Notes

Dan aka The Bassturd and RB aka Steely have enjoyed a multi-decade friendship and more-than-occasional working relationship. RB has played as a hired hand at a ton of Bassturd shows, mixed and/or mastered a large number of Bassturd albums past, and just generally is a big Bassturd fan who likes to help out that Bassturd however he can.

When the Bassturd came to stay with RB for a few days in the spring of 2009, the plan was to record or begin to record a bunch of new Bassturd stuff. Instead, they ended up bumming around record stores, talking politics, and eating a lot of Indian food.

In the last few hours of the visit, the Bassturd, determined to get something out of this trip, hastily scrawled down full lyrics to two song concepts he'd had rattling around in his brain for a while. They spent an hour recording the Bassturd's vocal parts against a click in RB's then-office (school was out, hey), with basically nothing else completed; the Bassturd had to return home before the capturing hard disk could even cool down.

RB, aka Steely DZL aka the Country Blumpkins (as dubbed by the Bassturd after the fact and outside RB's control), finished the track backings more or less on his own shortly thereafter. The Bassturd was apparently pleased enough to put the result out as a self-financed 7" single, long since sold out (but you can still buy the digital tracks here, from the Bassturd himself).

The "pedal steel" on "MFUTY" is an 8-string custom Allen Melbert lap steel, then just received in RB's home studio after months of excited waiting and drool-inducing behind-the-scenes pictures from the luthier, lovingly overdubbed in 2-4 layers to fake an absolutely impossible "pedal steel" copedent (i.e., tuning/setup) in RB's neophyte steel-hands. This ingredient was, by far, the most complex and time-consuming element of these two li'l productions. RB sure loves them steel guitars (...no, he absolutely does), and looks forward to actually being able to play one o'them someday.