Emergency & I is the third studio album by American indie rock band the Dismemberment Plan, released in 1999 by DeSoto Records. It was produced by J. Robbins and Chad Clark, and primarily recorded at Water Music Studios in 1998, with additional recordings done at Inner Ear Studios. At its release, the album was met with critical acclaim, receiving praise for its instrumental performances and lyrics.
Initially released on CD, Barsuk Records reissued Emergency & I in vinyl format for the first time on January 11, 2011 where it received further praise from critics and listeners, with many calling it a landmark indie rock album and the band's best release.
Background After a press photoshoot for the band's second album The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, the band decided that they wanted to sound "less wacky" on their third album, feeling like their sound had been gradually settling down. According to bassist Eric Axelson, the album was written across seven different rehearsal spaces, and the band attempted to individually write their parts like it sounded it came from a group. He noted that vocalist and guitarist Travis Morrison "had a knack" of matching his ideas with other ideas the group developed separately. One notable example of this is the chorus to "Back and Forth", which he came up with while going to work one morning not knowing what it would sound like as a song, and then going to rehearsal later that night and finding Axelson and drummer Joe Easley playing what would be the instrumental to the song. Another example, "Spider in the Snow", involved Axelson and Easley performing their final riffs and drum parts for the song "in straight-four, like a Motown thing", until Morrison suggested they "cut a beat off the end of the phrase", resulting in the final song.
Of the other songs worked on in this period, "I Love a Magician" was quickly written in and heavily influenced by the surroundings of one rehearsal space, the basement of an office building in Falls Church, Virginia. According to Morrison: "The ceiling was like five and a half feet off the ground. I'm not sure we were supposed to be there at all. Security guards were staring at us as we wheeled in our amps. I remember Jason [Caddell] howling away with this new distortion pedal. We wrote the song around that sound, pretty much." "Memory Machine" was the first of several songs on the album that made use of an E-mu sampler, specifically making use of an "ambient noise" from an unknown song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark.
In May 1997, Nigel Harrison, the former bassist for Blondie and at the time an A&R executive for Interscope Records, attended a Dismemberment Plan concert in Allentown, Pennsylvania and eventually arranged a meeting with Interscope CEO Jimmy Iovine to discuss a record deal. The band's publicist, Jessica Hopper, was against the idea of the band signing to a major label, citing the recent death of Brainiac lead singer Tim Taylor as they were preparing to record an album for Interscope and that the label's A&R department would have been looking for a similar band to match the "quirky art-punk-dance" bands on competing labels. However, The Dismemberment Plan were more intrigued by the idea as they felt they did not fit in with other indie bands at the time and could release adventurous music under Interscope.
An early version of "What Do You Want Me to Say?" was recorded by producer J. Robbins and released as a 7-inch vinyl single backed with the song "Since You Died" in November 1997, acting as their last release for DeSoto Records before signing to the new label. Robbins noted that "The City", influenced by the band Soul Coughing, first started being written roughly two days prior to the sessions, and a portion of an early version was captured on the master tapes to the single.
Recording In 1998, The Dismemberment Plan signed a two-album deal with Interscope, and Emergency & I was recorded as the first of those proposed two albums during the band's time with the label. Using the money from Interscope, the album was recorded in three weeks at Water Music Studios in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Unlike Inner Ear Studios, the smaller recording studio in Arlington, Virginia the band used for ! and The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified where they had to rush through albums on a budget, Water Music was a more expansive studio with its own five/six-bedroom apartment above the studio. The band had more money, time, space, and resources to work on the album in the complex, which Morrison likened to a college dormitory. Easley praised the acoustics of the wooden main recording room at Water Music, calling it "the one room I ever got to record in that was awesome for drums."
The album's producers J. Robbins and Chad Clark were described as being very opinionated about what they each wanted for the album, with Caddell describing the relationship between themselves and the band as "the passive aggressive Olympics at the beginning". Robbins kept the band in check playing at correct tempos and maintaining the recording equipment, while Clark took a Brian Eno-like role of finding ways to pursue "a wide-screen feel, pushing things far out and using the studio as an instrument", allowing the band to experiment with different keyboard sounds and amplifiers. The group had a minor conflict with Water Music's owner and head engineer Rob Grenoble, who persistently kept nudging up the treble during the mixing process for unknown reasons until they scolded him for it.
Some songs went through different stages during recording. Clark suggested that "Spider in the Snow" should use real strings or a Mellotron for its keyboard section to express the newer scope of tools and textures they had available at the studio. However, Morrison thought that using strings was "too fancy" and they decided to stick with the original Casio keyboard sound they used for live performances. Clark also originally did not want "You Are Invited" to be on Emergency & I, finding the song too sentimental. "What Do You Want Me to Say?" was originally going to have sampled turntable scratching, but the plan was scrapped because Clark thought using real scratching on that song would have been "corny" and "too obvious". Instead, Morrison ended up imitating the sound of turntable scratches with his voice at one point during the song, which Clark believed "sounded musically right and made no sense in the context of the song," but worked better than using actual turntables because he was "just freaking out and rocking to the beat." Axelson recalled that during the 1997 single's sessions, Morrison wanted to record the song without any guitars and use only keyboards and bass guitar, but this was rejected by the rest of the band. Robbins also recalled that midway through recording vocals for the album version of the song, Morrison's girlfriend called him to break up with him over the phone. This upset Morrison to the point where he lost composure and broke down crying in the middle of the recording, which Robbins referred to as "a microcosm of the record".
When the band's scheduled time at Water Music ended, they returned to Inner Ear to make additional recordings and create the album's final mix. The album was mixed to half-inch analog tape and mastered by engineer Alan Douches. Robbins and Caddell remembered there was tension during this time as the band and producers all had their own particular preferences for the album's mixing, resulting in some songs having eight different mixes before a final cut was chosen. During this process, Morrison claimed that he had a panic attack and had to be driven to a hospital by Axelson. In hindsight, he called the incident "embarrassing", as his sister (a nurse) after reading his electrocardiogram commented "If you were having a panic attack, you were really calm!"
The cover art and three other pieces adorning the album's packaging were drawn digitally by Morrison on a personal computer at Water Music in the downtime between recording sessions. He claimed he was "just doodling" with no concept in mind when designing the artwork, and that other people in the studio had nonplussed or averse reactions to it.
Music Style and influences The album utilizes elements of soul, hip-hop, jazz, synthpop, post-punk, electro and techno. The album also makes use of sampling and odd rhythm patterns. According to Nolan James of Pacific Lutheran University: "It really does sound more like the rock music that would be released throughout the next decade, with its soft male-lead vocals and noisy, basic guitar. It is pretty forward-thinking in that way. meandering verses suddenly transition into great, climactic choruses, and likewise subdued and unexciting choruses follow intricate, well-built verses."
Lyrical themes Morrison stated in 2011 that the lyrics were inspired by the birth of his young sister's child and the death of his father, both of which happened in quick succession, which he felt was a breakthrough into covering more personal "basic life" themes in his lyrics that he frustratingly did not know how to write in the past. Prior to the album's release, he claimed the events affected his approach to writing lyrics and that topics commonly covered in punk rock and emo lyrics "suddenly sounded hopelessly self-absorbed and adolescent and self-pitying." He started studying songs with optimistic lyrics, as well as soul and country music lyrics to search for inspiration from songs oriented towards older adults "about family, community, trust, communication […] with some sense of perspective and not from deep within one's own butt", the latter of which he claimed was a common vantage point for punk and rock lyrics that mostly "wallow in misery and heartbreak". Clark felt the death of Morrison's father loomed over the album "in a way that I think gave it a gravity." PopMatters Zachary Houle noted that the album had themes of growing pains experienced by people in their 20s. Jeremy D. Larson of Consequence noted the influence of Stephen Malkmus on the album's lyrics.
With regards to individual songs, Morrison stated the opening track "A Life of Possibilities" was written about "the price of running away, of changing one's environs continually, of declining to commit -- something that I see a lot in many of my peers, for whatever reason". He claimed that topics covering the consequences of "adventure and individualism, especially when taken too far" were rare in rock music, and felt that "the single hardest lesson of growing up" was that everything has consequences. "You Are Invited", a song about an anonymous invitation that comes through the mail, deals with belonging and selflessness. "The City" deals with Morrison's loneliness living in a city, his longing for a wanderlust lover, and his inability to leave the city without abandoning everything that makes him who he is. The verse structures of the closing track "Back and Forth" are based on Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)". Zachary Houle argued that songs such as "Memory Machine" and "What Do You Want Me to Say?" deal with themes of disconnectedness in the Information Age, including predicting the social media phenomenon that would be prominent in the following decade. The lyrics to "The Jitters" were originally written inside a copy of Charles Shaar Murray's musical biography on Jimi Hendrix, Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix & The Post-War Rock n' Roll Revolution, that Morrison had borrowed from Axelson.
Morrison claimed to have first thought of the album's title after returning to Washington, D.C. from the recording sessions on July 16, 1998, during a Shudder to Think concert at the Black Cat nightclub, but he did not know what the title meant. Paul Thompson of Pitchfork related the album title to the encroaching chaos of modern life with the self.
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