HELLBENDER: The Journey
(or: a plodding account of how Vesan rose from the murky depths and has been nocturnally lurking on the shore still)

NOTE: This is part 1 of a two-part article. Part 2 will describe the recording techniques used on Hellbender.

"Countrified folk filtered through rotgut bourbon and impure animal crackers. Neil Young if he harbored violent, paranoid impulses to pull apart tendons with sinewy scummy fingers. Harrowing aural seizures and soaring sound-o-spheres in line with a virgin ayahuasca ingestion." - my assessment of Hellbender

As I've mentioned on vesan-sound.com, just about everything I've put out under the Vesan moniker was written between 1995-2001. Vesan, the name, wasn't even rattling around my skull until around 2000. Up until then, I tried to start a band in high school (1995-96) called Scratchboard (a name which was later revived with its full original length for another project…). The band was little more than me pathetically trying to get friends to play my songs (songs which made up the bulk of Disposable). No concept or identity, though, truly existed for these tunes. Nor did I possess any leadership skills to pull it off.

What ended up happening was I joined up with a friend at school and a band called King’s Manor was established, fronted by this friend. We played a couple of his songs and a few we wrote together, but we also featured a few songs that would become Vesan tunes (they really always were). If I remember right, they were: “Frazzled, To Beyond”, “Looking Into The Light”, and “Atmosphere”. I also performed “Blackwood” at my high school Baccalaureate and for others around that time. I was a bit afraid of playing then (unlike now ha ha). Lack of confidence. This was 1997-1998.

Moving ahead. Sometime around the end of 1999, I decided I had to do something with all these songs (more than 80 in number) clogging the neural passages in my swollen, soupy brain. So, I started to take all my songs and group them together according to similar characteristics, tones, and themes. Some of the lesser quality ditties were sacrificed. Some of the songs didn’t fit anywhere. Around then is when the concept and drive for something, later called Vesan, was initiated.

Skip-skip-skipping along. In May 2003, I moved to Philly to attempt sell this Vesan character and the new The Way Out Is Through album to the public. Being somewhat disconnected at this point from the songs on that album, I had trouble really getting into performing them. Gradually, I started incorporating songs that would end up on Hellbender into my performances and the response was far more encouraging (after all, it made sense, I feel like they're more engaging tunes, no?). By late July/early August, I grew tired (despite a couple show offers and some album sales) of playing the WAY songs and I stopped performing. Still having a lot of tunes left in my melon, I was too eager to start the next project – which I was hoping was Hellbender (at that time still untitled). I really poured over what to do next – what needed to leave my mind first – and, in the end, I chose to record 2 other albums first. Still feel like it was the right decision. It’s difficult to know when you are prepared to take on certain things in life. With some stuff, you need to just jump right into it. Not this. Not me. I don’t seem to work like that.

Disposable took me a ridiculous time to mix (off and on for about a year). After all, mixing was still, to quote Will Powers, all new to me. I rested a bit, I suppose, and around September or October 2005 (can’t remember), focused and laid down preliminary tracks for HEL. It was sounding okay, not blown away. But this was quickly put on hold when I realized, due to various circumstances, that I couldn’t concentrate on it. That dang-blasted ninja soundtrack was a festering, fetid sore that I gave into and scratched unmercifully and lustfully for the latter half of 2006. So it goes. Like everything else in life, though, there was a purpose for this, and I believe that due to the nature of the work and the sweat and toil put into it, I was now fully prepared to do what was necessary to record Hellbender.

In the ensuing 11 months after finishing the Dream Date Diddle-E single, I recorded an album’s worth of demos, moved twice, had some hedonistic adventures, and finally somehow settled myself into work mode. Recording officially commenced on August 11, 2008, the day I got home, still drunk, from my sister’s wedding.

After tracking all the guitars, basses, and most of the keyboards in around 2 months of non-stop sessions in a cramped, stinking-hot room, I got a little ill in October. I'm not known for taking exceptional care of myself and I must have overdone it a bit in the couple weeks leading up to October 5, when I went to a massive block party in Brooklyn. I did myself in pretty bad after a day of unwarranted sloshitude. The rest of the month, I was physically and mentally unable to do any work of any kind. Around the second week of November, I was starting to feel up to the grind again but my computer (a bloody PC, on which I do my tracking) decided to expire, leaving me pegged for a bit. After I managed to “go for it” and buy a new one in December, getting back into the process was anything but easy. Not much to recount here, other than that aside from a couple more issues I had to address, the rest of what needed to be recorded took me way longer than I had anticipated (a common thread through every project). Oh wait! Yeah, I almost forgot that I started to learn to play the drums in November while my computer was busted and that’s probably what took so long (and some complicated keyboard orchestral parts). Yeah! That’s it. Anyone want to trade brains for awhile?

LINKS TO AUDIO: CD Baby - IndieRhythm

Below are a shoddy timeline and when every one of the songs were written (or at least finished):

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...perhaps you'd like to hear 3 songs that didn't make the final cut for the album. If I didn't mention this before, I attempted on 2 previous occasions to try to record this album, without getting very far. The first time was around September 2005 I think, however, by June 2006 another project demanded my attention and it was an itch I had to scratch at the time, so I went with it instead. The first two tracks below are from those sessions. Another spoiled and short-lived attempt was around late 2007-early 2008, from which the latter song is derived. When I finally began to record what would be the master takes for Hellbender in August last year, I ended up trashing the sessions from 2005 instead of building upon them as I had hoped to be able to do.

"Jesus, It's Cold Outside" (c. January 1996, recorded June 2006)

"Idaho" (c. April 1998, recorded July 2006)

"Breakdown Blues" (c. March 2001, recorded December 2007)