FROM THE ARCHIVE - "Dr. Abraham" (Original Keyboard Demo)

Here’s an oddity from The Tea Club archive, from when we were writing Grappling!

I was enjoying rediscovering my 1996 Yamaha PSR 225 keyboard around 2013, and wound up writing a bunch of cool little tunes using the keyboard’s multitrack feature. They allowed me to do one of my favorite things musically, which is to create sick drum beats. We’ve already posted two of the songs from that time here on Patreon, “Sentinel” and “Sky Chase”. Those tunes actually become songs this year for our video game music project AfterForm. This one, however, was the beginning of the song “Dr. Abraham”, which would later be on The Tea Club’s Grappling album.

It started as an icy piano progression which was inspired by the music for Snowhead Temple from the video game “The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask”, which as many of you know, is a video game that has had a profound effect on my imagination since it was released on the Nintendo 64 in 2000. I then added a bass melody and a funky drum beat to go with it, and threw in a synth harmony and some strings to complete it. The result is a quirky little demo that is actually one of my favorite things I’ve ever recorded.

When we were assembling the songs for what would become our Grappling album, I had the idea of mashing this song together with a riff we had recently written, which we called “The Beardfish Riff” due to its brutal heaviness a la the great Swedish prog band Beardfish, whom we had toured with in 2012. To our surprise, the parts seemed to compliment each other perfectly. For a while, the song was actually called “Grappling”, but when we were done recording this album and we’re considering album names, Pat suggested we call the whole album Grappling. We immediately knew that this would be a perfect album title for our record, so we changed the song title to “Dr. Abraham”.

I hope you enjoy this little piece of Tea Club history, and as always, THANK YOU, Beloved Patrons, for your continued support! ❤️

-Dan McGowan