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…..

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.

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.