You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
This episode contains explicit language.
Hardly art, hardly starving.
Hardly art, hardly garbage.
Hardly art, hardly starving.
The band The Thermals originally began as Hutch Harris' solo recording project.
He sang and played all the instruments on the 2003 Thermals record More Parts Per Million.
In this episode, Hutch breaks down his lo-fi recording of the song No Culture Icons.
The track was later mixed by Chris Walla, who's best known for his work with Death Cab for Cutie,
and we'll hear some thoughts from him as well.
I spoke with Hutch in front of a live audience at the XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon.
This just started as a recording project that I was just doing by myself on a four track Just recorded at my old house So this was like the start of the whole band like there was nothing and then I recorded a bunch of songs on the four track and that became the band maybe when I was 17 or 18 I got a four track and a lot of friends I you know,
this is before Pro Tools.
So everyone I knew was recording Songs on it on cassette because it's cheap mainly,
and then it's easy, you know, it's cheap and easy to use.
A cassette costs a dollar, and I think I could fit like three or four songs on a cassette,
so really the record costs about like $12 to make,
so if you can accept that the recordings are really low-fi,