Bret Alexander-Paul Smith-Ron Simasek

LESTER'S BREAKING EVEN (listen to MP3 sample)

THE SONG: Lester was one of the tracks on "Perfect Smile" that was written entirely on the spot, in the studio. The night before I had watched the film "American Beauty". The main character was Lester Burnham. So that was kind of what I had to work with that day. One of the first lines of the movie was "How did I become so sedated?", so I used that in the bridge. I guess it's a funny, bitter, divorce, custody song based loosely on "American Beauty".

THE RECORDING: A few people told me that this song reminded them of Squeeze's "Tempted". Similar groove, I guess. Eighth note drum/bass groove with a twelve string riff throughout. There are some Danelectro guitars in there too. Before the last chorus we put in this random sweep a la the end of "Day In The Life". It's a bunch of cellos sweeping up a scale. Paul played them. This sound has made it into several other recordings of ours. We archive stuff like that and reuse it. Great sound. We added an Ebow in there for color too. The main vocal sound is me singing the song twice in two different octaves. One main vocal and another falsetto vocal an octave up.

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