Nightlands’ Dave Hartley finds his voice, many times over

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      The word  dreamy gets used a lot in music journalism—maybe even too much. But there really is no better way to describe Oak Island, the sophomore effort from Nightlands, the solo project of the War on Drugs bassist Dave Hartley. The songs are expansive and gorgeous, with numbers like “Born to Love” and “So Far So Long” shimmering like ’70s soft pop as heard through a codeine daze. They’re also awash in multi-part harmonies, almost all of them provided by Hartley himself.

      Reached en route to his parents’ house in Maryland (he’s borrowing his folks’ van for Nightlands to tour in), the Philadelphia-based musician notes that some songs contain literally hundreds of vocal tracks.

      “I sing through this vocal pedal, and I sing a note and it’ll stack two harmonies—like a third and a fifth—above whatever note I’m singing,” Hartley says. “So then I would sing a root note and I would sing four takes of that and then I would double the third interval with the harmonizer pedal still on, so it would be stacking above that. And then I would sing the fifth, still with the harmonizer stacking above that, and double that four times. And then I would go back through and sing every one of those parts organically, without the harmonizer pedal, four times, and then bounce it all to tape, slow the tape down, and double them all again on tape, bounce that back again, speed the tape up, double all those again… you know what I mean? And just go on and on like that, where I’m doing every type of different bifurcation that you can do, and it just became exponential.”

      Oak Island and its predecessor, 2010’s Forget the Mantra, provide abundant evidence that Hartley achieves beautiful results from stacking a single voice on top of itself in various ways, but it’s not something he feels compelled to repeat indefinitely.

      “I feel like I’ve kind of done that to the max on the last two records,” he says. “I couldn’t take it any further as far as quantity. That was coming from an ELO—Electric Light Orchestra—sort of vibe. At the time, I was kind of obsessed with a certain ELO record and just really wanted to get into that. But now I’m listening to more Simon & Garfunkel, the Byrds, and the Beach Boys—bands that have blends of different voices. I think that’s kind of the next horizon.”

      Hartley mixes his music digitally using Pro Tools, but he records to tape. His TASCAM 388 has its drawbacks—it only has eight channels, for one—but that’s just how he likes it. “I get a little paralyzed with too many options sometimes, as anyone would, I think. I think a lot of people have that problem when they’re recording digitally. You can do anything now, it’s so easy. It can be a little paralyzing trying to decide what kind of sound you want. So I would oftentimes just record to tape and make a lot of the commitments really early. I would commit to certain structures and sounds and rhythms and stuff at the very early stage. That helps me finish things, to commit.

      “I like limitations,” Hartley concludes. “I need them.”

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