Sing For Your Meat — A Guided By Voices Tribute

Fea­tur­ing:

The Flam­ing Lips, Kel­ley Deal and Buf­falo Killers, Thurston Moore, Blitzen Trap­per, West­ern Civ and more.

This album is a cel­e­bra­tion of the many faces of Guided By Voices and the mul­ti­tude of artists that they have influ­enced through both their music and men­tal­ity. Through a broad array of record­ing tech­niques and musi­cal gen­res the artists have shown us all just how deeply they have been inspired and engaged by the works of GBV. Both con­tem­po­raries and cur­rent indie up-and-coming artists alike have con­tributed to what we feel is an authen­ti­cally GBV’esque album. Some lean­ing heav­ily toward the lo-fi aes­thetic while oth­ers mir­rored the more pro­duced side of the vast cat­a­log, these fans-at-heart have cre­ated an album full of depth and raw character.

The CD is a 17 song LP with a free 6 song dig­i­tal EP
1. Kel­ley Deal and Buf­falo Killers — scald­ing creek
2. Thurston Moore — Stab­bing A Star
3. Elf Power — man called aero­dy­nam­ics
4. Super­drag — A Salty Salute
5. West­ern Civ — My Valu­able Hunt­ing Knife
6. Crooked Fin­gers — Trac­tor Rape Chain
7. Lou Bar­low — Game of Pricks
8. Sorry About Dres­den — Echos Myron
9. James Hus­band– Buz­zards and Dread­ful Crows
10. Flam­ing Lips — Smoth­ered in Hugs
11. La Sera — Watch Me Jump­start
12. I Was Totally Destroy­ing It — I am pro­duced
13. David Kil­gour — How Loft Am I
14. Cym­bals Eat Gui­tars — Gleemer
15. Jason Isbell and the 400 unit — Every­where with Heli­copter
16. The Pneu­rotics — I am a Tree
17. Blitzen Trap­per — Hot Freaks

Free Dig­i­tal Com­pan­ion
1. Mass Solo Revolt — Gold Star for robot boy
2. Gregg Yeti — Qual­ity Of Armor
3. West­ern Civ — Gold­heart Moun­tain Top Queen Direc­tory
4. North Ele­men­tary — They’re Not Witches-Ex Super­model
5. Marie Stella — lit­tle lines
6. Free Elec­tric State — Weedking

Dou­ble mixed color vinyl set includes all 23 tracks and has a gate­fold jacket with an 11″ X 11″ full color poster style insert.

Vinyl I

Side A
Kel­ley Deal and Buf­falo Killers — scald­ing creek
Jason Isbell and the 400 unit — Every­where with Heli­copter
The Pneu­rotics — I am a Tree
Blitzen Trap­per — Hot Freaks
Free Elec­tric State — Weedking

Side B
Crooked Fin­gers — Trac­tor Rape Chain
West­ern Civ — My Valu­able Hunt­ing Knife
Cym­bals Eat Gui­tars — Gleemer
North Ele­men­tary — They’re Not Witches-Ex Super­model (These 2 songs are merged together)
Gregg Yeti — Qual­ity Of Armor
Lou Bar­low — Game of Pricks

Vinyl II

Side A
Flam­ing Lips — Smoth­ered in Hugs
Mass Solo Revolt — Gold Star for robot boy
I Was Totally Destroy­ing It — I am pro­duced
La Sera — Watch Me Jump­start
David Kil­gour– How Loft Am I

Side B
James Hus­band– Buz­zards and Dread­ful Crows
Marie Stella — lit­tle lines
Elf Power — man called aero­dy­nam­ics
West­ern Civ — Gold­heart Moun­tain Top Queen Direc­tory
Sorry About Dres­den — Echos Myron
Super­drag — A Salty Salute
Thurston Moore — Stab­bing A Star

A Few Words From Rich Turiel:

(Guided By Voices/Robert Pol­lard right-hand man/tour manager)

“I’m Burt Bacharach in reverse”

Robert Pol­lard uttered these words on The Elec­tri­fy­ing Con­clu­sion Tour back in 2004. He was refer­ring to the amount of “hits” he has writ­ten with hardly any­one notic­ing. Over the years I’ve seen lots of “famous” musi­cians come back stage and pay homage to Bob. I always won­dered why there wasn’t a mas­sive Guided By Voices trib­ute album fea­tur­ing REM, U2, Tom Petty, Cheap Trick (all bands who have had mem­bers who have praised Bob’s music). But I real­ize that maybe I was look­ing at this all wrong. It wasn’t the already famous that mat­tered, it was the num­ber of young musi­cians that Bob was influ­enc­ing that were more impor­tant. These were peo­ple that mat­tered. The ones who saw GBV play in the small clubs, the ones that played WITH GBV in the small clubs. They were the rock and roll war­riors that share Bob’s rock and roll ethos. They are the spirit of GBV. Why you ask?

Tid bits about mak­ing this album:

Some of the tracks were lit­er­ally recorded in bedrooms.

West­ern Civ’s tracks were recorded in their prac­tice space (at Rich’s house) with a guy they had never met before and his portable record­ing rig. (Todd Fitch)

Lou Bar­low recorded his track 12 times on a walk­man like thing and then stacked them all. How cool is that? He gets my per­sonal thumbs up for coolest technique!

Kel­ley Deal and The Buf­falo Killers had never played their song together before they arrived at Can­dy­land to record it it! (Talk about insta-chemistry!)

The world found out we were mak­ing this trib­ute when Wayne Cohen tweeted him­self record­ing the
vocals for The Flam­ing Lips track.

La Sera’s track was done entirely by two peo­ple. Katy Good­man (vocals) and Brady Hall (instrumentation)

Both the Thurston Moore track and the James Hus­band track had been pre­vi­ously released on other projects. Thurston’s track was under the name Male Slut on the first GBV trib­ute, “Bla­tant Doom Trip” which was done by the infa­mous Trader Vic.

Mass Solo Revolt’s track was all played and recorded by one guy, Mar­tin Brummeler.

Superdrag’s track is from the web! A friend of theirs (Dewey Cole) had recorded a live show. John Davies grabbed the track from the web in MP3 form and we sent it straight to the mas­ter­ing engi­neer as is.

Which brings me to Dave.
Many thanks to our mas­ter­ing engi­neer, Dave Har­ris of Stu­dio B in Char­lotte. He deserves mul­ti­ple pats on the back for mak­ing all of this sound some­what cohe­sive while still keep­ing the raw GBV feel. You sir have super human ears, and we think you rock.

A Few Words from some of the artists:

“GBV were the first bunch of older cats, in Day­ton, play­ing weird,
orig­i­nal music that I liked. It seemed like all the other guys were in cover bands or doing bad bar blues or bad punk. And GBV sang about Day­ton, Ohio. They cel­e­brated it — made fun of it. They made me appre­ci­ate it. I felt like I came from a way cooler place than I actu­ally did. When I root for GBV it feels like I’m root­ing for the Home Team.” –Kel­ley Deal

“The main influ­ence that Guided By Voices had was mak­ing me real­ize that you could record an album at home essen­tially for free on 4 track cas­sette, instead of spend­ing thou­sands of dol­lars
in a pro­fes­sional stu­dio record­ing a “proper” album.” - Andrew Rieger, Elf Power

“They were such a huge influ­ence… and they were just hugely inspi­ra­tional to us over the years. Our drum­mer Don turned me on to “Bee Thousand”—that was in 1993. He was the first dude I knew of that was into Guided By Voices. He actu­ally saw the “clas­sic line-up” [Bob, Toby, Mitch, Greg (or pos­si­bly Jim Greer) and Kevin] at the Mer­cury The­atre in Knoxville… I totally blew it by miss­ing that show. Seems like there were hun­dreds of days on tours when the first act of the day would be to get in the van, throw on “Bee Thou­sand”, or “Alien Lanes”, or “Do The Col­lapse”, or any num­ber of GBV records, crack some beers, get stoked-out, and charge it to the next city. They always just had kind of an “insta-stoke” effect that was good for the heart. Our lone hit “Sucked Out” was orig­i­nally intended to be pretty much an out­right rip-off of “Echos Myron”, espe­cially the outro (orig­i­nal 4-track demo attached); I told Bob that, but I don’t think he believed me. He gave us a hard time one night about not putting that song into the set; “that’s a fuckin’ hit, man! You gotta play the hit!” When Bobby P gives you advice on putting your set together, chances are you’d bet­ter take it. Get­ting to go on tour with Guided By Voices (not once, but twice!) was hands-down the pin­na­cle for me… of all the places we saw and all the gigs we got to do. They treated us as equals; they were a class act. I remem­ber the first night, Bob told us we were “good Rock per­form­ers”… and he’s the best front­man in Rock! We were fired-up. We actu­ally played at a birth­day party in Colum­bus with GBV back in ’98; that was the Bob-Greg Demos-Doug Gillard-Jim McPher­son line-up. Bob came out­side and we got to meet him; he said, “I knew you guys would be drinkers! You’re from Ten­nessee!” Then he said, “I’m a hill­billy too, you know…” so Don (Cof­fey Jr) said, “bull­shit! Where you from?” “SOUTHERN Ohio!” (ha ha) Plus, they made their records on 4-track, and 4-track record­ing has always been the foun­da­tion of every­thing we’ve ever done. I still make all of my demos on 4-track. A 4-track and a 58; that’s all I’ve used at home for the last 18 years. That’s all you need. Yeah, I could go on all day, but suf­fice to say, Superdrag’s col­lec­tively got MAD respect for GBV. Our bass player Sam Pow­ers actu­ally did one Euro­pean tour on bass with GBV before Chris Slusarenko joined. So killer! And he can def­i­nitely hang with Greg Demos when it comes to eye-catching stage pants. (ha)” –John Davies, Superdrag