Live Show Archives: 2018 Crocodile Rehearsals, Day 3

Hello again, Patreon land. Ethan here for this month's live show archive album! This time, a bit of an experiment: on a lark I was listening back to some 2018 pre-tour rehearsals at Seattle's Crocodile club, where we spent some time calibrating the set in an empty room--mostly for sound and lights, but also to get acquainted with the setlist in a real venue. Present-day Ethan just watched the "Get Back" Beatles documentary and has been listening to a lot of Let It Be lately, and suddenly the thought of piecing together some of those rehearsals for this month's mix started to appeal to me, as it had the same kind of "several dudes woodshedding in a big warehouse" vibe, where full song performances could erupt (or stop just as suddenly) from any moment of joking or plinking around.

Out of three days we had at the Croc, the third seemed to have the most satisfying setlist and longest actual runtime (other days had more technical fiddling where not everyone was present onstage), and had some great setpieces I had forgotten about: namely our set-closing interpolation of "White Ferrari" into "Those Boys" into "Do What You Gotta Do". There was also a mysterious, twangy jam with a really cool riff I don't remember writing.

I tried not to edit or stylize anything, but trimmed around a lot of the dead space and semi-audible murmuring that makes up a lot of rehearsal recordings. In cases where we played a song multiple times, I just went with the best, least messed-up one. Finally, perhaps this goes without saying but it's definitely not our best performance ever--what does make it sound cool is the feeling of hearing material that's still breathing and shifting around a little as it's being played. I like recordings that sound like the notebook is still a little bit open, like they never fully got 100% set in stone. Hope everyone enjoys! As always, a track-separated album is downloadable below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/170kCemfvHzynqYHFzljVvYsge1EHfyQh/view?usp=sharing