Sometimes all it takes to start over is a full-on computer crash.
That's what happened to Darren Keen, the Lincoln musician whose new minimalist electronic project Touch People is releasing the album Brain Massage this Friday at The Bourbon. A few months before he killed Rainbow, as he describes the end of his 10-year one-man band The Show is the Rainbow, Keen had begun working on "Body Rhythm."
It's the oldest song on Brain Massage, and it's a 7 1/2-minute, well-composed piece built from the ground up by a glitching base of MIDI instruments made with organic elements. Keen says the song's hook was so powerful that even after his old computer died, the song was so ingrained in him that he could bring it back to life.
And all in all, it was the crash that served as a turning point from Keen's earlier Touch People material — "incorporating a lot of hip-hop and a lot of dance music" — to the final result of Brain Massage that will be available at the Bourbon concert on Friday, which starts at 9 p.m. and features Talking Mountain, Green Trees and Omni Arms.
As he and I have pizza at one of his workplaces, Yia Yia's, Keen calls the crash a turning point because "it was so liberating even though it was so horrible," he says. "I always believe there’s no wrong answer creatively, of course, so it was time for me to put my money where my mouth is, and just be, like, “I have no reason to not make the exact album I want to be making right now. So I just did.”
Read on for an in-depth interview about "Body Rhythm," from its composition to its lyrics to its recording, and learn the song's verse and chorus further below with a transcription of chords and lyrics.
Hear Nebraska: You say you were born in the backseat of a cargo van. Tell me more about that.
Darren Keen: I’ve just been realizing lately that I went on my very first tour a week after I graduated high school. This album has really been, lyrically and conceptually, it’s like a big — I don’t want to say “turning point” because I think that’s kind of a lame term for an artist to use about themselves — but maybe just trying a little harder and being more honest and opening up in new ways, more honest ways than I ever have in anything I’ve done.
So I guess I was just saying, you know, people have been cutting me slack for years, watching me run around and slap people in the dick and be wild (laughs). I just like saying that I feel like I’ve grown up on tour. I feel like I’ve been touring forever, and a lot of my development as a human happened in a van, or very near a van as you travel.
It’s just been a huge part of my life: the road and touring. I was just trying to express that I’m not the same dude as I was when I started Rainbow. This is a new thing for me.
HN: And I just heard you talking (with John Freidel). Is the next tour starting April 8?
DK: April 8, yep. And it’s all in Europe.
HN: Where do you start?
DK: I start in Switzerland, and I’m going to start by camping for three days. I’ve never camped out of the country. Especially when I go to Europe on tour, I’m always super, super worried about going broke, so I start playing shows immediately and have no days off and spend no time relaxing.
Over the years, I’ve realized that’s not really the best way to tour because sometimes you end up filling your days with shows you lose money on anyway. You would have been better off staying where you have a free place to stay and a kitchen available. You lose less money, and you can spend more time appreciating what’s going on around you and learning from it, which hopefully will contribute to your overall experience.
So yeah, I’m starting off this time by catching up on jet lag and doing three days of camping in Switzerland, then about a week of shows there before I go to other countries.
HN: Why did you pick Europe over anywhere in the U.S.?
DK: I just got an invite from someone to go over there, and when I got the invite, I wasn’t even done recording Brain Massage. I didn’t know if it’d be done. I wasn’t worried if I’d have my new set ready or my new album ready. I was just thinking that I’d potentially go there before I put Brain Massage out and do my first Touch People tour and play old material, then come back and start the Brain Massage tour basically.
But I finished the album completely on pace, and so I was able to get it ready for tour, and would rather perform it and just get going with it. It’s not like there’s too many people in the states who are like dying for Touch People right now, like, “Hey, you put your album out, so you gotta get to Connecticut!” or something like that (laughs). I have very small pockets of fans at this point, and they’re fine waiting an extra month.
HN: Do you remember always being able to follow along with more complex songs you heard as a child and teenager? I’m asking because this song talks about polyrhythms.
DK: Yeah, and it talks about, “Is it tricky to find the one? It’s always been easy for me.” Yeah, I kind of have always had a good memory for songs. I’m not one of those guys who can just hear a song once and play it on piano or play it on guitar, though I am getting a lot better at that now.
I wasn’t a prodigy as a kid by any standard, but I had a really good memory at least for the structure and arrangement and general ideas of a song. I could commit that stuff to memory pretty easily at an early age, I think.
My high school band, we were doing a lot of covers, and we’d have these three-hour sets where we would play tons and tons of songs. I never had lyric sheets or any notes on my set list. I just would remember it all.
HN: And I heard you call “Body Rhythm” your nerdiest song. Is that right?
DK: Well, “Body Rhythm,” actually, this whole album is really nerdy in my opinion. I’m really proud of it because of that. I’m not afraid to embrace that anymore. But it has to be right up there with some of the nerdiest material I’ve written. A lot of the song is in 5/4, which immediately makes everything more complicated, so that’s funny about it. Then in addition to being in 5/4, in the intro part and the outro part, I’m holding these long triplets over 5/4.
So it just creates this feel, like, right when you start bobbing your head, all of the sudden it glitches out, and you’re, like, “Wait, I’m off the beat.”
photo by Eric Gonzalez
Then right when you start bobbing your head, it glitches out, and you’re off the beat again. And I wasn’t going out of my way to be, like, “Hey, I’m going to mess with people’s ability to enjoy the song.”
I just wanted to make something that was so deliberate that it couldn’t be an accident or something that dudes just jammed out to. This is a super deliberate idea, and that’s what I like about it.
That’s kind of the, I don’t want to say mantra, but just the idea I’m focusing on a lot lately. I want to make music that, even if you don’t like it, whatever your feelings about the music are, you understand that it’s all really composed. I just want to communicate really clearly so that there’s no confusion about what I was going for with the music. Even though it’s very complicated and bizarre, it’s done in a very plain simple way, where even a person who doesn’t compose music can hear it and tell that there’s a lot of depth to it.
HN: Do you remember about how many tracks the song features?
DK: All of my songs, now that I’m trying to get in this minimalism thing, I’m limiting the number of tracks I can use in a song. But this album, I started realizing that about halfway through. So some things on the album are, like, one channel will have a couple different summed channels into it because I started working towards that; this is a new goal of mine, to limit the number of instruments in a song.
So “Body Rhythm” was written and composed before an old computer crash, and I only recorded it using the live stems, so when I actually recorded it, it definitely only had nine channels, but some of those channels had already had things sub-mixed into them. So it’s kind of hard to count, but if you could go back and expand all of it, it’d still be below 20 tracks for the whole thing.
HN: Did that crash influence the final result at all?
DK: Yeah, definitely, but for the better. It sucks to say that, but I was heading down a pretty similar road to my last album, where I was just incorporating a lot of hip-hop and a lot of dance music. I was getting comfortable making dance music that every once and awhile got a little polyrhythmic. I was also getting comfortable making instrumental music.
The computer crash coupled with really wanting to get out and play live again, and killing Rainbow, has made me realize that a key thing that people respond to in music is vocals. Specifically, one thing when people come to see me play, one thing they’ve enjoyed about me traditionally is that I’m a pretty funny frontman, pretty good on the mic, pretty high energy and all that. I love doing that stuff, I really do. So it was just a process to figure out how to incorporate a wild, weird frontman into a minimalist electronic project.
The turning point was when my computer crashed and I had to restart making the whole album. I was, like, “OK, there’s no music in this computer right now.” I was just thinking that I only have one one-man band now, so this is it. This is a great turning point for me. It was so liberating even though it was so horrible. I always believe there’s no wrong answer creatively, of course, so it was time for me to put my money where my mouth is, and just be, like, “I have no reason to not make the exact album I want to be making right now. So I just did.”
HN: So what’s the basic timeline? Was there a first version of “Body Rhythm” on that computer that crashed, one that resurfaced on the new computer?
DK: Yep. Let’s see, I can’t remember when I made that first version. I’m trying to think about the first times I played it. I played it when I opened for The Faint and when I toured with Yip-Yip last year. I don’t know which of those came first. I think the Yip-Yip shows were first. That was probably the first time I played it.
So I started working on “Body Rhythm” probably about eight months ago, but it’s definitely also the first song I started working on for this album. It’s the oldest song of all of them. “Body Rhythm” and one part of “Cast a Spell” were the only things that survived that hard drive crash. And they only survived because they were so ingrained in me compositionally that I was really easily able to recreate them. Some of the other stuff I worked on was more demo quality. There weren’t any chord progressions or melodies that had burned themselves into me.
But with “Body Rhythm,” that hook is so powerful, and I love the vocoder on it. It’s not clear idea, I guess, but the lyrics are so audible compared to a lot of vocoder music. So I just felt strongly that I should retool it. And it was still really in line with the rest of the album. I don’t think it stands out sonically. I think it stands out because it’s a kickass song. But I don’t think it stands out as being drastically different from the other songs on the album, so I was happy with that.
HN: Talking about the recording, what kind of instruments, real or digital, are on “Body Rhythm”?
DK: There was a super good combination of both, but mostly, it’s almost all real instruments manipulated digitally. I’ve started composing in Ableton instead of Pro Tools because I found cool ways to use Ableton’s MIDI instruments. So for example, they have these drum racks where you can build drum beats. But if you look at them visually on the grid with the rest of the music, they’re expressed as a piano roll. So you can see the notes of the piano, and maybe the C is the kick drum, and the E is the snare drum: that type of thing.
Well, I made these drum racks where I sampled every note on my guitar chromatically, both palm-muted and not palm-muted. I did that for two different guitars of mine.
photo by Eric Gonzalez
Then I did that with my voice, singing oohs and ahs, chromatically from the lowest to the highest I could. I did a couple takes of that. Then I put those into these drum racks, so whenever I push C on the ooh drum rack, it has this thing of my singing an ooh. It’s kind of like in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off sneeze control. So then I take these racks, and I have these MIDI instruments that I built with my own instruments — I also sampled a set of bells, and I sampled a bass, and I sampled some synths. Then I play them using a MIDI keyboard, or I just write the music in using the draw tools.
Mostly, the only instruments on the album are those two guitars, the bass, those bells are a huge part, the oohs and the ahs. Then on top of that, I have the Casio SK-1, this really old keyboard that has this easy-to-identify beep-beep-bloop-beep kind of drum sound I use a lot. A lot of people use it. Then I use the Roland 808 drum side-by-side.
That’s about it. I mean, I have the vocoders on top of that, but if you listen to this album, outside of “Ecstasy Organs,” there aren’t many synthesizers on the album. It’s mostly these organic elements manipulated using the amazing power of MIDI.
HN: How is the recorded version different from the live version?
DK: In the live version, you’re going to hear separation between the amps more because I use five amplifiers carrying five different signals. Plus, on top of that, the house PA carries a different signal, and I have my vocoders running through the house PA as well. So you’re going to hear things in a more directional manner live.
On the album, everything is really smooth and balanced, but if you hear it live, depending on where you’re standing in the room, you might hear more synth or more guitar because you’re going to be standing closer to an amp that’s playing that instrument at a pretty loud volume. Also, playing live, I have a MIDI controller that allows me, in real-time, to do live looping, live remixing and editing of the songs. So I’m not going crazy with that stuff now. I want it to have a lot of that live, frontman punk energy, but when I don’t have something to do on the vocals, if the vibe is right, if the song is at the right point, I do some A-B-C gadgetry wonder stuff, too. But I don’t go too crazy with the live remixing. I use it more as a transitional thing.
At the end of a song, I’ll really get nasty and start going crazy, messing with the song just to bridge it into the next one. I don’t go too crazy in the middle usually because the songs are still new to me. Probably as I go on, I’ll start getting weirder with it, but for now, I just want to play them as they are.
HN: And for some reason, the lyrics, or the rhythm of the lyrics, make me think of Laurie Anderson.
DK: Yeah, I love Laurie Anderson.
HN: And I remember you played her at Hear Lincoln last year. Does her music influence your work?
DK: Absolutely, yeah. Laurie Anderson is a huge influence of mine. The one thing I think is a connection or a similarity between me and her is that her music is really weird and complicated, but it’s that kind of thing I was talking about earlier. Even if you like it or don’t know if you like it, you still can hear it and understand exactly what she wants you to understand about it. It’s really deliberate. Her stuff with that Big Science album and her newer stuff she’s done — she’s been on KRNU a lot with that “Only An Expert” song. All that stuff, both those albums are hugely special to me.
HN: Locally, as far as influences go, you mention a lot of Nebraska musicians in your credits as people you thank. Can you talk about some of the musicians who are important to you?
DK: Definitely all those Faint dudes have helped me out a lot. Their influence on me now is just being a good influence and good friends and having a great sounding band because our sounds are drifting apart from each other, I think. Those guys have had an irreversible influence on my life and my career because I looked up to them for so long. They treated me so well and took me on tours and helped me out. It was literally a dream come true when they were doing that. I’ll be an old man and I’ll still think about that as probably the best time of my whole life. So those guys have undeniably had an impact on me.
photo by Daniel Muller
Jim, I always talk about. Jim’s been my best friend for a long time. I think I’m in his top four or five best friends (laughs). Jim for a long time has been obsessed with delay pedals going back to Mr. 1986 and especially the first UU album with all of his repeating guitar riffs. I have never been into delay ever in my life, and I’m still not, but one thing I’m getting into is I like to compose things that sound like a delay is on it. I like to have a bell part and then have an ooh that chases it, like a quarter or an eighth note behind. So it has the sound of a delay, but they’re two different instruments so it’s not really a delay. And definitely a lot of the stuff I’ve learned about how much delay is appropriate or when delay is appropriate, how to manipulate it comes from Jim. And that’s just one little way that Jim has influenced me.
Let’s see, there’s a lot of kickass people from around here. Luke Polipnick, he’s a guy who can one night play a smooth jazz or a blues show, and his chops are just so there that he can play any style that comes into his mind, and he knows how to translate it to the instrument that’s in his hands. That’s a musical clarity that I would love to have some day, something that I strive for.
Eric Bemberger, the guitarist from Beep Beep, he’s another guy who, when he touches his instrument, it’s just like you’re hearing somebody who was born to be doing what they’re doing (laughs). It’s pretty awesome.
HN: Then just working here (at Yia Yia’s), having conversations with other musicians, how does that inform your music?
DK: A lot. This is all the kind of stuff I didn’t think about or that I was afraid to admit to myself when I was in Rainbow. But having a job here, or, like, I’m in that band Dark Satellites. I play guitar for them now, and when I ride down to Kansas City with them, our drummer, Nate (Bicak), is a design professor; he went to school here for design. So we talk super deep about design and how it relates to music.
photo of Dark Satellites by Angie Norman
Or working here (at Yia Yia’s) and talking to other musicians. We have a guy here who’s really into dance, and I’m always burning really deep with him about dance because it’s a very weird form of communication (laughs). You’re communicating with the movements of your body. These are the kinds of discussions that ultimately will lead me to be a better musician.
When I toured with Rainbow, you’d go to an after-party, and everyone would want to just talk about, “Have you heard this band? Have you toured with this guy?” That’s fun, and that’s a way to just prove that you’re cool. People do that when you’re young, and that’s just a trap you get into. But now that I’m older, I’m really appreciating having these talks with my co-workers here (at Yia Yia’s) and at Guitar Center honestly. I’m not this super proud Guitar Center employee, but there’s some really kickass people who work there. We burn super deep, and they make me think about things in a really different way than I would. Those conversations are really what make an artist grow, no matter what kind of art you’re making, I think.
HN: How much did you record at Studio PH, and what was the experience like?
DK: I’ll just say that the recording of this album from start to finish was the only recording experience I’ve ever had where everything went exactly as I hoped. And that’s not a bad thing about the other albums. Normally, you think something will happen, you’ll think, “Oh, I’m going to make an album that sounds like Justice.” Then in the end, you say, “Well, this sounds cool, but it doesn’t sound like Justice.”
This album, from start to finish, it came out exactly as I wanted. I spent three days at Studio PH, plus another evening just to do some bounce-downs. But three days… actually, it wasn’t three whole days. It was a Friday night, then a Saturday and a Sunday. I had composed everything already, so all we did in the studio is what I would do live. We put it all through the amps and recorded it using nice mics and nice preamps. Then Chris (Steffen), he helped me get really good sounds.
I’m a really good mixer and a really good producer, I think, but one skill I have not learned yet is engineering. I’m not good at setting mics up. I’m not incredibly good at turning knobs on preamps. Chris was really patient. We would set the stuff up, then he would let me set the knobs. Sometimes it would take me a little bit, and I would have to ask him for a lot of advice on how to use these preamps and stuff. But in the end, he was a huge help to have because that gear was invaluable, that studio space was invaluable, his monitors are great, and I was really able to hear everything how I wanted to hear it.
For him, it was a less involved process. He wasn’t running around frantically setting mics up all the time. So he was able to sit back. That’s what I told him at the beginning, that we’re not going to have to do nearly as much work in three days here as you would to record a normal band’s album. So let’s just never stress about getting the right sound. Let’s take a little more time and make sure everything’s going through the right channel, the right signal path, and that it sounds really good.
His help was invaluable, and the studio is amazing. I was there for three days, and it was just seriously mind-blowingly perfect. It was fucking great.
HN: Cool. I have just a couple more questions. Could you talk about the album art, how it was made and what it means?
DK: Yeah, well, this is a fucking cool story. It was drawn by my friend in Brooklyn, his name is Rob Corradetti, and he has a design thing called Killer Acid.
I used to play with his band Mixel Pixel, back in the day when that was his band. We actually did a Nirvana split seven-inch where me, him and four other bands covered Nirvana songs. So he is a tremendous artist. His art is out of this world, and it’s all rooted in this familiar imagery mixed with psychedelia, which is right up my alley, of course. He’s obsessed with pizza for example. So I really like this guy, and I’ve known him for awhile.
So I was, like, “Hey, do you want to design a T-shirt for me. I’m putting out this new album and going to go out on tour. I want to have a nice T-shirt for a change.” I always make my own stuff, and it’s just average. So we settled, and I paid him, and he drew the shirt and sent it to me.
If you see the design, it’s so cool because he had heard the album, but I hadn’t sent him a tracklist yet. He had no idea there was a song on it named “Brain Massage.” If you look at the art, there’s these brains getting massaged on the album cover. There’s these guys reaching in and touching brains (laughs).
I wasn’t going to name the album Brain Massage. I just didn’t have a name yet because I was unclear on what it was going to be. I just looked at that art, and in one second, it all just clicked. I was, like, “Well, you just picked my album title. I guess I have a titular track now because this is fucking awesome artwork.” So I just rolled with it, and that’s where the idea of the release being a T-shirt/download card instead of just an album came to light and swept over me as an instant idea.
HN: Now, lastly, if we haven’t already covered it, what does this album mean to you?
DK: It’s just a really good time. I’m returning to a feeling of tremendous positivity and tremendous hope for me and my career and my place in the scene. I want to spend a couple years of rediscovering what I liked about music.
I loved The Show is the Rainbow, but that became, after awhile, it got to a point where I was doing it because I liked hanging out in bars and getting drunk. There wasn’t anything about the end of The Show is the Rainbow that was what I considered cool to be in a band, or the reasons why I started a band. That was a really hard thing to step away from and realize.
This is just, for better or worse, people can take whatever they want from it, but for me, this is a true reconnection to the things I thought were important when I first started touring. I’m just looking forward to trying to learn from my — I hardly call them mistakes — but my mistakes in the past. I don’t regret anything I did with Rainbow. I don’t mean to sound like that.
It’s just that I don’t want to go down that road again. I want to keep this project as something I can be proud of for my whole career and not make those mistakes.
CHORDS
Chorus
A#
The days go by in the
D#
Bodies rhythm the
F#
Polyrhythms
A#
Nobody feels them
Verse
Gm D#b5 Cm Dm Fm7sus2 G5 A#6sus2 D#sus2
Is it trick – y to find the one
A# D#sus2 F7 D# G5 Cm7/D# G5 Dm D#
It has al- ways been eas- y for me
Gm D#b5 Cm Dm Fm7sus2 G5 A#6sus2 D#sus2
Some peo- ple can't count or feel it
A# D#sus2 F7 D# G5 Cm7/D# G5 Dm D#
They tap their feet a-sym- mit-tric-ly
D#/G Fsus2 D#b5
on the ground
Gm D#b5 Cm Dm Fm7sus2 G5 A#6sus2 D#sus2
while drumm-ers pound pol- y- rhy -thms
A# D#sus2 F7 D# G5 Cm7/D# G5 Dm D#
mak-ing peo-ple start to move a-round
Gm D#b5 Cm Dm Fm7sus2 G5 A#6sus2 D#sus2
peo- ple laugh and hug and cry when
A# D#sus2 F7 D# G5 Cm7/D# G5 Dm D#
peo-ple ne-ver e-ven say hell-o
Michael Todd is Hear Nebraska's managing editor. He thanks Darren for sending the chord chart; that saved lots of time. Reach Michael at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.