Strange and the Familiars - "Leave Me Alone or Take Me to Bed"

After moving to Portland and interning at 8 Ball Studio, I was looking to start recording my own clients. I had run sound for Stephanie Strange (at that time performing under the name “Steph Infection and the Heebie Jeebies”) at a gig and had mentioned to her I would love to work on some recordings with her. Our very first session was for the song “Leave Me Alone or Take Me to Bed”. This was in summer 2015.

Chris White, the drummer she had playing with her at the time, brought a kick trigger instead of a kick drum to the studio, which I thought had a cool sound. It also had the benefit of being totally isolated from the snare and cymbals, which gave me more independent control over those tones later when putting together the final mix.

We started doing takes of upright bass, electric guitar, and drums playing together with Stephanie singing a live scratch vocal. After the first take, I suggested Chris stay off the snare in the choruses and play the backbeats on the hi-hats, to make the choruses feel smaller than the verses. Listening back now, I think this flipping of the usual verse/chorus dynamic helps give the song a unique identity and serves to draw even more attention to Stephanie’s lyrics and vocal nuances on the choruses. We ended up doing six total takes, and kept the sixth one in its entirety.

We then moved into overdubs—saxophone, organ, lead guitar, and final lead vocals. When doing final vocals, Stephanie and I came up with a vocal production style we’ve used for every recording we’ve worked together on since: instead of double tracking the lead vocal for the entire song or entire chorus, we doubled only certain lines, highlighting specific lyrics and melodies. This created some nice textural variety throughout the track, and helped emphasize Stephanie’s vocal as the featured element in the song.

Once all the parts were tracked, I did a mix of the tune. I found that the snare sound was a little lacking throughout the track, especially compared with the awesome synthetic kick sound we had gotten, so I found a snare hit I particularly liked and copied and pasted it to reinforce all the snare hits in the song. This added a consistent tone to each snare hit that made it feel a little more like a sample, which put the drum kit’s overall aesthetic in a nice middle zone to my ears—not too organic, not too electronic.

I printed the mix I had done through 8 Ball Studio’s Alan Smart C2 stereo compressor, and we called it a day. Coming back to it with fresh ears when Stephanie was putting together Strange & the Familiars’ first EP “Pretty Deadly” in 2016, we were totally happy with that first draft of the mix, so that was what ended up being mastered and released.

I’ve recorded songs in many different time frames and spaces, and I still find tracking & mixing a song in a day with everyone together in the studio to be the most magical kind of recording experience. Check out the final track below!