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Thrice: Major/Minor By Ed Breckenridge

A new day, a new set of eyes on 'Major/Minor'.

Following his brother Rileystrong> and guitarist Teppei Teranishi we turn to Thrice bassist Ed Breckenridge for another track by track view of the band's staggering new album 'Major/Minor', out September 19.

Tomorrow vocalist Dustin Kensrue finishes the series, what will we do on Friday? Seriously...


01. Yellow Belly
"The bulk of this song Teppei, Riley, and I ended up jamming together when Dustin was out of town. This one came together really quick. There was a lot of great on-the-spot melodic shifts and flip flopping of parts. This is by far my favourite riff of Teppei’s on the record, and it’s great to think that the riff probably wouldn’t have been possible had we not mixed up the order in which we normally put things together and start with the drums. It’s such an awesome way to establish the beginnings of a song because a strong beat can be taken in so many different directions in mood and melody, and also a naked drumbeat just makes creative energy ooze out of you."

02. Promises
"In the early stages of the writing process we came up with the idea to have Riley track some drum beats on his own and send the recordings out to us to see what we could come up with over these drum feels. The great thing about this song is that it was comprised of two completely different feels that Teppei and I made separately and somehow they worked together. Teppei’s intro/verse part and my B verse part seem very different but the work together almost like they are speaking to one another, having their own lil conversation before they hit the chorus. I feel like parts like this B verse part have been hugely inspired by my upright bass playing... dropping open notes in certain spots and sliding into others... it’s really changed how my brain can visualize melody."

03. Blinded
"This song is hard to wrap my head around because it went through so many changes. It ended up being the combination of two song ideas. I tried to exercise restraint for this song... not playing too much or playing even at all at times. In the verses it actually felt good to be absent for the first halves but doing the same thing both times felt too robotic and square to just plainly repeat. Adding melodic movements to second verses was kind of a theme that I tried not to exploit but love doing so I kind of went for broke on this record and applied it to a few other songs. I think that my favourite part of this song is that we took parts and repeated them a ton, but just applied different themes and dynamics to them in such a way that they wouldn’t feel dull within the repeated melodic movement."

04. Cataracts
"I think this is the only song on the record that didn’t come from a demo. It just happened in studio... dudes sitting together having fun playing music. I had tons of progressions and sound ideas that were just flowing out of me during this writing process... lots of emotion and sadness to release during this writing process. I had so many ideas happening that I couldn’t remember, record, or contain them all. Hopefully it wasn’t annoying to the other guys... but often within a break or someone taking a phone call or whatnot I’d just start spitting out notes and creating layered loops with pedals until I was time to get back into working on a specific song. For this song I grabbed my bass, played a chord slid it back and forth and the next three stabbed notes just came... I thought it sounded a bit silly at first until Riley picked up on it and popped in the beat. It almost has a playfulness to it but with a scoop of nasty thrown in. I wasn’t sure at first if the vibe would work with our band, but then again what doesn’t work with this band? We just went with it."

05. Call It in the Air
"This song was originally two song ideas that we clumped together... the two parts were in the same key and ended up working together. It always felt like the music in this song told a story on it’s own. The double stops in the intro were kind of something I just threw in and ended up really liking. Again I was messing around with chords, double stops and then chords in the choruses. The past few years I’ve been placing chords on bass in older songs as a way to fill out spots of the song where the guitars are both playing in a higher register or just to make heavy part seem heavier. At points in the writing process I was definitely dancing around overdoing it, but for this song I needed to fill some empty space and I also wanted to experiment with how much of the basses weight I could apply or take away within the song."

06. Treading Paper
"Mmmmm... Whale sounds. I had to inject some more delay-swelled bass into a song, even if it was just the intro. I really like the vocals and guitar in the beginning of this... I think at one point I pushed to extend that part longer or add it to another part of the song. This was a song where I really didn’t want to tread too much on what was going on with the drums guitars and vocals. Staying locked with the drums (i really like the playing with the rhythm of the kick in the choruses) and applying a little melodic shift in the second verse was really all I felt necessary without fighting with what I already loved about the song."

07. Blur
"This song ended up being an interesting mixture of feels that I wouldn’t have thought could work together. But again, four unlike minds make things work in mysterious ways. If you were to listen to the first 30 seconds of the song and then skip to the second verse they could very easily be two separate songs. I get really excited about writing music with a push and pull of such different moods. I’m glad we attempt to pullthings off like this."

08. Words in the Water
"I’d made a demo for a song that was pretty basic. Just a looping bass line that I had recorded onto my computer while we were on tour. It started out as a sliding kind of loopy part that didn’t have much character, but I decided to throw it into the MP3 bin of writing ideas just to see if anyone felt differently about it. It ended up being a part that caught attention and developed the melodic base of a song. As the writing of the song progressed the speed of the song was bumped up and the loop kind of felt too quick and too noodley in my opinion. So we dumped the bass loop and moved forward. I ended up creating a double stop chord progression in the second verse (yeah changing up a second verse again) that ended up hinting at the original bass loop, but felt entirely different and fit the more delicate mood of the song."

09. Listen Through Me
"This song came about from a really sparse demo I created and recorded onto a dictation program on my phone. It was just an acoustic guitar recording that looped this riff maybe 3 or 4 times. The timing on the original demo was kind of hard to pick out because when I recorded it, I wasn’t thinking of timing or pace, just strictly thinking of the feel. It had a somewhat mathy feel... something like a 7count and 8 count back and forth. More akin to an atmospheric Talk Talk song. Brain to tape... it’s how a lot of my demos go. This riff went through a few phases before it became the melody played on the Rhodes piano in the verses. The first big change was to fit it into a 4/4 feel by adding an extra note in the first half. Somehow when the time signature was made straighter, the riff on guitar took on a kind of twang that rubbed me the wrong way for a long while. Eventually Riley had the idea to try it on the Rhodes and it stuck. I really like how this song ended up turning out... for a moment I’d felt like the demos character was completely lost, but in the end it ended up being something very different, but really great."

10. Anthology
"This song pretty much never changed from the first day we tried to put it together... For a while I struggled with how simple the song was... I tried adding more movement to the bass and ended up only really feeling right about some ascending notes that reminded me of a No Knife song. Too much movement though only fought the greater overall vibe of the song. This song was earlier in the writing process and one of the first of many songs on this record where I started using a lot of chords on the bass to push greater dynamic between parts. Sometimes I find it hard to just let a song go when it’s so simple it seems like you didn’t really put much effort into it, but in this case I had to just let go. Simple and strong."

11. Disarmed
"I remember recording this at the beginnings of a flu that later ended me up in bed missing a day in the studio. I feel that the way I played this song, weak and achy, actually affected the song in a beneficial way. I played less heavy handed that I might have otherwise and really like how the tone and the strings have a clarity to them that some of the other songs don’t. Since this song is one of the mellower songs on the record that character really pops. Every song on this record was recorded through my old 70’s(ish) Ampeg B-15 amp and a bass that I built from scratch at home. I love how simple yet versatile the bass setup was for this record."