Philbillie says I should blog about Bill. Okay. Here’s what happened.
We decided to use as a part of the new record an older recording of one of our favorite songs “Head of Fire, Feet of Clay” that we tracked some years ago with super-producer Bill Bottrell (Michael Jackson, Sheryl Crow, Tom Petty, Shelby Lynne, the list goes on) at his studio in Mendocino. We had high hopes of him recording the entire album, and we took home a CD of a rough mix, thinking we might finish it someday with Bill. But as it turned out, after the first sessions, Bill was lured back to the bright lights of Tinseltown.
We thought about re-recording it from scratch
but realized that his version had really become the definitive one for us. But we only had (what we thought) was a rough mix.
When we recently talked to Bill about doing a final mix for this song, for various reasons, it wasn’t feasible to remix, and in any case upon re-listening Bill thought it was excellent as it was and gave us his blessing to release it. However, we wrote that "in a perfect world 'Head of Fire' would have one more element, sustaining, like either steel or strings," but added that the mix sounded blankety-blank awesome.
So we gave a holler to our first-call pedal steel guy, Dave Zirbel who did a gorgeously executed track. Here’s a glimpse of Dave at work on the tune:
And so I guess it’s done now, at last. But isn’t the perfect world always a work in progress?
