Water In The Basement: Why It Took So Long To Make This Album, Part Six
Crissi Cochrane
As the spring trickled in, so did water in our basement. For people in Windsor, this is par for the course. Fortunately, it wasn’t because of back flow from the sewer, as is the case with too many of local homes, but a slow seeping through our foundation as the ground around the house grew saturated with the rains and melting snow. Puddles shivered across the basement floors, soaking anything we’d left on the ground.
Many mornings, I’d wake to the sound of the rain - a sound that used to be so lovely and soothing, but that now filled me with dread. I’d try to steal just a few more seconds of bed warmth before tiptoeing to the basement to check for water.
We’d be foolish to try to set up our basement studio. The room sat empty, a wasted space.
In the meantime, Mike put his studio in an upstairs bedroom overlooking the street, but it was too hard to manage all his gear with only one two-prong power outlet. These old bedrooms come from the days when the only electronics you’d have would be an alarm clock and a lamp - certainly not an entire studio’s worth of computers, speakers, amps, and everything else. Any electric guitar we recorded was marred by an obnoxious ground hum if I happened to face the wrong way in the room. At least, it worked well enough to get started on piano, which was recorded direct from a basic keyboard, played by the brilliant Mike Karloff.
We talked about what to do, and all of it was obscenely expensive or intensely laborious. We could rip out the concrete walkway along the house that slopes towards the foundation, build up the ground there, and pour new walkways. Dig up a french drain along the other side of the house, removing several beautiful flowering trees. Re-level the entire backyard (and replace the flagstone patio) with truckfulls of dirt, destroying all the landscaping and perennials. So overwhelming.
I was real proud of myself for cutting through the downspout all by myself with a hacksaw. It wasn’t a straight cut, but I didn’t lose any fingers, so it was a win.
Instead, we tried little things - extending downspouts, putting in a rain barrel with a hose that shot out to the alley, cleaning the eavestroughs. And finally, the basement dried. We put all the furniture on cinder blocks - just in case - and replaced the stained, saturated bottom three feet of drywall throughout the two finished rooms. We did a little soundproofing, putting in sound dampening (and fire retardant) insulation in the ceilings, and stapling commercial floor underlay to the walls. The underlay is like a super thick felt, a dark gray-blue, threaded with tiny strings of white, pink, and teal. It’s really quite pretty, it deadens the room nicely, and was a breeze to install.
One of my favourite mugs, made in-house at the trophy shop where I worked in Halifax until moving to Windsor. Pictured behind: the floor-underlay-as-wall-treatment.
And we started to record.
You’d think the first album we’d have done would be mine, but surprisingly, it wasn’t. We decided instead to start work on an album for The Family Soul, my husband’s horn-fuelled soul band, in which I play flute and sing back-ups. He recorded drums, horns, guitars, singers, everyone, in our humble basement. It created the blueprint for our entire recording process, and ironed out any kinks before getting into the real behemoth that would be my album.
I got so used to bundling up the baby and taking her out of the house during recording sessions - our creaky footsteps on the wood floors, her playing and crying, all too loud. It was harder in the summertime when it was so insufferably hot outside, or in the rain. Nap time only sometimes lined up with our sessions.
Production took just under three months from start to finish - pretty miraculous for a lush eleven-song album. We hosted a listening party in the basement, bandmates in folding chairs in a semi circle around the desk. It was a living, breathing thing. It was done so quickly, and then it was out. Our CD release show was maybe my favourite gig I’ve ever played, of the more than 500 gigs I’ve logged in my past dates section (NB: none of my shows in my Halifax days with Gamma Gamma Rays are recorded there, much to my chagrin). I danced so hard, it was a wonder that I didn’t take someone out with my flute.
There was no time at all between scheduling sessions for The Fam’s album and scheduling sessions for mine. Those same players were back in our basement the next week, recording the horns for my album. I finished recording my guitars, and Mike set to work writing back-up vocals and guitar leads, adding percussion, and adding synths. He worked so many hours, I’m afraid to even estimate how many, in between also getting up some mornings at 4am to work at CBC.