Contributors:
Brian Wooten, pedal steel guitar
Heath Nicholls, bass and harmony vocals
Jay Miller, drums
Jules Bryce, keys
Mac Bartine, lead vocals and rhythm guitar
Rich Adlin, lead guitar and harmony vocals
Seva, theremin; recording, mixing and mastering engineer; producer

Tracking: Kiss Hello changed more in the studio than any of our other songs. The vibe of the song stayed pretty consistent before and after; it just became a little extra through the process. Over 1 and a half days on June 30 and July 1 2024, we recorded 3 takes of all 12 of the songs we originally planned to put into this album. After recording the takes of Kiss, Seva asked us to do a take where we doubled the length of the song, saying he wanted to have a version he could play around with after the album was done. We tried one take of it immediately where we doubled the length of the instrumental at the beginning, the verses (just repeating the lyrics), and the instrumentals between the verses and choruses, but we couldn’t wrap my head around extending the choruses, so we just bulled on through those as we normally played them, and somehow it all came together in 1 take. Seva gave us all the takes to listen to after the 2-day initial recording, and we were immediately captured by the extra space built into the longer version of Kiss, and Seva had thrown in these wonderfully unexpected theremin lines from a keyboard he keeps by his console. Mac wrote a 2nd half of each of the 2 verses, and we recorded those new 2nd-half verse vocals on a different mic. The end result took a lot of back and forth extra sessions in the studio, a little friendly discussion, and a bit of extra imagination, but the way it came together made it all worthwhile.

Mac’s Songwriting Notes: I wrote the original 2 verse version of Kiss Hello in a little 2-story 1920 South Knoxville bungalow that my first wife April and I owned. I wrote in a room on the main level that had been painted a deep red by the previous owners. It had a big window looking out to the back yard, and I could see the telephone and electric wires running into the house from there. We had a regular murder of crows that were fans of the big old trees in our neighborhood, and they liked the wires running to our house, too. The first line of the song was literally me sitting in that room with the back window open, trying to write a new song while looking at a bunch of crows hanging out and squawking on the wires. Crows are often omens of bad tidings, and I occasionally indulge myself with the guilty pleasure of writing fancy pants lyrics in some of my songs, so the second line was easy, too. The rest just flowed from there. The original chorus was simpler, and I updated it with what’s now the first half of the choruses (originally what’s now the 2nd half was pretty close to a repeat of the first half) when Chameleous first started playing the song because it didn’t feel in step with the verse lyrics. The new second half of the verses, I pretty much just decided “I’m going to make these new 2nd halves of the verses pissier so it’s easier for me to sing them differently,” and all I really cared about was making sure the meter and rhyming schemes stayed intact.