This installment of BackStory features the story behind Austin, Texas’ The Octopus Project‘s song “Catalog.” And the photo of the band above was taken by Wiley Wiggins– and he directed the video below, too. He’s a man about the Austin music scene these days and something of a renaissance man according to the Internet, but to me, he will always be the Freshman/little brother in Dazed and Confused. (Because I love the movie– not because I reject his growth since then.)
Originally, we started working on the music for “Catalog” as a soundtrack to a short film by John Whitney entitled (surprise!), “Catalog.” We played a show at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin last year where we wrote all new music to existing short films. It was a fun experiment and a couple of the songs from that show ended up in slightly different forms on our new record.
The seed from “Catalog” came from a looped, arpeggiated keyboard line that I accidentally happened upon while recording random sounds in our practice space. We loved the loop, but it ended up in a 7/4 time signature, so was a bit tricky to write something catchy on top. Toto is pretty amazing at taking things in weird time signatures and making them feel natural, so he tackled the loop and ended up writing most of the parts of the song.
As it goes with most of our stuff, once a song is sketched out, we all get together and try to figure out how to play the song live as well as work on all the arranging and crafting it into a finished song — each adding our own little touch. We spent a quite a bit of time (particularly on the loud section) working everything out.
The recorded version is pretty similar to the live version. The biggest difference being that we added a whole ton of craziness in the middle to make it as nuts as possible — really trying to make it sound like you were sucked into a vortex and spit back out on the other side. One of the tracks is a slowed-down, tape-delayed recording of our dog freaking out. Strangely enough, we’ve had a couple of folks tell us that their dogs also freak out during that section! Success!!
Catalog from Wiley Wiggins on Vimeo.
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