Sham Family

Sham Family is my favourite band and I’m super proud of this song we did together. Spitting Image is guttural and aggressive on its own, but there are a few moments I got particularly excited about. The calm vocal moment about halfway through — Kory and I were finishing up the last overdubs together and he felt restricted behind the vocal mic. He was holding back, and if you’ve seen Sham Fam play live you know that Kory will absolutely not hold back. So I gave him an SM58 that he could hold in his hand and pace around the live floor as if he were on stage, the “real” vocal mic picking up his movements around the room.

The second part of this song I get excited about is the broken down ending. I thought Cole was going to blow out his vocal chords while Jay was creating that wild feedback with his bass, and Zach hitting his snare drum so hard it fully detuned itself (there may have been blood?). We took the whole band track, ran everything through a pair of Fender amps and captured it back onto 2” tape (driven hard). That’s the whole sound of the ending. Cole didn’t have a mic for his “spit” vocal - it’s just coming through the drum room mics.