Thin Air (Smells Like Mississippi)

Thin Air (Smells Like Mississippi)

George McConnell: Stepping Up To The Plate (2003)

when I got [to the studio], there were about fifteen or sixteen ideas that they had already put down. Some of them there were only like 25, 30 seconds long; some of them were five minutes long. But the majority of the stuff that ended up on the album we just made up in the studios. It was kind of this cool little challenge in the first couple of weeks that I was there. It was like, "OK, lets go record, everybody put your headphones on, pick a key." Somebody would pick a key and Todd would take off on a rhythm and we would jam for a while. And the producer John Keane would finally come on the call back, "Alright guys, cut that shit out."

Because we would take it everywhere. We would try to jam and get a solid rhythm thing going and then we would play a little solo over it. And then we would just try to mess with each other. Try to crack somebody up, or try to play something really goofy, or play the theme to "Peanuts" during the middle of the jam or something. And then we'd go back and listen to it for a while. And out of one of those like 30 minute jam sessions we ended up getting a couple of little pieces out of it. One of them being, "Thin Air," which is why we called it that. Because it just came out of thin air and we jammed on that for a while, and added some chords to that, and that's sort of a good example of how a lot of the songs came to be.

-George McConnell

Tossing The Ball with Dave Schools, Part Two

"Thin Air," I don't even think JB was there when we did that track. I just said, "Let's do a fast Latin song that will showcase some of the percussion." We started with the song "Too Rolling Stoned" a Trower song and I said, "Listen to this kind of beat, this Truckin' kind of beat. Let's go from here and see what happens." And we recorded it and forgot about if for a couple weeks and then it came up again. There were a lot of things that didn't make the record. Todd must have recorded seven or eight songs and JoJo had some songs. But like I said anything was fair game and thank god for John Keane.

-Dave Schools