Here, you can listen to a stripped down version of the 2nd verse of It's No Good - just vocals and a bass line.
About the vocals: I believe I tracked 2 or 3 takes which is unbelievable given that these days I do at least 30 of which I keep about 12 to stitch together the final piece from.  The whole experience just flowed though with this one. I remember it took me about an hour to lay the vocals down. I just shut off all the lights and sang in the dark. I lived in this tiny little dorm room at the time, which I tried to turn into a spiritual place of inspiration, whatever that may mean (see picture).
For the vocals, I used a Shure Beta Green 2.1 microphone, which is sort of the little brother of the SM 58. I don't remember what exactly I did to process the vocals, but besides the usual eq and dynamic compression, I believe I used a lot of subtle preamp-like distortion, to give the vocals a lot of punch and definition. The excerpt here has the vocals pretty bare, but the actual song includes an extraordinary amount of distorted & flanged & phased vocal echoes, etc.
The bass sound was simply a low-pass filtered string sample. Nice and simple. 
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