Friday, November 11, 2011

Free Exclusive Track: The Great Lakes: Blood On My Tooth

We, here at the PIAPTK Blog, go out of our way to try to bring you exclusive, unreleased tracks from amazing bands that you may, or may not, already know.

Today, we've got a great unreleased tune (and commentary) from Brooklyn psych country act, The Great Lakes. Great Lakes have been, over the years, a revolving cast of players focusing around Ben Crum. They are associated with the Athens, GA Elephant 6 crew and have shared members with Of Montreal, Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, Olivia Tremor Control, Essex Green, etc, etc.

If you haven't heard them before, I HIGHLY recommend starting with Diamond Times, a playful, upbeat, psychedelic romp with pedal steel (and one of my top 20 favorite albums of all time) or their last record, Ways of Escape, which is a more subdued (but no less beautiful) collection of introspective country tunes.

New Great Lakes record is coming in 2012!

Blood on my Tooth
"Blod på tann" (blood on the tooth) is a saying I learned from a friend while on tour in Norway. It means about what you'd think it would: once you get a taste of something good you want more, and you're not going back to how things used to be. Kinda like the way people in the US say "whet my whistle" or the way the Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski says, about Bunny, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Karl Hungus?" At the time I wrote this I'd been reading Keith Richards autobiography, Life, in which he gets into some shop-talk about his discovery of the open G tuning. He tells of how some of the first people to introduce him to it were Phil & Don Everly, and goes on to enthuse about their rhythm guitar playing in open G on songs like Bye Bye Love. The rhythm guitar part for this song came out of me messing around with that style. The dirty-sounding vocal echo and electric guitar stuff were both nods to Dave Edmunds' I Hear You Knocking. Blood on my Tooth was written, recorded and mixed in a couple hours on December 5, 2010. I like it, but it's not going to go on the new Great Lakes record because it doesn't fit stylistically. So it's available for your listening pleasure here. I hope you enjoy it. - Ben Crum, Great Lakes

The Great Lakes - Blood On My Tooth by PIAPTK

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