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Hello, dear friends, this is John Butler and you're about to listen to a podcast called Running the River. This is a new podcast that I have put together with my dear friend Dingo Spender. He, you may recall, helped me with the last podcast I made for my album Home. Here again we deconstruct and get under the skin and get our hands dirty in the substrate soil of what I was envisioning for this latest ambient album.
This is an album I made for wellness practitioners and practicers alike to defrag and decompress in this very busy, fast and quick world, and we hope you enjoy as we take you up down and across the river. This is Running the River.
So let's go a little bit deeper on the intros to your songs.
So, yeah, always mucked around with that eastern and celtic, I mean even blues does it.
You know, there's like this miran meandering, uh, intros, that kind of set a mood and a feel, um, and so, like you know, even acoustically, uh, you know, for example, you know, even when I was learning with Deba Shish, for example, you know, like the, the, the intros are kind of important, you know, and then then you'd go into the Raga but like, for example, you know this ESC, you know, as I said, into the raga, but like, for example, you know this esque.
You know, as I said, I bastardize and mongrel everything. So this is no, there's no strict modality about what I'm doing. But these kind of things, yeah, so I mean the Celtics have is much the same as the Indian stuff, at least how I approach it. As I said, I'm no aficionado how do you say that word? Aficionado, aficionado, I'm no aficionado on any of it. So you know what would that be? It's like, you know, I mean it's Celtic-esque.
You know, if I was doing the intro, you know, just kind of very similar to like the Indian stuff in a way. You know, but then not instantly, I start bringing in Debashisha stuff and turns into Celtic Indian, I don't know whatever. So yeah, it's very much the same. But if you're doing even blues, if you're starting, I think you know probably most practices, you know most styles of music have that kind of thing, or maybe instrumental music, maybe.
Yeah, so show us like how you make these guitar beats and lay down this band.
Yeah, so I think I said earlier on, like once I decided I got the arc of the seasons and had some context. It was like things started falling into place really quickly. So I just kind of this is like my little mini, kind of mini rig that I use for real small you know, doing benefits and stuff, but it was something even smaller than this in my living room.
I just sat there and kind of wrote most of the music really quickly and it kind of started just with, like you know, literally a heartbeat, as simple as possible, you know. So something to play over, something to kind of create a bed with. So it's like you know, and and then create some ambience, some, you know, that'd be the basis really. Thank you, thank you, so, so, and that's kind of how I wrote most things Like.
Even, like you know, you know, sometimes I would slow down the delay a bit and then just literally just on the spot, be like so yeah, so there's like a whole delay pedal like on the bridge pickup.
So I run two pickups and this guy's picking up the body and this guy's picking more of the amp just to bring in extra grunt when needed, you know, and so maybe one song might just be a little bit more like, like, uh, and all of them are like based around this heartbeat, like not getting fancy with the beats at all. So just kind of like, let's make it slower. Wait, what's that? Speed back, that's actually good. It's slower, john, that's faster, let's try this one, okay.
So a lot of times like, okay, I want this to be calming, slow, and in the practice of making it, it sent me to new places to really get mindful, because there was no way I could be anywhere else but in these very slow rhythms. So like something like this, for example what do we do next? May I go? Yeah, so that's the song off the album, thank you. And just the practice of having to play that slow and just like Was amazingly therapeutic.
It was totally healing for me just to play that slow, bring the nervous system down away from something like you know, like you know, like whoa, which is great and super warrior and great. But you know there's a whole other idea of warrior. That's common, you know.
And so I made this a lot of these songs 10 minutes, 15 minutes to, so you could be used for like a practice, like TM does, 20 minutes, you know, and you know, some of the breathing exercises are 15 to half hour and I was like, how can I make this? You know, shavasana, shavasana. After yoga it's like you sit for 10 minutes, 15 minutes. So I was writing, you know, I'd make a loop on the beat and then I play this chord progression for 10 minutes and I often pluck different every time.
But this song, these songs, wanted repetition, trance, like headspace. So it's just, you know, One, two, three, four, that's it the whole time, like that's it. And then you know, and doing that for 10 minutes, like it's an extremely calming thing, a very simple thing, very trance-like thing, and a lot of times we'd listen back and we'd both be nodding off and that was like, yes, we're doing the right job, you know, because, yeah, it was about bringing the nervous system down.
So that was kind of how it was built and I just made most of the songs other than Wartua, you know, wartu song and chant and pray for my people, and the flute, the flute kind of breathing cedar instrumental. They were mostly built this way and kind of that quickly sometimes, you know, and then in the studio we could elaborate and Stretch out and David have a suggestion of? Maybe not, and that's how it started.
You know, we, we literally set up a whole room with a PA that would just make, you know, put the beat in the room and record that whole beat in a big ambient space, not just through a DI, that whole beat in a big ambient space, not just through a DI, and then, you know, I'd play to that and we'd have nice mics on my guitar, but then this whole thing, or at least, or at least this part, it would all be going on in another room as well through a PA system.
So mics in this PA system, and Dave just did this amazing job of capturing like the three-dimensionality of the sonics and that space actually really adds. It really adds to the sound. I mean, yes, there's delays and there's reverbs, but there's also this cavernous space that all the sound is being able to envelop in. So yeah, that's kind of the techie world and the birthplace of it.
You know, a big part of that was Dave Mann, which we've kind of gone into before, just like how amazing he is as an individual and the sounds he pulled, and also just a really great this crow, this war, the car ward on and and what, andy Wongi, and that there's a crow that's on a song so interesting and we you know Davis, we had a whole bunch of mics up in the in the recording room that had that was recording the PA, and then I was in the monitor room with him with the mics on my guitar and
this word on was kept on crowing through the whole song and it ended up becoming the name of the song flight of the crow, because he just was just there coming at, okay, knocking on the window can I ask is it, is it the crow?
is it the get out of bed crow? It's the get out of bed crow. Yes, yes, can I share? Yes, please do so. I've stayed quite a number of times in your studio, um, not necessarily because we've been doing music, but I've also. Yeah, I've got a lot. I've done a lot in time in that room.
Yes, and there's this crow, this that has this compulsion at the crack of dawn, pretty much every day, and he comes up to the, to the glass, and he just pecks it and it's like quite loud, like he goes bang, bang, bang and then, and then you wait a minute and then three knocks again and he, it's, he does that, he's been doing that for years, he has been doing it for years and who like?
what's his story who? Who are they? Um, I mean, I mean, that's a big question. You know, I'm always similar to when dogs don't like you and you're like what do they see that I don't see? Like, oh, I'll take that personally. I always take it a little personally when
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the crow just finds the room I'm in, when the whole house is empty, and goes with his beak.
Yeah, it's so hard as well, like his beak must be, yeah.
Well, you know they, like I don't know what the dreaming stories are for other places, but you know what I've been shared with from Uncle Wayne and and his son Isaac is, you know there's a vanity story.
There's a vanity dreaming kind of story about, kind of being obsessed with their image and having this whole kind of war with it and the fact I think it was actually like I don't recall the story exactly but like the reason why the crow and the magpie are the way they are is because they were fighting.
They're both really big, bold energies that were fighting to be the most beautiful and they got in a fight and they actually got burnt in the flames and that's why the crow is black and that's why the magpie cobardy, as they call it in Southwest is is black and white, um, but I don't know the intricacies of that story.
but yeah, all Wardong came and knocked at pretty interesting times during the whole thing, hmm, and you can pick it up because the studio is not soundproof, like this my, my monitor room is ish, but the main room isn't. You know, we live in the country, you don't need a lot of it. And uh, so there's a lot of bird sounds on the album that were caught, captured. You know this. We're capturing this pa doing this guitar beat and then I'm playing over the top of it.
We have like a pickup that's with a delay, that's being played through a pa in a very big room with high ceilings and then these mics on and so like everything's kind of getting picked up. There's all this space and yeah, there's a few birds in there. And yeah, Dave just got an amazing sound, a really great sound. And then from there, uh, and also just an amazing individual, very gentle and humble and thoughtful individual, um, to work with, which was really great.
It felt really, you know, uh excuse the catchphrase, but it felt safe, you know and um, and then we took it to James Newhouse, an amazing engineer, producer, mixer, and we sat for a few days and mixed it. So, Dave and an amazing engineer, producer, mixer, and we sat for a few days and mixed it. So Dave and I worked for 10 days on the album just doing all the stuff.
And then I went to James Newhouse and he's fantastic and also, once again, a very amazing gentle, humble, badass and sweetheart of an individual Went to his home studio there, or the studio that he has in his home, a really great studio. And then we got Zeno Mickerey to master it and I got Zeno's name because he did all the Nils Fram stuff, which is music I just love to listen to Speaking of soothing Me too Frayed nervous systems. No-transcript.