Summer 1997 - Bugg Studios

## Summer 1997 - Bugg Studios, Chicago

Produced by James Iha and Jim Scott

* Be Strong Now
* Sound of Love
* Beauty
* See the Sun
* Country Girl
* Jealousy
* Lover, Lover
* Silver String
* Winter
* One and Two
* No One's Gonna Hurt You
* My Advice
* Take Care
* Falling
* Summer

Sessions for James Iha's first solo album, Let It Come Down.

"After the Pumpkins did a European tour," Iha
explains,
"I had half an album's worth of older songs that didn't make it to the
final
cut of the Pumpkins records. So I decided to write some more stuff and
do
my
own record, with my singing and production the way I heard it in my
head.
It
was a very enjoyable experience."

Composed entirely of summery melodic pop songs that sound like a cross
between
Big Star and the Byrds, the record received mixed reviews, but it
offered
Iha
a creative outlet he sorely lacked. "Sometimes it's frustrating not
having
more creative control, and I wish I had more songs on Pumpkins records,"
he
admits. "But I'm given a good amount of freedom to come up with guitar
parts
and stuff, and Billy writes great songs."

**James Iha**: There's a little bit of that jingle-jangle in there. In some
ways the record is sort of a throwback
record. Everything I used --12-strings, acoustics, clean electric
guitars and strings, cellos and violin and
organ -- are all kind of '60s or '70s instruments. I didn't set out
consciously to make a retro record or
anything like that. I just wanted the songs to really stand out and the
vocals to be the main driving force
instead of heavy-duty, alternative-rock drums and fuzz-box guitar.
People will either like the songs or hate
them. There's nothing to hide them. There's no alternative-rock
stomp-box thing, there's no trip-hop beats
or anything like that.

For one thing, it's a really small basement. There's like a control
room. Jim [Scott] brought in a bunch of old gear for those
gearhead-inclined; we
had, like, a little Neve board, a mini Neve board and a Studer 24-track.
In the live room I had one
old weird drum kit, a '60s kit that Jim had and I had, a Yamaha kit. I
don't know, just a bunch of
Fender amps, Vox amps.

I have about five or six acoustics lying around my house, each tuned
differently. A little more than half the album is recorded in open
tunings. I especially like Gibsons; the Hummingbird,the J-100,the J 160
they're all traditional country and western guitars. And I have a really
good Martin guitar. I have a lot of electrics, but I mainly use just
three or four: a Fender Telecaster, a '68 Strat and this weird Danelectro
guitar that sounds acoustic but looks electric-actually, it looks like a
coffee table made out of wood paneling or something, like somebody made
it in their home ec class. I did a lot of overdubs with that. I played
slide on it, a few bits on the song "lover,Lover" and I used it as a
rhythm guitar, and, just here and there, drop in melodies or chords to
fill out the arrangement, as well as ghost rhythm guitar parts to broaden
out the sound. But there wasn't too much layering.

Return to Adore

1. ↑ Pulse Magazine, June 1998.
2. ↑ Gil Kaufman, "Smashing Pumpkin James Iha's Solo Trip", Addicted To Noise, February 1998
3. ↑ James Iha, "Free Byrd", Guitar World, March 1998