

SONG: “They Can Make It Rain Bombs” . (OGG version here.)
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: This isn’t based on any recent research. It’s a penitential cover for being late for one of the previous songs. The original is by Eugene Chadbourne with Camper Van Beethoven, though there was also a great dark country cover by The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir.
ABSTRACT: I knew I had a backlog of penitential covers, which I think I’m caught up on now, but I didn’t originally think of this as being one. It’s just a song I’ve loved since the 1980s that I thought I’d record a version of and get out of my system to clear the way for a “real” song. Then I couldn’t stop improving it, mostly by taking stuff away.
And it is a scientific song, two different ways. I can’t hear it without thinking of climate change, although I’m pretty sure I heard the song before I’d even heard the now-old-fashioned phrase “global warming.” At the very least, it was a new idea. And the original starts with a marvelous sample of an even older lecture about nuclear bombs that got accidentally dropped or fell out of plane accidents. “It’s been in the headlines – you forgot” hits even harder nowadays. But the whole idea of there being stray machines capable of rearranging a city or more is an important thing to realize about the human drive for technology.
I recorded a few more tracks than you hear here. The first (after the super-simple drum loop) was a rhythm guitar, followed by a pair of soloing lead guitars. I added the banjo (in three different tracks because I’m just not that good a picker) and then hmm. The guitars just didn’t sound lonesome enough. So after a bit of backing and forthing, and snipping to fit around the main vocal track, I just muted them, added a simple acoustic bass line and yeah, that was better. There was an organ that came and went. The harmonica took a few takes to get passable – it’s still hard for me to navigate a C harmonica rather than a D (the half-step in the middle of the scale feels like it’s a in a different physical location on the instrument), and the song is really in A minor, which is a C scale that just starts four steps lower so all the notes on the harp are in a different different place. High lonesome harmony vox came in. Then the last thing I did was add a second, softer bass line to get a little more of a walking-bass feel.
And then lots of mixing passes to try to get the levels right, swap out different headphones, rebalance, listen on another device, change them again… and then suddenly it was the 21st and I looked around and didn’t have anything else started. Two nights of disrupted sleep (work things, family things) and it was clear a last-minute tune wasn’t happening for me. But I had this.
It really did turn out alright.