I guess you could call Nth Floor Elevator my first double album. It wouldn’t fit on a 60–minute cassette, so I used 90-minute ones for the final album. As with a lot of double albums, I probably would have been better served by boiling it down to a single album by getting rid of the weaker songs.
My opinion of which are the weaker songs has changed somewhat over time, though. I certainly had a lot of songs in general. I already had several in progress when Why Not? was finished, and my unceremonious parting from Culture Shock spurred an additional burst of spiteful creativity. I was still learning my way around writing melodies and lyrics especially, but the overall quality kept improving.
Sonic quality was improving, too. I had purchased a newer and better 4-track recorder and a digital delay, and to my ears the contrast with the last album’s dry and muffled sound was very apparent.
I lived in a thin-walled apartment at that time, and I felt very self-conscious about recording vocals at the volume needed for a good performance. So I took along my recorder to my night-shift job on a slow night and recorded most of the vocals for the the album there. Needless to say, there was no one else in the building, and my time there was coming to an end, anyway.
I’m not sure where the album’s title came from—just one of those random synaptic firings, I suppose. The cover I now find very uninspired, especially in black and white, which most copies were. Still, I was taking increasing pride in what I was producing.The album was finished in 1995.
Be First to Comment