Bettie Serveert guitarist Peter Visser is quick to list the advantages of recording at his home in Holland. "You have plenty of time and you can work at night, with headphones on, a bottle of wine next to you, you can smoke cigarettes and just record," says Visser of the sessions for the band's latest album, Log 22, which it will support with a fourteen-date tour that starts tonight. "Carol [singer/guitarist van Dyk] could sing whenever she felt like it, which is mostly not in the morning. So it was way more relaxed and exciting like a kindergarten type setting. You have a lot of toys you play with."

The kindergarten atmosphere made space for incidental bits of conversation -- recorded on tours, off the top of the Bettie's heads and in the case of "Wide Eyed Fools," off the TV -- to creep into the fabric of the album. "I have this little dictaphone machine I carry with me all the time, whenever I'm in the streets or on the subway," says Visser. "The woman from the Handsome Family came on the television and it was a coincidence that I was working on the song. I thought it sounded great and it stayed on that song."

With much of the album recorded in Visser's living room, the guitarist found plenty of time to explore left field ideas, including a foray on a synthesizer that wound up supplying a portion of the horn section for the song "Have a Heart."

"I started playing trumpet and saxophone parts on it, but in this totally different key because I don't know how to play keyboards," Visser says. "Carol almost threw the headphones on the floor in disgust. She loathed it, but she said the idea was good. We figured out what keys I could hit on the keyboard and we put a little pieces of tape on it and Carol said, 'You can use those keys and not the others.' It almost worked. At the end of the song you only hear the plastic horns and in the middle it's the real ones mixed with what we did at home."

Log 22's songs began as demos with just vocals and guitar, with some undergoing minimal alterations and others gradually growing into fully realized arrangements with strings.

"What I wanted to do is get away from the drums, bass guitars, then guitars, then vocal routine," Visser says. "That's why we changed it around. I wanted to experiment a little bit. It also helped that I quit smoking. That freaked me out, so I was kind of fucked up and it helped to give it that edge. But then after a couple months we needed some quiet songs on the record so I started smoking again."

Bettie Serveert tour dates:

10/7: New York, Mercury Lounge
10/8: Brooklyn, NY, Southpaw
10/9: Hoboken, NJ, Maxwell's
10/10: Arlington, VA, IOTA
10/11: Carborro, NC, Cat's Cradle
10/13: Nashville, The End
10/14: St. Louis, Blueberry Hill
10/16: Minneapolis, 7th Street Entry
10/17: Chicago, Double Door
10/18: Detroit, Magic Stick
10/19: Pittsburgh, Rosebud
10/22: Cambridge, MA, TT the Bears
10/24: New York, TBA
10/25: Philadelphia, North Star

COLIN DEVENISH
(October 7, 2003)