Tim V. Smyth has been an active participant in the Irish music scene for many years under a variety of different monikers. His most recent musical endeavor was Hidden Highways, a dark and minimal folk/alt-country outfit inspired as much by “The Hired Hand” and “Return To Oz” as it was by Townes van Zandt and Gillian Welch. Unsurprisingly, then, the songs he penned for that project found their way into a number of film soundtracks.
However, despite his love for Americana, he has recently moved away from his alt-country roots to explore a darker, more glutinous sound in his latest self-produced work. This new body of work features a wide range of influences, from the solo guitar pieces of Loren Connors to the lo-fi electronica of John Maus. Tim utilizes a variety of tools, toys, and techniques to create a unique and textured sound. Test equipment, botched guitars, dictaphone vocals, broken bass synths, and wonky tape float together around lyrics dealing with the age-old subjects: life, death, and love.
The third single, “Love’s Not Through With You Yet,” will be available digitally on the 10th of November 2023.
About the song:
“Love’s Not Through…” started as a song with a beginning, middle, and end but ended up as a loop on the Zvex pedal, the Lo-Fi Loop Junky. I had been re-watching “The Harder They Fall,” a 50’s film with some less than complimentary portrayals of boxing when the vaguest of lyrics sprang to mind. I worked on it over the next couple of weeks, trying to match it to tunes that just wouldn’t wear it. Around that time, I had an opportunity to buy a Zvex Lo-Fi Loop Junky looper pedal. I say “opportunity” as they are prohibitively expensive, but this one was reasonably priced. It’s an odd beast – if you want to use it like a Boss looper, you’ll be hard-pressed! I believe it’s analog or analog-ish, utilizing a chip from old answering machines. Not surprisingly, there’s no quantization, smart start, or overdubbing. However, whatever is looped into it comes out like some old scratchy 78 record or a warbly cassette recording.
I recorded a few demos with just circular riffs into this machine and started to match lyrics to one. The boxing analogy for resilience is a tritely obvious one, but I thought I was pretty clever working a sport into a song. Pretty clever, that was, until I heard “When An Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease” by Roy Harper.
I did a first run of the song that evolved into an unsuitable synth-pop oddity and had to start from scratch using the loop itself as the track’s starting point. It was immediately clear that less was more for this track, and I added gentle chords from my Epiphone Dot Studio 335 copy and lush strings from a Korg SP-80s. The reverbs were from a Zoom MS-80CDR in my Tascam mixer’s send/return. A swimming feedback howl was recorded with the 335 copy and my favorite amp of all time – a Coron Live 10 mic’d with a Blue Hummingbird and used as you would a synth pad. The track still felt empty, and I left it alone for weeks, hoping something would come to me.
It wasn’t until after finding an LP copy of one of my favorite film scores, Gabriel Yared’s for “Betty Blue,” that I dug out my melodica to complete the track. Now maybe it’s harmonica on that score, maybe it’s a melodica – I’ve never been able to get a clear answer on that, but to me, it sounds more like a melodica. My own melodica is the cult classic Hohner Piano 26 models, and I’ve tried to incorporate many tracks, but it’s never made the cut. I had doubled or complemented its line with my Korg Poly 800, but these sounded intrusive when paired with it and were dropped. The melodica was mic’d again with the Blue Hummingbird, which is ideal for small spaces, and the mic itself sounds great.
