House of Sugar

Recording at Sonic Ranch.

I saw my heart yesterday.

I got an echocardiogram for a very minor health concern that turned out to be nothing, but it meant that for thirty minutes I was lying on my side watching a live video feed of little flaps in my heart open and close like exuberant, autonomous uvula-thingies.

The sonographer operating the machine flew through menus and control options as quickly as a League of Legends e-sport athlete, drawing little boxes on parts of the image of my heart, joystick-ing around video playback.

When I was a little kid I got a bunch of echocardiograms related to Kawasaki Disease. Those visits were distant memories until the sonographer opened up the bottle of ultrasound lube and its smell brought those memories flooding back.

Anywho, I’m completely OK and was never at high risk. I wanted to tell you about it anyway cuz it’s weird to watch a live video of your own heart. At one point, the sonographer did something with the machine that “dyed” one area of motion red and orange and another blue, making it look like my heart was on fire. Very metal.

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We finished up the session in Texas. It was a beautiful, peaceful, musically rewarding and socially great experience. Really kind people, studio time completely devoid of nit-picking and weed-pulling. Some records need you to go through those processes, but this wasn’t one of them.

There’s a little bit of info about the record on social media but I can’t scoop it yet on Substack so I’ll save that for when the album is closer to release.

The studio, Sonic Ranch, is modernly fabled among musicians. Its property butts up against the southern border. Some of its tracking rooms look out at mountains in Mexico and Tr*mp’s steel slat border wall is a two-minute drive away. At some point, probably in the nineteenth century, there was a US Customs Service house on the property, and its cast iron sign still stands in the driveway.

The ranch is a working pecan orchard, on acres and acres. We ate a lot of pecans while making this record.

The studios are acoustically treated with panels covered in eclectic designer fabric, collected during owner Tony’s many trips to Paris. The Neve recording console from Motown West is in one of the studios and a musician who had played on Motown records decades ago was working in that studio, playing through the console again. I was unexpectedly starstruck when I found out Lil Yachty made his newest record in the room we were using.

Wildlife abounds… Tony told us stories of panthers and other big cats roaming the orchard, having escaped from cartel mansions on the other side of the border. We saw many cool, big birds, predator- and peaceful-type. While on the phone with Casey, pacing around our house one night, I encountered a skunk and looked its butthole in the eye as I realized the danger I was in. I ran inside to our kitchen, which was a cell service dead zone, so all Casey heard before the phone clicked off was, “Oh, shit, that’s a skunk!”

The Texas sun set over the orchards every night and wowed us.

One collaborator taught me how to improve my basketball shot. (Let’s say from 0 skill to 0.001 skill.) The secret is in BEEF: balance, eyes, elbow, follow-through.

Another established a found-rock-and-stone museum on the window ledges of the studio. Discovered countless treasures in the gravel and dust just feet from the building’s front door.

We drove into town one day to get groceries and visited this amazing tourist attraction of a house, Casa de Azucar, decorated as a tribute to a Catholic figure of El Paso in the 90s.

Casa de Azucar in El Paso

We were accompanied by a studio cat, Squeaker, whom I wrote about last week. Every studio or area of the property has an attendant cat or two. Since I wrote about Squeaker I learned that at one point, he had been run over by a sex worker driving recklessly in a Mercedes. He had (expensive) surgery and he seems totally fine today.

We spent our nights eating our leader’s home cooking and watching VH1’s Supergroup, a show from 2006 in which, mainly, Sebastian Bach whines about anything that doesn’t involve wine or rocking and Ted Nugent desperately tries and succeeds in talking about his balls and/or ballsack at every possible opportunity, and then some. Amazing entertainment.

Tonight (Saturday) Case Oats, Casey’s band, plays our first hometown show in a long time, at Golden Dagger. It’s on its way to selling out so if you’re in town and you see this in time, get an advance ticket :) We’ll be raising money during the show for Brandon Johnson’s mayoral campaign. And our good friends from Appleton, Dusk, are co-headlining.

Thanks as always for being here,
Spoon