Ultimate Guitar Archive, also known as Ultimate-Guitar.com or simply UG, is the largest guitarist community website including guitar and bass guitar tablature, chord sheets, reviews of music and equipment, interviews with notable musicians, online written and video lessons, and forums. It was started on October 9, 1998 by Eugeny Naidenov, a student of the economic faculty of Kaliningrad State University, Russia. (More from Wikipedia)
In an interview posted on ultimate-guitar.com, Alain Johannes discussed the album: “We [Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider] became Walk the Moon and started to explore more of the songwriting stuff and different textures that are not usually rock band-based like synths and all that other stuff and I started playing my odd instruments. Well, some of them not odd but the pipa [Chinese lute] or sing like a Sufi-inspired Kowali singing and Natasha would do little choirs.”
(April 2015/1)
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Even considering that he is talking about his wife, Alain Johannes can hardly praise Natasha Shneider highly enough for her musical genius. In an interview that features technical talk which is a little beyond me (posted on ultimate-guitar.com), Alain Johannes was asked about Shneider’s essentially playing bass guitar on the keyboard with her left hand while playing regular keyboards with her right: “[P]eople would be watching us and she’d have the keyboard and I’d usually do a MIDI map of the two-and-a-half octaves and later on it became an Ovation Bass Station or the Wurlitzer. So that would feed into a bass amp and it was onstage and it was a huge sound with that Moog Bass in her left hand. She was so independent, she could sit in the pocket with Jack [Irons] and have a different pocket with the right hand, which was basically a second rhythm guitar and lead lines with me and then sing lead or harmonies as if there were three completely different grooves.”
Asked about specifically not wanting a bass guitarist, Alain Johannes continued: “Yeah, basically because her musical thinking on the bass was just so far beyond. Her mind was like [Paul] McCartney, and if you listen to her bass lines, they have this contrapuntal and second melodic thing, and the tension and release she creates against the chords are masterful. We were really into the energy of the three, because Jack and I had known each other since we were 14 or 15, and Natasha and I were soulmates and at the time I was hoping lifelong partners.”
(April 2015/2)
