Mr. Jones & The Hard Feelings

The Hard Feelings/Make You Strong
Too Nice
Never Tell
Time To Go
Ring From My Finger
Election Day
Ugly Inside
Why Must You Be So Mean?
No More Fighting
It’s Been A Long, Long Time
So Easy
Beautiful

All songs written by Andras Jones

Andras Jones – Vocal & Acoustic Guitar
Marshall Thompson – Keyboards & Vocals
John Nason – Electric Guitar, Mandolin & Vocals
R. Walt Vincent – Bass
Colin Mahoney – Drums
With:
Clay Goldstein – Harmonica
Lili Haydn – Violin
James Lee Harris – Vocals
Lilly Gobeil – Vocals
Cindy Wassreman – Vocals

Recorded at Q Division in Boston, MA with Mike Deneen & John Lupfer
Additional tracking at Kommotion in San Francisco, CA with Fred Cirillo
Mixed and Mastered by John Nason & Earle Mankey in Thousand Oaks, CA
Execpt tracks 5, 6, 7 & 8 by John Nason & Colin Mahoney  at Zacudo Audio in Santa Monica, CA

Additional engineering by:
Colin Mahoney, John Nason & R. Walt Vincent

From Andras Jones:

I don’t like this record.

I know what it was and what it could have been, and even had I achieved my sonic aspirations, I probably still wouldn’t like it. It’s about a volatile love relationship that I was long over before we got to recording it the first time. We tried at least two times, maybe three, before we got to the tracking that ended up on the final release, recorded in Boston, San Francisco, Olympia, Santa Monica & Thousand Oaks. With no label backing, that meant it was all paid for by the band, and by me personally, during tours. Like one of those awful Orson Welles films that could have been great if only he’d sold out.

My dad died during the lead up to the release while I was in LA. He was in a home in Gig Harbor that I’d put him in when his private caregivers robbed him and abandoned him in a junkie flophouse. It’s a sad and ugly tale recounted in my book “Accidental Initiations”. I played a gig with the band at Fair City in Santa Monica the day I was informed of his death and only told them afterwards what was going on, to explain why the show was so raw. I think I recorded the vocals for “No More Figthting” & “It’s Been A Long, Long Time” that day. My dad had been suffering years of alzheimers-y decline, which is what brought me and Heidi, and eventually the rest of the band, to Olympia once we started touring in earnest. At the time I probably needed an intense project like this to pour my grief into but I don’t particularly want to go back there.

That said, I think some of it sounds really good, and I get a lot of e-mails from people who love it, so I’m not going to sit here and tell you what I think is wrong with the record. Here’s what’s cool about it.

We were touring like mad in the year leading up to this recording. Heidi and I had moved into a house on Franklin Street in Olympia that The Noses (a great indigenous local band) had just moved out of. I kept going down to LA to play shows and audition for acting roles, often staying on friend’s couches or in their guest houses for weeks, even months, at a time. This was around when Dan Bern’s career was really taking off, and that was fun (and aggravating) to watch. Only aggravating because we wanted to be riding alongside him, instead of behind. That’s the only drag about your friends getting successful. If it doesn’t happen to you too at the same time? You don’t get to see as much of each other for a while. Dan played his first big out of town shows with us in Richmond & Danville, Virginia. Our big shot Hollywood producer friend/fan/benefactor Jerry Meadors set these shows up for us in his home towns. We’d been, and would continue, playing with Dan for years. Colin and Brian Schey will eventually join Dan’s band on his “New American Language” CD after The Previous fold. But that’s well in the future of this re-telling.

We had several bass players during this period. Holly Montgomery, who we borrowed from Bill White Acre and Dan Bern, was a very impressive performer, but also very busy. She wanted to actually make money and couldn’t run off on some indie tour with a band of hopeful monsters like us. Glen Cathan, on the other hand, was more than willing, but he was a little bit over his head musically. Colin and John and Marshall brought a level of musical excellence to the band that I had come to rely on. They could also be incredibly passive aggressive, which probably held us together but not comfortably. Glen was super sweet and fully engaged in what we were doing. They loved him and were frustrated with his playing. I think I ended up just kinda being a dick to him. (Sorry Glen) He did several tours with us but when we were planning the tour that would lead to Boston where we planned to lay down the basic tracks for The Hard Feelings at Q Division Studios with Mike Deneen, I fired Glen and hired Walt. Walt would probably scoff at the idea that I “hired” him so let’s say he agreed to tour with us the way he came to Vienna. We covered his costs, and he had an adventure.

We played The Hard Feelings a lot during that tour. Got some pretty nice live recordings. I’m particularly fond of one from Gotham City, a little coffeehouse in Ferndale, Michigan. I don’t remember getting along particularly well with anyone. It was late fall and it was cold. Everyone had colds. I felt like a pretentious jerk. Walt has always had the ability to make me question myself, and that tour, the answers I was arriving at weren’t good. Still, when we played the music, I remember liking that.

Deb Pasternak turned us onto Mike Deneen, which proved fortuitous, not just because he’s a great guy with a good ear who helped us capture our attempted masterpiece in all the regal old school studio glory of Q Division, for a price we could afford…. What it was I don’t remember but it was probably around $1500 a day. Can that be right? I can’t imagine spending that on studio time now. Oh well, gas was cheap, and we were getting paid to play…sometimes. None of us had cell phone bills.

The especially cool thing about Q Division, the month we were there, is that’s when Mike Deneen, along with Jon Brion and Aimee Mann, were finishing up tracks for her breakthrough album “I’m With Stupid”. Jon Brion would end up being a big influence on me in the future but at the time I didn’t meet him. Mike did play me an early mix of “That’s Just What You Are” and told me a story about Jon, who played on Jellyfish’s “Spilt Milk”, when I sited that album as an influence on “The Hard Feelings”. He said Jon hated working on it because all the parts were just “impressions of Queen and George Harrison”.

That’s what I liked about it.

After the Boston sessions, which sounded rich and potent, we wanted to record the vocals at Kommotion Studios in San Francisco. The idea was that we could afford more time to fine tune the vocals at $300 a day or whatever we were paying at Kommotion, plus James Lee Harris & Lilly Gobeil (of the band Patchwork) lived in the bay area and I wanted to get their voices on this record. While they sounded great, something about this process necessitated bouncing some of the original tracks down to digital tape and losing the warmth we had paid so much for at Q Division. My memory is not very clear on the production details, and maybe the bouncing happened later at Zacudo Audio in Santa Monica or with Earle Mankey in Thousand Oaks. I just know that we tinkered for quite some time before eventually releasing the record, like a turd that none of us cared that much about by the time it was done. And with us not caring, The Hard Feelings simply joined the other CD’s on our merch table and, even as ambivalent as I feel about it now, it probably deserved a better and more enthusiastic release.

The truth is, by the time it was done, I was already fully focused on what would become my favorite of our CD’s, “UnPop…” I will say this about The Hard Feelings, though, I love the opening 3 minutes.