Former Mad Season drummer Barrett Martin recently discussed the band’s song “Ascention” in a new KEXP interview. You can listen to the song here.
“This recording, when Mike McCready and I did the final Mad Season deluxe, we went through everything. Mark Lanegan sang those three outtakes that Layne was never able to sing, and he did a great job. We had this one song leftover, an instrumental, but it didn’t seem finished. Every song has its time. Afterwords, Mike and I went back in the studio, and we basically just finished the song. I wrote a melody for it in the way I thought Layne might have sung it, and we finished it, and made it an instrumental.”
Martin recently released an excerpt from his book The Singing Earth about Mad Season recording Above.
“The recording sessions were booked at Seattle’s Bad Animals Studio, at the time owned by Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart, a truly heroic band for those of us who grew up in the Northwest. The recordings were overseen by engineer Brett Eliason, who had previously worked with Heart, as well as running the front of house sound for Pearl Jam and Screaming Trees during our bands’ early tours. The first 10 songs were recorded quickly, two of them featuring additional vocals from Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan, as well as some exceptional saxophone work from a Seattle jazz musician known as Skerik. In just over two weeks of recording, with an additional week for mixing, the album was finished and ready to be presented to the world.
Above was released internationally on March 14th, 1995 on Columbia Records and it immediately struck a resonant chord with the public that sent the album to Gold status (500,000 units) within a few weeks. It peaked at #24 on the Billboard Top 200, and the album’s first single, ‘River of Deceit’, was a bona fide radio hit in the United States, reaching the #2 spot on the modern rock chart. All of this happened without the band having played a proper advertised show, much less having toured to support the album, so we decided to play a regular, advertised concert.”
