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...
