"Atari Du Cirque" is the 10th TA-80 release. It is a compilation of mostly pre-released material, however there are 6 never-before-released songs. It was released on August 1st, 2007.
There are 2 songs from "Are Go!", 6 from "Junk Car Grand Prix", 3 from "4", "Peppermint Girl" comes from the "God Save the Queers" compilation, and the "Think Tomorrow" single.
About the previously unreleased tracks:
"Small Moments" was recorded in the same 2005 sessions that yielded the "Think Tomorrow" single, it was recorded in the Basement studios with Randy Curtis and at the time we were in=between drummers so for the first time since "80-83" Amy 80 plays drums on a song. Amy also plays bass, I did keyboards and Jens 80 played guitar. I like this version a lot better than the one on "Are Go!", although my old D.C band-mate, J.J., claims the original version is better (he would also be completely wrong). We actually re-recorded this song a 3rd time in 2008 for the abandoned (?) "Weekly World News of the World" L.P. However we'll probably re-release that in the near-future along with "Angry Young Computer" (more on those later). I think this is the first full-fledged TA-80 song Jens plays guitar on.
"It's Always One Step Away" was recorded in 2006 in a one-off session with a producer named Eric (I totally forgot his last name) who was yet another producer trying to turn TA-80 into a pop band. This one was more egregious than "4" even, in that Eric totally replaced ALL the music we recorded. God knows who is really playing this. Yet somehow the results are better than "4". I actually like this, due to the fact that the song was pretty well-written to start with and I think Eric actually liked the band. Amy's vocals are great here too.
There are also a couple of songs from Jens' old band The Rummage League, "Capsul Countdown" and "4-1 Against Maybe". We decided to include these since Jens had just joined us and the other musicians on the recordings were Amy and Russ anyway, so it seemed appropriate. It was a good way to introduce listeners to Jens and I think these were recorded at the exact same time we started "Junk Car Grand Prix".
"The City Sleeps With One Eye Open" and "Marginal" are demos from the unreleased "40 oz. Rose" sessions (MUCH more on that on a later post).
"The City Sleeps With One Eye Open" was recorded in 2006 in our spare bedroom using Powertracks. It was a real turning point for me. With the last couple of albums I had really tried to guess what other people wanted to hear. I made sure that the intros were the right length and that there weren't too many or too few chords, but at this point it honestly looked like the band might be doomed, so I threw my arms in the air and said "fuck it!"
I was literally recording exactly what I wanted to hear. The song only has 2 chords? Fuck it! The vocals are mumbly and go out of tune? Fuck it!
So in a way it was a callback to the dreaded old days but somehow we had improved a whole lot since "Psychic Headache." So even though we were doing exactly whatever we wanted to do and were recording it with zero regard for what other people thought, the result was actually fairly listenable. I still kinda think it's one of the best things I ever wrote. We had no drummer at the time so both this and "Marginal" have programmed drums. "City Sleeps" will always be special to me because it features the heavily reverbed meow of my black cat "Padme" who died shortly after the recording.
Oh yea, it also got us on the Queers tribute.
"Marginal" was also written at about the same time as "City Sleeps" but it took about, oh... a year, to write a chorus for it. So this is from around late 2006 or early 2007. I have fond memories of sitting around the Bambi Bar at night with Amy, pounding pitchers of Budweiser and coming up with lyrics for the third verse(I guess I have written drunken lyrics since 'Junk Car'...). We are currently re-recording this for the upcoming "TA-80 Will Bury You" LP.
Track Listing:
1 Peppermint Girl
2 Psychic Headache
3 Small Moments
4 It's Always One Step Away
5 The City Sleeps With One Eye Open
6 Marginal
7 Everything's Okay
8 Warm Kites
9 Capsul Countdown #2
10 Occupy Her Mind
11 (I'm Giving You) All Of Me
12 Super Slob
13 Think Tomorrow
14 4 - 1 Against Maybe
15 Spinny
16 Writing Songs For You
17 Soft Noise
18 Heaven?
19 Mambo #80
We only made about 50 of these and there are maybe 3 more left at http://interpunk.com/item.cfm?Item=68094&. After these last 3 sell I'm not so sure we'll reissue it. I'm not that proud of most of the older material, yet at the same time it's the only place to hear old TA-80 and all the post-"Junk Car" material on it is pretty good, and I still love the liner notes... so the fate of the cd is up in the air at the moment. Whatever you do, just make sure it's not your first TA-80 album. Buy "Born Insecure" first. It's much better.
Jens did the album art, we basically just stole the art off the cartridge of "Circus Atari" (which is 'Atari Du Cirque' in french (at least according to babel fish)). I don't know if anyone else ever caught this or not but the front cover says "15 Super Songs!" When in all reality, there are 19 songs on the CD. Oh well.
- Jamin 80
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"Atari Du Cirque" came to be because it was already taking too long to get "40 oz Rose" recorded. As Jamin said, MUCH more on that later. It also came out of people (horribly confused and misguided people) who kept asking for us to reissue our old albums. Even in 2005 or 2006 (whenever we credited this as coming out) we knew the old stuff was mostly unlistenable. We had a handful of new or unreleased songs, some demos, some of Jens' demos from The Rummage League Cowbell Sessions, and a decent sized group of oldies that we could actually stand. We threw them together with a couple of the singles we had done and called it good.
This was the first album we made available for sale online. Jamin posted the link above so I don't think I really need to post it again. Just scroll up if you missed it the first time. Anyway, this was a big step for us. I had started really doing online networking for the band and found a few places (and people) that liked our music and this made us all confident in bothering a place like Interpunk to sell a measly few of our retarded albums. We sold a good amount and still have a few left. Grab 'em while they're luke. Luke-warm? No, Luke Skywalker, you fucking inbred.
This was release right at the end of when things had completely fallen apart for the band. After living with us for a couple years and randomly helping us on shit here and there, Jens officially joined the band with the recording of "Small Moments." Jens did an amazing job both mimicking the original and also coming up with his own new twist on the song that made it even better.
Now, Jens is my brother. The thought of working with Jens instantly brings back memories of our parents making us do house and yard work together as kids, which usually ended with a huge fight (sometimes physical) and someone crying (not ALWAYS me). Jens and I have always gotten along great but we've never been able to work together. A few times in school we had classes together...our poor teachers. They could do nothing but sit back and let us yell obscenities at each other until we calmed down and got to work on class stuff. Getting away with this type of shit (I think) was only possible because we were either too funny or too smart to interrupt. So, I had some serious doubts of how us working in a band together would go.
In fact, Jens wanted to join us years earlier. When Jamin and I moved out to Arizona he wanted to join us. Instead I joined a band he had put together with this drummer he knew. He acted like a total ass at the first practice, I yelled at him and told him I could never work with someone who was such a bully to new people and also said he would never be in These Acoustic 80's and left. I stuck by that until he joined us in 2006. He was on a very tight leash for a while and was basically told to keep him mouth shut and do what Jamin and I wanted until we knew we could trust him to be civil. He surprised us. He was and continues to be a great asset to this band and I was a fool to keep him out of it for so long. So we even included a couple of his solo songs just to show our love and appreciation for his work. He brings a helluva lot to the table. Good stuff.
I do need to take a moment and talk about "City Sleeps" and "Marginal." These two songs are still (maybe, on certain days) my favorite two TA-80 songs. Hearing these now, I'm still excited about what we're going to do with them. The versions on this album are only the demos. And this is pretty much what our demos sound like now, if not slightly more fleshed out and with more complex vocals. Canned drums, muddy bass, muddy guitars, a butt-load of keyboards and some rough ass vocals recorded on our Shure Beta 58a's (a pretty damn decent mic for instruments, in my opinion) because we don't even keep our vocal recording microphone around here all the time. These were the first demos we ever did that came out so amazing. At this point, these sounded better than anything we had recorded before. The songs were a million times better than anything we had written thus far, for sure.
"The City Sleeps With One Eye Open" started as one of Jamin's crazy ideas. He explained it to me before I ever heard it (something he does with almost every song he writes nowadays) and I have to be honest, I was more than a little worried. The things he was describing reminded me of "Expansive" and I told him that I wasn't convinced that heading back down this road was such a good idea. He assured me that I would like the song and went ahead and put together the drum loop and a rough demo of him singing and playing acoustic guitar.
When I heard the song, I was floored. I thought it was amazing. I still think it's amazing. I immediately threw on my vocal parts and we decided to keep Jamin's vocal on the 2nd chorus. A lot of people love Jamin's vocals, me being one of them. I've never been a fan of cutting Jamin out of a singing role. However, we've heard from many more people that they prefer hearing someone singing who is a bit more accessible and on top of that, Jamin's never been that fond of singing. He likes doing the hardcore stuff and back-ups and throwing in "Hey's!" wherever they're needed, but that's about it. But his vocals on this song are spot on. You can hear a couple parts where he goes slightly flat but he never loses the note and that imperfection creates such a warm, indie-rock vibe that I adore, there's no way I wanted to cut it out completely. My vocals can be too cookie-cutter perfect sometimes and music isn't perfect. Sometimes you need a bit of the dirt to give it some depth.
This song also opened with Padme's purry meow. I miss her so much. She was a good kitty, even though she shit everywhere except for the litter box. This song is Padme's song. She was inspiring. I wish we had more of her work, but like so many amazing artists, her life was, sadly, cut short, and we all miss her dearly. I love you, Padme!!!
"Marginal" was a bit of a chore. We had the opening verse and bridge for about a year before we finally got around to writing the rest of the song. I'm pretty sure we actually wrote the rest of the parts several times but Jamin and I always wrote at the bar, on napkins, and we would either lose the napkins with the new part or look at the napkins the next day and wonder how the hell we had been singing it the night before. I will say that I came up with the music for the chorus at the bar, maybe a month after we wrote the song and we never worked on it again. For a year I kept telling Jamin that I remembered it and that we didn't need to even worry about it. Once the rest of the song was written and we were ready to do the full demo (the version you hear on "Atari Du Cirque"), I had to remember, or at least figure out something as good as, the part I had come up with so long ago. It must've been great because the first time I picked up the guitar to prove to Jamin that I remembered it, I played it perfectly. I could've shit. My memory sucks so this rarely happens to me. But, it's a great chorus and one that definitely sticks with you.
I played piano, acoustic and bass on this song. I'm not great at piano, though I have been playing that longer than guitar. Just not as consistently. I modeled the playing after the piano part on "Imagine". I've never known how to play that song but I knew that style would fill this song out nicely, keeping it nice and slow while still moving at a steady pace because of the quarter notes. It's music geek shit but it works. I do think about this stuff sometimes.
Well, that's about all I have to say on this little compilation. "Mambo #80" is still awesome. I just realized I never really told the story of how that came about. It's quick and simple. Jamin was going through Fruity Loops trying to find a loops he liked and every time he played a new one, I'd play the bass line you hear on that song. When he hit the mambo style drum loop and heard my bass part, we both busted up laughing and recorded it. After that, I left the studio and Jamin and Russ took over and finished it. Many beers later that night I heard it and loved it. It still cracks me up. See, being obnoxious CAN be good!
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"Atari Du Cirque" is cool Daddy-O. Nawwww...don't say that...
- Klae 80
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