Meryd Yannaconne is the name of my project manager at Oasis CD. This woman with the extravagant last name is responsible for the equally extravagant, from my point of view, process of producing the album. Everything from album graphic design (using the excellent drawings Lee Ellen drew and scanned and sent all the way from Germany) to making sure the masters get engineered and proofed, to pressing, printing, shipping, and making sure I'm happy and adequately answered to throughout the whole ordeal. Matt and I sent off the master last Tuesday, six days ago, after a full weekend of not sleeping and non-stop mixing (especially for him). Before last weekend we still hadn't finished all the drum parts and hadn't finalized a good amount of the arrangements for End of Time. And somehow, with our aural and musical and mixing powers combined, we finished it and sent it off. The album, all fourteen glorious pop songs, has its flaws, both in terms of arrangement (there are some violin and cello parts that were written but never recorded) and in terms of mixing (Ancient Avenue is extremely over-compressed and both of the super poppy electronic songs are a little strange), but overall I'm pretty pleased. By and large I think my vocal performance was better than I had been thinking all along and the songs are solid and catchy for the most part. I'm biased of course, but even after hours and hours of listening and re-listening, I still like them. Which is a good sign, right?
Now what is left is to do is organize the cd release party, which involves making flyers, promoting, organizing people and rehearsing, learning a bit of extra technology (the live performance software Mainstage that comes with Logic) so that we can make all those extra sounds that are indigenous to Logic, and still...yes...figuring out a name. It is really late in the game to be trying to figure out a name, days before our album is going to be pressed and printed, and at the end of a long and taxing road (five months since we started!), when we are worn out and starting to shrug our shoulders at everything. As I read back through these blogs I confirm my inclination that the best name for this album is my name, Adele Fournet, the name I feel most comfortable with. I've been thinking over what one of my Blog readers said (thanks Dave!) about image/name as a medium. A medium for what? He asked. For what message? If I'm going to the trouble of fabricating an image other than the one I project ordinarily, what's my intended effect? And the only purpose I think of is that I, potentially, want an image that can endorse the words and meanings of the songs when I (normal Adele) don't always identify with them. I write songs in a flurry of emotion, in the moment of some experience, in the pressing need to say something or express some feeling at a very particular time and place. And then the feeling and the experience subsides, and sometimes I never feel that way again (though of course with some songs, if they are good, I often do). But in any case, the song is there, calcified, objectified, and I have to keep singing it, or at least keep listening to myself sing it as a disembodied recording. And sometimes it's a person I no longer identify with. The question I guess is whether or not I'm ok with maintaining a personal identity that is fragmented and false at times (saying words I no longer identify with) or if I would prefer to have an alter ego. Right now I am feeling comfortable with the idea of having an artist name that is my name, mostly insofar as having a complex and shifting and malleable identity is a part of being a normal person, and expressing that complexity in songs and trying to get behind that complexity during a performance I guess is just part of being a person who also chooses to be a performer. But the conviction wavers frequently…
But self-titling is totally out of the question for Matt, completely alienating to him and the people he sees potentially touring with us and this music when I get back from Peru. He feels that he has put as much creative energy into this project as I have and that this album wouldn’t have happened/wouldn’t be as good if he hadn’t been involved, both as a drummer and as a mixing artist (which it certainly wouldn’t be). Self-titling, from his point of view, would marginalize all the work he put into it and, he is quick to call upon, goes against my own goals with the girl/band agenda. If I refuse to choose a new name I run the risk of alienating him AND of not being able to have an album release party with him, which means probably no album release show at all. At this point I am so alienated from the music and the project in general that I don’t feel much strong resistance to his desire, other than the faint and sometimes stronger inkling that I would feel even more alienated from the music if it didn’t have my name on it. That, and I think he is conflating is role as a mixing artist with my role as the music artist.
I was working at Arsaga’s the other day, pulling espresso shots and conversing haphazardly with patrons as they came and went, and out of nowhere I remembered vaguely what Marx wrote about how Capitalism alienates people, the proletariat in particular, from the products of their labor. In pre-capitalist times, according to Marx, workers identified strongly with the fruits of their labors, especially since they went through the whole process of making these products, conceptualizing them, gathering materials, cutting, carving, assembling, selling. Start to finish they invested themselves in their work and the products thereof. In capitalism the process gets cut up, sorted into assembly lines parts, divided and compartmentalized and owned by corporate bodies, and the individual worker becomes little more than a machine that facilitates the process of production. No identification, just time and labor in exchange for money, and very little at that. Now why I thought of this has little to do with pulling espresso shots. It’s true that I am pretty alienated from the fruits of my barista labor—I’ve never identified too strongly with any one latte (though I do feel the occasional delight at a nice cappuccino design)—but I’ve always had such a strong satisfaction with interacting with patrons and my fellow baristas that it never really got to me. No, I actually thought of this idea in relation to my music and this album. In the past, my process of making songs has been pretty immediate. I would write the song, arrange it, show to some people, play it. It was never very involved or drawn out or public, at least not ‘til the very end when we performed it. But now the process of writing songs has become a lot more involved, a lot more steps, more technology, more rounds of pruning and listening, more public. And now, at the end of all that, there is this album, this disembodied collection of songs, me, there, singing and playing and communicating, and I am finding it so alienating and foreign. In a way this really doesn’t line up with Marx’s idea. Creating an album of original music ought to be the epitome of pre-capitalist creation—complete personal identification with the fruits and process of one’s labor. But for whatever reason I don’t identify. Maybe I’m just in a daze of postpartum depression; given birth and now I don’t want anything to do with the ugly, bloody screaming mess. Just take it away and let me sulk in my bed! Or maybe it’s that I felt so down and out and tumbling in turmoil throughout the whole process that it has left a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe it’s because I didn’t feel like I was writing it with a band, with a community. The community that would lend mutual support and take up the ball and run when the individual fumbles.
Whatever may be the cause, the alienation is so strong at this point that the thought of not having an album release party doesn’t really bother me all that much. The thought of not playing at all anymore (zero, zip, nada) actually doesn’t bother me all that much either. Last week I decided it might be a good idea to try taking some piano lessons with Claudia Burson, the key-tickler I had mentioned a while back. The result? Some interesting pointers and ideas, but mostly the overwhelming realization that I have a LOT to learn on the piano and that I am not going to get anywhere until I really, really want to learn. And at this point I just don’t feel like learning. I don’t know what happened.
Sorry to leave you on such a down note, but sometimes things are down. But they usually come up again. The album is good, I think you’ll enjoy it, at least parts of it.
In other realms of life, my mind has now, finally, started to turn itself towards the reality of moving to Lima in a month’s time. Now the news of Peru actually interests me. Thousands of tourists trapped by flooding in the Andes? What!? Bus accidents and robberies? All of the sudden I am starting to care. And my article, FINALLY, revised and resubmitted, hopefully to be accepted and published in the summer edition of the journal. We’ll see! Enjoying the Arkansas snow, friends and family getting cozy and cuddly.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
La Adelita
I have put off writing this blog post for many weeks for the primary reason of wanting to be able to say (nay, exclaim!) that the audio capture for the album is almost one hundred percent done! With the exception of a few drum tracks to re-record, a bass part to fix here and there, and a few more horn parts, the album is sitting in the brains of my Macbook Pro (as well as my handy dandy external hard drive and a few other hard drives around Fayetteville), ready to be mixed and released into the world. There have been many moments where I thought that it wouldn’t happen; where I felt the strongest urge to give up, forget it all, move to California and just fuck it all until I move to Peru in March. And although there is still a lot of work ahead, I finally feel like it is actually going to get done and that it might actually...be really good?
As I sat on a plane from Chicago to San Francisco today (why I am in San Francisco is another story, which relates to both Foucault and Cryonics in much less round about ways than you might first speculate) I did a survey of the songs on the album. Of 14 tracks, 8 (EIGHT!) are about, much to my surprise, relationships, 4 are about existential crises, one about the end of the world and one about a super sadistic sex house that catches on fire and burns all of its sinful inhabitants to a tasty crisp. I guess a pretty spot on relief for your typical pop album wouldn’t you say? Good job, Adele! Part of me is feeling a little self conscious about all the relationship songs (though not all straightforwardly relationship-y, I’ll admit), and my first inclination is to stick a few more angst-ridden intellectual tunes in there. Some good old “INSTATUTIONALIZED” or some “In a cage, avoid your gaze” or “I’m just a brain in a vat, prove me wrong, bitch I can’t do that!” or “To realize their place in the vegetable hierarchy is to have an imagination, Sociologically.” But then I remember my goal: to produce a pop album. A pop album that reflects me, of course, but poppy, in the sense of being popular, nevertheless. And, alas, relationships are where it’s at, popularly speaking. And they are certainly what I’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about these last few months, so, why not? I am confident that my internal meanderings will navigate their way back towards the sociological very soon, and my song-writing will reflect this, but why not explore the heretofore uncharted terrain (in my book) of relationship songs while I’m in the neighborhood?
My next task is to come up with a name. What’s in a name? A rose by any other name....no, sorry. A lot, I think, is in a name. Reading more about image artists like Madonna and Cindy Lauper, and now the infamous Lady Gaga, I’ve been thinking more and more about public image as the venue of artistic expression. In other words, the personality you project to the world, the image that is perceived and consumed by strangers, as your artistic canvas. As it turns out, women like Madonna and Cindy Lauper didn’t have much else to work with when it came to their artistic medium—many of the decisions about their actual music were made for them, by male producers and songwriters. So instead, they turned their artistic energy towards image, producing videos like “Girls just wanna have fun” and “Borderline” to advance a public figure they could use to communicate all kinds of ideologies, like new female sexuality and liberation (however subtle and sullied). And even though Lady Gaga writes her own music, image is still her number one artistic output and influence. So I’m at a crossroads. Do I want to develop an image, a public identity, that is partly me, one of my masks, and partly not me? Do I want to actively take on image construction as a deliberate and strategic artistic project? Or do I just want to be me, Adele Fournet, making music, and cultivate a kind of multi-faceted identity as the same person? My knee-jerk reaction is to say “of course you should craft an image!” and then I go back and substantiate it with reasons like 1) well, it would be really fun 2) it’s super lame to self-title an album 3) I like the idea of having name privacy 4) it would be really fun....
So if I do go this route the first step is, yes, coming up with a name. Some name that can be my symbolic title but that isn’t my actual name. So like St. Vincent (actually Annie Clark), like Tori Amos (actually Ellen Amos), like Lady Gaga (actually Stephanie-something), Cat Power, Madonna?, M.I.A. (I restrict my list to women because I see the world from behind blinders). I had thought of “La Adelita,” because I’ve always loved the story—the female hero of the Mexican revolution, the epitome of female strength and bravery, la soldadera extraordinaire( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Adelita). Plus I think that relating to Latin American women has been a pretty significant part of my identity, at least over the last five years. Matt thinks that this one is “self-absorbed” and “sounds too much like La Abuelita hot chocolate” and “people who will listen to your music aren’t Hispanic” and it’s just plain old “stupid.” My initial reaction is to just tell him to fuck off, but I’ll consider his reasons and think of some more names. “Reasonfriend” was one I came up with during the summer when I became convinced that I was a Kantian and that my number one friend is my power of Reason (that, and that I think I am a very reasonable friend), but that one is pretty dorky. I could use my middle name, Keala, which means the way and nice smelling in Hawaiian, but I have a strong aversion to being called “Kee-lah.” Still, Keala, maybe with the traditional accent (Ke’ala), could be a cool name that I still have a personal connection with. I’ve always liked the band name “The Autodidact” or “The Autodidacts,” both for the straightforward meaning and for the reference to Nausea. At this point the only two names I feel any strong connection with are La Adelita and just my name, Adele Fournet. Any thoughts?
Walking the streets of San Francisco this morning, up and down the hills, enjoying the only 55 degree weather and the sun sifting through the fog and the tourists with their cameras, I chewed over an even more fundamental issue: cultivating a singular artist image vs. a cultivating a collective artist image. Matt feels that this album should have a group title, a band name. And of course, I am compelled towards this idea because it is what I write about and fight for, with word and type, for other women in rock—the opportunity for women to work in collaborative musical units (bands), the arena in which they are and have been so conspicuously absent. But at the same time, I don’t feel like with this is project I am in a band. This is my solo album, my music, my words, my ideas, my songs that I have carried with me through three different groups of musicians (The Done For, Thank You Senator Fulbright, and now Adele and the Matts). So even though I lament that there are so few bands with female members, especially with female center-points (the brain of the machine, the songwriters, the central artistic drivers), it would be a lie to try to make this project into a band. Moreover, I am still embedded in a discourse and practice of achievement that values individual accomplishment—academia, professionalism. It is important in these realms to achieve, as an individual, in order to accumulate credibility. Then as individual credibility accumulates, venues for collaboration for other already-established artists opens up.
So even though I value collaboration in music and desperately want to create venues for it, both in my own life and in the life of other musicians (mostly women) who I think could flourish from it, I realize that this is not this project at this point in time. This is Adele Fournet, La Adelita...
My next step today is to research copyright issues in music. I know that there are at least two domains of copyright—one for the songs themselves and one for the specific renditions and recordings of the songs. It is in the first domain over which I will have complete authorship, and in the second where I want to share authorship with Matt. I need to look into it and discuss it with him, but I certainly need to figure it out soon...
2009 has been an eventful year. I wrote a hundred-page thesis, defended it at my baccalaureate exam, graduated from New College, got a Fulbright, started a band in New York with Lee Ellen, built a recording studio and got really close to finishing an album. I also fell in love, traveled to Europe with a near-stranger lover, made new friends, tended old friendships, experienced more pits of deep depression than I ever have in my life, started to see my parents as real people, learned about my menstrual cycle, lifted weights for the first time. It’s been a mixed bag for sure. A hard year, but a good one.
My new years resolution is very simple: really listen, especially to myself. Last year’s was: quit the guilt! And it worked out pretty well. Instead of boiling over with the anxiety and dread I usually accumulate as a direct result of all kinds of internalized guilt I carry around with me, I just took action and said goodbye to the guilt and the insecurity. Now the insecurity is starting to creep up again (why are you wasting your time making pop music, you know you are a second-rate musician, most of your success in life is just posturing, you are spoiled and undeserving and blah blah blah), so perhaps the new year’s resolutions should just accumulate instead of cycling? The mantras can continue through the years...
As I sat on a plane from Chicago to San Francisco today (why I am in San Francisco is another story, which relates to both Foucault and Cryonics in much less round about ways than you might first speculate) I did a survey of the songs on the album. Of 14 tracks, 8 (EIGHT!) are about, much to my surprise, relationships, 4 are about existential crises, one about the end of the world and one about a super sadistic sex house that catches on fire and burns all of its sinful inhabitants to a tasty crisp. I guess a pretty spot on relief for your typical pop album wouldn’t you say? Good job, Adele! Part of me is feeling a little self conscious about all the relationship songs (though not all straightforwardly relationship-y, I’ll admit), and my first inclination is to stick a few more angst-ridden intellectual tunes in there. Some good old “INSTATUTIONALIZED” or some “In a cage, avoid your gaze” or “I’m just a brain in a vat, prove me wrong, bitch I can’t do that!” or “To realize their place in the vegetable hierarchy is to have an imagination, Sociologically.” But then I remember my goal: to produce a pop album. A pop album that reflects me, of course, but poppy, in the sense of being popular, nevertheless. And, alas, relationships are where it’s at, popularly speaking. And they are certainly what I’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about these last few months, so, why not? I am confident that my internal meanderings will navigate their way back towards the sociological very soon, and my song-writing will reflect this, but why not explore the heretofore uncharted terrain (in my book) of relationship songs while I’m in the neighborhood?
My next task is to come up with a name. What’s in a name? A rose by any other name....no, sorry. A lot, I think, is in a name. Reading more about image artists like Madonna and Cindy Lauper, and now the infamous Lady Gaga, I’ve been thinking more and more about public image as the venue of artistic expression. In other words, the personality you project to the world, the image that is perceived and consumed by strangers, as your artistic canvas. As it turns out, women like Madonna and Cindy Lauper didn’t have much else to work with when it came to their artistic medium—many of the decisions about their actual music were made for them, by male producers and songwriters. So instead, they turned their artistic energy towards image, producing videos like “Girls just wanna have fun” and “Borderline” to advance a public figure they could use to communicate all kinds of ideologies, like new female sexuality and liberation (however subtle and sullied). And even though Lady Gaga writes her own music, image is still her number one artistic output and influence. So I’m at a crossroads. Do I want to develop an image, a public identity, that is partly me, one of my masks, and partly not me? Do I want to actively take on image construction as a deliberate and strategic artistic project? Or do I just want to be me, Adele Fournet, making music, and cultivate a kind of multi-faceted identity as the same person? My knee-jerk reaction is to say “of course you should craft an image!” and then I go back and substantiate it with reasons like 1) well, it would be really fun 2) it’s super lame to self-title an album 3) I like the idea of having name privacy 4) it would be really fun....
So if I do go this route the first step is, yes, coming up with a name. Some name that can be my symbolic title but that isn’t my actual name. So like St. Vincent (actually Annie Clark), like Tori Amos (actually Ellen Amos), like Lady Gaga (actually Stephanie-something), Cat Power, Madonna?, M.I.A. (I restrict my list to women because I see the world from behind blinders). I had thought of “La Adelita,” because I’ve always loved the story—the female hero of the Mexican revolution, the epitome of female strength and bravery, la soldadera extraordinaire( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Adelita). Plus I think that relating to Latin American women has been a pretty significant part of my identity, at least over the last five years. Matt thinks that this one is “self-absorbed” and “sounds too much like La Abuelita hot chocolate” and “people who will listen to your music aren’t Hispanic” and it’s just plain old “stupid.” My initial reaction is to just tell him to fuck off, but I’ll consider his reasons and think of some more names. “Reasonfriend” was one I came up with during the summer when I became convinced that I was a Kantian and that my number one friend is my power of Reason (that, and that I think I am a very reasonable friend), but that one is pretty dorky. I could use my middle name, Keala, which means the way and nice smelling in Hawaiian, but I have a strong aversion to being called “Kee-lah.” Still, Keala, maybe with the traditional accent (Ke’ala), could be a cool name that I still have a personal connection with. I’ve always liked the band name “The Autodidact” or “The Autodidacts,” both for the straightforward meaning and for the reference to Nausea. At this point the only two names I feel any strong connection with are La Adelita and just my name, Adele Fournet. Any thoughts?
Walking the streets of San Francisco this morning, up and down the hills, enjoying the only 55 degree weather and the sun sifting through the fog and the tourists with their cameras, I chewed over an even more fundamental issue: cultivating a singular artist image vs. a cultivating a collective artist image. Matt feels that this album should have a group title, a band name. And of course, I am compelled towards this idea because it is what I write about and fight for, with word and type, for other women in rock—the opportunity for women to work in collaborative musical units (bands), the arena in which they are and have been so conspicuously absent. But at the same time, I don’t feel like with this is project I am in a band. This is my solo album, my music, my words, my ideas, my songs that I have carried with me through three different groups of musicians (The Done For, Thank You Senator Fulbright, and now Adele and the Matts). So even though I lament that there are so few bands with female members, especially with female center-points (the brain of the machine, the songwriters, the central artistic drivers), it would be a lie to try to make this project into a band. Moreover, I am still embedded in a discourse and practice of achievement that values individual accomplishment—academia, professionalism. It is important in these realms to achieve, as an individual, in order to accumulate credibility. Then as individual credibility accumulates, venues for collaboration for other already-established artists opens up.
So even though I value collaboration in music and desperately want to create venues for it, both in my own life and in the life of other musicians (mostly women) who I think could flourish from it, I realize that this is not this project at this point in time. This is Adele Fournet, La Adelita...
My next step today is to research copyright issues in music. I know that there are at least two domains of copyright—one for the songs themselves and one for the specific renditions and recordings of the songs. It is in the first domain over which I will have complete authorship, and in the second where I want to share authorship with Matt. I need to look into it and discuss it with him, but I certainly need to figure it out soon...
2009 has been an eventful year. I wrote a hundred-page thesis, defended it at my baccalaureate exam, graduated from New College, got a Fulbright, started a band in New York with Lee Ellen, built a recording studio and got really close to finishing an album. I also fell in love, traveled to Europe with a near-stranger lover, made new friends, tended old friendships, experienced more pits of deep depression than I ever have in my life, started to see my parents as real people, learned about my menstrual cycle, lifted weights for the first time. It’s been a mixed bag for sure. A hard year, but a good one.
My new years resolution is very simple: really listen, especially to myself. Last year’s was: quit the guilt! And it worked out pretty well. Instead of boiling over with the anxiety and dread I usually accumulate as a direct result of all kinds of internalized guilt I carry around with me, I just took action and said goodbye to the guilt and the insecurity. Now the insecurity is starting to creep up again (why are you wasting your time making pop music, you know you are a second-rate musician, most of your success in life is just posturing, you are spoiled and undeserving and blah blah blah), so perhaps the new year’s resolutions should just accumulate instead of cycling? The mantras can continue through the years...
Thursday, November 26, 2009
tumbling and revisions
And sometimes when I'm falling flying or tumbling in turmoil I say whoa so this is what she means, she means we're bouncing into Graceland. I’m not really sure what Paul Simon meant by bouncing into Graceland, and from what I’ve read he didn’t exactly know either, but the flying and the tumbling in turmoil I understand. It has been over a month since I last wrote and this month, even more than the last, has been the biggest freefalling, flying, tumbling month I’ve probably had in my entire life. Disorientation, depression, self-alienation. Conviction, lost then found, lost again… Motivation found on the ground, on a walk or on the way to work, in very small golden morsels, only to be picked up and then immediately dropped, slipped through my fingers.
Yet I don’t feel that I can productively write more about the freefall than to simply say that it happened, and that it still continues to happen to a certain extent. There is nothing to be said without it seeming cliché and solipsistic. The truth. I suffer existential crises like everyone else. We wake up in the morning, confronted by all the possibilities, all the contingencies of our existence. And worst and best of all, we are confronted by our ability to choose what to do. Out of all the options, the projects, the friends, the books, the podcasts, the degrees, the papers, the closets to be cleaned, the trip to plan, the jobs to be applied for and considered… And, ringing in our ears, “No excuses” (“..no exit..” a distant echo), “Responsibility” “Freedom” and other Sartrean banner slogans. Or perhaps it takes a more 1980’s EST motivational training tone, “take responsibility for your actions” or “only you can create your personal transformation!” And it is in this state of choice and responsibility that I have been lingering, stuck, aware of my responsibility, my freedom, my lack of excuses, yet not being able to choose. Not being able to say, “Yes! This is the project I endorse!”
There is so much more to be said about how much this state of not choosing sucks, how emotionally and physically and socially draining it is, depressing. But I wont go there now, because in all likelihood, you, dear reader friend, if you are indeed one of my friends, angsty as you probably are if you are one of my friends, already know. And I have no real complaints after all, right? No real wars to wage, babies to feed, conflicts to negotiate, essential problems to solve. No, just me and my own internal conflicts and blockages. Spoiled and comatose, you SELF-CENTERED BITCH!!!! I console myself somewhat with the words of people I meet. A guy at my last show: “Yeah, the first year after college totally kicked my ass.” Yeah, totally getting my ass kicked, but in the most pansy childish way to get one’s ass kicked. It just goes back to overeducation, and holy jesus that’s a hard sickness to conquer.
As I was writing my thesis I concluded that I wanted to be a female music artist who broke a whole host of stereotypes about women who play music. I wanted to have my own band (instead of being a tool for someone else’s), play an instrument (instead of just singing), write my own music (instead of performing someone else’s), and produce myself (instead of going into some studio as a half-decent singer songwriter and have some dude with fancy equipment make me sound like I don’t suck). I feel like I am living up to most of these ideals I set forth for myself, but I still have my uneasy feelings about how the album is getting produced. Matt is the producer of this album, no doubt. He knows more about mixing than I do (or, more importantly, cares to know more about it) and has a much better ear for all things mix-related. Reverb, delay, compression, EQ, staging. These are elements of music I can hear if I bring my attention to them, but they are not what I primarily pay attention to. I think about the song structure, the arrangements, the harmonies, and now, more than I used to, the lyrics. But those other elements of production are certainly all elements of music that I understand. After taking electronic music last year, building my own synthesizers from scratch, applying envelopes and filters to these synthesizers using Reaktor, I get it. But I definitely don’t get industry standards. The “expected” amounts of reverb and compression on industry quality albums. To me this all seems to historically arbitrary—it’s not really about the music, just about priming the music, dressing it up in a way that is palatable to a contemporary audience. Kind of like how Schoenberg started to introduce atonality in the language of romantic music. So perhaps catering to industry standards when it comes to reverb is my historically contingent version of Schoenberg presenting atonality in the compositional language of Brahms?! It was worth a shot….
Nevertheless, I still have moments where I feel like the typical female artist, being emotional, tapping into her creative inner self to create art, haphazardly putting it together with the available technology, while the man, the producer, comes in and “makes it sound good.” When I think of it this way all of my feminist anger boils over and I don’t feel like doing anything, and I get angry at Matt. Yesterday I even hit him, much harder than I had expected to, half joking half seriously. Matt doesn’t always help, because for the most part he sees it like this as well. Of course, for him it’s not a matter of gender. He just thinks that it would be difficult for any artist, male or female, to try to compose, arrange, record AND mix his own music, and do all aspects well. Having someone else there to make the mixes of your creative babies is just a plain old good idea. And Matt is really good at it, so I really need to let go of my angst and anger for the time being.
Still, these feelings are there and I acknowledge that. And the only way I can think to remedy them is to perhaps take on a song on the album to fully produce myself. And then to console myself with the prospect of producing another artist in the future—someone else who is just getting started who needs a third party listener to rework the tracks.
This past week we’ve had another drummer in the studio, and his energy and style are really refreshing and enjoyable. Still, seeing the way he and Matt interact, friends, collaborators, getting excited about making music together, makes me miss having female artists to collaborate with. Not that I don’t feel that I can have this relationship with men, it’s just not at readily comfortable. I definitely felt comfortable with the guys in The Done For, and with Aaron. Perhaps the sex jokes have something to do with that. There’s really no way to avoid the ‘your mom’ jokes when it comes to “trying out a couple different positions” with the mics. COME ON dudes!!! I can’t help but turn into a bitch around that, defensive and equally abrasive.
In another arena, I have been slowly but surely revising my thesis for the Music and the Arts in Action journal. For a long time I didn’t want to think about it at all because I was so burned out on my thesis, but finally one of the editors contacted me and asked if I was still interested in and planning on resubmitting my revisions. As I rethink my ideas, I realize how much more there is to explore in the topic and how underdeveloped some of my ideas were. Or at least, how limited they were by the initial theory I decided to use. One of the biggest comments from the editors about my paper was that I talk exclusively about musical knowledge as cultural capital, (which informs social status, power, etc.) but very little about the technicalities of the music itself. Does gender in music have a sonic component? If so, what is it?
The truth is that I didn’t go into this element because it’s kind of a touchy topic for me. If a potential interviewee for my study played an instrument in a rock band, according to my definition of a rock band (more than one person, amplified instruments, usually a drummer etc.), then she counted as being a more or less successful participant in local level rock music making and qualified for the study. But the fact of the matter is that I really didn’t like the music most of these women made, and that in most cases they weren’t as good as their male counterparts—their music was simpler and they didn’t play as well. Some of them were really awesome and I genuinely liked their music, but for the most part, yes, I have to admit it, I didn’t! Of course, I attribute this to a number of factors, like less playing time and fewer people to practice with. Women for the most part started playing in their early twenties, instead of their early teens, and had very little encouragement for all the reasons I illuminate in my thesis…. Still! There’s the reason, out on the table.
As I play more music with other people and as I slowly turn my gaze towards my project in Peru, I realize that I do want to incorporate more music analysis. But that is then and this is now. I might consider submitting the current article to a different journal if MAiA insists on more music analysis. Something like Socioanthrpology, Ethnomusicology, or the Journal of Popular Music.
I leave now to work on my newest song, Rabbit Hole, which incorporates the original string quartet audio recording of my piece Rebel Princess. Not really sure how the orchestration for this part is going to work out, but I have the inclination to record some of my own drum parts… so, I now set to work…
Yet I don’t feel that I can productively write more about the freefall than to simply say that it happened, and that it still continues to happen to a certain extent. There is nothing to be said without it seeming cliché and solipsistic. The truth. I suffer existential crises like everyone else. We wake up in the morning, confronted by all the possibilities, all the contingencies of our existence. And worst and best of all, we are confronted by our ability to choose what to do. Out of all the options, the projects, the friends, the books, the podcasts, the degrees, the papers, the closets to be cleaned, the trip to plan, the jobs to be applied for and considered… And, ringing in our ears, “No excuses” (“..no exit..” a distant echo), “Responsibility” “Freedom” and other Sartrean banner slogans. Or perhaps it takes a more 1980’s EST motivational training tone, “take responsibility for your actions” or “only you can create your personal transformation!” And it is in this state of choice and responsibility that I have been lingering, stuck, aware of my responsibility, my freedom, my lack of excuses, yet not being able to choose. Not being able to say, “Yes! This is the project I endorse!”
There is so much more to be said about how much this state of not choosing sucks, how emotionally and physically and socially draining it is, depressing. But I wont go there now, because in all likelihood, you, dear reader friend, if you are indeed one of my friends, angsty as you probably are if you are one of my friends, already know. And I have no real complaints after all, right? No real wars to wage, babies to feed, conflicts to negotiate, essential problems to solve. No, just me and my own internal conflicts and blockages. Spoiled and comatose, you SELF-CENTERED BITCH!!!! I console myself somewhat with the words of people I meet. A guy at my last show: “Yeah, the first year after college totally kicked my ass.” Yeah, totally getting my ass kicked, but in the most pansy childish way to get one’s ass kicked. It just goes back to overeducation, and holy jesus that’s a hard sickness to conquer.
As I was writing my thesis I concluded that I wanted to be a female music artist who broke a whole host of stereotypes about women who play music. I wanted to have my own band (instead of being a tool for someone else’s), play an instrument (instead of just singing), write my own music (instead of performing someone else’s), and produce myself (instead of going into some studio as a half-decent singer songwriter and have some dude with fancy equipment make me sound like I don’t suck). I feel like I am living up to most of these ideals I set forth for myself, but I still have my uneasy feelings about how the album is getting produced. Matt is the producer of this album, no doubt. He knows more about mixing than I do (or, more importantly, cares to know more about it) and has a much better ear for all things mix-related. Reverb, delay, compression, EQ, staging. These are elements of music I can hear if I bring my attention to them, but they are not what I primarily pay attention to. I think about the song structure, the arrangements, the harmonies, and now, more than I used to, the lyrics. But those other elements of production are certainly all elements of music that I understand. After taking electronic music last year, building my own synthesizers from scratch, applying envelopes and filters to these synthesizers using Reaktor, I get it. But I definitely don’t get industry standards. The “expected” amounts of reverb and compression on industry quality albums. To me this all seems to historically arbitrary—it’s not really about the music, just about priming the music, dressing it up in a way that is palatable to a contemporary audience. Kind of like how Schoenberg started to introduce atonality in the language of romantic music. So perhaps catering to industry standards when it comes to reverb is my historically contingent version of Schoenberg presenting atonality in the compositional language of Brahms?! It was worth a shot….
Nevertheless, I still have moments where I feel like the typical female artist, being emotional, tapping into her creative inner self to create art, haphazardly putting it together with the available technology, while the man, the producer, comes in and “makes it sound good.” When I think of it this way all of my feminist anger boils over and I don’t feel like doing anything, and I get angry at Matt. Yesterday I even hit him, much harder than I had expected to, half joking half seriously. Matt doesn’t always help, because for the most part he sees it like this as well. Of course, for him it’s not a matter of gender. He just thinks that it would be difficult for any artist, male or female, to try to compose, arrange, record AND mix his own music, and do all aspects well. Having someone else there to make the mixes of your creative babies is just a plain old good idea. And Matt is really good at it, so I really need to let go of my angst and anger for the time being.
Still, these feelings are there and I acknowledge that. And the only way I can think to remedy them is to perhaps take on a song on the album to fully produce myself. And then to console myself with the prospect of producing another artist in the future—someone else who is just getting started who needs a third party listener to rework the tracks.
This past week we’ve had another drummer in the studio, and his energy and style are really refreshing and enjoyable. Still, seeing the way he and Matt interact, friends, collaborators, getting excited about making music together, makes me miss having female artists to collaborate with. Not that I don’t feel that I can have this relationship with men, it’s just not at readily comfortable. I definitely felt comfortable with the guys in The Done For, and with Aaron. Perhaps the sex jokes have something to do with that. There’s really no way to avoid the ‘your mom’ jokes when it comes to “trying out a couple different positions” with the mics. COME ON dudes!!! I can’t help but turn into a bitch around that, defensive and equally abrasive.
In another arena, I have been slowly but surely revising my thesis for the Music and the Arts in Action journal. For a long time I didn’t want to think about it at all because I was so burned out on my thesis, but finally one of the editors contacted me and asked if I was still interested in and planning on resubmitting my revisions. As I rethink my ideas, I realize how much more there is to explore in the topic and how underdeveloped some of my ideas were. Or at least, how limited they were by the initial theory I decided to use. One of the biggest comments from the editors about my paper was that I talk exclusively about musical knowledge as cultural capital, (which informs social status, power, etc.) but very little about the technicalities of the music itself. Does gender in music have a sonic component? If so, what is it?
The truth is that I didn’t go into this element because it’s kind of a touchy topic for me. If a potential interviewee for my study played an instrument in a rock band, according to my definition of a rock band (more than one person, amplified instruments, usually a drummer etc.), then she counted as being a more or less successful participant in local level rock music making and qualified for the study. But the fact of the matter is that I really didn’t like the music most of these women made, and that in most cases they weren’t as good as their male counterparts—their music was simpler and they didn’t play as well. Some of them were really awesome and I genuinely liked their music, but for the most part, yes, I have to admit it, I didn’t! Of course, I attribute this to a number of factors, like less playing time and fewer people to practice with. Women for the most part started playing in their early twenties, instead of their early teens, and had very little encouragement for all the reasons I illuminate in my thesis…. Still! There’s the reason, out on the table.
As I play more music with other people and as I slowly turn my gaze towards my project in Peru, I realize that I do want to incorporate more music analysis. But that is then and this is now. I might consider submitting the current article to a different journal if MAiA insists on more music analysis. Something like Socioanthrpology, Ethnomusicology, or the Journal of Popular Music.
I leave now to work on my newest song, Rabbit Hole, which incorporates the original string quartet audio recording of my piece Rebel Princess. Not really sure how the orchestration for this part is going to work out, but I have the inclination to record some of my own drum parts… so, I now set to work…
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Sit Down
Apparently there is a quote from Simone De Beauvoir’s Pyrrhus and Cinéas that goes like this: “A man alone in the world would be paralyzed by the manifest vanity of all his goals.” I know this from reading ‘Sex and Philosophy: Rethinking De Beauvoir and Sartre’ by Kate and Edward Fullbrook, a book by a couple about a couple that Patrick and I are reading as a couple in our new investigation of otherness and role model couples. Following the quote by De Beauvoir, the Fullbrook’s offer this elaboration, “ To reduce and make bearable the contingency of one’s existence requires the validation by others of one’s projects.” And as I meander my way farther and farther away from the safe arms of New College and the institution of education in general, the validation-provider extraordinaire, I am feeling the paralysis creep in. Days going by with half, a third, a quarter the productivity I shelled out daily in Florida because I am, yes, paralyzed by the abyss of possibilities before me. Some of them are appealing, of course, but none of them provide the same allure and gratification as those possibilities set forth, solicited, authorized by the teacher, the boss, the institution, the grant foundation.
I am recalling, now finally understanding, the No Face song “Overeducated” I used to sing and perform at the beginning of college. The guy who wrote it dropped out after my first year, I imagine as a result of feeling the way he sang about in his song. And the problem with overeducation is not all the skills and talents and possibilities I have accumulated, or the pieces of paper, the connections, the grant monies. No, these are symptoms of being educated. Good symptoms, at that. The symptoms of overeducation creep up slowly, on rainy mornings and sleepless evenings. You find yourself craving an assignment, a task to be completed for someone. Your interests are accumulating, blossoming exponentially, yet...yet somehow the motivation to conquer them all, to do them justice, is missing! Gone into the bottomless hole of sleeping in, rummaging through the fridge, dawdling in your room while looking for the right collection of items to take on an afternoon stroll to the library. “No, it’s there!” you say, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to sew, and finish off The Will to Power, and produce an album, and now I have the time and the energy to do it!” But despite all the energizing self-talk, you are down with overeduation, and you have to admit to yourself that nothing gets you going like that 7 AM deadline for your weekly philosophy seminar paper. Nothing gets you going at all, really, without the promise of punishment. Or more pointedly, the sweet opposite, the promise of beautifully satisfying approval. Ohhhhh, yeah. Give me that approval.
So here I am feeling paralyzed, overeducated. I am not going to complain too much though, because despite however much I am supported by Existentialism and Simone De Beauvoir when I speak of the anguish of existence, there really is nothing more disgustingly privileged than whining about having too much education and being overwhelmed by the endless possibilities offered by the world. Please! Still, there are some important questions to be asked by all of us who are currently overeducated or who are at risk of contracting overeducation. First of all, since none of us who are currently infected with overeducation care to continue in this state of torpor, how can we overcome the primary symptom of overeducation? Namely, how do we get the approval we need for our projects without the support of our beloved institution, whatever it might have been?
I know there are many possible answers here, but I’ll just throw out a few. There is always the “the only approval you need is from yourself, march to the beat of your own drum” type of answer, but sticking with De Beauvoir for the time being I’m going to just go ahead and reject that one right now. Turning to our self as the sole judge of our projects just doesn’t cut it. We are social, we are hierarchical, and typically we engage in projects that have to do with other people, at least on some level. De Beauvoir wrote books she expected people to read, my friend Jim tests isotopes in ants so that other scientists can do their jobs better, my mom teaches yoga for her students. So, ok, fine, yes, I need to genuinely enjoy what I am doing, but that just isn’t getting me out of the bed on those deliciously rainy Arkansas mornings. There have to be others. Paralysis is unavoidable otherwise. The next obvious answer is to find another group of people who will give you approval; the ones that will appreciate the fruits of your efforts, those who the thought of which makes your projects seem valid and worthwhile. This option is a form of setting up a new institution of sorts for yourself; a new approval-dealer.
And it is within the second option that I find myself dwelling, in particular concerning the question “Why am I making this album?” Sure, I enjoy making music. But certainly not all the time. And recently I haven’t been that into it at all. So when the moments of sheer joy at making music dissipate, I am left with the question: “Why make an album?” I am no longer able to say: “well, I should finish it to get a good evaluation” or “might as well finish it up to get the degree" and I certainly am not in the mood for "well, it will look good on my resume." Instead I am starting to form this vague notion of people out there in the world who would receive the music. The people who might actually really enjoy listening to my music, my sometimes unusual musical choices, the genre combinations, the uncompromising lyrics. My imaginary group of ideal listeners has to be my new institution. Those people who do actually want to hear about existential crises and Ravel piano licks all in one song. The people who will like my politically apathetic tirades; the people, in short, who feel that they can express a part of themselves through my genuine self-expression. So I guess it’s really a combination between the beat of my own drum and the institution. The institution of people with metronomes at the same tempo as mine, at least close enough.
There is so much more to be said about the process, but this should be enough of a clue that it has been a month of more fretting and living in my own head than converting sound waves into digital memories. Still, progress has been made and will continue to be made. TV shows have been recorded, shows played, songs written, parts notated. I have a new song I like a lot called Sit Down. Sit down to know where I started, sit down to know where I fall.... I’ve noticed that now that I am out of school I spend a lot less time sitting and thinking that I used to. Now sitting down, to write, to think, to focus, is extremely cathartic and centering. Without sitting down every once in a while I find myself getting tight and light headed and out of breath, caught up in the fragments of my own mind and my disoriented and waffling projects.
I am recalling, now finally understanding, the No Face song “Overeducated” I used to sing and perform at the beginning of college. The guy who wrote it dropped out after my first year, I imagine as a result of feeling the way he sang about in his song. And the problem with overeducation is not all the skills and talents and possibilities I have accumulated, or the pieces of paper, the connections, the grant monies. No, these are symptoms of being educated. Good symptoms, at that. The symptoms of overeducation creep up slowly, on rainy mornings and sleepless evenings. You find yourself craving an assignment, a task to be completed for someone. Your interests are accumulating, blossoming exponentially, yet...yet somehow the motivation to conquer them all, to do them justice, is missing! Gone into the bottomless hole of sleeping in, rummaging through the fridge, dawdling in your room while looking for the right collection of items to take on an afternoon stroll to the library. “No, it’s there!” you say, “I’ve always wanted to learn how to sew, and finish off The Will to Power, and produce an album, and now I have the time and the energy to do it!” But despite all the energizing self-talk, you are down with overeduation, and you have to admit to yourself that nothing gets you going like that 7 AM deadline for your weekly philosophy seminar paper. Nothing gets you going at all, really, without the promise of punishment. Or more pointedly, the sweet opposite, the promise of beautifully satisfying approval. Ohhhhh, yeah. Give me that approval.
So here I am feeling paralyzed, overeducated. I am not going to complain too much though, because despite however much I am supported by Existentialism and Simone De Beauvoir when I speak of the anguish of existence, there really is nothing more disgustingly privileged than whining about having too much education and being overwhelmed by the endless possibilities offered by the world. Please! Still, there are some important questions to be asked by all of us who are currently overeducated or who are at risk of contracting overeducation. First of all, since none of us who are currently infected with overeducation care to continue in this state of torpor, how can we overcome the primary symptom of overeducation? Namely, how do we get the approval we need for our projects without the support of our beloved institution, whatever it might have been?
I know there are many possible answers here, but I’ll just throw out a few. There is always the “the only approval you need is from yourself, march to the beat of your own drum” type of answer, but sticking with De Beauvoir for the time being I’m going to just go ahead and reject that one right now. Turning to our self as the sole judge of our projects just doesn’t cut it. We are social, we are hierarchical, and typically we engage in projects that have to do with other people, at least on some level. De Beauvoir wrote books she expected people to read, my friend Jim tests isotopes in ants so that other scientists can do their jobs better, my mom teaches yoga for her students. So, ok, fine, yes, I need to genuinely enjoy what I am doing, but that just isn’t getting me out of the bed on those deliciously rainy Arkansas mornings. There have to be others. Paralysis is unavoidable otherwise. The next obvious answer is to find another group of people who will give you approval; the ones that will appreciate the fruits of your efforts, those who the thought of which makes your projects seem valid and worthwhile. This option is a form of setting up a new institution of sorts for yourself; a new approval-dealer.
And it is within the second option that I find myself dwelling, in particular concerning the question “Why am I making this album?” Sure, I enjoy making music. But certainly not all the time. And recently I haven’t been that into it at all. So when the moments of sheer joy at making music dissipate, I am left with the question: “Why make an album?” I am no longer able to say: “well, I should finish it to get a good evaluation” or “might as well finish it up to get the degree" and I certainly am not in the mood for "well, it will look good on my resume." Instead I am starting to form this vague notion of people out there in the world who would receive the music. The people who might actually really enjoy listening to my music, my sometimes unusual musical choices, the genre combinations, the uncompromising lyrics. My imaginary group of ideal listeners has to be my new institution. Those people who do actually want to hear about existential crises and Ravel piano licks all in one song. The people who will like my politically apathetic tirades; the people, in short, who feel that they can express a part of themselves through my genuine self-expression. So I guess it’s really a combination between the beat of my own drum and the institution. The institution of people with metronomes at the same tempo as mine, at least close enough.
There is so much more to be said about the process, but this should be enough of a clue that it has been a month of more fretting and living in my own head than converting sound waves into digital memories. Still, progress has been made and will continue to be made. TV shows have been recorded, shows played, songs written, parts notated. I have a new song I like a lot called Sit Down. Sit down to know where I started, sit down to know where I fall.... I’ve noticed that now that I am out of school I spend a lot less time sitting and thinking that I used to. Now sitting down, to write, to think, to focus, is extremely cathartic and centering. Without sitting down every once in a while I find myself getting tight and light headed and out of breath, caught up in the fragments of my own mind and my disoriented and waffling projects.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
a new strategy
Another week in the life of album recording and a new strategy in place. It’s called the Annie Clark method; the treat Logic as Finale method; the Adele maps stuff out with midi and then we go back in the replace all the midi with real instruments method.
At the beginning of the week I was feeling extremely frustrated because I felt handicapped by not having drum parts recorded. I felt that I couldn’t move forward if the drums weren’t recorded when the drums are supposed to be the first instrument you record according to all audio mixing books and gurus. So instead of just stagnating I came up with a new idea—record and arrange all my songs using scratch tracks, rough approximations of all the parts I want using midi instruments and some real audio, but with the right arrangements, structures, and tempo, so that Matt can just sit in with these pre-arranged tracks and drop in the drum parts when he has some free time in his day. This way he has a better feel for the song (because all the parts are there, even if in a shitty form) and I don’t have to wait for him to record drums to keep arranging. Moreover, this way I don’t have to be around when he is recording drums, which makes him nervous. Which makes anyone nervous. There nothing quite as intimidating as someone sitting outside the sound booth with headphones noticing every error or missed transition, especially when you are playing on their music.
But even with the new method in place I am overwhelmed by the amount of work that still lies in front of me. Fifteen songs (well, more like twelve now) to arrange with scratch tracks, re-record, and then re-arrange, mix, master. Whoa. That’s a lot of music, a lot of recording and rerecording. A lot of getting musicians together, a lot of parts to be notated, printed, distributed. On top of this we are still going strong with Adele and the Matts. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for last week’s show, we got a great little interview in the Fayetteville Freeweekly this week which makes us seem so legit. Check it out.
Still, Matt and I were talking about this yesterday over quesadillas before our second wedding gig of the year at Magnolia Botanical Garden’s in Springdale. Where can Adele and the Matts go? Maybe we should drop the trio idea and move into playing music from the album. Maybe we should just form a new band and use our opportunities for promotion to promote that—something that will actually have an album with it, could possibly have a future. We need to have a band powwow this week, before we are filmed for the local television series Front Row next week that features local northwest Arkansas musicians, to hash it out.
This week I am going to see St. Vincent and Andrew Bird play in Columbia, MO, and hopefully hopefully I will get to talk to Annie Clark in person. I interviewed her almost a year ago for my thesis, Chicks with Picks, and I really want to ask her some follow up questions, both about her role as a female artists as she gains more and more recognition and about her recording process. I saw an interview with her in which she described a process very similar to the strategy I outlined above, and I want to talk to her about it more in detail. But perhaps just a pipe dream. She might be too big at this point.
I am already getting down about not having any female musicians to collaborate with. Halley has been singing with us and I enjoy that a lot, and my hope is to start incorporating her more into the songwriting and arranging process. She doesn’t have a lot of confidence writing music, but I know that she has the capacity (she came up with some of the best vocal parts for Ancient Avenue) and I hope to draw it out of her more. Still, it would be nice to have a girl bass player or guitar play to work with as well. Lee Ellen, move back! There is just something different about the way I communicate with other female musicians that is missing with men. Maybe it’s because I’m not always wondering in the back of my mind if they are interested in me (though…I don’t really know why it makes a difference. But it seems to).
Well, to the scratch board now. Working on a new song called “The Parting” which has a really cool Ravel-inspired violin break in the middle. I notated the part out for the violin player who is going to work with me; turns out that there are seven parts. A violin septet for one player. Hmmmmm…..
At the beginning of the week I was feeling extremely frustrated because I felt handicapped by not having drum parts recorded. I felt that I couldn’t move forward if the drums weren’t recorded when the drums are supposed to be the first instrument you record according to all audio mixing books and gurus. So instead of just stagnating I came up with a new idea—record and arrange all my songs using scratch tracks, rough approximations of all the parts I want using midi instruments and some real audio, but with the right arrangements, structures, and tempo, so that Matt can just sit in with these pre-arranged tracks and drop in the drum parts when he has some free time in his day. This way he has a better feel for the song (because all the parts are there, even if in a shitty form) and I don’t have to wait for him to record drums to keep arranging. Moreover, this way I don’t have to be around when he is recording drums, which makes him nervous. Which makes anyone nervous. There nothing quite as intimidating as someone sitting outside the sound booth with headphones noticing every error or missed transition, especially when you are playing on their music.
But even with the new method in place I am overwhelmed by the amount of work that still lies in front of me. Fifteen songs (well, more like twelve now) to arrange with scratch tracks, re-record, and then re-arrange, mix, master. Whoa. That’s a lot of music, a lot of recording and rerecording. A lot of getting musicians together, a lot of parts to be notated, printed, distributed. On top of this we are still going strong with Adele and the Matts. Despite my lack of enthusiasm for last week’s show, we got a great little interview in the Fayetteville Freeweekly this week which makes us seem so legit. Check it out.
Still, Matt and I were talking about this yesterday over quesadillas before our second wedding gig of the year at Magnolia Botanical Garden’s in Springdale. Where can Adele and the Matts go? Maybe we should drop the trio idea and move into playing music from the album. Maybe we should just form a new band and use our opportunities for promotion to promote that—something that will actually have an album with it, could possibly have a future. We need to have a band powwow this week, before we are filmed for the local television series Front Row next week that features local northwest Arkansas musicians, to hash it out.
This week I am going to see St. Vincent and Andrew Bird play in Columbia, MO, and hopefully hopefully I will get to talk to Annie Clark in person. I interviewed her almost a year ago for my thesis, Chicks with Picks, and I really want to ask her some follow up questions, both about her role as a female artists as she gains more and more recognition and about her recording process. I saw an interview with her in which she described a process very similar to the strategy I outlined above, and I want to talk to her about it more in detail. But perhaps just a pipe dream. She might be too big at this point.
I am already getting down about not having any female musicians to collaborate with. Halley has been singing with us and I enjoy that a lot, and my hope is to start incorporating her more into the songwriting and arranging process. She doesn’t have a lot of confidence writing music, but I know that she has the capacity (she came up with some of the best vocal parts for Ancient Avenue) and I hope to draw it out of her more. Still, it would be nice to have a girl bass player or guitar play to work with as well. Lee Ellen, move back! There is just something different about the way I communicate with other female musicians that is missing with men. Maybe it’s because I’m not always wondering in the back of my mind if they are interested in me (though…I don’t really know why it makes a difference. But it seems to).
Well, to the scratch board now. Working on a new song called “The Parting” which has a really cool Ravel-inspired violin break in the middle. I notated the part out for the violin player who is going to work with me; turns out that there are seven parts. A violin septet for one player. Hmmmmm…..
Sunday, September 20, 2009
stuck in the pig sooie
We drive into central Arkansas as the herds of SUVs, donning red flags flapping in the wind like floppy ears and black and red tattoos, flock to Fayetteville for the mighty hog gathering. The coalescence of hog fans young and old, coming together to call them hogs with wooooooooo pig sooie and drink themselves silly and lament the loss of our forever failing team. I am with a caravan of musicians and musician’s girlfriends and we are heading to the lodge at Mt. Magazine, the highest point in Arkasnas, for a wedding. Our first gig as a new wedding band, ripping off the 60s Show set list from Matt Jone’s 60’s Soul Review I played in last summer. It’s a good-paying and steady gig for not very much effort—I think the song with the most chords is Two Step by Dave Matthews, which tells you something about the rest of the music.
The wedding itself was pretty unexceptional from a personal standpoint, but pretty intriguing from an anthropological one. It was a wham bam thank you ma’am ceremony, literally five minutes from front to back, in which the vows consisted of “I love you” and the preacher said “Um” at least half a dozen times. The rest was by the book—the protocol toast, cake-eating pictures, the band (us). There was no real collective excitement or energy, all just mandatory hoop-jumping. We started our set well but things went down hill quickly as the Razorback game got going and almost everyone there deserted us to go watch it on the big screen tv in the bar downstairs. Hogs over a live band, I mean, I really shouldn’t have expected otherwise.
The post-wedding festivities were what you might expect, with one salient exception. Arkansas still has dry counties, and Mt. Magazine happens to be in one of them. Dry county, you say? Yes, entire counties where it is illegal to buy and sell alcohol, except by permit in private clubs. So here we were, drinking and carousing in hotel rooms like fourteen-year-olds, sneaking from room to room so that the night cop wont catch us. It was a bit of a thrill, a return to that rule-breaking thirteen year old excitement, but not exactly how I want to party at a wedding.
But in general the gig seems promising. Good pay with quality free parties just about every other weekend. I also like the idea of being a fly on the wall at a variety of weddings I would never normally be invited to; just to refine my own preferences and to really get a feel for the ceremonial part of one of our most entrenched institutions.
Playing in this wedding gig is just one of the many activities in my life that is pulling my attention away from the album. I started working again at Arsaga’s, I am mentoring, continuing with my dance class, taking a dance class, doing physical training with a personal trainer, playing gigs with Adele an the Matts, reading with Jen and Halley and doing projects with Patrick. I have been thinking about my seemingly inexorable need to fill my life with activities, and my knee jerk reason so far has been that I believe that I am more productive when I am scheduled. Part of me feels that I will actually get more done on the album more quickly if I have definitive windows of time in which to work on it. Hopefully this mentality proves to be true, because so far I have been putting so much effort into setting up this structure in my life that I have been neglecting the album. The only significant work I’ve done since I last wrote was to record the drum parts to Evil Times multiple times, which we will have to do again because we changed the structure with the addition of more horn parts, and attempted to record piano parts. Unfortunately after recording these parts I realized that I really needed to test the piano mic set up, so I scratched those takes (which was already horrible and completely frustrating because it’s so damn hard to play!) and ran about twenty different mic tests, with different positions, levels, and caps. Now I finally have a mic set up for the baby grand that I really like, but unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to use it yet. This week the plan is to track the drums and piano for Ancient Avenue, Evil Times, and Palmetto. Then perhaps by Sunday we can get Matt Lewis in to record bass. Fingers crossed. The new goal for finishing capturing audio is the third week in November, which would give us about a month to mix and master and still get it done by Christmas. Like I said, fingers crossed, tightly. The real, no kidding deadline, of course, is March first. Hopefully we’ll find a happy medium between the two.
Friday’s show at Scarpino’s was a new performing low point for me. It was the first show I played where half way through I just didn’t want to continue. My whole body wanted to walk off stage and never perform again. Get up, walk out, fuck you, fuck everyone, I hate this. But of course, I couldn’t. I was glued to my bench, I kept playing, smiling, entertaining, counting, singing. It was really an out of body experience. And the reasons were many. I was pissed off at the band. We hadn’t rehearsed. I felt unprepared. The sound situation was extremely unsatisfactory, poor vocals, low piano, the drums were piercingly loud. People came late, left early. By the end I had a throbbing headache and all I could think was “who am I kidding wanting to be a music artist this obviously isn’t going anywhere and you are wasting your time and money on this album.” And why experience all this stress and anxiety?
Now I feel better. I remember my role models. The years and years of struggle Tori had, her first album, Y Kant Tori Read, which was a complete and total failure. I remember that I have a lot going for me. The time to do a project like this. The people who want to play with me. Gary and Jim played horns with us on Friday and Halley sang for next to nothing and it really sounded good despite our lack of decent rehearsal time. It all boils down to the larger dilemma: making good music takes an extremely huge amount of time and dedication and hard work and creativity, and there is very little promise of success. No certainty. It is times like this that I want to climb back into the cozy womb of academia and snuggle in. Back in the institution where hard work and brilliance is sure to pay off, with frequent pats on the back and applause from the people we pay to praise us. These are the times that I start to browse the websites for promising grad programs... “maybe I’ll just go right back to school when I get back from Peru...that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” School is my binky, my baby blanket, my mommy come hold me because I’m afraid of the real world.
We’ll see what happens.
The wedding itself was pretty unexceptional from a personal standpoint, but pretty intriguing from an anthropological one. It was a wham bam thank you ma’am ceremony, literally five minutes from front to back, in which the vows consisted of “I love you” and the preacher said “Um” at least half a dozen times. The rest was by the book—the protocol toast, cake-eating pictures, the band (us). There was no real collective excitement or energy, all just mandatory hoop-jumping. We started our set well but things went down hill quickly as the Razorback game got going and almost everyone there deserted us to go watch it on the big screen tv in the bar downstairs. Hogs over a live band, I mean, I really shouldn’t have expected otherwise.
The post-wedding festivities were what you might expect, with one salient exception. Arkansas still has dry counties, and Mt. Magazine happens to be in one of them. Dry county, you say? Yes, entire counties where it is illegal to buy and sell alcohol, except by permit in private clubs. So here we were, drinking and carousing in hotel rooms like fourteen-year-olds, sneaking from room to room so that the night cop wont catch us. It was a bit of a thrill, a return to that rule-breaking thirteen year old excitement, but not exactly how I want to party at a wedding.
But in general the gig seems promising. Good pay with quality free parties just about every other weekend. I also like the idea of being a fly on the wall at a variety of weddings I would never normally be invited to; just to refine my own preferences and to really get a feel for the ceremonial part of one of our most entrenched institutions.
Playing in this wedding gig is just one of the many activities in my life that is pulling my attention away from the album. I started working again at Arsaga’s, I am mentoring, continuing with my dance class, taking a dance class, doing physical training with a personal trainer, playing gigs with Adele an the Matts, reading with Jen and Halley and doing projects with Patrick. I have been thinking about my seemingly inexorable need to fill my life with activities, and my knee jerk reason so far has been that I believe that I am more productive when I am scheduled. Part of me feels that I will actually get more done on the album more quickly if I have definitive windows of time in which to work on it. Hopefully this mentality proves to be true, because so far I have been putting so much effort into setting up this structure in my life that I have been neglecting the album. The only significant work I’ve done since I last wrote was to record the drum parts to Evil Times multiple times, which we will have to do again because we changed the structure with the addition of more horn parts, and attempted to record piano parts. Unfortunately after recording these parts I realized that I really needed to test the piano mic set up, so I scratched those takes (which was already horrible and completely frustrating because it’s so damn hard to play!) and ran about twenty different mic tests, with different positions, levels, and caps. Now I finally have a mic set up for the baby grand that I really like, but unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to use it yet. This week the plan is to track the drums and piano for Ancient Avenue, Evil Times, and Palmetto. Then perhaps by Sunday we can get Matt Lewis in to record bass. Fingers crossed. The new goal for finishing capturing audio is the third week in November, which would give us about a month to mix and master and still get it done by Christmas. Like I said, fingers crossed, tightly. The real, no kidding deadline, of course, is March first. Hopefully we’ll find a happy medium between the two.
Friday’s show at Scarpino’s was a new performing low point for me. It was the first show I played where half way through I just didn’t want to continue. My whole body wanted to walk off stage and never perform again. Get up, walk out, fuck you, fuck everyone, I hate this. But of course, I couldn’t. I was glued to my bench, I kept playing, smiling, entertaining, counting, singing. It was really an out of body experience. And the reasons were many. I was pissed off at the band. We hadn’t rehearsed. I felt unprepared. The sound situation was extremely unsatisfactory, poor vocals, low piano, the drums were piercingly loud. People came late, left early. By the end I had a throbbing headache and all I could think was “who am I kidding wanting to be a music artist this obviously isn’t going anywhere and you are wasting your time and money on this album.” And why experience all this stress and anxiety?
Now I feel better. I remember my role models. The years and years of struggle Tori had, her first album, Y Kant Tori Read, which was a complete and total failure. I remember that I have a lot going for me. The time to do a project like this. The people who want to play with me. Gary and Jim played horns with us on Friday and Halley sang for next to nothing and it really sounded good despite our lack of decent rehearsal time. It all boils down to the larger dilemma: making good music takes an extremely huge amount of time and dedication and hard work and creativity, and there is very little promise of success. No certainty. It is times like this that I want to climb back into the cozy womb of academia and snuggle in. Back in the institution where hard work and brilliance is sure to pay off, with frequent pats on the back and applause from the people we pay to praise us. These are the times that I start to browse the websites for promising grad programs... “maybe I’ll just go right back to school when I get back from Peru...that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” School is my binky, my baby blanket, my mommy come hold me because I’m afraid of the real world.
We’ll see what happens.
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Stomach Drop
The studio is finally one hundred percent no kidding finished. The drum overhead mics, that last piece of equipment we were waiting on, arrived yesterday from Massachusetts where they had been catching beautiful frequencies in someone else’s home studio. They are a matched pair of Oktava condenser mics, with accompanying XLR cables, nice ones, and stands, and work especially well as drum overheads. We got an incredible deal on them on Ebay.
I was in California last weekend visiting my grandpa in Half Moon Bay, and while I was gone Matt took the opportunity to try out the studio and get a better feel for the equipment by recording another local artist, Michael Tisdale, who was looking for a three song demo to promote his stuff. So far the songs are coming out well and it is giving Matt a really good opportunity to familiarize himself with levels, which he is then diligently teaching me. At first I felt a little violated by these guys being in my studio, using my equipment, without me being there, and a little insecure about my male counterpart learning and experimenting and then teaching me second hand, but I am getting over it as part of the game of dividing labor, whatever gender you are. I am just making sure that I do in fact learn what he has learned, and don’t feel in the dark about any steps in the process.
Now that the studio is complete, I feel disoriented and insecure. It’s like we’ve reached the top of the roller coaster and now the bottom of my stomach has dropped out and I am petrified as the imminent drop off gets under way. Now I have all the tools for creation at my fingertips, I’ve spent a good chunk of my savings, and now all the pressure is on me to create. Here I am suspended, overwhelmed by technological capacity and opportunities and avenues and decisions. And with all this I have to create something GOOD. Not just sit down in front of Garageband and dick around until I find something catchy, but really create with all my mind and emotion and knowledge. Fuck!!! And it can be debilitating. Right now the hardest part is just getting started. Where do I start? At the piano? At the computer? In my room alone with a pad of paper and pencil? On Youtube watching other artists? With my iPod dancing around to Bjork in the park? All of the above? Ah, and then I can’t make a decision and I’ve already arrived at another obligation in the day and I have to stop working and I haven’t found that sweet spot—that moment of complete absorption in the creative process that sucks you in and alters your mind like a good drug.
Typically my method for moving forward in moments like this is just to work. Sit down and get to it. Set the timer, hang up some hand-crafted posters motivational posters on the wall that say something like “good ideas take a lot of hard work, don’t get down if they don’t come right away” and “action ameliorates anxiety” and “quit the guilt” and “you are not important, get over yourself” (I think those have all been on my wall at some point throughout the last four years). And I think this kind of method will work again, but of course this moment in time is couples with my whole life getting uprooted and changing and turning upside down, so I am starting to reconsider the old habits, the old methods of working, the old paradigms of motivation and achievement. So I can’t just sticky-tac up the good old slogans and put my nose to it. There is more resistance right now, and it stems from the underlying question: Why am I creating at all? Why do I feel the need to make music? To make this album? What are the real reasons?
And I have some trouble identifying the reasons. Part of it is that I feel some kind of obligation to the music I’ve created over the past few years, like I have a responsibility to capture it and do it justice, just for the sake of preservation, dissemination. I would feel like I had let so much work and creativity and community go if I didn’t do this. Then there is the personal desire, my own will to power, to have something solid and beautiful and marketable of my own creativity that I can seed out into the world and be recognized for. Then there is my desire to create that just comes from this underlying inexplicable desire to produce, just produce. I can’t necessarily pinpoint the origin of this feeling, but I’ve always had it. This inexorable drive towards projects.
And what about the audience? Do I think about them when I create or when I think about creating? Somewhat. My motto for many years has just been, “Make what you like and your audience will sort itself out.” And this is the motto I think I will stick to for the most part, but when you are embarking on a project of this scope, I think that it is also wise to think more carefully about your audience. Is there something you can do to entice them into your music, something that can ease the transition between what they know and like and what I do and make, even if it is slightly different?
The music I will make for this album fits within the broad category of popular music, and within that category I think that it fits in the genre of pop. But my music tends to push the boundaries of pop a little bit—strange lyrics, some odd chord progressions, unanticipated metrical and key changes. And this can alienate people. How do I bridge the gap then? I think the strategy is to have some pop songs that are just straightforwardly poppy, even if the lyrics deviate from the traditional topics—love, sex, love, sex, getting sad (about love and sex), hmmmm… fantasy? Getting pissed off? And then of course producing the music really well, which can make just about any song appealing (think Britney Spears, whose music is very well produced and very catchy as a result). So taking this idea, we are working on a new song called Fire Escape, which is actually an adaptation of a song I used to play with The Done For called The Wendy Bashant Blues, and which I had also arranged for full orchestra under the title Wu Wei when I was a third year at New College. The song is about a sex house on the edge of some unnamed town where the visitors participate in intense choreographed sadistic sex games for days at a time. Throughout the course of the song, though, the house catches on fire and everyone inside it, tied up and contorted, can’t escape and burns down in fiery orgasmic fantasy. The words deviate a bit from traditional pop topics, but the music itself is very catchy and straightforward and danceable. It still needs quite a bit of work, but I think this is one of those songs that can link the album to traditional norms of pop music.
I still feel a little more technically inept than Matt Todd, who seems to just have more interest in understanding the ins and outs of how things are working technically. My interest in these things comes, but only as I am trying to use them and not beforehand. The issue I am seeking to overcome right now is feeling like I can’t work without him, which is probably just a product of us collaborating so much recently. Today I hope to overcome this mental block and set to work on arrangements without him.
My new goal for releasing the album is around Christmas. This seems a little ambitious, but it would be so wise for marketing purposes that I am going to shoot for it.
Matt and I are on edge today because I am disappointing him by not participating in some plans we made a while ago. I am responsible for leading him to believe that I would be there today. Guilty? Who knows. I know that I woke up this morning with the overwhelming desire to be alone and to complete some projects that have been lingering. All I will say here is that the downs of all close relationships are inevitable.
This has put both of us out today, but I hope to get started on some of my lingering projects nevertheless and hopefully find some moments of flow.
On other fronts of my life, I taught my first free modern dance class at the yoga center yesterday and had five students of different levels, a good number I think for a first class. It was my first experience teaching a dance class and it proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Especially when the students are first learning routines, it is important for the teacher to do the movements with them, but repeating things while trying to teach and speak and be coherent is much more tiring than just taking a class and thinking about how the movement works. You really have to be firing on all cylinders, mental and physical.
I was in California last weekend visiting my grandpa in Half Moon Bay, and while I was gone Matt took the opportunity to try out the studio and get a better feel for the equipment by recording another local artist, Michael Tisdale, who was looking for a three song demo to promote his stuff. So far the songs are coming out well and it is giving Matt a really good opportunity to familiarize himself with levels, which he is then diligently teaching me. At first I felt a little violated by these guys being in my studio, using my equipment, without me being there, and a little insecure about my male counterpart learning and experimenting and then teaching me second hand, but I am getting over it as part of the game of dividing labor, whatever gender you are. I am just making sure that I do in fact learn what he has learned, and don’t feel in the dark about any steps in the process.
Now that the studio is complete, I feel disoriented and insecure. It’s like we’ve reached the top of the roller coaster and now the bottom of my stomach has dropped out and I am petrified as the imminent drop off gets under way. Now I have all the tools for creation at my fingertips, I’ve spent a good chunk of my savings, and now all the pressure is on me to create. Here I am suspended, overwhelmed by technological capacity and opportunities and avenues and decisions. And with all this I have to create something GOOD. Not just sit down in front of Garageband and dick around until I find something catchy, but really create with all my mind and emotion and knowledge. Fuck!!! And it can be debilitating. Right now the hardest part is just getting started. Where do I start? At the piano? At the computer? In my room alone with a pad of paper and pencil? On Youtube watching other artists? With my iPod dancing around to Bjork in the park? All of the above? Ah, and then I can’t make a decision and I’ve already arrived at another obligation in the day and I have to stop working and I haven’t found that sweet spot—that moment of complete absorption in the creative process that sucks you in and alters your mind like a good drug.
Typically my method for moving forward in moments like this is just to work. Sit down and get to it. Set the timer, hang up some hand-crafted posters motivational posters on the wall that say something like “good ideas take a lot of hard work, don’t get down if they don’t come right away” and “action ameliorates anxiety” and “quit the guilt” and “you are not important, get over yourself” (I think those have all been on my wall at some point throughout the last four years). And I think this kind of method will work again, but of course this moment in time is couples with my whole life getting uprooted and changing and turning upside down, so I am starting to reconsider the old habits, the old methods of working, the old paradigms of motivation and achievement. So I can’t just sticky-tac up the good old slogans and put my nose to it. There is more resistance right now, and it stems from the underlying question: Why am I creating at all? Why do I feel the need to make music? To make this album? What are the real reasons?
And I have some trouble identifying the reasons. Part of it is that I feel some kind of obligation to the music I’ve created over the past few years, like I have a responsibility to capture it and do it justice, just for the sake of preservation, dissemination. I would feel like I had let so much work and creativity and community go if I didn’t do this. Then there is the personal desire, my own will to power, to have something solid and beautiful and marketable of my own creativity that I can seed out into the world and be recognized for. Then there is my desire to create that just comes from this underlying inexplicable desire to produce, just produce. I can’t necessarily pinpoint the origin of this feeling, but I’ve always had it. This inexorable drive towards projects.
And what about the audience? Do I think about them when I create or when I think about creating? Somewhat. My motto for many years has just been, “Make what you like and your audience will sort itself out.” And this is the motto I think I will stick to for the most part, but when you are embarking on a project of this scope, I think that it is also wise to think more carefully about your audience. Is there something you can do to entice them into your music, something that can ease the transition between what they know and like and what I do and make, even if it is slightly different?
The music I will make for this album fits within the broad category of popular music, and within that category I think that it fits in the genre of pop. But my music tends to push the boundaries of pop a little bit—strange lyrics, some odd chord progressions, unanticipated metrical and key changes. And this can alienate people. How do I bridge the gap then? I think the strategy is to have some pop songs that are just straightforwardly poppy, even if the lyrics deviate from the traditional topics—love, sex, love, sex, getting sad (about love and sex), hmmmm… fantasy? Getting pissed off? And then of course producing the music really well, which can make just about any song appealing (think Britney Spears, whose music is very well produced and very catchy as a result). So taking this idea, we are working on a new song called Fire Escape, which is actually an adaptation of a song I used to play with The Done For called The Wendy Bashant Blues, and which I had also arranged for full orchestra under the title Wu Wei when I was a third year at New College. The song is about a sex house on the edge of some unnamed town where the visitors participate in intense choreographed sadistic sex games for days at a time. Throughout the course of the song, though, the house catches on fire and everyone inside it, tied up and contorted, can’t escape and burns down in fiery orgasmic fantasy. The words deviate a bit from traditional pop topics, but the music itself is very catchy and straightforward and danceable. It still needs quite a bit of work, but I think this is one of those songs that can link the album to traditional norms of pop music.
I still feel a little more technically inept than Matt Todd, who seems to just have more interest in understanding the ins and outs of how things are working technically. My interest in these things comes, but only as I am trying to use them and not beforehand. The issue I am seeking to overcome right now is feeling like I can’t work without him, which is probably just a product of us collaborating so much recently. Today I hope to overcome this mental block and set to work on arrangements without him.
My new goal for releasing the album is around Christmas. This seems a little ambitious, but it would be so wise for marketing purposes that I am going to shoot for it.
Matt and I are on edge today because I am disappointing him by not participating in some plans we made a while ago. I am responsible for leading him to believe that I would be there today. Guilty? Who knows. I know that I woke up this morning with the overwhelming desire to be alone and to complete some projects that have been lingering. All I will say here is that the downs of all close relationships are inevitable.
This has put both of us out today, but I hope to get started on some of my lingering projects nevertheless and hopefully find some moments of flow.
On other fronts of my life, I taught my first free modern dance class at the yoga center yesterday and had five students of different levels, a good number I think for a first class. It was my first experience teaching a dance class and it proved to be more difficult than I had anticipated. Especially when the students are first learning routines, it is important for the teacher to do the movements with them, but repeating things while trying to teach and speak and be coherent is much more tiring than just taking a class and thinking about how the movement works. You really have to be firing on all cylinders, mental and physical.
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