Fin

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.

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...