Keith Handy 1.999

Commenting

Recently someone told me in an email that they weren’t sure how to leave comments on this blog. I’d been wondering if the theme was confusing anyone; it may seem obvious to us blogosphere addicts, but for the rest of the world (say, for example, my mum), I think I need to make an adjustment to the theme soon. Edit 11:46 PM: Done.

In the meantime, if you’re among the confused, the number next to the title is how many comments there are, and clicking on it will take you to them.

I also think I should create a separate web presence, for people who might like my work, but aren’t necessarily interested in the mental process behind every eighth note. I’m not sure what that would be like, but now that you know how to leave a comment, you can share your ideas with me.

Quick plea to performing songwriters

If you perform covers and originals, please stop actually using the word “originals” (I have to work on this too). It attaches a stigma to your music. Present your music with the presumption of legitimacy that it deserves. Try this: at your show, don’t even tell them which songs are which. The focus is on performance, not songwriting. If someone asks about a particular song, “I wrote that” or “George wrote that” works fine. But in the energy and atmosphere of a live show, the experience will blur all the material into one overall vibe for most people; people don’t really latch onto songwriting until they’ve heard something a few times in their home or car.

Also, stop using the phrases “shameless plug” and/or “shameless self-promotion”. They were self-effacingly funny the first few times, but now that they’re commonplace, they come off like a desperate, passive aggressive sales pitch. Furthermore, it’s like starting sentences with with “I would just like to say that…”; they’re extra words that add no value for anybody. The DJ on the radio isn’t “shamelessly plugging” Black Sabbath. He just says “here’s Black Sabbath” and puts it on. Just say what needs to be said — “we’re blahblahblah, we’re at blahblahblah.com, our CD is over there (or better yet, refer to it by title instead of “our CD”), thanks for coming” — and trim off the fat.

Trust that your music has value of its own, independent of your salesmanship. It’s okay to be polite and show appreciation to your listeners, but there’s no need to reinforce the notion that your music is on a “lower rung” by repeatedly reminding the audience that you really really hope they’ll go to your website, and oh gosh you’d be so grateful if they’d please consider buying a CD because it’s so cheap.

Please copy the above plea and pass it along. Let’s all stop acting like wussies and present our music with the simple confidence it deserves.

I have a small audience, but I prepare for a large audience. I produce my recordings as if people will be picking apart at every detail and appreciating the extra care I put into them. I write posts assuming that people are interested. (Sometimes I’m okay with the small numbers and have more difficulty with the delay between creation and feedback — but of course larger numbers would shorten that delay.) Occasionally I have mini-breakdowns where I cry, throw fits, and question the worth of my existence, but then I get back on the horse and keep riding.

Validation is addictive, but not instructive. Commercially successful artists like to thank their audience for supposedly “making them what they are”, but the fact is, the audience didn’t pick out the chords or fuss over the lyrics. That has to be done alone, by the artist, in a void where he has no immediate feedback from anywhere but his gut, no matter how big of a star he is. Start making peace with that now, because although you say you’d love to be in a situation where your worst failure was going from an album selling 4 million copies to an album selling only 400,000 copies, that’s rejection by 3,600,000 fans. I haven’t experienced that, but it probably stings a bit.

You’re always going to be likening yourself to someone and differentiating yourself from someone else, so please, for all of us, help to rotate the line of differentiation so that it doesn’t fall squarely between independent and signed artists. So they have stars on their bellies and you don’t. Big deal. You’re not as different from them as you think you are, so stop playing up your “indieness” and just focus on being kickass.

(Dismounting soapbox and nodding politely to scattered applause)

More final hour lyric tweaking

In case you ever have a need for it, I just downloaded Finale Notepad 2008 to make that little sheet music sketch in the middle. It’s free. I usually only use notation to sketch out bits that deviate a little from the rest of the song or get a little fancy. I was going to write a little more about it, but I started feeling angry just thinking about it. I’ve heard one too many hostile, pro-ignorance arguments and statements, almost to the point of making me feel like I have to apologize for knowing how to read, and I think it’s a sad reflection on our society. Granted, most of the music I listen to is by people who don’t know how to read, but in those cases there’s usually a George Martin, or a Ron Geesin, or a Michael Kamen…

(If you’re one of the people who read this blog, you’re not one of the people I’m angry at, don’t worry.)

So you want to make an album? (part 24)

Where’s installment #23? As of now, it’s a draft with just a title. But suddenly I’m on a roll with this one, which I think would make for a good closing chapter in the book.

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 24: In soviet Russia… so your album wants to make YOU?

I have a lot of respect for the mind, the ego, and humans as individuals, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend either shutting off your mental faculties or belittling yourself while trying to produce an entire album. But as I’ve hinted at throughout this series, it’s important to differentiate between the work of your ego (important as that is), and the valuable contributions from the mysterious “everything else that is”. You could be the best surfer in California, but good luck telling the waves when to roll in. Likewise, when the inspiration hits you to make an album, you can accept or reject the challenge, but you are not the challenger.

A lot of insight can come from simple reversals of perspective. We do it with our pets all the time. We say our cats own us. This isn’t a lie, it’s just a different way of seeing something. In a similar way, as recording artists, or as artists of any kind, it’s good once in a while to remember that our music and art is creating us. (And when we release an album, it’s really releasing us.)

Try as hard as you like to skip past the awkwardness of “first album syndrome” — nobody ever has, and nobody ever will. It doesn’t mean you suck, or even that the album sucks (not totally, anyway). But it will look, sound, and most importantly, smell like a first album. The more you fight this, the more it will fight you.

So the question is not, “are you going to make that particular album?” — the question is, are you going to become a person who makes albums? Because what that first album will achieve, what it will succeed at, is re-shaping you. If you’re starting out, that’s not what you want to hear, and it’s not what I wanted to hear, and as I wasn’t willing to listen, why should you be willing either? I admire and identify with your determination, but ultimately, tough tapioca.

Oh, it will have its bits here and there where it transcends its own naïvety. Heck, if you pound your head against the studio wall enough times, you very well may increase the number of moments in which it achives such transcendent heights during its 40 to 55 minute debut. Sure, Led Zeppelin had a strong first album, but Jimmy Page was in a band before that and had plenty of session experience. It’s all ongoing. This obsession with The Album sometimes tends to make us forget we’ve been “creating” since birth and possibly before that, and the only distinction is that we’re now establishing a frame to better define our current creations. We’re saying, of what we’d be creating anyway, this is the first song, this is the last song, and these are the songs between them.

Yet even if you have plenty of experience writing or playing, the seemingly simple act of establishing that frame for the first time will throw a shiny new wrench into every aspect of your creative process. It’s like you and your muse were a happy husband and wife, and suddenly the recording studio is your high-maintenance mother in law who has just decided to move in. The dynamic suddenly shifts, and everything needs to be re-balanced.

If it makes you any less apprehensive, remember, you can always rewrite, er, uh, reframe history later. The earliest album of mine that I would even consider re-releasing in its original form — or rather, “consider being re-released by” (don’t forget to play with those perspectives) — was one that I finished in 1996. So from an outside perspective, that album will look and smell like a first album, and it does have its particular “firstness” to it. But, I finished one in 1993, so that should be considered my first, right? But, but, but, I was in a band that pretty much recorded a whole album in 1989, so that would be my first… right? But no, I was doing whole albums on portastudios and pairs of ordinary cassette decks before I even started highschool, and even drawing detailed cover art for them… so what is “first”? “First” is what you say it is. You don’t designate a blank space, and then suddenly create stuff out of thin air to fill that space — you create raw material just by being yourself, and then one day you decide to actually make a point of collecting, preserving, beautifying, and assigning track numbers to whatever is coming out of you, so that someone else in the world might benefit from it.

Okay, so the bad news is, your first album is going to have some of the tell-tale characteristics of a first album. It won’t truly reflect your unique style as well as something a few albums later would, once you’ve gained some momentum and a matured sense of intuition about the process. Once you hear it from the perspective of someone who no longer has the power (or motivation) to change it, the album may seem embarrassingly ambitious, lacking in subtlety, or just plain confused about what it’s supposed to be.

The good news is, every creative thing you ever do has a sort of “life of its own”, so you should try to look at it as an observer, saying, “that’s interesting”, instead of, “I suck”. In general, first albums are more valuable to long term appreciators and other artists than to the unsuspecting general public. They tell the first chapter of a great story about how you eventually developed the sound and style of your masterpiece (your sixth or seventh album). And they empower you, the artist, to continue creating without fear.

Embrace this weird passion that has entered your life. The heavens hath assigned to you and entrusted you with your first album project. Like your first car, it’s a wonderful, clunky “winter beater” with a fresh paint job; and though you may graduate to nicer and nicer cars as you go, you will never take this large a leap again.

This is where, if this were the last chapter of the book, I would just end it with “So… you want to make an album?” — but I don’t wanna get all teary-eyed here, because it’s a blog, not a book. Alright, I admit, I’ve got a little moisture in the edges of the eyes, but I swear, it’s just allergies or something. If I put this out as a book (and I probably have a few more middle parts to wedge in), it’s pretty much my “winter beater with a fresh paint job” in the literary world. Which is cool, because, hey. I don’t know what I’m typing anymore. Okay, over and out.

Rival Big Bang: sorting out the pile

As I sort out my pile of lyrical ideas for Rival Big Bang (which I have twice as many words as I need for, not counting new bits I’m coming up with to link stuff together), I feel like I’m sitting across from a nice, friendly, counselor-type person, who is telling me: “there’s no right or wrong way to do this. Follow your instincts. You don’t need to perform great feats of internal rhyme, or acrobatics of alliteration; just get the general message across and the music will carry it.”

Notice, of course, that when she says “acrobatics of alliteration”, she is obviously taunting me in an ironic way.

Update 12:24 AM: Okay, it has a shape to it now. Still has gaps and placeholders, but seriously, it was like alphabet soup before.

Update 10/27: I think this is basically it. Feel free to snicker at the crossed-out garbage that bit by bit got shoved to the bottom. Also feel free to snicker at the stuff that’s not crossed out, because without the dark-ish music, they might seem hokey. I don’t really expect any of my lyrics to stand on their own as pure poetry.

This will be the last song on the album. The lyrics only run half the length of the song, and then it goes on instrumentally. It clocks in at 4:20. Dude.

Quick note on aural fatigue

I’m writing this one quickly, on my way out the door, so forgive my lapse in quality control.

Last night I was up late working on a song. I was adding overdubs to it. Lemme clarify something about aural fatigue: you don’t necessarily lose all your ability to function when it’s setting in. You can still work. You might be on a roll with putting stuff down, and that’s great. What you are in danger of doing, is over-fiddling with mixing related stuff, because you’ll be a little lost regarding how present or clear something should be.

Like, last night, I had mixed feelings about this organ track I was doing. It had an excitement to it, but I felt like it was drawing attention away from the spirit of the music underneath it. “This is cool, but did I really want to go this direction?”

Today, it was much easier to put it in context. The very end of this organ part was really cool, have that up front in the mix, but have it a little quieter before it gets to that. And I immediately knew a couple things like this orchestra bell thing could start later, but also be louder, so it was okay for it to be “noticeable”, because by that far into it you’ll be starting to get bored of what’s going on up to that point, and need to hear a new instrument come in.

So the kind of creative work you can do while your ears are fatigued, is that you can play around with crazy-ish ideas (i.e. tossing things in to see how they sound, in the spirit of “playing” in the “what children do” definition of the word), but then give yourself the next day to decide how much of them to keep and how prominent in the mix they should be. Before you fire it back up, paint a mental picture of what it should sound like.

Also remember that when you’re fatigued, you might think a special effect makes something sound better, because you were getting sick of it the way it was, but leave yourself the opportunity to switch the effect off, or only use it on a certain part of a track.

Gotta go. Will reduce this pile of words to its essential point later.