EGGS 4 U

It took 3 fully recorded albums to get to the "Eggs" you all know.

I’ve been in a retrospective mood of late because I’ve been exhuming material from the Mysterious Production of Eggs era, working on a 20th anniversary box set. I say “era” because the making of this album was a saga spanning four years, 2001-2005. It took three fully recorded albums to get to the Eggs you all know.

Attempt 1: recorded at the barn in western Illinois with Mike “Nappy” Napolitano, Pat Sansone, Kevin O’Donnell, Nora O’Connor, and Andy Hopkins in the summer of 2002. There were versions of “Opposite Day,” “Skin is My,” and totally bonkers versions of “Masterfade” and “Measuring Cups.” In my mind, it was a failure, but really my process hadn’t caught up with what the barn-life was doing to my music. So Chicago came out to the countryside to record these songs and brought all that manic urban energy with it, and it felt incongruous. Like a party in a graveyard (that actually sounds fun, but you get the idea).

Attempt 2: I decamped to Nashville to make Weather Systems with Mark Nevers, and his ambient, linear textures captured it quite well. It was only meant to be a proof-of-concept EP, but it unexpectedly became somewhat of a success.

Attempt 3: I tried to repeat that success and make Eggs in Nashville, but it was a more complex, band-type of album, and it didn’t work. So that’s two mixed albums in the garbage.

Attempt 4: I went out to LA and met with Tony Berg, who said I should come work in his studio with this young engineer, David Boucher. We worked for three weeks straight. Some tunes, like “Opposite Day,” survived from the original barn session, albeit with some major tweaking. I suppose there’s some lesson here about how failure is a good thing, but the reality wasn’t all so positive. For long stretches, I was in despair, convinced I was truly failing.

I watched a doc we made with Bob Trondson and Billy Spunk from the Blue Meanies (Chicago ska/punk band), where they came out and captured some of that first summer at the barn. I was struck by how stone cold serious I was. Just on the verge of insufferable, but also resolute and self-possessed. I guess I was four albums into my career and somewhat seasoned at this point. Twenty-some years later, I’m still doing pretty much the same thing. I’m taking ideas and feelings and folding them into melodies. The way I do it is not easy, but oh so gratifying.

The Mysterious Production of Eggs started to reveal itself as a concept album — something to do with childhood imagination, conformity, bullying, measuring the immeasurable, arbitrary hierarchies, commodification of concepts like talent and genius. I always pictured a little kid with a cape and sword, fighting to keep these things from stealing her sacred, internal world. I had some things to get off my chest. I wasn’t rewarded by institutions, though sometimes a teacher would say something like, “you are very musical and have a nice tone, but you’re not technical. You need to practice your études and scales, and then maybe you can compete with so-and-so.” Musicality is a very abstract idea to an eight-year-old.

More to come from the Eggs archives — I’ve been digging through a lot, and I’ll be sharing more from the era, including a deeper dive into how the songs came together.

Until then,

-A.B