If you can judge a band by its friends, the Salt Collective—Stéphane Schück, Fred Quentin and Benoit Lautridou—is unimpeachable. The guest list on the Paris trio’s new album, Life (Propeller Sound), reads like a MAGNET back-issues ad: Matthew Sweet, Juliana Hatfield, Matthew Caws (Nada Surf), Richard Lloyd (Television), Pat Sansone (Wilco), Matt Douglas (Mountain Goats), Susan Cowsill and Mitch Easter, plus Chris Stamey, Peter Holsapple, Gene Holder and Will Rigby (all from the dB’s and many other bands you hold dear). Stamey produced the LP, and we’re gonna pass the mic to him to tell you about Life track “Nursery Rhyme”:
“When Stéphane Schück asked me to collaborate with him on this track, I already knew he was a fan of some of the early recordings by the dB’s. And the music he’d written reminded me of some of the flavors of the band’s first record, Stands For deciBels. But I also thought I heard a whisper of another band, Traffic, which not only featured multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Steve Winwood but also the flute and sax playing of Chris Wood. The band made a lovely, trippy sound—as one did in the late ’60s in the U.K.—on songs such as ‘Paper Sun’ and ‘Hole In My Shoe.’ I jumbled these musical images together in a big top hat of the imagination, put my ear up to it, and these words and melodies tumbled out. First, ‘We are the dreamers, and we are the dream,’ then the idea of a circus tightrope walker balancing, perhaps teetering, on a tenuous timeline, on a möbius pavement, ‘standing on the edge of a moment’—which, of course, is what we all do, all the time, so to speak. The rest followed from this. Peter Holsapple and I sang it together as one composite voice in the way we used to do—and still do from time to time—in the dB’s, with Gene Holder’s bass and Will Rigby’s drums making it flow. Then, Matt Douglas added his dreamy flute-tations and massed saxes, Crystal added the nursery rhymes, and we had a record!”
We’re proud to premiere the video for “Nursery Rhyme” today at MAGNET. Check it out now.
