matt kivel: days of being wild

Days of Being Wild was recorded over the course of six weeks in the summer of 2013 with Paul Oldham in a small detached shed in Los Angeles. The album art features original drawings by Max Markowitz. “I had worked with Paul on the last record I did, 2013’s Double Exposure, and I was lucky because he decided to move to LA right after that record was finished. My friend Brian Cosgrove has this house in the Echo Park hills, kind of a punk house where everyone who lives in it plays in bands. It’s got a front porch with a refrigerator on it and it’s got a one room shed in the back where bands rehearse. A lot of bands have rehearsed there over the years. Paul and I started meeting there over the summer and I would buy Paul beer. We drank whiskey on the first day, but I think we both got too drunk to do anything productive—well, at least I did, Paul’s from Kentucky, so he has an even higher threshold—so we switched to beer and things went smoothly from then on. I played most of the instruments, Paul played bass, and my friend David Kitz joined in on drums for two of the harder songs. Paul told me some great stories about all of the musicians he’s worked with over the years. He even told me the secret to I See a Darkness—Bunny Wailer’s ‘Blackheart Man.’ Supposedly he and Will were listening to that a lot when they made that record— one of my favorites. So, I started listening to it myself. It’s fantastic. “When I wrote these songs I was trying to do something that felt more social, something that reached out a little bit more to other people and that’s why there are more drums on it. People like to rock! I also wanted to use more electric guitar. I was listening to the radio a lot at this time. I was really sick of my record collection and I started listening to the classic rock stations and for the first time I really started enjoying that music—Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, The Cars, Fleetwood Mac—I was really feeling that stuff. My friend Eric Deines told me that some of the songs feel like ‘super-minimal, outsider transmissions of “Jesse’s Girl”’ and I kind of like that. Todd Ledford from Olde English Spelling Bee was also very helpful after the recording was done. He was the first person I sent these songs to and he gave me a lot of good advice about mixing and recording and life. He thinks there are a few potential hits on this album … but which ones? I guess we’ll have to watch the Billboard charts to find out.” —Matt Kivel