Remaking Rumours

About a month ago, the artist Jennifer Delos Reyes put together a piece at Haverford (where I teach) in which she arranged for members of the community to remake the Fleetwood Mac album Rumours in its entirety. The album is legendary because, among other reasons, four of the band's members were involved in break-ups with each other while the recording was taking place. So it stands as a kind of monument to the difficulties and possibilities of collaboration.

Participants were all assigned a song to work on, mine was "I Don't Want to Know," on which I was paired with a Haverford junior named Jacob Waters, whom I'd never met before. We were the first people to record (lo and behold, my college has a recording studio in the basement of the dining hall--first I'd heard of this). The day of our assigned session, Jacob and I met in my office from 3:15 to 4 to talk about an idea I had for an arrangement of the song, then I ran off to faculty meeting, then to the studio for our session scheduled from 6 to 9. And despite all the difficulties we faced--the uncertainty of not knowing each other or each other's musical taste/approach, the age and student/prof differences, the general harried quality of the day, and so on--it came out pretty well as a Pavement-like slack sound. I'm playing drums and bass; Jacob sang and played guitars, and Julia Ryan, the Bryn Mawr student who was assisting Jen Delos Reyes, got thrown into the mix after she was caught singing harmony in the control room.

Jacob, Julia, and Me, "I Don't Want to Know"