- Save The Date: Azz-Is Jazz/Not-Jazz Festival on Sunday, Nov 6th in Venice, CA - October 22, 2022
- Bay Area Singer-Songwriter Evelyn Rose Releases New Album “Little Moments” - October 14, 2022
- MR PUZL – “Tomorrow – Original Mix” (feat. Maarten Goji) - July 20, 2022
We’re really excited to share the fresh new single “Overrated” from Bay Area artist Firemaid, the solo project from Kaila McIntyre-Bader (Big Tree, Bows). The track also came together with additional help from Luke Bace (Bows). The track is beautiful in its’ simplicity, with Kaila’s smooth vocals front and center on top of airy piano chords and emotionally-charged arrangements. I love the melodies and tempo of this song, it’s just a nice sonic journey.
We dig the track so much we had to ask them about the writing and recording process for this one! See what they had to say and stream the new single below:
Kaila: “This process was pretty different than what I usually do. I started this song a while ago when I was messing around with my VoiceTouchLive2, using it to affect and loop my voice. I created a densely layered arrangement, and then added some chords on the piano to accompany it. I performed it that way at smaller, intimate solo shows, but when we fleshed it out with the full band, it took a different shape. It ended up sounding a little more alt-country with the live instruments, and I took a break from it to let it breathe so it could become what it was meant to be.
The inception of this recording actually began at the beach with wine in hand, watching a sunset. Luke had his OP1, a sampling instrument, with him, and he recorded my voice and a few guitar strums. We ended up keeping those samples and used them on the track you hear here. We added a simple drum beat, and voila! We were on our way!
We decided we wanted to submerse ourselves in this one, so we took an entire weekend and locked ourselves in our home studio. We tried a lot of different elements- some stuck, and others didn’t make the cut. There was a lot of jamming, a little bit of bickering, and finally the tune started coming together. Once we got all the sounds we liked, the arrangement came together pretty organically.”
Luke: “While on the northern californian coast we decided to do some pre-production on “Overrated”. All we had was an acoustic guitar and an OP-1, so Luke sampled a few chords onto the OP1 and we walked along the bluffs until we found a cozy spot to sit and work. Luke sequenced the guitar chords on the OP-1, then started building a beat using arpeggiated vinyl clicks and a wonky, unquantized drum beat.
Kaila was feeling it so we sang the verse and chorus right into the OP1. Luke then took a piece of Kaila’s vocals, and sampled them internally so he could play back bits and pieces of Kaila’s voice chopped ad pitched. The result felt right and the demo of “overrated” was born. Back at SclipperStudios Luke dumped the acoustic guitar and vocal chops from the OP1 into his DAW, then got to work recreating the drums, retaining the vinyl click idea and building a more solid beat.
From there, we workshopped the arrangement, juxtaposing a warbley piano and juno sound with a driving sub bass line and punchy drums. Continuing with the vocal sampling idea, I sampled some of Kaila’s vocals into the iPad app SAMPLR and dumped some of that into the DAW. After a day of work-shopping the arrangement in the studio, we were really happy with all the elements, and there was enough unused content to scavenge through later and re-purpose as ear candy…every production needs a lot of it!”
