The Light of Day

So you want to make an album? (part 24)
KeithHandy posted in Personal Favorites, Producing, So You Want..., Your Soul on October 27th, 2007

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.