Artist: Alec Lytle & Them Rounders
Hometown: Woodside, California
Song: “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” (Paul Simon cover)
Album: The Remains of Sunday
Release Date: April 17, 2020
Label: CEN/The Orchard
In Their Words: “There is a bit of an interesting story around the album cut; it was fully recorded live, no overdubs. The band was in the live room at Sound City Studios and I was in the reverb chamber. The chamber is a huge, empty, concrete vault normally used to add reverb and echo to the mix in a very natural way. So I sat in there, hearing the band over headphones. No light, total blackness. All that echo and reverb is because of the space I’m sitting in. This is the same reverb chamber that became famous from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours that was recorded there too.
“I chose to put this song on the record after sitting with it for about six months. My sister passed away recently after a brutal battle with cancer. She loved music, she was the first person I ever heard play guitar and sing, she sang the soprano part when my sisters and I would sing together. I played this song at her memorial service because my family and I felt like this song represented how we want to remember her. I decided to include it on the record as a marker for her… a testament to her memory.
“Dylan Day (guitarist/Jackson Browne, Jenny Lewis, Beck) was spending a few days at our house in November. We had just finished playing and recording some other songs in our living room when we noticed the light starting to fade at the end of the day. Dylan and I decided to play the song outside our back door while the sunset over the forest. It was a one-take thing… filmed and recorded in a matter of minutes. This was likely only the second time Dylan and I played this song… the first time for the record, and then this time behind our house.” — Alec Lytle
Photo credit: Scott McKissen
