Hal Cragin is a Producer/Bassist working in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles and the NY metro region.
About Hal Cragin
I recently finished a production with a great young singer from upstate NY called Lindsey Mae,an incredibly strong songwriter/singer with a talent and confidance well beyond her 17 years, If you like A Fine Frenzy you should have a listen, [up there on the player, as well as her site!] Right now shes doing a bit of touring in the northeast you should check her out asap!
I also produced Alison Sudol/A Fine Frenzy's debut "One Cell in the Sea" on Virgin/Capitol
Also I have to give a shout out to a great band I produced [back in 2006] from Long Beach California called the Crystal Antlers.
They just released a record on Touch and Go records and are a great band. We cut a bunch of songs, [one of which is up above there on the ol' SpaceRadio...]I could relate to them as they had a bit of Iggy Pop in there, but not just the rocking part but the artistic awareness of free jazz and alot of other music outside the norm. I suppose its called Garagepunk or something-core [Core is the catch all in music as "gate " is in politics...hmmm Depressiongate?]
Note**I highly recommend anyone reading this tome for the Iggy stuff to check them out as well
News...Currently I have finished producing/ co-writing a new Iggy Pop record called "Preliminaires" to be released in May.
heres a little press release....
NEW YORK – Fans of the music of punk godfather Iggy Pop might be surprised to hear the quite rocking singer/songwriter has a softer side. In 1998 his longtime touring and recording bass player Hal Cragin suggested a jazz collaboration to Iggy as a relaxing departure from their relentless (and high volume) touring schedule. "Our first collaboration was in my apartment/studio on 3rd Street,NYC, something very informal just duo things which I added to later. We did some Jobim and Cole Porter, it was a lot of fun, and Iggy was really on"
These tracks were put aside for more than a decade while Iggy and Hal went on to other musical creations until "Iggy got a call to do music for a documentary about a writer named Michel Houellbecq trying to direct a movie version of his popular book," The Possibility of an Island." at that very same time I had sent Iggy our old jazz tracks just for posterity's sake, the timing was right, and we used this excuse to resurrect and complete our particular collaboration," Hal explains.
The collection,"Preliminaires" (foreplay in French), will be released in May worldwide on Virgin /EMI.
On the music:
"Some of the original songs we did had a launch pad from the spirit of Houellbecqs book, but once we got rolling the collection of songs took on its own life."
Our first song was an Iggy original, "King of the Dogs." I produced it with full King Oliver New Orleans fanfare.The song is really swinging and the NYC horn players nailed it in 2 takes.I played Freddie Green type guitar as the bass was usually a tuba from that time. Below is a great video made for this song
Other Tracks Include:
"Les Feuilles Mortes" ("Autumn Leaves" in the original French). "Most American audiences will know the English version sung by Johnny Mercer in 1949, but we wanted to pay tribute to the original version by Hungarian Joseph Cosma (1905-69) and legendary French poet Jacques Prévert (1900-77) which was performed in the 1946 Marcel Carné film "Les Portes de la Nuit."
"We did a very dark and cool american version of Autumn Leaves back in the original apartment session, somehow Iggy thought it seemed like a better plan just to go back to the source for a number of reasons when we revisited it, Iggy singing in French is quite a first."
"To the Beach", is very introspective, and really just floats along on the lyrics and piano figure, I felt a rhythmic element too soon would break the mood.
"Je sais que tu sais" is a duet in english/french with Lucie Aime from the Poitou-Charentes region of France.Dark and rocking it follows a dialog between the sexes.
"Spanish Coast" Iggy was somewhat inspired by the character in the book " the possibiliy of an island" he had the first few lines and and we took it from there, there is a pulsating string motif in the intro and outro which borrows heavily from the oceans waves.
"Nice to be Dead"Is a full blooded rock track, which goes poetically from wanting to be left alone to acknowledging that being dead is the best "green" solution for the planet.Some classic Iggy in there, "we kind of rocked this in a way that I knew would work. As the vocal becomes more urgent the track really takes off its towards the end where i wanted to create a audio firestorm/end of the world kind of a sound with Iggy in the center
"How Insensitive" The original by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, features English lyrics by Norman Gimbel. "We tweaked the feel of the rhythmic features.On the more well known jazz tracks that are such a staple of the lounge jazz cannon, I approached them with a new twist...to bring the songs into a new wing of the building as it were.I feel theres no point in doing another BMW car stereo ready jazz track. so this pulsates and then erupts with Iggy floating on top, quite nicely I may add"
"Party Time." This is an electro dance type track, with quite funny lrics about disco culture, with Daft Punk like electronic elements. "At this point we were careening from one side of the road to another stylistically having fun, perhaps we grazed the guardrail a bit with this one, but it works really well"
"Machine for Loving" is a spoken word recitation from Houellbecqs book. "Its a beautiful passage but quite dark as well"
