lifeblood: songs: backgrounds: the last supper

1994-12-02: amy ray on...jesus christ superstar, the washington square news:

dc: when you did "the last supper," and there's the whole scene in the middle of it where it's like jesus and judas going back and forth at each other.

ar: right.

dc: were you and michael in the studio together doing that?

ar: he put down a scratch part that he was interested in sort of fixing if he wanted to, and i went sort of against that. i think he might have kept some of that, i'm not sure. it was like he kind of sang back and forth with me in the studio, and then he went and fixed things that he didn't think were as good or something. but, it wasn't like everything was kept. my part was live, that's the way it was. but for his, i think... i think we sang against each other and then he replaced some of the stuff.

dc: was that done a lot with the album?

ar: he helped people out since he knew all of the vocal parts for every single character. he would sing whoever's part you were singing against to you while you were singing sometimes, to just help you get in the spirit of it. so, if there were chorus parts, like in "hosanna" or something... i went in before a lot of stuff had been recorded, the choral parts hadn't been recorded yet, so he had put down scratch choral parts that he sung all himself, so it was kind of funny actually. he did mary's parts, and it was like, schizophrenic or something.

dc: now, did you go in and just like, in a few days, record all of just your parts?

ar: two days, yeah. two days and then i went in for a couple of hours in the middle of a tour on a day off to fix something that i didn't like.

dc: now, when were those two days that you recorded?

ar: oh gosh, i can't remember. it was early on in the project. it was right before i went out on the road. it was probably in may.

dc: so it was right when swamp ophelia came out?

ar: yeah. we had just gotten done mixing and stuff with that, and it was coming out when i started practicing, and then i went in to record it right before we went on tour, so it had just come out and we had been finished with the album for a couple months.