Another retake. Transparent, you might say.
Category: Bootyproof
During my time at Stumptown, and for a bit thereafter, I recorded music with my friend RC Gartrell as well as others. RC and myself made these recordings during about a two year period, in his basement in Portland. We actually went under the name The Amies at some point, but since that was a name I’d used before, I went with Bootyproof here.
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Run Away
This might’ve been among the first songs that RC and I wrote together. Here it is for you now, polished like a pebble.
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Word Is Out
Another song we developed from a demo of mine, this one features us beating on the air ducts with sticks to make percussion loops.
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Hero Ran
Revisiting an earlier demo, this time it sounded a lot more like it should. RC plays great drums, I do my best Elvis Costello impression on the keys.
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Yo Soy Dinero
This was one of the more successful songs we worked on together. We’d get asked about this song years later. It was a crowd favorite.
Jordan Hudson plays drums. If you’re curious, you can listen to the earlier demo version.
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Sunlite
Sunlite was the second song I wrote just for the band we were calling Bootyproof. Having done a poppy rock track earlier with Officially, we were feeling like this was our groove. We had started to play shows, and these tracks anchored the set.
We were both also going through our own relationship issues at the time, and lines like “in the sunlight of your eyes, I found the rain” were inevitable. I remember writing the “vampires of the past” line in tribute to Sparklehorse, whose Sick of Goodbyes song had fantastic lyrics like “no one sees you’re on a vampire planet…” and were so damn good they’d bring me to tears.
There’s a video, too. This was produced for the Hello! Video show, and the footage came from my friend Lizzie.
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Run Away (Instrumental)
This was kind of a half-finished version of this song, but it took a long time to build so here you go. I think we were kind of finding our footing still at this point.
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No More Waiting
One of the first songs I think I actually recorded with RC. Early 2001 in Portland.
Lyrics just kind of came while we were working out the rhythm in the studio, and we decided to take turns singing. We kind of play around at the end, so in a sense it felt like a “warm-up act.”
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The Big Mystique
The bass line here was so awkward that when I asked RC to play it, he thought I was crazy. “Bill Berry felt the same way about that song on Green,” I told him, to which he responded “Bill Berry ended up not playing that drum part.” Touché.
I think the working title was “The Big Mistake.”
