and didn’t have a lot of time to make sure they were well-tuned. Not bad for a night of work and another hour or two of mixing.
The remaster brings up the level and beefs up the low end. If you have a subwoofer, you might need to turn it down as there is a ton of low end on this one. Lyrically, this song might as well be what I wanted in 1991. I’m not sure Rod knew that when he wrote the lyrics, but this is definitely up there for me as one of our better works.
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/dooce/11_Montero_-_Remastered_1.mp3]Direct download (mp3):
Montero – Remastered, Burn Swim Burn, Swim Herschel Swim