This is just a few seconds under 30 minutes. These are my 8 favorites, and I’m having a tough time with order. I really believe a CD has to transition smooth, and feel like some sort of story is being told. This is the best I can come up with, but I keep changing it, and listening to it for a better mix. We just need the songs we haven’t recorded yet, and then it will all come together. Since I’m traveling to Maine, this is the mix I’m taking with me. I’ll be back in CA end of August so Mark and I can finish this project. Until then, anyone got a better playing order for these 8 songs?
To download our new tunes, simply right click each one and “Save Target As” to your desk top. Then right click the mp3 files on your desk top and “Open With” iTunes or other music player.
It is indeed a wonderous thing when Mr. Mark Harvey comes to play his guitars. It’s not easy getting both of us in the same room at the same time, but when it happens, I think it’s what we’re on earth to do. Make music together. Here’s another fun clunky ditty we put together for you to listen to. With your ears.
I am so happy that Mark could get this recording onto bandcamp’s way cool site. This is a set of songs I wrote. It’s just Mark and I playing acoustic guitars and singing into his DAT player. Recorded in the living room at the Rain Station (which was a little house off 45th and Lawton in the Sunset of San Francisco). I gotta record a couple of these songs in a studio some day. They have potential. I guess that’s what I love about this recording. It’s immediate, live, and real. This is what Rain Station sounds like LIVE- campy, kooky, stoney…
I don’t remember a thing about this recording. I remember making the CD cover artwork, and I remember recording Summer Home, Widdershins, and Quiet Morning… it’s such a blurr. Mark, do you know the story of this disc? It seems to have about 3 different worlds compiled into one project. There are the tunes with Tony and Brian, the stuff you and Brian made, but where was I at that time? Did I return to Maine for a while? What do you remember about the process of making this disc?
I still dig this 4 track recording. It is from a time when we just plugged into the old 4-track and whoever was around added a bass, guitar, or something. After a while, I had all sorts of great tracks. I noticed that the best tracks had Mark on them. Criminal Goat is a collection of the songs with Mark, and Rain Station was born. We’ve continued to record off and on when time permits for the past 800 years. It’s an amazing track record if nothing else. Criminal Goat is a clunky, strange, home recording. It’s very improv based, and raw. I still get a good creative vibe off it. I like to draw while I listen. I draw really weird stuff too. It’s a project that just keeps giving, and it’s here now for your pleasure, or pain… Criminal Goat by Rain Station.
Summer of 1993 I was in Boston walking in the rain toward South Station to catch a bus to Maine to see my folks. There was a lot of construction at the new station, so there were temporary fences and walkways, with lots of signs to help find your way. Everyone was doing their best to stay under the roof of the tracks to stay dry. A man holding a briefcase was standing in a way so that his case was hiding the first letter to a sign. As I walked into the area, I saw a bold blue sign with an arrow that read, RAIN STATION. My brain took a minute and wondered what a Rain Station was. Do they monitor the rain fall there? Is it a temporary structure to keep passengers dry? Then as my perspective and angle changed, I noticed there was a T behind his briefcase, and the sign said Train Station. Silly me. Here I am at Boston’s South Station, and I think the sign says Rain Station. The moment stuck with me. I had seen a sign. Not only did Mark and I name the band Rain Station, but we named the (soon to be condemned) house we lived in, Rain Station being in the fog zone of San Francisco’s Sunset Beach District. Black mold took that house over, and we all had to move out. Hack hack cough cough. Very damp and rainy indeed.
Mark adds a second guitar track onto RS-05, which later became Give The World. Here you can hear the entire drum track that is cut down much shorter in the final mix. The beat had a strange bit, where it attempts to go into another beat, but quickly changes it’s mind, and just stays in the same rhythm. I knew I was going to cut the track, but Mark wanted to give me as much meat and potato as he could. Mr. Harvey is a patient man, and as weird as the drum beat was, he gets it after a couple takes.
