Did you say goat toenails?

Ken Lewis with his goat toenails, Paul in the background

Today we had a bunch of meetings and GMA-ish stuff, but in the middle of all that Chris and I went with Paul to the final tracking session for the single. Ken Lewis is putting world percussion sounds on the song, and he couldn’t do the regular session because he was recording in Korea (oh sure, that old excuse).

He was pretty amazing, and I love that stuff, so we were watching him add a lot of percussion “bling”. He takes out this long rope that has all these little one inch square, brown, papery little things sewn to it and wads it up in his hands with a Tibetan bell rope. I spent the whole track trying to figure out what that was, so when he was done, I had to ask.

“Oh, that’s goat toenails.” Um, what? “Yeah, it’s goat toenails. I pick up weird things all over the world when I’m traveling. But they make a cool sounding shaker, don’t they?”

Actually, Ken, yes they do. They sounded really cool. And yet, I wonder, does knowing that there are goat toenails (and yes, people, I assume he means the hooves!) on your track take away any of the worshipful feeling? Hmmm….

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