Remember when we told you that Fred Armisen and Bill Hader‘s fake band The Blue Jean Committee isn’t actually all that fake considering they have an EP on the way? Well, the band–which originated in a Saturday Night Live sketch in 2011 and was more recently the subject of an episode of the IFC series Documentary Now!–is releasing that EP, Catalina Breeze, very soon, on November 20. Ahead of that, the duo shared “Gentle and Soft,” which you can listen to below via EW.
Although the aesthetic of the band and its music is, like what a lot of what Armisen and Hader do, supremely tongue-in-cheek, that doesn’t mean that the band didn’t do their homework when creating the EP.
“I was emailing with one of the members from the band America, Gerry [Beckley],” Armisen told EW. “I asked, ‘How did you get that sound?’ And it’s because they all, at the time, engineered their music to sound good on AM radio. And they still sound good today on your iPad.”
He also spoke more specifically about “Gentle and Soft,” saying that the tune is a mission statement for The Blue Jean Committee:
It came from when we were writing the show. The main idea of the band was that they were gentle and soft, so I listened to SiriusXM’s The Bridge a lot. Everyone is so smooth and gentle, and they play a lot of the band America and Seals and Crofts and bands like that. I wanted that sound, very smooth and purposefully soft sound that also works as rock. To me, that reminds me of California and the early ‘70s. So the best way to do it for us would be to just spell it out and call the song ‘Gentle and Soft.’
That sounds like a lot of work for an album that’s sort of a joke, but let’s not forget that Armisen’s first major gig in entertainment was as the drummer of punk band Trenchmouth, and let’s appreciate how close an approximation “Gentle and Soft” is of the era it both parodies and tributes.
The 12″ vinyl EP has seven tracks and is currently available for pre-order from Drag City’s website.
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HT: Pitchfork
Featured image courtesy of Drag City
