Future Artifact

"You’re a future artifact, you’ll always be looking back, 20, 30 years after the fact…"

Or not even. Maybe only 17 years after the fact. “Future Artifact” was the title track of the first album by my band SHArQ, released in 2001. I still like the Rat-fuzz and rough edges of ye olde SHArQ album version, but as with “Cactus In A Fishbowl Blues,” I wanted to record an alternate version even before Future Artifact came out. (In particular, my vocals on the original make me cringe in a few places.)

All the references to the past made me want to record a version with more acoustic instrumentation. Mentioning “washboards” without actually incorporating a washboard into the song felt like a missed opportunity.

You’re a future artifact

you’ll always be looking back

twenty, thirty years after the fact

Your tapestry’s woven gold

gets buried under the moss and mold

caught in entropy’s stranglehold

Purple Rain, Paint It Black

from washboards to Marshall stacks

electricity to candle wax—sink back!

Spittoons, saddlebags

full of plastic replicas of Kerouac’s nutsack

whole platoons of artifacts

You’re the future architect

of an ancient revivalist sect

two millennia after the fax

Archaeologists years from now

dig a jukebox out of the ground

drop in a quarter, hear this sound…

Sink back! Leap forward!

When I began recording the follow-up to Frost Heaves in late 2009, my original vision was for it to be an all-acoustic album. I recorded my acoustic guitar and scratch vocal tracks for several songs at home. I decided to take another crack at “Future Artifact,” and this time I capo’d further up the neck to put the song in a better spot for my vocal range. My new “Artifact” guitar tracks sounded rich, due the big, full sound of the 1940s Marvel jumbo acoustic I recently traded in a guitar for at Luthier’s Coop.

The words also evolved over the years. The reference to “Purple Haze” was changed to “Purple Rain” after the death of Prince. And then there’s “Kerouac’s nut sack”… at some point I began singing it that way as a joke, and it stuck.

However, this new “Artifact” made its biggest leap forward when I was able to get one of my guitar heroes, Sue Burkhart, to come in to Harmonium with her National resonator and lay down some swampy slide tracks. The Delta blues vibe Sue brought helped the song “sink back” to the first half of the 20th Century, and Norm captured the gritty glory on a ribbon mic. Sue’s slide is my favorite thing about this version.

Soon thereafter, James came into Harmonium to add an acoustic bass track, I laid down a better vocal… and then the song—and the whole project—was put on hold while we chased our muse hither and yon, and eventually down a rabbit hole into Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World. Eventually I got back to it and began adding more layers to “Future Artifact” at home: shakers, cabasa, Fanta bottle, triangle.

Dan Mickus took four passes at a solo but didn’t quite nail it. We planned on having him come back again for another shot, but then I cobbled together a composite solo where I spread out all four of his solo tracks. I love the clean ‘50s rockabilly tone he got.

And once Emily Brewster came in and added her gutsy backing vocals, we knew we were really on to something.

But there was still something missing… washboard, of course. Matthew Duncan came into Algorithm Studios and did several passes on washboard. Rather than try and use it throughout, Norm came up with the idea of using the best bit from Matthew’s performance, adding a floor tom, and thus, found the low-end hook the otherwise overly trebly song needed.

And yet even after Norm had finished his final mix (and made it clear he was done with this one), I was still hearing something else. I tracked the grungy guitar to the “Marshall stacks” verse with my Rat Deucetone pedal, a nod to the Rat Turbo track on the original grungy SHArQ version. Oh, and as long as I’m at it, why not throw in some wiggly wah guitar to add a paisley splash of psychedelic 60s flavor? Thankfully, maestro Mark Alan Miller was able to blend these post-mix-tracks in seamlessly prior to mastering.

(Of course this condensed entry doesn’t even go into what Norm and I did during the freak out following the “archeologist’s quarter drop.” Let’s just say that I recorded some theremin, and we tossed a pitch-shifted bass-line from one the greatest pop songs of all time, along with a few other skewed ingredients, into the blender.)

And there you have it… a fairly brief account of a very long process. And one that probably isn’t over. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in another 20 or 30 (or 17) years, I decide it’s time for a new, improved “Artifact.” Stay tuned…