LIZ + THE BAGUETTES
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Punk

5/30/2017

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First impressions are not always accurate. The first time I encountered the word punk, for example, was at a friend's house. She had a copy of this:

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This is the sort of early-80s artifact that now seems incredible merely for existing. ​The track list included Blondie's "Call Me," and that was as close as it ever came to punk. Other songs included "What a Fool Believes" (which six-year-old Liz loved) and "Still Rock and Roll to Me." It was so wide of the mark that, remembering it in adulthood, I was convinced I had to have conflated it with something else, some overheard top 40 or something, but no: those songs were on there. Along with a version of the Pink Panther theme with a really souped-up syncopated sax solo, because, you know, what's more punk than that?
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Whoever assembled this thing felt about punk the same way Clouseau feels up there. There's nothing like dismissive contempt to really help you get an artistic movement.

By the time this thing came out, in 1981, my parents had already abandoned pop radio, and they were trying to raise us without much TV (a feat at which they largely succeeded, so well that I missed many of the defining experiences of Gen X). When friends had anything that hinted at pop culture—music, non-literary writing, Little Debbies—I grabbed for it frantically, sensing the pornographic allure of the forbidden. This is why I still love comic books and graphic novels, and it probably has something to do with why I'm an artist, too: pop culture was transgressive at the most elemental level.

So I didn't know I liked punk until college, when the sounds of grunge waning into nü-metal and alt-rock convinced me that I too needed to take a break from pop radio. And then it turned out that I didn't just like punk: I needed it. It spoke to something visceral and messy, some part of me whose existence the world tried to deny or prettify. 

Not every Baguettes song is, or ever will be, punk. But I hope we always cleave to the honesty of it. At least a bit more than the Pink Panther did.
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Homebrew

5/22/2017

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Homebrew is my nickname for rough versions of songs, in which I am playing all the instruments and supplying all the vocal tracks. (If other people are involved in a recording process, it's generally for a more polished studio version.) These are mostly demos for the band, though a few are just documentation, or else proof of concept for composition experiments.

Most Homebrew tracks are as lo-fi as it gets, using GarageBand and the built-in mic on my laptop. Sometimes I'll get a bit fancier with mics and amps and so forth, but rarely. This tends to mean there's a bit more room noise—tires squealing on alley ice, rain, the cat demanding lunch (right after "all the same" in verse 2)—but I like giving the songs space like that. It's a better indication of how they'll fare in the world, and I've never been a huge fan of surgically sterile studio sounds; I'd rather have a bit of grit and ambience.

I almost never bother with miking the drum kit—Charlie is both a better drummer and a better sound engineer than I am—so the percussion often consists of handclaps, snaps, or bongo-style slaps on the edge of the table. For Whiskeyboots, I didn't yet have a drum kit, so the bass drum sounds come from banging a felt mallet on an unabridged dictionary.

I do not apply any sort of pitch adjustment (which is obvious in a few tracks, alas), and I try not to do much cutting and pasting between takes. Sometimes I noodle around with GarageBand's amp filters. Again, not much. Most guitar solos are little more than placeholders, since I typically play rhythm and hand the solo over to Charlie or Zach.

Anyway, as we work towards the second full Baguettes album, there's enough Homebrew to put out a decent compilation. What should be on it?
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    Liz Bagby

    Songwriter & multidisciplinary artist

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