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ALBUM NOTES FROM TIM PAGNOTTA.

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THE ALBUM TITLE
There are several meanings behind the name Palm Tree And Power Lines.
For each bandmember the phrase brings different feelings and conotates an array of emotions. Sugarcult is very much a California band. California is where we played our very first show, where we live and what provides the spirit of our sound. California is home. The juxtaposition of a palm tree and a power line is something that is very Californian. It is something that you see often. You just have to stop to notice. It's our adopted icon. It's the combination of man vs. nature, and the relationship of the two existing together. It is simply a symbol. It's also the view outside the recording studio window, when one blistering hot afternoon Marko pointed out the irony of a skyline full of palm trees and power lines; a view of beauty and harsh reality co-existing. At that moment we had a title for our new album.

For me Palm Trees and Power Lines is a transitional album. Thematically the record expresses the feelings of a traveler, as several songs reflect an urgency to get back home.
A need to get back home fueled by a relationship,; it's ups it's downs, it's romance and it's psycho- social struggles, which made for an important and emotional ride.

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THE SONGS
Palm Trees And Power Lines was recorded during the months of February through May 2003 at Third Stone Studios and Full Kilt Studios in North Hollywood, CA with producer, engineer Gavin MacKillop. Here are some rough notes on some of the inspirational rampages.

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SHE'S THE BLADE:
One morning while sitting in my bedroom I came up with the idea for "She's the Blade." Only it should have been called "How do I get away with ripping off Elvis Costello yet one more time." The sun was coming up through my window and I had just returned home from tour. I brought my guitars into my room so they wouldn't feel lonely in the garage. I started messing around with a chord progression that sounded like a transcending keyboard line. I have always admired Elvis Costello's ability to do this, especially in the song "Radio Radio" off the album This Years Model. In previous versions of "She's the Blade" there was an intro riff that was later abandoned for our drummer Kenny's infamous countoff (1-2-3!). I started singing melody ideas over the chord progression until a marriage of the two made the most sense. I ran into the next room and grabbed a tape recorder so I could get my idea down on tape. The first thing that came to mind was the lyric "She's the blade and you're just paper". This immediately fired off a bunch of other lyrical ideas and brainstorms. From there the song pretty much wrote itself. Marko came over one night and worked out a bunch of guitar parts, one that became the keyboard line in the beginning of the song, which was played on the album by Ariel from the band The Hippos. There also used to be a middle section to the song that took up twelve bars of music that was reminiscent of bad classic rock. Our producer Gavin made us take it out. Thank God!!!! We all felt that "She's The Blade" would be a great song to start the record off with.

This is some of the gear we used recording this song:
Moog Prodigy
Fender Jazzmaster/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Epiphone Les Paul/ Gibson SG, Bogner, Marshall
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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CRYING:
Crying was one of those songs that was written over a period of time (six months). I had the riff of the pre-chorus and chorus long before the melody for the verse. This song is a bit of a stretch for me, mainly because it's really hard to sing and play at the same time (see example 13A in your textbooks regarding patting your head and rubbing your stromach). The verse stumped me so much that I finally took to dividing it up with a scream in the middle of the section. Marko adds some very interesting guitar playing in the pre-chorus using only harmonics as notes. The middle section of the song used to be sparse with only a choppy version of the chord progression filling in the space. Three days before the song was mixed I recorded a guitar solo as an experiment on my Gibson SG with Gavin. I hated it; but Gavin used it in the mix. The bridge of this song reminds me a little bit of U2; because everytime I hear a drummer keeping time on the floor tom I think of any number of songs from the U2 album "War". The outro lyric of the song ("you can't break away what you cannot change") was discovered during the recording of the harmonies. I felt at the time that there was too much blank space at the end of the song and it wasn't lyrically complete. Tim Cullen from the band Summercamp guest appeared on this track singing all the harmonies. Thank you Tim, those notes are really high!! This song is gonna be hard to sing live.

Gear:
Fender Jazzmaster/ Matchless intro
Epiphone Les Paul/ Gibson SG, Bognar, Marshall
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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MEMORY:
"Memory" was the very first song I wrote for the new album. It is also my favorite song on the new record and in my opinion bridges the gap the best from "Start Static" to "Palm Trees And Power Lines." The idea of this song is based more around a lyrical perspective than melody. The subject is about a person I met while I was on tour in Boston. At the time I was fresh out of a relationship and very careful about not starting a new one. I sat on my couch one evening and day-dreamed about all the reasons why a relationship with this person wouldn't work out. Before I knew it I had played out this fictitious relationship in my head to its entirety and assumed we would fail at handling our differences. (It pays to think things through, but maybe not to this extent!!!). I grabbed my acoustic guitar and started strumming chords. The song was hatched. The first chord I strum is a "D" and the second an odd "E". I use my third finger on the "A" string and pinky on "D". It's a chord that I stole from my favorite Superdrag song "Expanding My Mind." I kept playing the chord-cycle over and over while using the phrase "can I be your memory". My roommate shouted from the room next to me and asked me what song I was playing, thinking it was somebody elses. I grabbed my tape recorder and started getting it down. I immediately thought, "ok this makes for a great chorus, but how do I go about writing a verse." I felt this way until I played Kenny the song for the first time. The advice he gave me was that the song needed a chorus and that the lyric that I had was really a verse. I went back to working on this song and thought hard about what the song meant to me. I felt that the lyric needed to represent the initial innocence you share with someone new in your life juxtaposed by what happens when things fall apart.

Gear:
Martin D18 Acoustic
Piano/ Fender Rhodes
Fender Jazzmaster/Matchless DC30 intro
Fender Jazzmaster/ Sovtek
Epiphone Les Paul/ Marshall Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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THE WORST DECEMBER:
This song was a secret for awhile. Mainly because the lyrics were a bit confessional in regards to a relationship I was going through. I feared that if my girlfriend discovered the paper with the lyrics, we'd have to confront our issues. A band from Santa Barbara called Bright Life inspired the music of this song. I always admired their use of open chords in their rock songs, something that Sugarcult doesn't do very often. Kenny's drum beat in the beginning of the song is very important. He keeps time on the rim of the tom. This is where we hear the "tick-tick tick" sound. It sounds very much like a clock and gives the track a nice ambient space. Lyrically the song is about about space and feelings of being away from home. I think these two ideas are very important to eachother and add to the songs mono verse qualities. The song's lack of bass in the verse arrangement is also something that we have never ventured into before. My favorite part of this song is the end,"December's gone, it came and went". It sums up best the way I felt about myself and the situation at the time. The song was also very difficult to record. It took three different attempts to record the rhythm guitar parts mainly because we couldn't keep our guitars in tune. Marko's intro riff is my favorite thing he played on the entire record. It was something he came up with the last night in the studio inspired by candles, coffee and chain smoking cigarettes.

Gear:
Martin D18 Acoustic
Greatch Anniversary/ Marshall
Epiphone ES335 Elite/ Marshall Combo
Epiphone Les Paul/ Bad Cat
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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BACK TO CALIFORNIA:
Back to California was an idea that I came up with in my bedroom. In my opinion it is the centerpiece of the record. It is also the only song on the record where the E string is dropped down to D. This kind of tuning gives the 2nd and 3rd chords more tension. Early on I imagined this song to have the kind of singular perspective as the Phil Collins song "Tonight". I have always been a fan of how sparse that song is and how effective it made his voice. When I played this song to Kenny at a practice and we began talking about how we like how Jimmy Eat World uses lots of hand percussion in their music. We tried to incorporate a little of this into the track, especially in the introduction of the drums. The chorus of the song has a lot of stacked voices and call and response harmonies. This is something you can hear on old Carpenters records that I grew up listening to with my parents. In earlier recordings of this song we used a clean-toned electric guitar that threaded the song together from beginning to end. Although a pair of acoustic guitars, hard-panned to give the song a more fragile feel, later replaced it. Once we committed to this arrangement, we all felt that it lent itself to a more ambient style production. We used loops and guitar playing that sounded like orchestra strings to support this. Airin and I sang harmonies for this song in the back room of the studio. I can't tell you how many times we sang the line "how long I'll wait just to say goodbye". Every time I hear it, I think of how we pressed rewind/playback.

Gear:
Martin D18 Acoustic
Greatch Anniversary/ Marshall
Gibson SG/Silvertone Twin Twelve
Epiphone ES335 Elite/ Marshall Combo
Epiphone Les Paul/ Bad Cat
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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DESTINATION ANYWHERE:
During the pre-production of "Palm Trees And Power Lines" we spent three weeks at a studio in Los Angeles called Studio 9 on Santa Monica Blvd. For the first week Kenny and I would get together on off days to practice songs the band hadn't yet become familiar with. On one of these "off" days I got to the studio early and started playing the drums and singing melodies off the top of my head. At the time I was listening to a band from Texas called Spoon that had musical arrangements heavy on drums and vocals. I grabbed my tape recorder and set it on the floor tom and let it roll, I started singing "Destination Anywhere". I got through almost the entire first half of the song in one pass making it up as I was going along. Kenny came in; we grabbed a piece of lined paper and mapped out the rest of the song. I thought it had a 60's sci-fi quality to it and thought introspective lyrics should reflect it's sound. It was very spontaneous. At the next band practice we played Marko and Airin the song. Airn cemented a riff that sounded like a cross between U2's "New Years Day" and something similar to any number of Motown songs. Marko played guitar stabs reminiscent of British 60's mod. The song was born. When we brought it in the studio, Gavin said it reminded him of INXS. We were all shocked in horror. From there we striped it back of any of its cheesy bells and whistles and added a moog keyboard riff into the bridge. Now the song was complete. The vocals of this song were re-recorded twice. Gavin felt that this track needed to sound very intimate, especially considering how naked it is in the verse. It also had a second pre-chorus that was edited out in the last week of the recording. This was one of the harder songs to record on the album. This is Marko's favorite song on the record.

Gear:
Fender Telecaster/ Silvertone Twin Twelve
Epiphone Les Paul / Marshall Combo
Epiphone Les Paul/ Matchless DC 30
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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CHAMPAGNE:
I used to live in a house in North Hollywood, CA. It had a back room void of sunlight all hours of the day. It was a great place to write songs. If it were hot outside, the room would be cool. If it was cold out, the room had a heater vent in it so it would be the first to get warm. (Side note: Marko lived in this room on and off for about six months). Right around this time we were dealing with the internal politics of our band and confronting all our own issues, while starting to work on our new record. I was feeling trapped by the last year of my life and disappointed by the situation and wanted to write a song about my frustrations. "Champagne" is a song that switches between first/ third person perspectives of a relationship between someone with an addiction (It's meaning is pretty obvious and literal). I called Marko and sang it to him over the phone and later wrote the chorus in the shower in the middle of a brainstorm. Musically it is really satisfying. It reminds me of The Cars on steroids. It was the last song to be finished in the studio. My friend Mark Trombino mixed "Champagne" (the day Marko got married) and I think Mark added a harder element to the song that we didn't think existed.

Gear:
Fender Telecaster/ Silvertone Twin Twelve
Epiphone Les Paul / Marshall Combo
Epiphone SG/ Sovtek
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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WHAT YOU SAY:
This song was the fastest and easiest song on the record to record. It was something that was very in the moment and inspired. It came together from a jam between me and Kenny. The song's true magic is when we play it live. Come to a show.

Gear:
Fender Telecaster/ Silvertone Twin Twelve
Epiphone Les Paul / Marshall Combo
Epiphone SG/ Sovtek
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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OVER:
"Over"was a song that was never intended to make it on our record. It was one of those happy accidents. I had the idea for the verse kicking around for a few weeks, but could never really get it together enough to bring it to the band. One day while we were deep into recording drums at Third Stone Studios, I approached Kenny and Gavin with a finished chorus. Between the three of us we hashed out something that would be recorded early the next day. Kenny and I jammed out an arrangement that made sense and recorded it in about thirty minutes. Marko mentioned that it should have a break in rhythm going into its last chorus. It sounded like a cool idea so we incorporated it into the song. This is one of those songs that is purely a studio track. It was never played by the band all at once. We all had a shot recording what we felt the song needed. In the end when we mixed it we ended up stripping the song down to it's rawest form. This is the first rock song our band has ever made like this. Its lyrics are unique in that they reflect a first person fictional relationship between two people where the feelings are not mutual. I came up with the idea based on a few "strange" incidents where someone has gotten too close to us as individuals based on anything but reality. I think of it as the stalker song.

Gear:
Fender Telecaster/ Silvertone Twin Twelve
Epiphone Les Paul / Marshall Combo
Epiphone SG/ Sovtek
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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HEAD UP:
The original idea of this song was written backstage at a show in Belgium. We were deep on tour in Europe and I was trying to figure out how to use my new mini disc recorder, a Christmas present given to me by my dad. The opening band was playing upstairs and I was downstairs playing chords on my electric guitar into the recorder. I couldn't figure out the key of the chords because the noise was so loud upstairs. I recorded what I could and listened to the tape later on the bus ride. The next day we had a soundcheck and I played the riff while the band jammed along. When it came time for the chorus I just kept the same chords and started singing a new melody. It shaped up very quickly and we had enough of an idea to work with. After the tour was over I sat down with an acoustic and figured out proper chords and worked out a bridge. "Head Up" is similar to "Crying" in that it is a little difficult to play and sing at the same time. The lyric of the song reflects what it's like trying to stay positive doing something that others around you don't approve of. This is very much the way I felt after I dropped out of school to play music. Earlier drafts of this record excluded this song. We all voted the song back onto the album after a show outside of Houston, Texas.

Gear:
Martin D18 Acoustic
Greatch Anniversary/ Marshall
Gibson SG/Silvertone Twin Twelve
Epiphone ES335 Elite/ Marshall Combo
Epiphone Les Paul/ Bad Cat
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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COUNTING STARS:
I had the chord progression for this song kicking around for about two months. Most people that play guitar can relate to the occasional chord progression that kicks around for eons. You're not quite sure what it's going to be used for or what its purpose is. All you know is you keep playing it over and over while annoying roommates and house pets. For two months this song went speechless. I didn't have any lyrics or melodies for it. It wasn't until I went to the doctor and was misdiagnosed for a virus. After this happened I went home, grabbed my guitar and the song just poured out. I am firm believer now that songs sound like certain events. In this case the sound of the chord progression was intended to be written about this specific experience. I had an early acoustic demo of this song that I recorded one late night. I used paintbrushes on a piece of paper for percussion. On the recording of the album we had a friend of ours make sounds with his guitar that sounded like animals dying.

Gear:
Martin D18 Acoustic
Greatch Anniversary/ Marshall
Gibson SG/Silvertone Twin Twelve
Epiphone ES335 Elite/ Marshall Combo
Epiphone Les Paul/ Bad Cat
Fender P-Bass/ Avalon sp737/Ampeg head/ Silvertone Twenty-One-Twelve
Neumann M149 Microphone, Neve 1073, Urie 1176

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SIGN OFF:
This song was written in almost one pass with a tape recorder running in my room. I wrote it from the edge of my bed with the same Harmony acoustic guitar used in the "Bouncing Off the Walls" video. The song is pretty self-explanatory and was written while we were recording the basic tracks for the record. I recorded it in the back room of the studio by myself. Some of the over-dubs and bizarre noises were added on by our producer Gavin MacKillop.

Martin D 18 Acoustic
Rode NT1000 Microphone, Avalon sp737
Gibson SG/ Marshall

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THANKS FOR LISTENING.