Window Business - "No One's Good at Love Except for Babies"

Will Stafford, who releases music under the name Window Business, has been a long time musical friend. In 2019 and 2020, he was working on a multi-part medley of various songs he had written called “Hallelujah for That”. We booked a weekend of studio time at The Hallowed Halls Recording Studio in July of 2020 to track that medley as well as a few other songs he had written around that time. The collection of songs we recorded that weekend were released later as “Six Songs Together”.

One particular song from that release ended up connecting me with my first feature film scoring project. Will had written “No One’s Good at Love Except for Babies” on guitar, but we all agreed the recording of the song should be piano-driven. We set up in the main live room of Hallowed Halls, which is a very large and echo-y room (the studio was converted from an old library). The drums were in a separate room, but the piano, upright bass and lead vocal were all set up in this giant main room with 18-foot ceilings.

We had never played the song together before with this arrangement of instruments, so I offered the idea of counting it off with middle C on the piano. We liked this way of intro-ing the song, and we tried putting another count-off before the second verse, but that didn’t quite work. Will had the insight to cut the second count-off down to only 3 beats, and that seemed to feel right to everyone.

We did five takes and kept the last take we did, no edits, no overdubs. I ended up mixing the song back at my home studio a few weeks later. It was an interesting challenge figuring out how to appropriately mix the piano, bass and vocals—all of the mics on those instruments had bled into each other! I ended up low passing the close mics on the piano at about 2 kHz, which let the higher treble frequencies of the piano come entirely from the more distant vocal and bass mics. This helped emphasize the roominess of the piano, which added a lot of character to the recording.

This song (along with a few other Window Business songs) ended up being licensed for use in the 2023 film The Year of the Dog, and, because of my work on the Window Business tracks, I was hired to create additional incidental music for other parts of the film as well. Check out the trailer for that film (which uses a small snippet of the song) or the full version of the song below!