Singled Out: Thundercloud Kid's Well After Quiet Hours

12-23-2018

Thundercloud Kid's Sean Caputi tells us about "Well After Quiet Hours" a companion song to the band's graphic novel The Charmingly Odd and Oddly Charming Tales of the Thundercloud Kid. Here is the story:

I wrote the lyrics for "Quiet Hours" while I was traveling through the National Parks of Utah and Arizona so I think that the landscapes out there played a role in shaping the song; I'd never seen nights or mornings quite like those. The area reminded me of one of the settings in the universe of our books, The Charmingly Odd and Oddly Charming Tales of the Thundercloud Kid, so I knew that the poem could fit into the project. As soon as I got home, I wrote the music on my guitar in a few hours in my bedroom, as is standard procedure. It's a pretty simple little series of chord progressions, but something about it sounded like open space and desert winds to me. In the process, I toyed with the key a little bit to strike the right mood, and to make sure that it would fit right into the wheelhouse of our vocalist, Dallas Greene. We added the outro after the rest of the song was already written because we wanted the music to build into a kind of restrained crescendo as opposed to just repeating the chorus for a third time.

We recorded the song at GCR Audio in Buffalo, which is owned by Robbie Takac of the Goo Goo Dolls, so we actually used a lot of their equipment on the final version. Recording the drums was a funny scene since the beat stays the same throughout the entire song and wasn't exactly the toughest assignment for our drummer, Frank Zanti. He looked pretty bored. After we had the basic track recorded, Jimmy Douglass heard it through the grapevine and wanted to work on it too, so he did the mixing and mastering in his studio for us. The electronic sounds that you can hear peppered in the background were Jimmy's idea and he also spliced the vocals at the end of the song to create kind of a cut-up, sampled sound to Dallas' voice. The guy's a master, there's no denying that. At the last minute, we had some pressure from our team to change the name of the song from "Laying in the Dirt," which was the working title, because technically, that wasn't grammatically correct. I argued that there was a specific reason for that grammatical error, but lost out to the powers that be. I guess "Well After Quiet Hours" works too, though.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself here and learn more about the novel right here!