First thing we did was google the radio show, and we were astounded to find very little information about it online. We found a Youtube video with gospel singers with the similar title and we both gulped, and wondered what we’d gotten ourselves signed up for. Turns out, Voices from the DMV is a very new local radio show produced by Antonio Villaronga. The show airs on WERA-LP 96.7 FM in Arlington, VA every Friday at noon. Each week, Antonio invites a new local artist to showcase their talent. The show is pre-recorded live in the Audio Production Suite at Arlington Independent Media, although some folks play pre-recorded music.

The Arlington Independent Media building is in Clarendon, right around the corner from Galaxy Hut and Iota Club. That means its geographically close to some neighborhoods with very good taste in music. Josh used to live a few blocks away from this building and jogged past it thousands of times (okay, okay, jogged by it a few times). Each time Josh ran by, he thought it was a place that sold tickets to music events for some reason. I guess the giant satellites on top of the building just weren’t enough of a clue, but it leads to a nifty fact: This building actually broadcasts on a local FM station. It’s the only local station that actually gets picked up at the FCC’s headquarters across the pond in DC. Noice.

We learned all this when we met our new best friend Antonio. We walked into the studio and found it to be remarkably posh. This place has state of the art recording equipment that’s available to rent at shockingly low prices to Arlington County residents. So if you’re local – look into it.

When it became time for us to use the studio, we all got to work. Antonio setup mics, stands, and other recording equipment that was needed. We got our instruments out of cases and into working order. First things first, Antonio asked us to do some self-interviews, where he’d ask us to describe our music, our influences, and the local music scene – and we’d ramble an answer his way. We’re not sure how, but we ended up talking to ourselves for like an hour, and thankfully Antonio chopped this down to a few minutes. After we got done talking – it was time to make some noise!

We came prepared to play 2 songs. Turns out… Dan had played like 6. So we were already behind. But whatever, we setup our video camera, pushed play and did a few takes. Antonio ended up mixing and mashing a few takes together via his workstation to get the best outcome. He was really cool about all of it and we had a great time playing. We’ll admit we were a little nervous at first, but Antonio cheered us on and we got into the swing of things. As we were all packing up, Antonio said that we could’ve played a few covers if we were worried about it being a short show… D’oh! Since we didn’t have a lot of original material to offer, we followed up afterwards with our home recorded track Sequestered Together to help make our set a little longer.

With everything packed up, we left the studio, and headed over to Galaxy Hut for some camaraderie. A few days later, Antonio got back in touch with us after doing a little bit of mixing, and voila! We had finished tracks. The results were astounding. The Voices From the DMV setup is amazing and the quality is just as good as professionally recorded live albums released by big name acts. Do yourself a favor and be prepared to feature the best originals from your catalog. Listen to our show below.

Once the show aired we asked if we could put the tracks on Soundcloud and YouTube. We took a still from the video and used it to create some simple album artwork. The album was called Live on WERA 96.7 FM. We hated not using Voices From the DMV in the album name, but we thought it was useful from a marketing standpoint to show that we had played live on the radio. In our Youtube videos we made sure to feature ‘Voices From the DMV’ loud and proud.

If you get the call to be on this radio show, we really recommend that everyone come ready to play LOTS of songs, bring a video camera to turn it into a Youtube video, and offer up some desserts to Antonio for his time. He’s a great guy doing a wonderful service for the local music community. He’s also got a huge sweet tooth. He informed us his favorite dessert is apple pie. Bring that too.

See below for us playing Spec, VA, which is hosted on our Youtube channel.

Here’s the Soundcloud album, and both tracks are downloadable!

Structure & Lyrics

Here’s the song’s lyrics:

Meaning & Development

The song was inspired by DCist’s series about Abandoned States in the DC area, the Spec, VA one in particular. Spec was an old mining town before the Great Depression hit. And when I say small, it might be better to refer to it as a village or even a hamlet. DCist does a great job describing the town, so we’ll let them explain.

Spec, Virginia is a town even smaller than it sounds. If I’d have blinked, I’d have missed it. Its fifteen or so residents are tucked away in the Blue Ridge mountains, four hours or so southwest of D.C. It’s a handful of mobile homes and trailers, a gurgling creek and the occasional lumbering freight train providing its bucolic soundtrack.

The song was written about a fictional iron worker striving to make a living right around the time of the mine’s inevitable demise. The lyrics are sung from the perspective of the worker who is trying to win the heart of one, Analien. Underneath the obvious pleading of the iron worker lies a dark undertone of hardship that was faced by all of the workers upon the depletion of the mine. Through his hard work and infatuation with Analien, the iron worker has decided to put an end to his apparent alcoholism and depression to win her over.

In terms of development, we’ve begun to embrace the folksiness. Much like our most recent song You and Me, this song began as a guitar riff and melody recorded onto Kenny’s phone. It grew and grew, especially as we added vocal harmonies, until we arrived at today’s version. An interesting thing about this song is that there is no chorus – the verses just keep chugging along. Most people don’t notice, but some have commented on the abnormal song structure.

Recording

We are really not going to comment on the recording process. We recently grabbed iMovie, took some footage of the whole process, and then cut it all together. Therefore, there’s a video to come describing the whole recording process so stay tuned!

Video

We drove 3.5 hours southwest to Spec, VA to actually film a music video. We had no idea what the hell we were doing, but it all kinda worked out. We really don’t know anything about making a video, but the next time we at least know how important it is to keep the camera still! When we arrived, we were already fighting daylight, so we had to do all the filming in 2 hours. We then cut up the footage on our iPad via iMovie and this is what popped out!

<tangent>
Without getting into too much detail (or give too much away), we have decided to not follow a particular genre when we write music. We know – we know.. This doesn’t really work.. Who are we marketing to? The short answer is: We just want to write music we like. If that means spanning a couple, or gratuitous amount, of genres.. so be it. It feels musically liberating and allows us to express ourselves however we like – regardless of it’s “marketability”. We understand that very few, if any, mainstream artists have executed this successfully, but we aren’t focusing on how radio ready our set of music is. We just want to create music we, and hopefully other people who hear it, like it.
</tangent>

Lyrics

Here are the song’s lyrics:

Meaning

You and me is a simple song meant to be a retrospective on my relationship with my wife — let’s just call her El. On its surface, it is pretty straightforward. The lyrics in the verses paint a picture of my pride and nervousness at our wedding, along with the general love and devotion to my wife even during tough times.

The bridge takes it to a deeper, more personal, level and meaning. For those of you that don’t know me (Kenny), I had a pretty serious bout with anxiety a couple of years ago. Don’t worry – I’m A-OK these days, but the bridge explains the situation and my appreciation towards my wife for guiding me through that tough time. I think when it was all said and done, that period of anxiety brought my wife and I closer together. I am and will be forever grateful to her. This song is the best I could do to show her how thankful I am.

Development

Kenny’s style of writing music is very abstract and organic, so development has been going on for a few months. He tends to not write out things, have a chart of ideas, or develop overarching concepts of what a song needs to be or achieve. Everything comes in the moment and what is created is what he feels sounds good. This method is aggravating because it’s difficult to sit down and just work on a song. His mind doesn’t think of music as something that can be worked on like a building or program. The end result is a cool concept that sits around for a while until the rest comes. Josh has done a good job of corralling Kenny’s efforts, helping the song along the finish line, and making it what it is today. Many people would have probably gotten frustrated and stopped working on it with him, but Josh has been a great teammate and we are figuring out how to work together. [this would be the bro-hug portion of the conversation]

As a side note.. It is kind of funny how opposite our music writing styles are. We plan on taking that as a positive since we can blend our styles and use them to our advantage. We can teach each other how to do things we wouldn’t normally do better. Kenny added this into the development because it’s important when you are working with people (not even in a band per-say). Everyone is different and it is up to you to learn how to work best together.

This song began as a guitar riff / melody hummed onto a phone, and to all songwriters out there, we highly suggest getting a recording app on your phone. We’ve forgotten countless cool little melodies over the years that could have been immortalized by a quick tap on the phone. The riff was showed to Josh and he loved it. We decided to move forward with it because we felt it was one of the better ideas we had at the time. That is when Kenny-osis set in. Every time we tried to pick the song back up to write more – KTL just had the hardest time appending parts to it. When we added something to it.. It didn’t feel natural. He’s weird.. and doesn’t know why he’s got a mental block about writing sometimes – he just does! It is difficult to go back to something that came to him in the past. So long story short – the song sat around because of his medically diagnosed music-writing phobia. We’ll get better about it in time.

Things started rolling again once the lyrics and subject of the song were established. The folky-ness was an obvious attribute of the song, so the mandolin was a great addition. It is one of those instruments that just puts you by a campfire. Kudos to Josh for creating the complicated mandolin parts. It really enhances the song. He has done an awesome job of taking this song to the next level with the mandolin so we also decided to take advantage his brass-playing ability and added in some cornet. We felt like it would be a good idea to do because – well – Sufjan Stevens. Plenty of his acoustic / banjo songs feature it and they sound awesome.

We are finally finished recording this puppy and we had way too many ideas to throw at it. The tambourine and the kick for percussion came in last. Here are some of our initial recordings.

This first cut could technically be called finished. You can listen from end to end, but it lacked that something special. We tried to record everything in one take…and it just didn’t work.

Here’s our re-recording of the underlying song…no vocals just yet.

Recording

The recording started with the acoustic guitar. I went with a large diaphragm condenser and a sure sm-57 to record the instrument in stereo. I have the two mics on separate track and they are hard-panned to the left and right respectively. I then re-recorded the guitar part on two other tracks and flipped the left and right pan on the mics. This gives an interesting / dynamic stereo sound.

Next came the mandolin. I went with the same mic selection but with a little bit different placement. The only difference is the mandolin was only recorded once. This introduces a new – more central – layer to the sound. The mandolin comes at you more directly and stands out a bit more. This makes sense because the mandolin is more of a solo-type instrument.

We decided to begin laying down the vocals. The acoustic guitar and the mandolin play a nice part as the foundation of the song and gives us plenty to work with in terms of vocals. The vocals were recorded twice through one microphone and panned hard to the left and right respectively. It gives an interesting sound to it – kind of like the flaming lips. It is hard to make this method sound great because you have to sing it relatively the same way both times [not just pitch, but the downbeat and length of notes], or else you will get some ugly and very noticeable discrepancies in the sound. So keep that in mind if you decide to go that route.

Now that we have the majority of the song complete, we added in some cornet in the buildup and the bridge to give those parts some edge. We were able to achieve an ensemble sound by recording a 3 part harmony multiple times with different panning schemes. If you listen closely, there is a solo-esque cornet part that plays above the ensemble parts. This was only recorded once, not panned, and the volume is raised a bit. The combination makes this part more pronounced and is similar to the mandolin/guitar relationship in terms of panning and volume.

Performance

We actually have a vide of us performing this song! It’s still pretty new so we’re working out the kinks of how to play it live.