*The Following Press Release Was Issued By The Sarandons*
"The Great Divide" is unique in our song catalogue, as it's among the darkest and heaviest. It's also one of the most stripped-down songs we've recorded. It's pretty much the five of us playing, with very little if any double tracking and not much instrumental overdub. By pulling things out of the mix and having verses, for example, just as bass, drums and vocal, things can really feel big and explosive.
Stream our new single now: https://ffm.to/thesarandons-thegreatdivide
We record a lot of voice memos and then file things away in the band's Google Drive. There's some folders that contain little snippets of stuff. Every once in a while, we'll go through them and flag anything that's interesting. The genesis of "The Great Divide" was a particular file called "Bowie 80s (8.5-10)." It was from way back in June 2018, but clearly someone had given it an 8.5 out of 10 rating, so it was worth a second listen. It's our vocalist/guitarist Dave Suchon on our old Mason & Risch piano with some bass notes in the left and a dissonant drone on the right hand. The verse vocal melody is there and the drone is picked up in the final recording by the guitars. There was a swagger and a character that we embraced in a fun plastic soul kinda way.
The lyric video for "The Great Divide" is taken to the next level. We worked again with Barto Bak, who had previously done our video for "Stand Down," a stop animation cartoon romp in the style of the Monty Python's Flying Circus intro. For "The Great Divide," Barto built on the cut up squares motif from Trace Loops and created a grainy strange black and white talking head video. Our producer, Dan Hosh (Wild Rivers, City and Colour, Glorious Sons), was instrumental in getting this song to the final sound. He dialed in the feature bass and drum sound and equipped Dave's chorus vocals with sufficient slap back to recall the 80s Bowie records. Dan has also gotten us to trust ourselves musically and stay with bold singular ideas.
"The Great Divide" is probably our best example of an unadulterated, unfiltered track.
Thank you for listening,
The Sarandons
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