13ghosts - Garland of Bottle Flies

Release Date: November 8, 2011

We started recording Garland of Bottle Flies in 2008, right around the time that Strangest Colored Lights was coming out. We demoed four or five songs, and Buzz, who had been in the band since the beginning with me, decided that he needed to bow out for personal reasons. I had written my half of the record by then, which is how Buzz and I always made records, and so I started writing new material to cover his half.

I couldn’t decide what I wanted the new record to be. I’ve always loved Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, and I wanted to do something like that, but I didn’t have enough murder ballads. And I didn’t have any theme that tied it all together in any kind of cohesive way. I just had 10 or so songs. So we demoed the rest of the record to see what we had. In the process, because of Buzz bowing out, and because of another line-up change, the band had become something entirely new. But we’d begun the record the same way we’d begun the others, as a studio project, which is to say, many overdubs and multi-layers and all that. So I started doing most of the guitars and pianos myself, with Andrew making sounds here and there and engineering it, and Sammy and Jason playing the rhythm section.

Then I got to thinking about Cicada, and the way we had called in all our friends to play on it when the drummer quit. We did that because we didn’t know what the hell else to do, and we just wanted to make the record. I got to thinking about how much fun that had turned out to be, and we were sort of in the same position again. So we started calling in friends to play on this one. We called our buddy to put together a horn section for Billy Dee. We called some other friends who played cello and violin for Whitey Joe. We called a lot of buddies from other bands to sing with me or play guitar or piano or whatever, and it got to be a big messy thing again, which is kind of where we started out with Cicada a long time ago. And I think big and messy is kind of what this band has always been about.
-Brad Armstrong