Posture
Let’s get this out of the way right now. I am a terrible singer and I have no business singing in the shower much less recording a song. You may have heard me mention this punk band I started and I am in fact the singer of that, but I decided to front a punk band specifically because my terrible singing can be overcome by intentionally hurting myself on stage and entertaining angry kids with mohawks. I am honestly completely without any musical talent what so ever. Fortunately for me I have some very talented friends.
When my friend Ross Harman killed himself last September I kept thinking about how many amazing musicians showed up to his memorial. An hour into the service I knew what I had to do. I manged Ross’ band The Gaskets for five years and it was time once again to put on my managerial hat and get to work. I started asking all his musician friends at the memorial if they would be interested in contributing a track to a tribute album in his honor. Everyone there could not have been more into the idea.
Six months later I was wrapping up the CD and making sure everyone was getting in their music. I think in total the CD is going to contain 18 tracks and I was very impressed with all the music. As happy as I was to be working on this album I suddenly had the great desire to be a part of it but I wasn’t exactly sure how. I was going to ask one of my friends if I could record some back up vocals or something to a song but most people had pretty much finished already. Luckily I had another idea.
I reached out to my friend Patrick Albertson to see if he would be interested in helping me cover the song Posture which Ross wrote for his solo project Ballpoint Pens. It only had a few lines of vocals in it and I figured I could get throug them. Patrick was honored to be part of the album and quickly recorded the full song complete with his own vocals. It sounded amazing and I hated that I was going to have to ruin it with my voice.
Patrick sent his music over to Teddy Blanks who was Ross’ band mate and one of my closest friends. Teddy patiently helped me record my vocals over and over again until he thought I had given him enough takes. They all sounded terrible on their own but Teddy went through each take pulling a word here and a word there until he assembled several vocal tracks that sounded okay and he put them on top of each other and then added Patrick’s falsettos underneath. He also added some hand claps and mixed the whole thing together into and almost listenable song.
I am really proud of this album, but I am also very proud that I got to contribute to the actual music on the CD. I am going to be blogging about this album again once it is complete but I wanted to give you a little preview now and let you hear my contribution to the Ross Harman tribute album. So listen to my song below and then head on over to TheGaskets.com where you can download nearly every song Ross or The Gaskets ever recorded for free including the original version of Posture which is taken from the album Calcutta.
Thanks for humoring me I hope you like the song or at least the idea of it. I would love to hear what you think…
Igor & Patrick Albertson – Posture
