The story of "Treasures"
Like “Hold On,” “Treasures” started years ago as a half-finished idea. I never finished it, but something about it always stuck with me.
Fast forward to January 2024. We were having a DFM jam session, working on new ideas, and we pulled up “Treasures” and completely reworked it from the ground up. Our friend Alex Scott was with us that day. He’s phenomenally talented and he came up with a jam that became the end of the song. It’s one of my favorite things about the track. It doesn’t wrap up neatly. Instead it ends in that jam, with a kind of unresolved tension.
We finished the lyrics and started recording final vocals in June 2024. Some lines survived from the original scratch version, some we rewrote, and it all came together over a few sessions. The fun part was building those huge harmony stacks of Teressa’s vocals. By fall, after a few mixes playing with different blends, we had a “final” version.
Then, in early 2025, I was going to be in London and got the chance to work at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios. So I did something I hadn’t done in about 15 years, a 100% analog mix of “Treasures,” through their 96-channel SSL console.
A fully analog mix is rare these days, and for good reason. Mixing on a computer compared to mixing on a console is like driving 25 miles instead of riding a horse! A computer is faster, and everything is simply saved. With an analog mix, when you’re done, you have to “print” (which means you record every single track back into the computer so the mix with the analog settings actually is saved). That alone took a few hours, because some of the vintage console’s channels had random static and we had to re-record them.
One of the highlights that day was that there’s a software plugin I love using on vocals, modeled on a vintage analog unit called the Aphex Aural Exciter. At the studio, of course the plugin had authorization issues and wouldn’t work. A little later, the assistant engineer walked back into the room carrying an actual original Aphex unit they had in storage. It got me the vocal sound I wanted, and it was so fitting to use the real analog thing in an analog mix.
The mix took something like 14 hours. It was a special thing to finish a DFM track in that room, the slow and long way, which is how we tend to do everything with DFM 😆
But the biggest highlight was that my whole family, including my sister and my mother-in-law, plus a couple of friends, got to be there that day to hang out and have the whole Real World experience. That’s a day I’ll never forget.
~Vincent
The original vintage Aphex Aural Exciter that came out of storage at Real World.