Big Rock Candy Mountains

On our cd the Neighbor’s Giraffe we covered the old folk number Big Rock Candy Mountains. I always felt there was a psychedelic leaning to the lyrics and there was no resisting the urge to push that leaning so far the words melted into a whole new consciousness of strangeness.

DNA Girl and I re-worked the lyrics a good dozen times before we settled on the recorded words. The live performance of the lyrics is slightly different but live vs. studio is a subject for another time.

I have no idea how many vocal takes I did on that one before we agreed on one that we both liked.

Part way through working on it we thought it would be fun instead of just ending the tune where it normally stops that we would have it explode into psychedelic abandon and set free some weird sounds.

We thought when we recorded that section (yes this track was a cut and paste job to some degree) it would only be a couple of minutes…. Those who have the cd know the full track is a little over 10 minutes long. We went nuts and had so much fun we didn’t care. We edited the best parts of the sonic exploration into the song.

Part of the soundscape was DNA Girl playing guitar which we ran through the TTT Analog Delay Theresynth which is a mutated pedal/theresynth made by Chamber of Sounds (they rule!). While DNA Girl played, I manipulated the TTT Analog Delay Theresynth in real time distorting her guitar all over the place. It was a gas.

We decided to make a video for the track but figured it wouldn’t be fun to do the entire piece so we edited the song down to just the vocal section for the video.

The Big Rock Candy Mountains video is chiefly comprised of found footage. Some from public domain films and a lot from the Count Robot personal archives. Some people might spot an old Mass landmark in the video.

So here it is.

Dig it like gold.

-Sincerely Groovy,

Count Robot