ALBUM TRACKS:
  • Underground

  • Dogs

  • Breathe (FIRST SINGLE)

  • Fish

  • Comes And Goes

  • Mike Hammer

  • Tonight

  • Alive

  • Pleasing Falsetto (originally known as "Pleasing"?)

  • Mandolin

  • Place

  • Liberation

  • HIDDEN TRACK:
  • Deliver Me

  • POSSIBLE B-SIDE:
  • Sunday Comes
  • MERCEDES FIVE AND DIME




    THE DEMO
    Moist finished demoing an album's worth of new songs early in the fall and had hopes of entering the studio in November. The 11 tracks, included songs "Breathe", "Liberation" and two versions of "Pleasing" (titles could change). None of whom have been tested out on a live audience. Drummer Paul Wilcox defined, "We're going to find out the real direction of the sound when we get a producer. The way that the demos are laid out, they're very bare bones. We did a lot of it at Mark place. We wanted to strip it down and get really basic, so the producer can hear the song, not necessarily our interpretation of it." Wilcox adds, " "We want to keep working right up until we go into the studio and while we're in the studio as well."

    THE PRODUCER
    Moist chose to work with David Leonard, the nashville based producer responsible for the Barenaked Ladies' Stunt and Wide Mouth Mason's forthcoming album. "He's got a large body of work and he's pretty versatile which is what we're after for our record coming up. He's not just a rock guy. He's not just a country guy. He's not pigeonholed to one kind of music. He's all over the place, from Prince to Shawn Colvin", described drummer Paul Wilcox.

    THE STUDIO
    "Underground" was recorded/produced in Morin Heights, December 8th to 10th. Although, the track was mixed in Nashville at Starstruck Studios. The rest of the recorded was produced at Studio Piccolo, in Montréal. "We want to stay close to home," explained Paul Wilcox.

    DIRECTION OF THE ALBUM
    "It's going to be pretty diverse, but we're not going to reinvent the band by any stretch." - Paul Wilcox. The band admits one of their goals in making this album was to make their sound grow. They've been using a few non-traditional instruments, but mostly they've been playing a lot with a nord analog synthesizer keyboard.

    THE ALBUM
    The dozen or more songs they've recorded at Studio Piccolo will be mixed in April in Nashville. The band has been rumored to start the filming of their new video in late April.

    THE TITLE
    Undecided seemed to be the general comment for quite some time, Mark Makoway was quoted saying: "We're looking through the song titles and the lyrics and trying to find something taken from the record that will somehow suit the overall thing. It's hard to do before the final mixing. You get an idea of what the songs are doing in the rough mixes but sometimes things really blossom in the mix."; the titled was announced on Moist's web site (www.moist.ca) on April 30th 1999, the 3rd album will be called MERCEDES FIVE AND DIME.

    THE FIRST SINGLE
    Breathe, first aired the second week of May 1999 on selected radio stations across Canada. The video was filmed the second weekend of May in Toronto with director Phil Harder. It should be airing on MuchMusic and MusiquePlus in June of 1999.

    SOUNDTRACK AND COMPILATIONS
    UNDERGROUND

    Toronto's The Edge reported that it had "lots of strings and a downbeat kind of tune". This is the song Moist recorded with David Leonard before deciding to have him produce their next album. Underground was submited to apprear on the soundtrack of the film Cruel Intentions, but it didn't make it. If it had been accepted it would have played over a funeral scene and the final credits. Paul Wilcox insisted the title wasn't an intentional tie-in. "The song was written by the band. It's a song we had, but we just changed the intro around, but apart from that the song was already done." Underground employs a rather big string section arranged and conducted by Montreal's Robbie Finkel. Wilcox admited, "It's a string quartet but they played four or five different pieces down on it, so in some places we have like 20 sets of strings on it." Wilcox and keyboardist Kevin Young joined Leonard in Nashville for the mixing of the track, "He mixed it and we just listened and said, 'Hey, cool',".

    BREATHE
    "breathe" will appear on the soundtrack of "Stir of Echoes" (Sept. 99 release) a film starring Kevin Bacon. The video for the song will be edited as to include a second version with clips of the film.

    TRACKS OF 'MERCEDES FIVE AND DIME' DESCRIBED BY KEVIN YOUNG (source: Jam! Music - Karen Bliss)

    UNDERGROUND:
    "Is probably the song we've listened to the most. We've recorded it three times. We've mixed it twice. It was written basically around a string arrangement that Jeff had come up with and we had been writing with different string arrangements, trying to come up with an arrangement that was more grandiose one than usual, with the intent of sending it off to a movie soundtrack. We left, after being frustrated by two tries, with different songs and that song popped out on Jeff's computer in the morning and by late afternoon, we knew that was the one we were going to send off. And it was the hardest song to mix, apparently. After a demo of it was mixed in Mark's living room, David Leonard did a mix of it and then it was sent off again to be mixed by Thom Lord Alge, who apparently expressed a certain amount of frustration with it. It's a huge pick of a song and there's a lot of tracks on it."

    DOGS:
    "Is the song we took the title of the album from. One thing that David did when he was working on lyrics for this record is I think he took a different approach. Some people have found the songs a little less cryptic than perhaps they have been in the past, and 'Dogs' is a really good example of that. It just seems so immediate to us lyrically. Throughout the process, we've done several different versions of that song and the one thing that has stayed constant with that song is the mood and the quality of story-telling that David put into it."

    BREATHE:
    " 'Breathe' is the first single. We were really happy with that. There was an interesting little technical thing that happened with 'Breathe' in the studio. When we got into the studio, we decided that we wanted to change it a little bit and see where we could take it, and we just went for a Wurlitzer sound. I had my Wurlitzer, which had been dragged all over the stage, and almost chucked into the pit, so it's not the most reliable instrument, and our producer David Leonard, forced me to take it apart and tune one particular note, which involves applying and removing solder. from a piece of metal. And I was very resistant because every time I take the thing apart, it breaks down beyond all repair. By the end of it, we tried to find an in-tune Wurlitzer all over Montreal. By the end of the recording of 'Breathe', which took a number of tries, we had three broken Wurlitzers and we went back to the original noisy sloppy Wurlitzer track and pitched the rest of the band around it, re-tuned the guitars to exactly what the Wurlitzer was which was slightly out of tune. So that was the story of the three broken Wurlitzer."

    FISH:
    "'Fish' appeared on Mark's computer, so Mark wrote that, and when it came together, that songs was one of the ones we used a lot of the pieces from the demo recordings. Mark wrote some of the lyrics for that one. This one, Mark wrote the song. It came out on his computer. We went in and started messing around. It was very stripped down version when the song first got recorded, just acoustic guitars and some loops and whatnot. An we added as we went on, but we stayed very true to the basis of the song and the feel of the song. It changed a lot in the studio, but it maintained the same mood, and with a lot of the songs, they changed drastically once we got in the studio. "

    COMES AND GOES:
    "That was another one that almost didn't make it, but, again, blossomed in the studio. By the time we finished, like 'Place', we were incredibly pleased with it. We had a very odd little man come in and play a tiny snake charming flute. What did we call him? Guest snake charmer (hint: he also plays 'hacked-out' trumpet)"

    MIKE HAMMER:
    "Is a song that probably has been sort of a band favourite since the beginning. We loved playing it, we loved writing it. For us, it's an odd little song. Part of that, is just the title, people would say, 'Mike Hammer, the detective? Is that right? Is that what you're calling the song?' "

    TONIGHT:
    " That's another one that stayed pretty true to the demo form. Nothing interesting on there" (Kevin laughs).

    ALIVE:
    "Is another song that came together on Mark's computer and one of the songs that from the very beginning listening to it, there was a huge cymbal slam coming into the chorus. One thing that remained constant with the recording of that song was that it was based on this marvelous huge slam, obviously the writing of it wasn't. That is my 8-year-old nephew's favourite song. Every time it comes up to the chorus of the song, he raises his fist in the air and pounds on the downbeat where the cymbal comes in."

    PLEASING FALSETTO:
    "That was another one that at some point in the studio we were very frustrated with. We recorded it, we mixed it, we listened to it, we didn't like it. Some songs don't sound the way you want them to sound. You get them recorded, you listen to them and they still just sound wrong. They just aren't exciting you. And because we worked song by song on the record, we'd know if a song was exciting when we played it back. And with 'Pleasing Falsetto', pretty much towards near the end of the recording process, it wasn't doing it for us, and in the mix process, it started to leap out again, as a song that was really going to work. Mark was a supporter of the song all along. I think he realised that eventually it would work out, but there was some dissent at times as to whether the song would actually end up sounding the way we envisioned it sounding, and in the end, it didn't exactly but it's turned out quite well. "

    MANDOLIN:
    "I think that was the first song that we actually recorded in the studio. When we went into the studio, it was the lowest priority of the songs that we had together. It was barely together and it ended up being the first track that we recorded. Jeff is playing mandolin on it. He recorded a lot of mandolin for that song. Jeff was the first person who actually showed up onstage with a mandolin, so if you show up onstage with an instrument, you get to play it. That's how it works. So Jeff played mandolin on that song and, as I say, it was the lowest priority when we went into the studio but it ended up being the first song we recorded and it worked out amazingly, very quickly, and following that we got into a whole raft of technical problems. "

    PLACE:
    "Started out as very very simple song, basically just bass and a little bit of bass, a little bit of acoustic guitar and vocal, and once we started laying stuff down on it, we just couldn't stop. We just kept getting deeper and deeper and deeper into the tracks and putting sounds all over it. I think the band was really surprised at how it turned out, at least I was. It just blossomed in the studio. It became so much more than it was. It started as such a simple acoustic song and it became this much larger, much more exciting piece for us to record and listen to. "

    LIBERATION:
    "If you listen very very hard at the end of 'Liberation', you'll hear a hacked-out, slightly out of tune trumpet arrangement. I wonder who's playing that? We snuck it in during the mixing process and were deciding whether or not it could actually fit in the song anywhere because it's, well, me playing trumpet, which isn't too pleasing." (Kevin chuckles)

    DELIVER ME (hidden track):
    "It's the only thing on the record that is actually a demo. That is the demo version of 'Deliver Me' and we just put it on as an after-thought. The demo had a really nice, off the cuff, sloppy vibe. We had two studios set up, the main studio and the small studio with a computer in it, and I tried to recreate it a couple of times, but it had just been so off the cuff to start with that it sounded best that way, and eventually, we just ran out of time. Sonically, it's obviously a demo. It's more an addition to the record, than part of it. It's apiece we tacked on for fun at the end. The rest of the album hangs together quite well, in terms of the production and style of it, but that song is obviously done in someone's (Mark's) living room.