Track by Track: The Mayor - Live At The Acropolis
The Mayor’s new EP, Live At The Acropolis was released in December and we asked guitarist James Ryan to tell us about each track. Check out his commentary on the EP below!
1) Get Your Fuckin’ Shinebox
Ahh, the satisfying sound of The Mayor being wound up to be sicked upon ear holes. I admittedly was not in the studio for the skeletal recording of this song - I recorded my guitar part alone in Colorado on my mobile recording setup and sent it over to Mike in Brooklyn at Behind The Curtains Studio to be mixed. When I was sitting down to write and record I was thinking, “Lord how is this gonna go?”, because it would all be written by ear - no visual hints or cues.
Mike is a hell of a guitarist and I’m usually able to get into the ballpark by watching his hands to work out what he is playing and then start to match my own patterns. I’m very happy with it actually - while I was recording there was a cool feeling of how comfortable I am playing with these dudes even if I’m 1,200 miles away.
2) Quit While You’re Ahead
This tune was one of my favorites to record because Kev is such a beast. The drum part at the beginning was what he came up with immediately, I think, which immediately throws fuel onto Mike & I to match that energy. There becomes this feedback loop playing music with people when they keep hitting the nail on the head in terms of making the part more awesome, more fun to play, heavier.
Heavy like a beautiful piece of heavy equipment on a jobsite that arrived just in time to get the job done. The intro speech came after we had written and recorded the whole tune so we had a little bit of studio fever from being in the room all day, but we are generally goofing around the entire time anyway.
3) Freight Train
Freight Train was the first tune we recorded for this EP. We hadn’t played together in a while so it was definitely an experiment in direction versus what we had been up to when we recorded our first batch of tunes, “There Will Be No Miracles Here”, which were perhaps more linear as metal songs and structuring. I think this tune was exciting for us in that way…it gave us a bit of proof in being able to incorporate grooves and structures that are more out from what we’d been doing, but also being able to suture it back into the more thrashing & driving music that is The Mayor’s aim.
We screwed around with a vibraslap overdub for the groovy bit in the song. Mike set up stereo microphones and Kev slapped the thing while gliding it along the stereo plane to get a wonderful stereo image of the vibraslap. We thought it was hilarious but I don’t think it ultimately made it onto the record. It’s rare that we aren’t making a joke of seemingly everything.
4) Acropolis
An acropolis is a fortified part of an ancient Greek city, typically built on a hill, but more importantly it was the site of an historic performance by one of our greater (possibly greatest) influences, Yanni. This song is a testament to the dynamic performance Yanni inflicted upon the world on September 25th, 1993. The concert took a year and a half to organize and cost Yanni $2 million of his own money to fund.
He performs with his six-piece band and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Shahrdad Rohani. The album was mixed and produced by Yanni in his studio, and was made into a television special which aired in the United States on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).
His performance received a mostly positive reception from music critics. It was an instant commercial success, reaching number one on the Billboard New Age Albums chart and number 5 on the Billboard 200. It remains Yanni's highest selling release with 4 million albums and 600,000 home videos sold in the United States, and an estimated 7 million copies sold worldwide. In 1994, the video received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Lighting Direction (Electronic) for a Drama Series, Variety Series, Miniseries or a Special. A remastered edition with bonus material to commemorate the album's 25th anniversary was released in November 2018.
Bottom line, this is the type of shit The Mayor strives for. We make spreading awareness one of our growing responsibilities.
5) Rot Gut Guillotine
Regardless of the concept that “the MP3 killed the album”, song sequencing is greatly important on albums and ep’s. I’m usually arranging the recorded songs in my head in some fashion while they are being recorded but this batch of songs was a bit ambiguous as to what song fit best in each position of the sequence in terms of conveying a cohesive feeling. I find Rot Gut gives a sense of completion in the idea that is Live At The Acropolis. It’s not extraordinary to hear somebody say that they felt bleak and shitty during The Great Quarantine. We weren’t much different - I’ll speak personally and say I was pretty hurt when it all stacked on.
The sparse ending of the song is a conveyance of the melancholy, heavy, un-fucking-escapbale nature of quarantine, travel ban, and all the fun associated with that. This EP came out of dealing with a lot of those feelings in a way that is constructive and energetic. These are the songs we were able to distill from being in the studio together during that crazy ass shit we all went through together.