Oh Lonesome Ana’s new album MEG/\DETH TEE was released July 15th and we asked the band to tell us about each track. Check out their commentary on the album below!

The Dirt Road

This record was inspired and based on the poems and prose of our dear friend and poet Johnny Allen. I’ve worked with Johnny for over a decade now, and when we start collaborating on something, usually Johnny sends me a ton of poems all at once. This was the first one. It felt incredibly intense, and it made me cry when I read it. I put off writing the song for a long time because of how powerful the words are, and when I finally wrote it, it probably didn’t take more than an hour. It seemed appropriate as it was the first poem I read, that it’d also be the first song.

Drums, bass, and most of the guitars on this record were recorded live to 2” tape with Grammy Award nominated American record producer, audio engineer and musician Jack Shirley at The Atomic Garden Recording Studios in Oakland. We recorded the other parts – vocals, synths, keyboard, and auxiliary percussion as overdubs, either at home, with Jack, or with Patrick Hills at Earthtone Studios in Sacramento.

Ashley (Bass) and Zach (Drums) create a driving groove that explodes at the end, and Jacob (Guitar) adds an incredible fuzz solo and rhythm textures somewhere in between Dinosaur Jr. and Black Sabbath. Jack mixed the intro in mono with more distortion and compression, shifting to a cleaner stereo mix when all the instruments enter. Also, I wanted it to sound like driving down a dirt road, so there is a cabasa overlayed on the drums. 

The Slow Death of Lung Cancer

Early into the process of writing this record Jacob mentioned that in some Thin Lizzy songs there’s a modulation after the first chorus leading directly into a solo. Sounded like a neat idea, and I tried to incorporate it into this song. The format didn’t quite work to where the solo was directly preceding the chorus, but the modulation did. This song is maybe the most complicated song I’ve ever written. There are a few tone shifts, as well as a key modulation and time signature change. As a result, we had more than a few takes for this song. Getting the tempo nailed down from beginning to end was particularly challenging.

Ashley and I got together with Patrick Hills, who arranged and recorded our friend Rachael McElhiney, who is an incredible vocalist, and songwriter sang on this song along with Ashley. The arrangements here in the chorus and the outro are a testament to Pat’s sense of melody.

Sending Out a Dove

This song went through more than a few iterations. I had the main concept for it for quite some time, but this was the last song written for the record. A few of the iterations were combined, so each chorus is slightly different, with the same parts in a slightly different order each time through. It also kind of builds throughout the song. There’s also several synths and drones building that hopefully increase tension as the song progresses.

I’ve Got Your Blood

We used the Boss Dimension pedal heavily on this record. I read something at one point about Stevie Ray Vaughan using a Roland Dimension to make the guitar on Texas Flood sound thicker, and our record obviously does not sound like Texas Flood, but it does add a bit of complexity. We tracked one of the rhythm guitars through it to a second amp and mixed it behind the main amp, and it’s also used on the Rhodes.

Jacob and I started working out more harmonized lead parts during the recording than we had been playing live, and this song benefitted from that treatment. There is an arpeggiating Juno-60 during that bridge/ musical break as well.

I’m Glad You Got Out (But I Miss You)

There’s a wider gap between the meaning of the lyrics and the mood of the music on this song than any other. It also represents a shift in focus from the first four songs to the last four. I hoped this would be a bridge to the second half, which is still sad, but also deals with themes of coming to peace with traumatic memories.

Rushing Lattice

David Mohr is a painter, in acrylic, in music and in word. David wrote the lyrics basically as they are sung, with a few small changes because sometimes it's difficult to make the melody do exactly what you want it to, and then I just repeat the chorus a lot at the end. This was David's response when I asked about meaning: "The lyric “Rushing Lattice” was about being fenced in or caged in and ultimately trying to come to peace with that feeling. ...My guess is stray cats have an unfathomable wildness that haunts them as they try to make sense of their pocket of human society.

I was trying to write about the idea of caring for a creature that has no idea it is being cared for and how doing something good can be perceived as the opposite." When I was writing the music for this one I was seeing a lot of really horrific footage from the 2019-2020 Australian Bush-fires and I was thinking about all the animals trying to escape that were being rescued by humans, but since we can't communicate with Koalas they have no way of knowing our intentions. So sometimes I think about Koalas when I'm singing this song. I think Jacob heavily inspired the mood of this song. The mesmerizing outro brings the genre out of whatever we were doing in the first half to something akin to Yo La Tengo.

No Kind of God

This song was reworked probably more than any other on the record, and I think it benefited from the consideration. The first iterations did not contain the musical interlude that happens around 0:52 and once it was introduced there was a lot of retooling based around when and where and how many times it would happen. It's a nice part, and functions decently as both instrumental hook and transition between sections, and I'm glad we ultimately figured it out.

I asked Zach about the drum part: "The song delves into broken homes and childhood loss/life changes so I really wanted to create the feeling of standing on shaky ground with the drum part, especially in the intro. The dynamic range of this song also became super important to me, I hope the drums bring out a feeling of super low lows and high highs as the song progresses to the massive drum fill at the end and then a small intimate finish after that. From a technical standpoint I’ve been obsessed with ghost notes and trying to really add a lot of character and feel into parts that at first glance could seem simple and familiar."

MEG/\DETH TEE

For me this song is about the stuff you bring with you as you pass through life: T-Shirts, memories of your favorite dog, memories of past relationships, traumatic memories. It’s about making peace with all of the stuff that you’re sad and ashamed of and accepting it as a part of you. And about the animal friends that were there sharing time with you that helped you get through it.

If you’re a fan of the band from the t-shirt, you may recognize the lyrics in the bridge, as well as the more obvious lyrical reference in the pre-chorus. Sleigh Bells played in 6/8 time is one of the best sounds out there. That combined with Rachael’s vocals on the end of the song make this maybe my favorite song I’ve ever recorded.

To Feel So Small (Hello Me, It’s Me Again)

This song is all about Ashley and Zach. The drums and bass on this song make it truly beautiful. One of the things that makes me feel incredibly lucky is to play with people who know when to make a move and when to keep a part simple. The bass part in the bridge is really one of my favorite parts on the record. Every time we add a lot of percussion to a song it comes alive. And that’s my final note, next time there will be even more auxiliary percussion. 

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