Record of the Week: Surf's Up

Laurie Spiegel taught herself notation in an off-grid trailer in western Illinois, with no running water and a kerosene lamp, because she wanted to write down what she was making up on the guitar. A few years later she was at Bell Labs with Max Mathews and Ken Thompson, writing software that let a computer improvise alongside her.

John Agnello and Stewart Lerman kick off a new Record of the Week with The War on Drugs' Red Eyes, off 2014's Lost in the Dream. They trace the two-year process behind the track (six or seven studios, by their own count), break down the harmonic choices that give it its pull, and swap stories about how they each got hooked on Adam Granduciel's band in the first place.

Elvis Costello sits down with Gear Club for a career-spanning conversation, from the tiny London room where My Aim Is True was recorded to the unpublished Bob Dylan lyrics he helped finish decades later. John Agnello and special guest host Tony Agnello of Eventide join for a conversation that gets surprisingly candid about the studios, the producers, and the gear behind four decades of records, including the Eventide H910 Harmonizer that helped define the guitar sound on This Year's Model. Topics include the 49th anniversary box set of My Aim Is True, the making of Imperial Bedroom, working with Jeff Emerick, King of America with T-Bone Burnett, Wise Up Ghost with Questlove and The Roots, and the New Basement Tapes sessions built from Bob Dylan's unfinished lyrics.

In this episode we present the history of Eventide, makers of revolutionary audio products for over 50 years, as told by founder and owner Richard Factor. Eventide's history stretches back to 1971, but Richard was tinkering with audio electronics well before that, paving the way for some of the first Eventide products. Richard takes John and Stewart through the early history of Eventide, from its founding and naming to its first groundbreaking products, among them the first remote tape machine transport control and the first digital audio device, the 1745 Digital Delay Line.

In this Record of the Week, John and Stewart dig into "Peaches en Regalia" by Frank Zappa, the opening track from his 1969 masterpiece Hot Rats. They break down the recording techniques Zappa used across the album and how those techniques shaped one of the most celebrated instrumentals in rock history. Along the way, John shares his own story of accidentally reinventing the same trick decades later, and why Hot Rats still sounds like nothing else ever made.