Without asking you to specifically speak for Dean and Dave, what was their reaction to this approach? Were there cases where they specifically locked on to the sound in your head, or where what they did was way off what you were expecting?
Dean and Dave probably thought, "Oh boy, here we go with some California crazy." :)
I don't know what they thought, to be honest. The collages were more for me than for them, but I realized while we were in the studio that having visuals probably helped convey the tone and mood of certain songs, for sure. It definitely doesn't hurt!
Dave Winer and I had done months and months of pre-production demoing prior to stepping into the studio so we had a really good idea on direction before we started recording. But the in-studio chemistry and collaboration between the three of us was really fantastic - and it was basically just the three of us in the studio making this record. Even though we have very different musical influences, we have similar taste - we agree on what's good and what's not good. So that makes things so much easier from the get go.
But, of course, there were lots of surprises. "Street Life" was probably the biggest in that it steered furthest away from what I thought the song was going to be. Going in, I knew I wanted to start it minimally with the bucket drum, bass, vocals and field recording sounds. At the first chorus, Dean added beats from this amazing vintage Maestro Rhythm King drum machine and started doing these fun little electronic glitches with my vocals and some analog synths.
Then, the vocal breakdown part in the middle of the song happened so spontaneously. Dean's kids just happened to have some friends over for a playdate and we asked them to come in and lay down vocals with all of us singing the "ha ha ha " bits together. They were game so we all crowded round the microphones and spent about 5 minutes recording what truly sounded like a big hot mess of vocals. But Dean had a vision and finesses it into this cool TuneYards-inspired goodness.
The song was getting there but still missing something until Dave came up with the funky horn/melodica lines that break into the group vocals and take the song out - it's so playful, imitating car horns and brought such a joyful, funky soul to the song.
It's probably my favorite song on the album and it was one of those instances (there were many) when I felt so profoundly grateful to Dean and Dave for helping me create something so much better and more interesting than what I'd initially envisioned. That's the magic of music.