A Note On The Final Version Of Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw
In advance of its streaming premiere on Friday Jan 24th listen to the new Deluxe Edition and read words of defense from its creator.
Directly after wrapping The Soft Ache and the Moon Dave Palmer and I began more recording sessions, bored during covid and most likely sensing we were on to something. As usually is the case right after an album, especially one as involved as Soft Ache, the writing sort of stalled out. Like many creative adjacent people during covid, we issued that session in full as “The New Mood Tapes” just in case the world ended. It didn’t, and those songs went on to live on different “proper” albums. One of them would make its way onto an album that would initially come out, in an incomplete form, in 2022, a more complete form in 2023, and a fully (I pinky promise) complete and forever unalterable form in January of 2025. More on that…
The writing started happening quickly after Ketamine treatment. I’d been taken to Chicago by a loved one for a couple weeks of Ketamine injections to see if it would help with my abdominal pain. It didn’t, and I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience, but I started writing and wrote a love song called “Ketamine” about being in love and missing Chicago. A song called “Jane Greer With A Gun” followed. Two songs! I could cut a single! Everything needed to be immediate during that period. So I gathered The Velvet Ocean (Pete Thomas, Johnny Flaugher, Mike Bloom) to make single and we booked studio time at Red Star in Los Angeles.
With the two songs in the can my plans started to change. Dave and I had been doing some other sessions with Jay Bellerose on drums and I got a wondering eye. I also found that more songs were coming. Estonia, then Holy Spirit!, The Mad Bomber, Benzedrine, Bacall… I remember Palmer saying, “you know you’re making a record right? Why not commit to it?” So I did and we booked additional sessions, this time around with Jay Bellerose on the drums. “Jane Greer” would hit the cutting room floor (and can be heard here on disc two, along with that original version of “Ketamine”), but “Ketamine” would be recut and become the centerpiece of an album about love and time. Which must be what all records are really about.
The sessions were beautiful, sprawled all over various studios in Los Angeles and Ojai, including a particularly fun couple of sessions at Lucy’s Meat Market cutting key overdubs with Benny Bock, another new collaborator. We didn’t use The Section Quartet as much this time around as we had on Soft Ache but at the end of the first batch of sessions we gathered the quartet at Los Angeles’ East West and cut the strings, including for a new song called “Benzedrine”, a late arrival about the winding down of a relationship. It spooked me. My album about love and time was suddenly veering into breakup territory. I panicked. My brain was still in Ketamine mode and, after mixing the sessions in LA with Norm Block, I assembled a version of the album without the three songs that I was convinced would curse it or me. And it gnawed at me for a year.
In December of 2023 I made the decision to issue the album with “Neighborhood Girl With Dog” and “Benzedrine” restored to their rightful place. These weren’t new recordings, they were recordings from the GE/VD sessions that I had omitted during a moment of temporary insanity. But I’d made another mistake and IT gnawed at me for a year. Jeez Louise!
The final song I wrote for GE/VD was called “Bacall”, an idea that came out of my “Cecil and Adina” screenplay (featured on this site and in the Movie Book that is about to land) about a man experiencing death in a nitrate film fire. Again I panicked. The album about love and time was becoming an album about love and time and death. So once again I cut a song that should have been on the album. I stuck it on the rarities set but it bugged me. So after a year of it bugging me, I made the decision to alter the album for a final time. “Bacall” became the 11th of 13 tracks that make up “Ghost Electricity/Vampire Draw”. The real one. I promise.
I’ve never behaved like this before and I’m not sure why it happened now, with this album. I have a few ideas: I was in a rush, in fear of death, I was oddly paranoid, I was processing the end of something, I was dealing with the death of my grandmother, maybe the Ketamine had me goofy, it’s most likely my final album of original compositions and there being anything wrong with it maybe affects me more. I’m not sure. But I’m sure that it feels finished now. It feels like a complete piece of work and as essential as anything I’ve made to me. An album has never developed in this way for me and instead of wondering “am I allowed to do this?” I’m super grateful that I lived long enough to see this one restored to its proper form. It’s now 13 tracks. 47 minutes. There are 14 tracks that make up the second disc of the Deluxe Edition. It comes to streaming Friday Jan 24. Every moment of my day is spent dreaming about getting the 2xLP made somehow. I love it and hope you listen to it LOUD!
God bless David Lynch forever and ever, amen.
-Richard.
