The process of recording alone also allowed her more latitude when writing. “I wrote ‘Beautiful’ as a sort of stream-of-consciousness,” she explains. “I had the loop down, and just started singing into the microphone, which is something I never would have done if someone else was in the room with me.”

Larkin also found it easier to record her guitar parts when working by herself. “I am at the place with my engineers where I feel pretty free to do that,” she says. “But there is still this internal judgment thing that goes on when somebody is sitting there when I’m working something out.” Some of those parts involved bowing a Teisco baritone guitar with a child’s violin bow. “It was something that I had been experimenting with and I decided to put it on as a backing track on a couple of songs,” she says. “If I hadn’t made the decision to do everything myself I might have brought in a string player.”

Experimentation was the order of the day on Watch the Sky. Larkin experimented with low tunings such as DADGAD transposed down to B [B, F#, B, E, F#, B low to high], and she played the slide parts on “Hollywood” in a B-major tuning [B, F#, B, D#, F#, B, low to high].” Larkin also made good use of a solid-state Leslie 825 rotating speaker cabinet she was talked into buying. “Besides putting the acoustic guitar through the Leslie, for a couple of days I was running everything through it, including the background vocals on ‘Here,’” she says.

The song “Walking in My Sleep” is rife with sounds that might be mistaken for keyboards, but are in fact guitar. “I do most of my looping with a Boss RC-20XL Loop Station, but for some reason I don’t like the sound of its reverse function, so I used a Lexicon JamMan for the backwards guitar part on that song,” she explains. “And, once again, I used the Leslie, especially on the spooky slide part.”

When it comes to performing the pieces from Watch the Sky live, however, Larkin prefers the Loop Station. “With the Boss you have more control right at your feet than with the [old rackmount] JamMan, because you don’t have to go back to the rack to adjust things,” she says. “I also like that you can erase the previous loop, and you can store loops in memory, as I do with the drum machine part on ‘Phone Message.’ I loop ‘Beautiful’ live and parts of other things. When I play ‘Dear Heart,’ I loop a tag at the end and play the violin bowed part over it. In ‘Walking in My Sleep’ I loop the chords so I can solo along with them.”

In addition to all the electronic guitars and effects on Watch the Sky, Larkin also made frequent use of her ’93 Olsen SJ Cutaway acoustic, which is fitted with an L.R. Baggs LB6 pickup. “My guitar is rosewood with an Engelmann spruce top rather than the usual cedar, and a custom neck that is the same width and length as the one on my Martin D-18, but less deep,” she says. “I also used a little ’57 Guild acoustic that I like because it is funky sounding.” A nylon-string Martin from the 1860s appears on “Bound Book” and “Traveling Alone,” and a ’30s National graces “Waterside,” “Beautiful,” and “Hallelujah.”

Larkin recorded everything—guitars, bass, and vocals—to Pro Tools via API preamps connected directly to a Digidesign Digi 001, though she enhanced the sound of her acoustics with a Pendulum HZ-10SE preamp. Her primary microphone was an AKG C 535, though she also used a Neumann KMS 105. “The cool thing about the [vocal oriented] KMS105 is that you can take the cover off and it acts more like an AKG C 460, and becomes a great guitar mic,” she says.

Although Larkin says that she wants to get an engineer in to help her improve her recording and editing chops, she is also aware of the pitfalls of working alone. “I had to discipline myself to write, because all I wanted to do was get on Pro Tools and fiddle with tracks and overdubs, which is really fun,” she confides. “Then again, as a guitarist, I like being able to really work through my ideas, and the ones I don’t keep just go away and no one is the wiser.”

www.pattylarkin.com