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.
