It jumps right into the kind of rhythm that screams “party.” A hands-in-the-air rhythm. A bumping bass, frizzy keys, horns snaking in and out. And most of all, a whole lot of voices, talking about nothing but fun, nothing but love.
The song is “Satanic Girls,” and it’s credited to Marq The A$tronaut, CrissB.Amazing, The Telle, and Fernanda Franco. But it involves even more people than that, and because musicians can’t get together to record like they could before the pandemic started, it meant they had to figure out a way to piece it together. They did — and it started with Marq the A$tronaut, a.k.a. New Haven-based musician Mark Lyon.
“I live alone,” Lyon explained. “It’s just me here at my computer with my keyboard and my guitar and bass.” One night, about two months ago, he wrote the song. It was an ode to “witchy women,” he said, and drew from past masters.
“The song definitely has a Prince and P. Funk inspiration. I’ve been listening to that music my entire life,” Lyon said. He also found himself with a common goal with much of that music: “I wanted people to giggle a little bit and maybe shake their ass,” he said. Plus, he said, “it’s something to do.”
Lyon.
For Lyon, making the song was as much an exercise in figuring out how to better use music technology as it was in keeping up his songwriting chops. “It’s all a learning process for me,” he said. To start, he said, “I pulled up a drum loop and started writing a bass line and guitar and keyboard parts.” He recorded and mixed the parts as he went.
But he soon realized he couldn’t get the sound he wanted on his own. That began with the drum loop that had helped get him started. “I want some real drums on this, too,” he recalled thinking. He contacted out to Nick D’Errico, drummer in the Backyard Committee. D’Errico, who can record his drums at home, sent Lyon drum parts and additional percussion. Lyon added a bit more himself. Then out went the loop.
Lyon also wrote lyrics, but didn’t like the sound of his voice singing them. “I suck at singing,” he said with a laugh. He reached out to singers Gabrielle Lakshmi of The Telle, Fernanda Franco of FaTE, and Lady Liz. “Everybody said, ‘yeah, sure, let’s do this,’” Lyon said. And “they completely crushed it. We all just did it in our respective bedrooms. The very end, that outro verse, that’s Fernanda, and she wrote that verse — which is so cool, above and beyond,” Lyon said. Lady Liz “sang a bunch of ad libs into her phone and I chopped them up.” Meanwhile, saxophonist Dylan McDonnell, of Phat A$tronaut, and trumpeter Keenan Asbridge, of Nikita, “met up at the Nikita headquarters to lay down their horns.” Rapper CrissB.Amazing wrote a verse for the song as well.
“Most of those people that are on it, I’m really close with. I talk to them practically every single day,” Lyon said. “I honestly cried a little after every single person’s track they sent me.” It all happened over the course of a month. “They’re all such pros,” he said.
Mixing the song turned out to be the longest part of the process, which Lyon did himself. “One of my favorite things about it is how much I got to learn about mixing,” Lyon said. “It was a really healthy thing to do.”
The whole process was also a reminder of how the arts scene is staying together during the pandemic. “Artists and musicians, we’re really helping each other out, big time,” Lyon said. “We realize we really need each other, and if we’re capable of helping each other out in some way, we’re doing it.”
Phat A$tronaut.
In that same vein, Lyon said that Phat A$tronaut — the experimental soul outfit in which Lyon is the guitarist — has been rehearsing at the State House thanks to the generosity of the club’s owners. Six of the group’s members have been able to keep their distance from one another in the space, which is able to hold hundreds of people. “We take the pandemic very seriously. The last thing any of us want to do is get it and give it to someone else. We’re all about making sure that we’re as far away from each other as possible and still creating,” Lyon said. But “If not for the State House, we would not be playing together.”
The band has been able to use the time to work on new material. “We’ve been rehearsing these songs to the click so we can bang them out in the studio,” Lyon said, even if they can’t all be in the recording space at the same time.
Meanwhile, Lyon has been able to continue teaching music during the pandemic, albeit virtually. This carries opportunities as well as the obvious drawbacks. “It’s been nice to learn how to do it virtually,” Lyon said. “I have a student in Guatemala now.”
But most of all, like everyone else, he’s ready for the pandemic to be over. “I really want to hug my mom, hug my grandma, and get a haircut,” he said.
