Squarehead

LJ said..." I love "Instinct". Its always been my favorite Iggy solo album, I think was the first album I bought with Bill Laswell's name on it. It has lot of power and understatement. Steve Jones' guitar fits beautifully. The sound is crystal clear and haunting.

The lyrics are deep in places, or just funny as "Squarehead"."

This comment recalls another story from the Instinct mixing sessions.

Iggy arrived at the beginning of one session to recut a vocal. My understanding is that he had written completely new lyrics to one song, the song that became Squarehead. I didn't ever hear the song before it became Squarehead.

We set up a Neumann U47 Tube 47 and gave it some mild compression with a Summit TLA across the insert. Iggy knocked out the lead vocal in one take. There might have been a punch-in or two along the way, I don't remember, but I do remember it going very quickly.

After he got the lead vocal, Iggy went in and did a 3 part doo wop style background vocal part for the bridge. Each of these vocals were also done in one take. They were not perfectly in tune but the dissonance and rawness of the part perfectly fit the mood of the lyrics. It took less than an hour to do all the vocals for Squarehead.

Two days later a new Rolling Stone magazine came out with this picture on the cover of Talking Head frontman David Byrne: