Written by Joe Viglione
Friday, 22 May 2009 10:28
Title: Breaking the Glass
Artist: Selcer, Ken
Catalog #TTS 1008
Originally released in 2002 with 8 tracks the 2008 edition features 11 including the bonus track of Evelyn. In 2009 another expanded edition was released including the new addition "Even A Fool"
For a quick link to this site:
http://tinyurl.com/breakingtheglass
Title: Breaking the Glass
Artist: Selcer, Ken
Catalog #TTS 1008
Originally released in 2002 with 8 tracks the 2008 edition features 11 including the bonus track of Evelyn, Boston area musician, songwriter and industry veteran Ken Selcer has issued an interesting and unique look at his work outside of his many touring groups. With a back catalog of probably a thousand live tapes (if not more), Selcer is one of the most recorded artists in New England. We decided to focus on this project for the first "Going Track By Track" with Ken Selcer
1)Why does "Annie" start off the disc and what is the song about?
Annie starts the disc off because I wanted a song that set an upbeat tone(as far as rhythm) - and it has a singable chorus. It's an accessible song. I like the play of words during the verses - lots of variations on the theme. The song is basically about a person dealing with a break up and wanting to go away somewhere to lick his wounds. He's commiserating about the breaking up (why did you have to quit?)and feeling the loss of the dream of a future together (check out the chorus). It's a good upbeat song about a bad thing. The guitar riff is very catchy, and moves the song along, etc. A good opener for a cd.
2)Was "Moment By Moment" recorded in the same time period and at the same studio, and if not, could you give us a bit of the history behind each track's recording and dates?
All of the Breaking the Glass songs, except for the bonus tracks were recorded at the same sessions. I did the basics at Wellspring sound in Acton, MA(some of the songs were "complete" like Shout - the basics were kept). I did the overdubs and vocals at my friend Jill Stein's and my studio in Lexington, MA. I recorded 13 songs at the time. I took my time mixing them for various reasons. There are now 12 songs from those sessions on the cd with the inclusion of Go and Even a Fool. One more Place For you is not mixed. Who knows when for that? Another song Stay While was recorded with 2 guitars, bass and vocals. I started to do the song with my band(Shazam, on those days) and I realized that only a full out version of the song would do it justice so I didn't keep that stripped down version for the cd. Moment By Moment was my homage to Latin music, which I like very much. It's a hybrid of different styles because I didn't quite know how to write in a Latin style like Salsa or
Cha Cha and so on. There's a Santanaesque guitar solo in the middle. Mark Shilansky, the pianist, helped me with the arranging. I brought in Equie Catstillo to play congas and timbales to bring it more into the Latin world. I listened to Ricky Martin and Mark Anthony while writing the song and a Bob Weir song too that had a Latin flvoer. I checked out how they wrote the lyrics - alot of lyrics are drenched in emotion. I brought in Larry Finn on drums for the session(for all the songs). He's an absolute rhythm machine (he's one of the best drummers around) and I love rhythm. He recommended Lou Ulrich on bass. I knew of him from area rock bands. Very fine player. Chris Billias is a killer Hammond organ player who I worked with before. Mark played all of the piano parts. He's a monster musician also. I brought in Billy Novick to play sax on a couple of cuts. His sax charts and performance on Shout made the song! Amazing. I used 10 backing vocalists (inc. my
self) - all people I knew except for Lauren Wool who was recommended by Mark. Mark Baxter was my vocal coach. He was on the cd and helped me during the recording of the vocals to ensure I was singing the best I could for the times. Everyone was great to work with. Huck Bennert engineered the basics and mixed the cd. I love working with him. He can bring the music to life. We did the basics in 2 days starting with Another Day. Everyone was so good that it went very smoothly. I knew what I wanted and I trusted the musicians to go beyond what I could envision and it worked.I'm very proud of the cd.
3)At 5 minutes plus "Imagination", like most of the music here, stretches out beyond the prime pop target area of 3 to 4 minutes. Is "Imagination" indicative of Ken Selcer live or do you use the studio to paint a different picture?
I don't really see myself as a pop artist. I don't have the looks anymore and I really don't have the sensibility to exist very well in that world. I've been attracted to many styles of music over the years including pop, but my strengths lies elsewhere. I like some jazz and world music and I grew up with Motown and top 40, so there's a wide range of music to deal with. I never was around the business people who could help steer me in a direction of more accessibility and towards more possibilities in the mainstream world. I was never averse to writing a song that could be a hit type song. I just couldn't do it. It's not what I heard in my head and it wasn't the culture I was in, so to speak. My songwriting reflected not only what I was into but what I could write. As I matured as a song writer (I did "study" what made songs a good song and all that), my songs became more accessible in a lot of ways and they became clearer and more focused.I think I have a body of work th
at stands on it's own and reflects a clear vision of a world view. Now as far as marketing all this, well, it's something I would like to do. I would love to have my songs heard. A song like Imagination has a jazzy type solo in it. That makes it long. The rest is a jazzy pop song. Almost 2 songs in one. I'm a good guitar player and I like to mix it up sometimes in my songs. I would need a context to write and put together songs for a more mainstream audience. By a context I mean the people I work with, the scene I hang out in, the possibility of more exposure, people with more business experience than the people I have worked with in my musical past and so on.
4)"Fly Away", like many other titles, conjure up jazz-oriented titles, but the music is more a happy-go-lucky New Orleans rag with almost Latino tinges, do you intentionally keep the audience off-balance with the concepts?
A good question in that I am a prankster of sorts. I do like to keep my audience (or even friends)off-balance in a way. I have a song (not on this cd) where a lyric says "what you say ain't what you get". I am into so much. music, arts, politics, etc, and I look and even act sometimes like a mild mannered guy, one who is easy to typecast. But I think I can play many many styles of music and that's what I like to do and I can fool you by just being who I am. I like rock and folk and jazz and funk and blues and country and world and everything in between. I'm fascinated by all different kinds of music - probably because music is just people after all - and I get fascinated by it all and I love to go into people's different world's. I don't really intentionally keep the audience off-balance in my songs though I do like to keep it real by showing that real could mean a multitude of things. And I do like to mess around some when playing live. I find that I do think tha
t people's conception of what hip is is very provincial and I do like to break up people's notions of that. I can do that much better in my guitar playing than I can in my songwriting and my lyrics, but I'm working on it.
5)I Oughta Know continues the vibe but has more of a distinctive riff.
What's your artistic statement with the lyrics? And by the way, the
8 1/2 x 11 enclosed lyric page is so much more helpful than slapping the words in tiny type inside a booklet.
Fly Away is a groove song sort of. Maybe a good jam band could do it. There is a Beach Boys type descant (or high voice ) in it put together by Mark. I Oughta Know shows my fondness for funky riffs and maybe for funk in general. There's a lot happening in this song. The lyrics talk about my awkwardness at parties(I don't like parties generally speaking - it's all there in the lyrics) and also my innate shyness and even misreading of the opposite sex. The guitar solo is my attempt to go full out within this type of rhythm and subtlety be damned. I think it worked. I was working with an octave divider and I was keeping Frank Zappa in mind. Who knows what I achieved there?
6)Who are the musicians on "Shout" and are they the same on much of the album?
The same musicians: Larry Finn on drums, me on guitar, Lou Ulrich on bass, Mark on piano, Eguie on congas and timbales. We kept the basics. That guitar solo is intact. I think the track is the 2nd take. We loved it. Billy Novick came in with a chart for baritone, alto and tenor sax, which he proceeded to play. Lovely! It all has an old school R&B sound. The guitar riff is from the Grateful Dead and jazz rock world. I love that stuff.
7)"Holiday" says 1999 and with its neo-Flamenco drenched in reverb guitar sounds it sounds like new age meets folk rock. It's a very strong track, care to elaborate on the inspiration for it?
Holiday is unique for me in my view. The lyrics are sarcastic which is highly unusual for me. Check out the so I am tending to wonder if anyone’s home line. Of course, it has my usual thematic lyric though: Doing something for others and getting nothing in return - gave my love away, whoopee it's a holiday - like it's unique for me to have this kind of thing happen. I have a version somewhere in my archives where I'm fooling around with drum machines and House rhythms. It's actually a cool recording. I'll have to dig it out someday. I wanted to record it for my cd and it came out real fine. The 2nd half is now called Belly of the Beast. It has echoes of middle east and eastern music. This was right during the 9-11 days. There a whirlwind of anarchy happening in the song, reflecting what was happening in the world then. This was also a two take song with overdubs. A great take. We put tablas on it afterwards (by Eguie) and Marlene Tholl did many many takes of here "p
eacock" vocal sounds. We used many of them in the final mix. And I played slide and Tim Kelly played lap steel. Even I can't tell who did what there. By the way, I've never played this live except for a few lame attempts at an acoustic solo version.
8)Mama Don't Worry hails back to 1973. Is this a new version or an older tape? It sounds like a perfect song for a Charlie Chaplin silent movie. Who is on the Honky Tonk piano?
Mama Don't Worry has a cool history. I was in a band when I first moved to Boston named Canyon Sparrow. We were a jam band before anyone called them jam bands. I wrote this song back then and it became our cult type hit for our few followers. Very fun piece. Very me. I did record it in 1980 in a band I was in called Rendition. That version got played on some radio station that did novelty music. I had a double kazoo solo on that version. I felt that the song had to be recorded and here it is. Mark Shilansky plays the killer piano and I play a pretty good solo on it too. Felica Brady heard it and said that she'd like to sing harmonies on it. She heard it as Texas swing. She's from Texas. I never looked at it that way and she was right! Now I hear it as Texas Swing with quirky lyrics. A cool and fun version.
9)Another Day is not the Paul McCartney solo hit from the first moments after The Beatles broke up. In fact, it has more intricate guitar lines that could find their way into early Yes, though not as progressive as it seems more like Flying Burrito Brothers. That's a market with a strong following, is this the arena Ken Selcer has pointed this album towards?
Another day has a nice history to it also. Back in the 90's, I hung out in Harvard Square, Cambridge alot. On weekends it was crazy with street musicians, jugglers, etc. It was like a carnival. And it was like a dream - for me especially roaming around by myself. That's were the lines I had a dream came from. It all seemed dream like. And I was alone, The rest is self-evident. I was listening to a little world music, maybe Caribbean music at the time and maybe also some Wilco. Some gospel. It's all in there. This is a good accessible song. Another good relationship song about transcending troubles and tribulations: There's always another day. As for the musical lines in the song: I like to include some moving lines in a song if I can. I think very compositionally and counter lines and all that. I try to put them into songs without that taking over the music and the song. I see much progressive music having the technique and compositional stylings in the forefront of the
music and taking it over. My approach is to have all that support the song so the listener can sink in to the emotional part of the song without being distracting by all the music nonsense that should support the song and not the other way around.
10)"Walk With Me" rocks out more, but still could be identified with West Coast Country/Pop a la John David Souther, Gram Parsons or the Eagles.
Do you play material like this in your live bands?
Walk Me Me also has some Billy Joel type piano on it by Mark Shilansky. At least that's how he described it. I like to rock out. I don't get a chance to do this kind of material in my live bands because of the instrumentation of my groups. There is a guitar in the back ground on Walk With Me that is always doing counter lines and has overdrive on it. I can't do that live. When I'm playing live these days I pick songs that the particular players and instrumentation points to. So the songs and the arrangements are geared towards that. If I do an older song, the arrangements invariably are different than the recorded versions. I'd love to have a band with full instrumentation to play these songs, but it would be a luxury these days to be able to do that.
11)The smooth "Evelyn" sounds like a more recent recording, it also feels more commercial. When was it put together and why is it a "bonus track?"
Evelyn is a more recent recording. I played all the instruments myself and programmed the drums with some help from a friend of mine Rob Rudin. This a an Americana type song. I was looking for a sparse elemental feel to it, especially to the lyrics. I was looking for a stark feel describing more relationship troubles and being in the midst of it all. And, while doing this, thinking about time passing and what it all means. I wanted to keep it very simple with very little excess. I heard about a death of someone I knew along time ago while writing this song. That's in the song. It all seemed to come together the way I want it to. I do feel it's more commercial. I'm able to write songs now that are more broad based and can appeal to more listeners. I recorded it in 2007 at my house and Huck Bennert mixed it. It's a bonus track for a few reasons. I like the song very much and because of that and because it has more mass appeal and because I have no idea of when I will have a
nother cd, it just seemed right to put it on Breaking The Glass so people could hear it. It's called a bonus track because it's not from the Glass sessions. It's a new song. I do have many many new songs, enough for 1 or 2 cds. Who knows when I will get to putting out another cd. This is also why I put another song, It's All Around You, on the cd, also as a bonus track. So I have 2 bonus cuts on it. It's All Around You is a reggae and R & B influenced song that is also one of my more accessible and broad based songs that I have written. So there are now 14 songs on the cd.
Anything else you'd like to tell us about this specific album, Ken?
I think that the cd is a good reflection of my music, especially for the time I recorded it. It has something for lots of people. It's an artistic and personal statement that stands up to the passing of time and people's judgments. It has many universal themes that we all can relate to. If you listen to it, it seeps into you and the subtlety becomes music and lyrics that brings you to a place of renewal and hope without wallowing in self-reflection. And, it has great musicianship and fine guitar solos too! Breaking the Glass is work I'm very proud of. Thanks.
Kenny Selcer
1. Annie 4:52
2.Moment by Moment 4:39
3.Imagination 5:18
4.Fly Away 5:16
5.I Oughta Know 4:03
6.Shout 7:43
7.Holiday/Belly Of The Beast 6:18
8.Mama Don't Worry 3:11
9.Another Day 4:36
10. Walk With Me 4:24
11.Evelyn (bonus track)
12.Even A Fool 6:04
