The first take of Black Tattoo survived several attempts to replace it. Brian Borcherdt says the band kept playing faster as they worked through the song, recorded without a click track. They eventually voted for the version they had started with. There is something reassuring about musicians doing more work and deciding the earlier attempt was better.
The single arrived on November 6 under Borcherdt’s Dusted name. Brian Borcherdt and Gavin Gardiner share the production credit, with Gardiner also mixing. Brad Kilpatrick plays drums, Ben Whiteley bass and Alex Edkins, also known as Weird Nightmare, additional electric guitar. The recording is a collective effort within a project usually identified with one songwriter.
Borcherdt’s account, published by Stereogum, places the performance on a vintage Tascam 388. The absence of a click track left the pace to the musicians, and the later attempts kept getting faster. Their vote for the earliest version makes the choice of take more interesting than the tape machine. They had tried the alternatives and found something in the original performance they wanted to retain.
Black Tattoo deals with a relationship whose repeated breaches have made its old terms meaningless. The published lyrics move between making amends and escaping in a changed state, without identifying the other person or spelling out the quarrel. Repair and departure remain possible in the same short song. There is no tidy account of who has recovered, or what recovery would look like.
Michael Leblanc’s video follows Borcherdt and his daughter through the Toronto subway. That family journey need not be a literal explanation of the damaged relationship in the song. The recording story leaves a similarly useful distinction: making another attempt and making an improvement are different things. The band went back to take one because they had compared it with what followed. Sometimes that extra work tells you when to stop.