Miesha and the Spanks members Miesha Louie (guitar and vocals) and Sean Hamilton (drums) have been playing together for more than a decade, meaning that they’re less of a band than they are a family.
That familial closeness was embedded in every moment of the making of the Calgary garage rock duo’s latest EP, last month’s Visions, which was recorded against a backdrop of trick-of-treating, Greek Easter, and feasting at Medieval Times.
They’ve come a long way from camping out in Walmart parking lots to the seasoned pros they are today, even recording the explosive garage scorchers of Visions with an whopping 29 mics on the drums. No wonder it sounds so huge!
Below, check out Miesha Louie’s scrapbook of the band’s time in the studio.
Original Album Cover Photo
The sprawling concept for Visions is holding a mirror to what we thought our life would look like right now and looking at what it is. In a lot of ways, it’s the same: music full time, full-ish throttle. It’s just balanced with family now, and because of that I’m a lot less of a dirtbag than I was 10 years ago. We don’t sleep in vans anymore! Although, if I’m being honest with myself, I do sometimes long for that chilly air wakeup in a Walmart parking lot. Its basically camping. So this photo that our best bud and tour photographer Sebastian Buzzalino took of Sean and I in front of the Sandy Hut in Portland is a little representative of that shift. I think it was the last tour that we did for the love of the game, or to say that we did it, and for that reason it was pretty darn fun. But we grew up a little afterwards.
29 Drum Mics
We recorded in two parts. For the first part, we brought our producer Hill Kourkoutis out to Calgary and drove out of the city every morning to OCL Studio. I’m speculating here, but I think because Hill is used to her home studio, which is a lot more intimate and not stacked with too much extra gear, we got a little carried away micing the drums. I had to check my notes to get the right number, but we landed on 29 microphones on the drums. Because we could! Which, when we played all together in the booth, sounded pretty deadly. The drums sound great on this album, not gonna lie.
Trick-or-Treating
One of my favourite parts of this recording was the family vibe we created. In Calgary, Hill was a guest at my home, sharing meals and hanging out with my kids. Halloween fell over our studio time, and she hit the dark streets of Bowness with me and two dilophosauruses combing for candy. Instead of splitting up after a sensory overload playing the same songs a million times a millions ways all day, we ate together, stayed up late chatting together, and on Halloween we trick-or-treated together.
Old Truck on a Range Road
Our morning drives to OCL through rural Alberta range roads in Sean’s beautiful old truck set the tone for our early studio days. It was late October, so we were still catching some sunrise on the drive out of the city, drinking coffee and listening to FM radio over the hum of an old truck just getting by, our butts vibrating on gravel roads.
Dying Eggs for Greek Easter
It was Halloween at my house for the first part of recording, but it was Greek Easter at Hill’s when we recorded Part 2 in Toronto. Still in the midst of tracking, we took an evening to help her dye eggs red while listening to Greek music and drinking tiny sips of Ouzo. We really came together family-style in the making of this album, and with that closeness came a warmth in the recording, and a second-nature understanding of each other as we tracked. We lived together during the making of Visions, and we shared traditions like trick or treating and dying eggs.
Medieval Times
Sean, Hill, her wife Abby and I booked ourselves some front-row seats to Medieval Times to celebrate wrapping of the album. Everyone really indulged me in this, because I’m the one who can’t get enough Medieval Times. Our knight didn’t win, but we wasn’t the bad guy, and we hollered our hearts out after a week well-spent hammering out every sliver of every song. A triumphant outro for all our hard work.
