Geese Break Down New Album 3D Country Track by Track: Exclusive
The post Geese Break Down New Album 3D Country Track by Track: Exclusive appeared first on Consequence.
Track by Track is a recurring feature series in which artists guide readers through every song on their latest release. Today, Geese walk us through their sophomore album, 3D Country.
Today (June 23rd), New York City indie rockers (and former Consequence CoSign!) Geese return with their sophomore effort, 3D Country. In comparison to the more angular post-punk of their debut, Projector, the new set of songs finds the outfit reinventing themselves as twangier, more soulful, and increasingly unpredictable.
At some points, like on the title track or “Cowboy Nudes,” it’s as if the band is taking cues from the alt-country playbook, whereas others see Geese getting abrasive (“Mysterious Love”), Beatles-esque (“Gravity Blues”), or funky as hell.
“I had been listening to songs like [Funkadelic’s] ‘Hit It and Quit It,’ ‘Nappy Dugout,’ and the like, which provided most of the inspiration for something kind of soulful and strange,” vocalist Cameron Winter tells Consequence about the track “I See Myself,” before describing “Mysterious Love” as a song that’s “a dozen ’90s rock cliches mixed into one little over-produced package.”
From the unique instrumentals to Winter’s eccentric, but wildly impressive, vocal performances, 3D Country is able to touch nearly every corner of music without breaking its continuity. While steering clear of being overly maximalist, the record is patently unafraid to explore, experiment, and find what works within its idiosyncratic sonic world.
Listen to Geese’s 3D Country below, followed by Winter’s Track by Track breakdown of the full album. The band is also set to hit the road this fall in support of the album. Grab tickets to their upcoming shows here.
“2122”:
For the longest time, I really wanted the very beginning of the record to be a naked vocal line. But I didn’t really know what I wanted that to be, or what the song itself would even sound like. I remember being on the subway when I thought of the opening lyric, “God of the sun” etc. The song developed quickly around that one line. I’m still not sure what it means, but it implies “apocalypse,” and it sets the stakes high right off the bat.
This is the one song we’ve never really gotten sick of. We’re still pushing it further and further. It was so Zeppelin-y from the outset that we ended up blemishing it with a bunch of noise to make ourselves feel less like a cover band. “2122” is half dad-rock, half harsh, cacophonous noise, and that’s been endlessly funny to us. It makes it a lot of fun to perform.
“3D Country”:
I had come up with a little story about a cowboy who does psychedelics in the Wild West and fries his brain forever, and I wanted to write a song around it. It used to be nearly nine minutes, with a bunch of extra sections and a huge three-minute solo at the end, our big masterpiece or something. Now, it’s not quite such a marathon, but the complexity is still there. When we play it live, we include some of the sections we cut for the album. It’s one of our favorites.
“Cowboy Nudes”:
We wrote the guitar riff for “Cowboy Nudes” nearly two years before we recorded it properly. It’s a fun little song, and the last one we tracked.
When we were overdubbing for it, I wanted to put something Eastern-sounding on the second verse, so I had Max bring over this busted-up sitar we’d had lying around since high school. I went to buy a pack of strings for it at a world music store, and the guy told me one pack was $80. I thought he was kidding, so I bought two. He was not; sitar strings aren’t cheap. I didn’t even restring it. I just played the one not-broken string it had, ’cause I was too lazy to put on all 18 strings. So, you better appreciate that goddamn sitar on the second verse.
The song is about life getting better and more fun after the end of the world. I thought it was funny. I’m proud of the line about falling in love with a tumbleweed.
“I See Myself”:
We never got a chance to practice and workshop “I See Myself” before we headed in to record it, so it ended up sounding a lot like its demo — which comes through in the recording, in that there’s a lot of emptiness in it. This distinguishes it from the other songs on the album.
This song owes a lot to Funkadelic; I had been listening to songs like “Hit It and Quit It,” “Nappy Dugout,” and the like, which provided most of the inspiration for something kind of soulful and strange, along with stuff like celeste doubling the bass, and the Q-tron pedal we used.
“Undoer”:
“Undoer” started with the bassline, which sounds like it belongs in an old noir movie, and it grew very organically from there into something pretty huge and wicked. This song is like the gumbo where all the weirder ideas we couldn’t fit into shorter, snappier songs ended up. We had a lot of fun designing the sounds and adding samples, like flies buzzing and MIDI trumpet glissandos. For the ending, we ran the master track through James (our producer’s) modular synth and then put some screaming over it for good measure.
“Crusades”:
This might have been the first song written for the album that ended up making it onto the final record. I wrote the lyrics after reading about some of the horrific stuff that happened in the Crusades, and paired it with this super simple, straight instrumental I had lying around. I’m entertained by how the lyrics paint a really dark, depraved scene over this happy little ditty.
“Gravity Blues”
Our attempt at combining “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” and “Oh! Darling” into one song. We failed, but in an interesting way.
I ripped the idea for a three-guitar solo from a Tom Verlaine album, where he does it with some frequency. I kinda love how dorky and excessive it is, it fits the song well.
I wrote the lyrics for this one thinking about a friend who was depressed and hospitalized when I was struggling to work through/understand how they were feeling.
“Mysterious Love”:
This song is about a dozen ’90s rock cliches mixed into one little over-produced package. And I think it works well. I’ve always felt proud of how quickly this one moves between moods and sections without sounding too corny.
We used to punctuate the very end with one last hit and be done with it, but then one day Max kept hitting his drums and we kept hitting that last note with him, for like, two minutes. We laughed our asses off, and now that’s how the song ends.
When we recorded it, we had nearly a whole minute’s worth of hits, but our label begged us to cut them out. (Which is fair enough, it’s a weird way to cap off what otherwise sounds like a U2 B-side.) We negotiated with them — that was a hilarious back-and-forth. They said, “Please only do eight hits instead of 40,” and we said, “How about 20?” and we ended up around 15.
“Domoto”:
The sad song on the album. The title is meaningless, it’s just the nonsense I typed into my laptop when I made the demo, and we never came up with anything better.
This song is interesting because of how much it’s changed from what it was at first; we first recorded it in the summer of 2020 and workshopped it a lot over time, adding the tempo changes and little details.
“Tomorrow’s Crusades”:
As the title might suggest, this one was originally meant to be a part two to “Crusades,” borrowing a ton of motifs and lyrics from that song — but it went through so many mutations over time that we ended up with an unrecognizable offshoot featuring a lot of weird key changes and heel turns. The strings tie it all together really nicely.
Everybody took great care to make their parts as good as possible on this song; I love how well Dom’s bass part sits, despite how complicated it is. And I’ve always found Foster’s riff on the verses to be absolutely beautiful.
The lyrics are especially abstract on this one, but I generally imagine them coming from some old grandfather telling the little children about some old biblical calamity.
“St. Elmo”:
We never learned this song at all, we just stitched it from overdubs and samples, and it ended up working out. We’d always work on this one when not everyone in the band was in the studio — I played bass, and Dom ended up playing drums. James took a solo. Foster plays cowbell.
I put a lot of my bitterness and anger into the lyrics, trying to think of a million ways to say “Fuck you” to those who could change the world for the better, but don’t. Likewise, the song was meant to be pretty ugly… but shortly before we recorded it, I added in the prettier part that comes toward the end, and I think it serves as a really nice Pet Sounds-y moment of relief at the end of the album.
Geese Break Down New Album 3D Country Track by Track: Exclusive
Jonah Krueger
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