Jesse Harris Silver Balloon Bio
When songwriter and producer Jesse Harris set about writing and recording ‘Silver Balloon,’ he was enamored with the esteemed science fiction author Philip K. Dick. “I love how he bends reality, and I wanted to do the same in the music,” Harris says. “The world feels so chaotic these days, and it was as though we – Kenny Wollesen and I – needed to express it, even embrace it.” And while chaos preoccupies the lyrical content of Silver Balloon — a collection of 10 exquisite songs assembled like miniature Goldbergian contraptions whose machinations, while beautiful, confound expectations — it also embodies the spirit of its recording.
“Almost all of my other recordings were made live with a band, aspiring towards hi-fi recording, but on this one we played to drum pre-sets of old keyboards, processed sounds through vintage harmonizers, and layered the songs as we went along,” Harris recalls of the process, listing just some of the tools he used to dismantle any notion of staid tastefulness. “At first Michael Blake hated what we did to his saxophone on ‘Hummingbird.’”
Harris recorded Silver Balloon over eight days in his home studio with percussionist Kenny Wollesen, a collaborator of 30 years. They would start casually at around 1pm and by 7pm, having recorded a complete song, go out to dinner at Frenchette down the block, come back and work some more. On two mornings Harris recorded a solo acoustic song (“One In A Million” and “The Good Morning Song”) in addition to the song of the day, over which Wollesen would add overdubs — and of course run them through the H3000 Harmonizer, a piece of outboard gear first designed in the 70s and used frequently by artists such as Laurie Anderson, and later by guitar gods like Steve Vai. “People have asked me and Kenny what we did to the guitar on ‘The Hanged Man’ and the honest answer is we don’t know. Often the H3000 would seem to make decisions on its own, and we began to see it as a kind of medium.”