THE MAKING OF ‘GOOD TIMES’

by Alexei Shishkin

In late July of 2023, I went to Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, RI, to record some tunes.

I had been to Rhode Island many times at that point, and I had formed a pretty steadfast view of what Providence and the neighboring towns were all about. Coffee milk, hot wieners, Dunkin’, Irish pubs, Savers, that one biker bar where everyone was smoking cigarettes, the open mic night at a different bar with the sign-up list that must’ve been a hundred names long, The Lodge’s fantastic clam chowder, keno… It all formed a collage of past moments I lived through and learned from.

The studio is run by a guy named Bradford Krieger, someone who I met via cold email in 2016. My opening line? “Hey there, I tweeted at you the other day.” Little did I know that I would end up working with him consistently for the better part of the next decade.

Over those years, I would slowly get more comfortable in the studio and learn many lessons. At first, I prepared demos, convinced friends to play, sent out charts (or at least my non-music-theorizin’ ass version of them), had all my lyrics written, tracked mostly live, brought a photographer to help capture the moments. I was trying to elevate my DIY, and I was meticulous about it.

It took me about three separate multi-day sessions over the course of a few years to realize that “elevating my DIY” was just not my speed. The sessions had subsequently less preparation, and fewer people involved. I was learning that over-preparing made the process feel tedious, and too many people made it move slower. We’re not trying to create the next smash hit here. Not every tone and melody needs to be overthought and discussed and replayed.

Cut to the late July day in 2023. I had just gotten off the 6 A.M. train from New York, and into Bradford’s car at the Amtrak station. No other players. No notes. No instruments. This was basically a trip to go have fun, use whatever’s at the studio, and most importantly, play music. No road maps, no strategies, no blueprints.

“What are you trying to do?” Bradford asked as he heaved open the big, red, horseshoe-adorned door to the studio.

“Good question,” I replied. And it *was* a good question. I had no idea. I was mostly trying to see what we could come with from scratch. We had our bassist Dave Kahn for half a day, so I pulled up some drum loops and we had him improvise some bass lines for about a half hour. From there, we collected lines we could build around.

Bradford and I spent the next three and a half days building all the songs that made it onto Good Times. No pretense, minimal editing, and a lot of stream-of-consciousness experimentation.

We had tons of stuff mic’d up, ready to go, so at the drop of a hat we could put in that *one* chord we needed from a 12-string guitar, or pipe in a sample of “Disco Elysium” sound effects, or get that weird little kalimba phrase to build around (you’ll hear Bradford enter as I’m playing and say “You tryna track that thing?” on “Magpie”). It was a frictionless environment, and in all my time recording, at Big Nice and otherwise, it was the most fun I’ve had at a session.

After the long train ride back home to NYC, life resumed as normal. Work concerns, money concerns, general concerns. I had been plopped back into reality from my brief escape.

It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I was able to finally crack into the tracks that were sent along from the session. We had ended up with 11 tracks over the four days, from zero to done, and they were all tracks we really enjoyed (Bradford even kept one to continue working on that I’m excited to hear at some point; I didn’t forget, BK).

As I opened up the .zip, I saw 12 tracks there… all 11 we did, and one extra track called “Good Times.” I played it back, and it was a solo piano piece. At one point, I had jammed something out real quick that I thought was a random, improvised cast-off. Turns out Bradford had been recording. And little did he know, along with playing all of the best parts on the album, he also stumbled onto the album’s name: Good Times, indeed. – Alexei Shishkin