A recent shot of Control Room A at Westend Recording Studios in Kansas City, KS
Strange how things happen.
I mentioned Paul Malinowski in my last blog article from a couple of days ago, and now this afternoon I somehow ended up on the Westend Recording Studios website. So I decided to poke around and see what was new at the studio since I haven’t been there for a few years, when I’d dropped by to pick up the master tapes of a Fragile Porcelain Mice album while in town for my friends’ band’s (Shiner, which Paul was actually playing bass guitar in at the time) farewell show in KC, MO.
This brings me to the point of us this article, but let me give you the back-story real quick before I move on. Westend is the studio where FPM recorded and mixed the All This Baggage album, as well as some earlier pre-production demos for said album–one of which actually ended up on this classic compilation series. Both projects were done with Malinowski at the helm as engineer, and he even laid down a guitar lead on one of the songs–coincidentally, the same song that I’m getting ready to tell you about.
The very first studio photo I saw today on the Westend Recording Studios site was this one (see above). It’s a recent shot of Control Room A, where we did all of the tracking and mixing for All This Baggage and for the demos, respectively. What caught my eye was at the very back of the photograph.
Just between the two computer displays (left, rear) and the 2″ analog tape machine (right, rear — possibly the same tape machine that we recorded everything on) there looks to be a new isolation booth with a window looking into the control room. It would’ve had to be in this space where at the time of our work at the studio there was a tiny, little storage room/office, complete with a small desk. It was at this desk–and with the windowless door that connected the storage room to the control room closed–that I sat alone with a Yamaha keyboard and headphones and wrote the piano parts for “Cross Anchor Union” on a whim, while one of the other guys was tracking his parts in the next room.
We originally (to my recollection) had no intention of adding a piano part to the song, but I suppose that when faced with a great-sounding keyboard in a private room while at the same time serving no immediate purpose in the recording process, I listened to my ‘Muse’ and let the melody and rhythm roll. For better or for worse, although we didn’t have time for me to take many passes at it, I was given the chance to record it, and it was from then on a part of the song. In fact, we played “Cross Anchor Union” at a Thanksgiving show a couple of years ago and had our friend Ian play the piano part live. That was exciting, and it was also the one and only time that we’ve performed the song live with the piano part to date.
Ah… Memories.
This Fragile Porcelain Mice fan page has “Cross Anchor Union” streaming in its music player if you’d like to listen. Hit play, close your eyes, and take a ride back in time with me–way back to 1997 in Kansas City, Kansas.
Filed Under: Studio
tonight. It’s a photo of the band driving in our first van, aptly named ‘Gladys’, that was snapped from out of the window of another moving vehicle on the way to a 
