Nathan

The intro to the song was done by my brother Matt Olsen, one of three collaborators on the track. The singers in question are the Carter Family, singing “Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow” in 1927. Matt recorded and produced the intro part using his own computer recording rig, at our family’s beach house on the Oregon coast. Everything else in the song was done in studio.

Basically what Matt did was to sample that old gloriously lo-fi Carter Family song (snagged, I believe, from the Library of Congress audio archives), and adjust the pitch of the song to be (relatively) in tune with his instruments. He then layered multiple hammer dulcimer tracks (and I think some guitar and/or autoharp) to fade in while fading out the Carter track. Then later at the studio we imported Matt’s section and lined it up to be the first piece of the song. The Carter Family hails from Virginia, so we thought it fitting to integrate an old-school Appalachian sound into the song, given the lyrical content.

The middle section of the song (vocal verses/choruses/solo) was recorded separately. I laid down a temporary piano guide track (which we ended up keeping), and we recorded everything else on top of it. Then I recorded the instrumental end section during yet another session, and Matt threw some dulcimer in there too. After that we lined up those three pieces, and thus our long-winded Frankenstein monster of a song was born.