Just as Diamond Rugs finished recording “Christmas In A Chinese Restaurant” and was still in the studio listening back to the track, John McCauley got in front of the camera to create this fun clip to the song. Filmed and edited by Justin Collins, who co-produced the record, the video’s charm and honesty is bound to bring a smile to your face.
“From what I remember, that was a song that John had played around with in the studio in earlier sessions, but he had never written a second verse. Adam kept harping on him to finish it and one of the nights he came in and said he had a second verse,” Hardy Morris recently explained to RollingStone.com. “Robbie played it on piano and when John got to the ‘moo goo gai pan’ lyric we realized it was the greatest 2nd verse to a Christmas song ever. It was very late and very funny.”
Diamond Rugs, Partisan Records’ latest signing, is a collaboration between John McCauley (Deer Tick), Robbie Crowell (Deer Tick), Ian Saint Pé (The Black Keys), Steve Berlin (Los Lobos), Hardy Morris (Dead Confederate) and Bryan Dufresne (Six Finger Satellite).
Not too dissimilar from the beginnings of Middle Brother, McCauley decided he wanted to make another record during his downtime in his new home base of Nashville with producers Adam Landry and Justin Collins (Middle Brother, Deer Tick). While attending a Los Lobos show (one of his all-time favorite bands), he made his way backstage and met Steve Berlin. McCauley convinced Berlin to come to Nashville to play on the record. Over the course of the next month, he also managed to convince Saint Pé (whom he’d met once before), Morris (who had opened for Deer Tick on tour) and his good friend from his hometown of Providence, RI, Dufresne. McCauley also recruited Deer Tick keys/sax player Robbie Crowell to play bass on the album. What happened next was entirely unexpected; the musicians McCauley had recruited to play on his record, ended up contributing their own songs to the album and a fully-formed band emerged, rather than a group of musicians playing on another artists’ record.
The Diamond Rugs long player is going to be released in the spring of 2012. It was recorded in Nashville and produced by Adam Landry and Justin Collins (Middle Brother, Deer Tick). Diamond Rugs will play their first show ever on December 29th at The Earl in Atlanta, GA.
