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.
