Rishikesh Hirway

There are things that are in the album that are so unexpected in the moment.

Things that other folks did.

You heard that sort of like ghostly, eerie lair in Stray Dogs.

That was played by my friend Cole Kamen Green.

For that song, he played this thing called an EVI, an electronic valve instrument, where you blow into it and there are like synth parameters that you can adjust with knobs.

And so the velocity is determined by how hard you blow into it and have it affect the volume or the pitch or all kinds of different things.

And so he essentially just improvised over that whole song.

We didn't do a lot of takes, but from one take to the next, it was always different.

And that was, I think, a fundamental aspect of a lot of the players that came in.

Shahzad Ismaili is another player on there.

He played a bunch of instruments on the album.

He's somebody who won't play the same thing twice.

One of my favorite things in the whole album is the piano solo that he takes in a song called Home Movies.

And there are samples of my wife and her dad from an actual home movie that I'd had in the demo.

And Phil saying, you know, since everything should be live, he's like, okay, well, why don't you give me those samples and I'll play them out of an amp in the room.

Yeah.

And Shahzad played this piano part that had never happened before that in any of the handful of rehearsals.

And it sounds like an accident.

I don't mean like what he's playing, he's playing accidentally.

I mean, it sounds like somebody having an accident.