Colin Burke first contacted STEM Recording in 2018 looking to track one lead vocal part in order to finish a recording he had been working on at a studio in Colorado. Seven years later, we have finished three ep’s and a full length recording and are now working on a second full length recording.
Colin had moved to Arizona in 1989 to go to college and then returned to his hometown of Denver, Colorado and started his first band, The Floor. The Floor soon became Carolyn’s Mother and spent the 90’s playing throughout Colorado and also did some extensive touring.
Carolyn’s Mother had some modest success in Colorado including gigs opening for Hootie and the Blowfish, The GoGos, Simple Minds and others. They even played the world famous Red Rocks Amphitheater. But Colin had his sights set higher than building a local or even regional following.
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“I had always told myself when we started The Floor that if we didn’t have a record deal by the time I was 30 that I was going to call it quits and start a family,” Colin says. “We were having fun but we weren’t growing so once I got married I kinda felt like music was done and I sold my guitars and we moved to Omaha.”
Colin and his wife had a son and a daughter and also bought a second home in Arizona, where he moved when his marriage ended in 2014. He and his wife shared custody of the children, so when they were away, Colin found himself with an abundance of free time and he began writing songs and playing music again.
Prior to finding STEM Recording, Colin recorded his first collection of songs with friends and former bandmates from Colorado and was flying back and forth from Arizona to Colorado to do so but after 10 round trips he needed to find something a little closer to home.
Our recording process has evolved over the years and has been a joy for me to be a part of. Colin’s intitial ep was called The Science of Sounding Off and I was immediately drawn to his unique blend of industrial and pop with a strong British tilt to it. At first he brought in drum machine parts and then played acoustic guitar over the drum machine and added bass lines played on a keyboard and then sang a scratch vocal and we would begin layering from there.
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While I loved the sound of the drum machine tracks, I was hearing polyrhythms that I couldn’t ignore, so one day after he left I began tracking drums in a sort of call and answer pattern in between the spaces. When I played the songs back to him, he loved everything I did and the live drums stayed with the digital ones on all tunes.
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The next ep we made was called World in Your Hands and we went with real drums and the drum machine was retired. As we got to know each other better, I learned that he was the bass player in Carolyn’s Mother. (I thought he was the guitar player) My next question was, “Why aren’t we playing real bass?” He said that he was going for a different sound. From that moment on we have used a bass to play bass lines. I did feel a slight loss in the industrial vein without the drum machine tracks and in order to recover some of that spirit, I found myself using non traditional percussion tactics like banging on weight lifting plates with hammers and shaking buckets of screws and everything we tried seemed to fit perfectly.
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We began work on our third ep Under a Blue Moon and thought about using feedback in the intro of one of the songs but as we let the song play, there never seemed to be a point where we felt like taking it out so we didn’t. But what we did do was instead of using just the root note, we added a third and a fifth and recorded the three note triad. We liked the result so much that we began trying it on the other songs and ultimately every song on the ep had a feedback track or three at some point in the song.
Postcards From the Roosevelt is our latest and first full-length recording. It is my favorite. “We’ve gotten so much better at writing and working together,” Colin says. “We kinda used all the tricks we have discovered on the first three recordings on this one.”
Lyrically, Colin’s songs are about life experiences, good and bad. “Everything becomes so much more emotional once you have kids,” Colin says. “Not every song is a love song or a heartbreak song. And I would never tell somebody exactly what a song is about. I sometimes re write lyrics over and over again so I’m not speaking in first person. A person might be going through a moment that we know nothing about and they hear a song that means everything about that moment to them. That’s the beauty of music.”
Colin’s music is available under the name DeadMan Wash. “I was always a fan of band names,” Colin says. “If I ever play live I would prefer it to be a band name instead of my own.”
You can find DeadMan Wash on Instagram and Facebook and you can stream the music from any of these recordings on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music and all the major platforms.
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