Sparrow and the Workshop's Guide To 'Crystal Falls'

Frontwoman and songwriter Jill O’Sullivan guides Gigwise through the making of ‘Crystal Falls, the lovely debut album from Sparrow and the Workshop.

“This album has been quite a trip for us. To be honest, it's hard for to us to listen to it because we've heard it a million times now, but when we do it brings back a lot of memories.
 
“Some of the tracks on the album were self-recorded when we had only been a band for 6 months or so. For instance, ‘Devil Song’ and ‘Last Chance’ made it onto the album even though they were home recordings at Gregor's parents house out in Livingston. We must have done those right before Christmas, 2008. We made a racket in their living room and Gregor's mom brought us bacon sandwiches every few hours. Luckily, our pal JP knew a guy called Marcus Mackay who lent us some pretty nice mics, too. He ended up mixing the tracks for us and we put them on an EP called "Sleight of Hand". We liked his mixes and ended up going to DivingBell lounge to record another EP with Marcus called "Into the Wild". His studio was an awesome barn that he converted and we were the first people to record there! A bit of a risk, I guess, but the end result was great. This was back in August, I think.
 
“We were still writing new stuff at this point and heard that Paul Savage was interested in recording a track with us, which was super exciting because we've always been big fans of his, and a fan of the Delgados and of Chemical Underground Records. We went down to Chem19 and ended up recording a couple of tracks. Paul has a great knack for recording and mixing and makes really subtle suggestions that make a big difference, it was great working with him.
 
“Anyhow, at this point our label [Distiller Records] started talking about putting the 2 ep's and the new tracks together to make an album. So we picked our favorite ones from the EP's and then put them all together and had Paul remix the whole thing and then Nick went down to the Edit Suite right before Christmas, 2009 to sit with Nigel Walton, the lovely guy who mastered the album for us.
 
“When we came back from Christmas break we got to work on the artwork and I had a bunch of collages I was working on cuz I'm terrible at photography so I have to cut them up and piece them together again to make anything resembling a nice picture. So those collages went on the cover and in the booklet, which our friend Domenico (who rather conveniently is a designer) worked on with Gregor, who also rather conveniently studied design.
 
“Now that I'm writing this, I realize we put a lot of work into this album, I mean whenever we were not gigging or working our other jobs we were pouring our hearts out into this album so I just can't believe its finished and out. We're really excited!!!”

Sparrow are also about to embark on a mammoth run of dates supporting Idlewild and then Brian Jonestown Massacre in April and May. Please check the Myspace for full details.

Crystal Falls - Listen in full!