The Light of Day

Happy 7/4!

Wow, the internet is dead today. But I guess that’s to be expected, since most of the blogs I read are by Americans, and today is the day we’re all out celebrating our liberation from those silly British folks, what with their nasty teeth and quaint figures of speech.

This is only “pretend sarcasm”, of course, since the American Revolution is one of the historical events that I actually feel happy about (with my relatively limited “just enough to get through school” awareness of history). But it would be funny if we were actually thinking about England at all during this celebration, since they’re the ones that should be liberating themselves from us. We, on the other hand, need to focus on liberating ourselves from something else: oil.

It’s a serious, hard-core, textbook example of addiction. I’ve heard projections of gasoline reaching $7.00/gallon by the end of the year. And what are people going to do? Are they going to actually reduce their driving, or are they going to consider it a necessity to continue to travel the same number of miles regardless of how little sense it makes? Do they understand that this is the equivalent of everyone in the world getting a pay cut?

It isn’t just that individuals can’t afford it — society can’t afford it. Those of you at the top, enjoy your priveleged position while it lasts. When your billion dollar business is suddenly splitting at the seams because your minimum-wage slaves can’t even make it to work anymore, maybe you’ll start to realize this is your problem too. Sure, you’ve got enough stashed away to afford the gas, but unfortunately the truck drivers couldn’t afford to keep hauling it to a station anywhere near you. Have fun with your “money” now. (Even if we get let off relatively easy, my take on it will be cynical; financial analysts have complex mathematical models to determine the optimum number of lives a CEO can ruin without ruining his own.)

We can each try to restore normality for ourselves in the short run by raising our own prices, but everyone else will have the same “solution”, forcing us to raise ours again, escalating the game of “economic chicken”, until we eventually realize that everyone has always been interdependent, and acknowledge that such a short-sighted remedy isn’t a solution at all. We have to smash the needle. We have to go cold turkey.

But how can we have a “wealthy” lifestyle without a car? That’s one of the fundamental, defining symbols of wealth: having a fabulous new car and driving it around everywhere. We’re so blinded by the addiction that we can’t see past this. What’s the point of having more money if we don’t have the wheels to prove it?

I’ve heard that if a frog is tossed into a boiling pot of water, he will jump out and survive; but if he is put into a pot of room-temperature water, and gradually heated to a boiling point, he will stay in it and die. Shame on the experimenters for being such pricks to the frogs, but take heed of the message: if we weren’t already addicted to our cars, and a salesman came along and pitched to us the idea of paying $25,000 for a car, plus another $10,000 in interest, plus $2000 for a warranty, plus $500 to $1000 per year for insurance, plus $40 a year for state registration, plus $20 a year for state inspection, plus any cost of repairs (most of which aren’t covered by the so-called “warranty” — generally $500 for anything important), plus the cost of oil changes and tune-ups every few thousand miles, plus tickets and surcharges for driving too fast or parking in the wrong spot, plus tolls for the expressways, plus quarters for the parking meters… plus, soon, $7.00 for each gallon of gasoline… we would laugh in the salesman’s face and say, “uh, thanks for the ‘offer’, but there’s no fucking way I’m going to bleed money out my ass just to zoom around in some big hunk of metal”. But, because the frog is already in the pot, we’ll take that five-degree temperature increase, and the trickle of blood has somehow become a fountain, and now we’re asking how we wound up on life support.

This isn’t going to go on forever, because some of us are a little smarter than frogs. God bless the early adopters, those of you who make any kind of changes in the right direction, be it tiny cars, hybrid cars, electric cars, hydrogen cars, hypermiling, car-pooling, biking, vacationing at home, moving closer to work, and/or getting a job closer to home. Some people will laugh at you, at first. Then they will copy you. Then they will mark some day on the calendar to remember you, and how you started the ball rolling that got us out of this mess. You, my friends, are the true Americans… even if you’re not American.

Peace and happy 4th!!!

(Ooh, animated GIF… those were the days… of course, if you’re like me, you don’t see it, because your browser rightfully put the animation out of its misery long before you finished reading the post. In that case, you’ll just have to reload the page and boost my Google Analytics stats, I guess.)

Quick note on racism

I just left a YouTube comment that I’d like to repost.

The video was an edit of some short clips from cartoons depicting racial stereotypes, or at least animals where “you can tell what color they’re supposed to be”. Having myself already seen some brow-raising doozies from the 1930s, most of the examples in this one were ridiculously tame, and certainly not hateful (example: the crows in Dumbo). Yet commenters (as usual) managed to run the gamut from “this is horrifyingly offensive” to “I wish all you f***ing n*****s were dead”.

Since I realize that leaving any kind of carefully-constructed comment in the middle of all that is like tossing a baby into a pack of wolves, I’ve decided to preserve a copy of it here for anyone who might actually slow down and think about it.

The problem is that “racism” is such a broadly defined word — covering everything from unconscious stereotyping to organized hatred — that if you look hard enough for it in your own bellybutton you’ll find it there.

If you break it down, hatred is clearly worse and more serious than stereotyping. As long as we don’t hate, we can work out the stereotyping crap.

That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say. Hatred: bad. Stereotyping: not great, but not enemy number one either.

Stop lumping them together, and your opponent’s argument will lose its fuel. Heck, you may even become friends.

(But where’s the fun in that, right?)

My problem with “sucks”

A quick rant to a group of people that aren’t reading this anyway:

When you hang out with a group of people, physically or virtually, and you finally realize what it is about the group that bothers you, good luck expressing or resolving it. Maybe it was impossible to understand from your perspective, but I’m completely serious when I say I can’t carry on a conversation with people that use the word “sucks” as often as you. It’s not a language issue, it’s a “way of looking at life” issue. If you’re sitting in a studio, trying to record a guitar part, and you botch up take 7 and say “that sucked”, that’s fine. But if you swing the word “sucks” around like a machine gun to wipe out entire songs, albums, and artists who actually put some effort into their work, without you putting any effort into explaining why, or even having the humility to acknowledge that your opinion is subjective, it only makes your armchair righteousness look all the more pathetic.

In short, if you haven’t tried to cut your own, then none of us give a shit what you think of ours. People who have tried, appreciate what other artists do even at their low points — not in blind worship, but out of respect for the guts it takes to keep going when you’re not sure where you’re going. (Maybe this doesn’t occur to you from the comfort of your computer chair, but there are no blueprints for this stuff, people; anybody who does know where they’re going, isn’t being creative.)

Some of you have very openly admitted (boasted?) that you have no desire to leave any mark on the world beyond the butt-shaped indentation on your couch, because you’re “not going to be here after you die anyway”. The same lot of you is struggling with depression. Have you considered that maybe if you did care about your impact in the world, your time on this planet might be more fulfilling, and, oh, I don’t know, happier?

Here is what I will concede. You and I are in a room. A song is playing. I don’t like the song. You do like the song. Instead of me saying, “you are wrong, the song sucks, you should learn to hate it”, I will admit that I am the one who isn’t appreciating it, and that your experience is genuine, and it’s too bad I’m not “there” with you. I can tell you how I’m perceiving the song, what I associate it with, what bugs, irritates, drives me nuts about it, and what I would do differently if it were my song — but I have no right to imply that you should be ashamed to like it. I will instead acknowledge that the song clashes with the way I see and hear life, I have a weak connection with or relationship to it, and it isn’t a good fit for the wavelength I’m on. (In general, I find that experienced musicians are more likely than naïve musicians or non-musicians to treat other people’s opinions with this kind of respect.)

Here is how 99% of the internet apparently understands subjectivity:

1. Your opinion is subjective.
2. My opinion is objective.

We could go so much farther as a global community of music and art appreciators if more of us had the motivation to grow past that mindset… and by “so much farther”, I mean not stuck in this one stupid pile of mud day in and day out.

Those of you who get what I’m saying, no need to pass the rant itself around; just try to set a good example. Maybe it will rub off on a few people here and there.

Does that make me crazy? Possibly.

“Crazy”, when used to describe someone’s mental state, is not a nice or modern term. But that aside, what does it mean? Can I say I was leaning farther that way than usual during a period roughly between 1990 and 1992? That’s what I tend to do, though I try to frame it with more compassionate words like “going through a rough time”. But what would it actually mean?

I know there are experts on psychology who discuss this in further depth than I’m able to, but let me toss out some definitions off the top of my head.

It would seem that I couldn’t claim insanity outright, because I’ve always had a well-developed sense of logic and reason. I didn’t take a course in statistics and probability, but I get the gist. (I’m not “crazy” enough to buy lottery tickets.) I know how to be critical of my own thoughts.

However, there are people with highly developed logical constructs of their own who manage to come up with terrifying conclusions, and can explain in elaborate detail why the muppets are communicating to them through controlled cloud formations that the FBI is reading their thoughts through stool samples collected at public bathrooms (unless they drink enough vinegar to scramble the data).

So this means “a sense of logic” isn’t good enough; we now have to distinguish between good logic and “crazy” logic. Each time I think of a way to differentiate between the two, I find myself coming up with notable exceptions. For example, favoring a majority viewpoint over a fringe belief, in which case we’d be discrediting the likes of Galileo and other pioneers.

Then I suppose I could try another defining factor: happiness (or lack thereof). If you’re happy, and at peace, can you technically be crazy? Even if you have beliefs which turn out not to be true, or logic with some holes in it? And it’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, which is what a lot of unhappy people do.

How about a total inability to communicate? If a person refuses to truly listen to anything you try to explain to them, and continues to repeat and reinforce a viewpoint that you’ve already explained away, you’re more likely to chalk them up as “not well” than if they said, “that’s an interesting point. I’ll have to think about that”.

Or how about lack of humor — inability to laugh from the belly, or to acknowledge absurdity? Or never asking questions, only ever making statements, as if you are The One with the knowledge? Or placing a high priority on some obsession of yours that ultimately has little effect on anyone, while disregarding the things that really matter?

Maybe insanity is one of those concepts that you can’t define by any one thing, but… well, think of an object with three elastic strings attached to it, and three people standing around it in a circle, suspending the object above the ground by each holding their own string taut in one direction. No one person is dictating the position of the object. If any one person moves from side to side, or increases or decreases his tension, the object will move, but it’s still dependent on all three people. Maybe sanity is similarly the sum result of several forces/factors pulling in a variety of directions.

A bleak moment before the creative storm (December 1990).

The way I felt (and feel) about music I was working on between 1990 and 1992 is mixed. Not just the usual “mixed”, but mixed with extremes at both ends. The extreme positive about it is that I had the will, ambition, focus, and commitment to get serious, take the wheel, liberate my muse from a dependence on bandmates, and try to ascend from “demo” level to “album” level on a limited budget without anyone’s help. I admire the Keith of that time for that. But I ache for how serious and important this was to him, to the point where he couldn’t just go off and have a bit of fun between sessions. It was like a religious mission. Hell, it was a religious mission. It was too important.

This is the backing track from Dear Diary (1991/92), without vocals. I wish I could listen to this and just think “that’s pretty neat, in a slightly embarrassingly dated way”, but there are too many emotional associations.

(Incidentally, this is when I was “born” as a guitarist. I wasn’t comfortable with it yet — improvising was clearly out of the question, although I tried once or twice — and I had to hunch over the guitar and stare closely at the frets to get the notes right.)

One thing I notice about people who exhibit various character flaws is that they’re often trying to compensate for something they perceive to be the exact opposite. My determination to rigidly control every aspect of the Open The Window album was a reaction to my feeling a greater loss of control over my life… and to a lesser extent, an uphill fight against the maddeningly convoluted digital ping-ponging technique I imposed on myself, for the wrong reasons. Any time I go back to one of these mixes it brings back the overwhelm and the futility. (Lesson: what you put in is what you get out.)

That said, it was shortly after the millionth re-EQ’ing of these nine overworked songs that I began the slow and clunky journey towards getting over myself (somewhat, that is… so, okay, it’s a never ending journey, and I’m fine with that)… so, it all ends with a light at the end of the tunnel.

Apparently, though, I felt like I had to stay in the tunnel until it was done.

Stuff that’s not so great (quick thought)

I don’t think of myself as having “good stuff” and “bad stuff” — I think of myself as having “good stuff” and “experimental stuff”. The good stuff is, well, good, and that’s wonderful. Calling the other stuff “experimental”… I don’t mean to get all pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, or imply that it’s all on the cutting edge and you’re just too bourgeois to understand it… but simply to have the attitude that it’s potentially good, or at least potentially interesting, or at least potentially good or interesting in some context down the road.

And it’s stuff that I can play around with, without worrying that I’d be ruining something.

Yes, I do have a wastebasket. But I think our culture is disposable enough already.

How low tech can be cutting edge

Excuse my, uh, “calligraphy” for a moment.

Ow, ow, ow. *shakes wrists*

I just don’t have the endurance for that anymore.

Anyway, the point isn’t that I have any desire to do a handwritten blog, and I will likely never do that again. But think about how strange it is that we get sentimental for “low tech” or “old tech” things, how there’s always a “golden age” to look back to. But none of that old stuff ceases to exist, or even ceases to be available. If you really want to shoot a movie on 8mm film, you can, though it’ll be a little pricey to get the film and develop it. Not prohibitively, though, if you really want to. Key words there: really want to. The only thing we’re ever truly being sentimental for is the lack of an excuse to be lazy. The fact that we’ve paved all these shortcuts doesn’t mean the shortcut is the only — or best — way.

But what truly makes “low tech” interesting now, is that we’re in this higher tech environment. You can not only shoot 8mm film, if you really want — but you could, if you really want, shoot 8mm film of a person sitting in a Starbucks with a laptop computer, wearing a Trogdor t-shirt. Which you could never do when 8mm was actually a sensible way of preserving memories.

Today, we can run a Mellotron through Autotune. We can sample a cassette. All these things we can do, but just don’t think of doing, because we’ve convinced ourselves that all our old toys have been replaced with new toys. Guess what? All your toys are still there; they may have moved to a higher (more expensive) shelf that you’ll need to climb a little (or get mummy to help) in order to get them down, but they’re still there. You have a shitload of toys. Do you realize how much “play potential” you have afore ye now? Do that “relationship” math again. Five toys is ten potential combinations, six toys is fifteen… and that’s only counting pairs of toys.

Tip: do “relationship math” in your head:
Take the number of people in the room, and imagine that number on the left.
Subtract one, and put the new number on the right. (If 7 is on the left, 6 is on the right.)
Whichever number is even, cut it in half. (Cut that 6 down to a 3.)
Multiply the left number by the right number, and you’re done! (7 x 3 = 21 relationships.)

It’s like this: there you were, in 1980, or 1985 or whatever, saying, “okay, if only I had this and this and this”, and now you’re waking from a deep freeze, realizing, hey, I have this and this and this!! All you’ve lost track of is why you wanted it. Once you remember, you’re all set!

Anyway, there’s a reason I wrote all this. Ask me to elaborate later, and I will. Ask me not to elaborate later, and I will anyway, just to spite you.

What Do You Think Of Yourself?: new vocal

First, enjoy the session, ’cause I think it went pretty well…

It’s actually a lot easier than my Rival Big Bang sessions were, because it has a definite and more structured melody. The part between approximately 4:00 to 5:00 is a little empty, though, and rather than featuring me half-heartedly ad-libbing, I want to fill it in with something like gospel singers. I just emailed Paul Gaspar to see if he knows any.

I’ve only been saving my session videos as 320 by 240 MPEGs — better looking than what you see on YouTube, but still small — because the videos themselves aren’t meant to be works of art. That said, I’d still like to incorporate parts of them into more formal “music video” videos. There’s stuff you can do to low-res images to make them… not necessarily look hi-res, but at least look better when blown up.

You’re full of shit…

…so cut the shit!

“Well, I never!”, I can hear you say in gasping, blushing, brow-raised disgust, shielding your upper chest with the spread fingers of one shaky hand. Okay, okay. Lemme clarify. We’re all full of shit. Ah, that’s better, isn’t it?

See, I just filmed this short video blog, and — well, what I really did was just turned the camera on, and left it on for hours, until I finally had something to say. I initially shot and discarded over an hour of myself lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, sort of playing guitar along to music I didn’t know, out of tune, beating rhythms on my stomach, coughing, blowing my nose, and occasionally making the valiant attempt to speak to the camera. And when I finally felt I had said something worthwhile, and watched it back, I was disgusted by all the crap I said leading up to it.

“Oh, actually, I already know I’m full of shit”, I can hear some of you say. “I mean, I have a day job, and/or some difficult relatives, I sometimes have to interact with people I don’t like, it’s just part of life.” BZZZT. No, that’s not what I’m talking about. That’s the easy part.

I’m talking about being full of shit when you’re in your element. It’s the most pervasive part of your affliction — the shit that you don’t smell anymore, because unlike the masks you sometimes put on and take off, this is running through your heart, mind, and soul, all day and night.

It’s easier to see it in other people than in ourselves. Let’s pick on an easy example: someone who devotes his personal education and career to being an expert on finance. To me, he’s obviously doing one long and meaningless dance around something that, in the end, is a.) is going to all whittle down to one barely-interesting little number at the bottom of a sheet of paper, and b.) is going to be distributed among his survivors (whose love for him was always genuine, of course) because he’ll be too busy feeding the subterranean ecology to spend it on anything meaningful.

Okay, so, speck in one eye, board in the other, what about all the crap that I ramble about? So I know which musical intervals approximate what whole number pitch ratios, and how much they’re off by. How does that help me? Even as a songwriter, how the fuck does it help me? How does it benefit anyone? The information itself is just noise. Maybe occasionally useful, but even so, for the few people that ever need to do so, they can look it up on a table.

But it’s worse than that. It’s not my occasional tangent into mathematical factoids; it’s my constant endless rambling about what I want to do with my life, and how far along I am on this, and what little thing I worked on today, and so on. It’s fine that I do those projects, and useful that I have such patience for the mundane details while doing the work, but when it comes time to talk about them, what do they mean?? It would probably take me a while (and some humbling) to even comprehend what the big picture looks like, because of how ingrained my habits are of throwing jargon around to describe some obscure tweak I just made. And using that jargon as ___ to ward off the Big Questions nipping at my feet. (And then complaining that people “don’t get it”, because it’s easier than admitting I don’t get it myself.)

Videoblog #1 doesn’t answer The Questions (I put that in bold type to avoid the flood of demands from people wanting “their ten minutes back”), but it gets me to the point where I’m at least asking them, and that’s a a start:

Now, granted, I’m still kicking the residual gunk from this cold, and I’m not at full energy or clarity. For that matter, it may be downright hypocritical to post such a shitty video. But why not begin this process now, since the past few weeks of zero productivity kind of gives me a blank slate.

Eagle-eyed viewers may spot mice at play in the background. Notice how totally not full of shit they are.

How about you? What would you kick your own ass for babbling about way too much, and what point are you trying to get to? You know all that clever and careful editing we do on our art and music, to get rid of all the stuff that was helpful in the working stages, but superfluous in the final presentation… could you benefit from applying some of that ruthless editing to your own everyday inner dialogue?

Miracle

Multiplying the loaves and the fishes.

For those of you who like to keep current on the mundane aspects of my life, the consumable items pictured above (at least those on this side of the looking glass) have been the staples of my special “bread and tuna” diet, a practical survival strategy throughout my infamous eight-month “lost weekend” from the workforce in 2007. I have re-entered said force, but the diet remains prudent while I play catch-up. In addition to the pictured items, the diet is supplemented by water, vitamin pills, cereal, coffee, soda, and the occasional excursion into madness, in which I am defeated by the irresistible urge to eat out.

I am supposed to get my first paycheck this week.  (Please don’t let something go wonky with the deposit!) Until then, no such excursions into madness are permissible.

I’m currently reading a book about the history of animation (thanks, Santa!) and it’s helping to unclog my brainstorming pipes; even though I’m not lifting techniques directly from the pages, the mere fact that I’m reading about them helps my own ideas to swim around in my mind more freely.  Does that make sense?

In the meantime, be sure to chew something for a little longer than usual today… and while it’s smooshing around in your mouth, think about how awesome it is to eat.

Happy new year!

“An average level of candidness”

These are my results for one of those “no right or wrong answers” tests given by a local employment agency. I’d make fun of it, except I have to admit, it’s pretty accurate. (The stress management bar should have a little cartoon stick of dynamite at one end and a sparkly flame at the other.)

There must be a planet for me out there somewhere, though, because if the people in my society weren’t so damned “ambitious and assertive”, i.e. pushy, then I wouldn’t have anything to stress about in the first place. Anyway, now that everyone is so well-equipped to methodically assess my fundamental character flaws, does anyone want to offer an actual remedy for them?

No, seriously, the truth is, they don’t want you to be a total flake, but they want you to be just enough of a flake that when you’ve worked hard on something and then your supervisor destroys it in front of your eyes, your instinctive reaction is to smile and say, “rock on, boss”.

No shortcuts, buddy

Scams as wish lists

I don’t really have a shape to this thought, so if you know what I’m getting at, feel free to pick up the ball and run with it.

It’s about things that are advertised, which we intellectually know to be untrue or misleading, but emotionally we’re kind of drawn to it anyway. Get rich quick schemes, for example. Mixed in with their misrepresentation of how feasible or sustainable their system is, is generally a valid motivational hook: have more free time to spend with your family and doing what you love, etc.. As much as this hook manipulates the gullible viewer’s perception of the scheme, by causing his sense of “good reason” to spill over into his attitude about the mechanics of the scheme itself, it works the opposite way for the skeptic: our intellectual knowledge of the flaws in the scheme spill over into a rationalization that “more free time” is impossible.

Instead of us shaking our heads in disgust that the worms on the hooks are made of rubber, why don’t we look at those fake worms as models, wish lists, or “vision boards“? We can say, yeah, that particular worm is fake, but how can we all work together to fill the world with real worms, so instead of running schemes to merely move wealth from person A to person B, we’d actually be creating more of that wealth for everyone?

And by wealth, I don’t just mean money, I mean time as well — actually more so, because unlike most of western culture, I value time more than money — and also the actual goods and services that money itself is just a medium of exchange for.

That said, my long term desire to free the entire world from long “check your human rights at the door” workdays and workweeks needs to be put aside in the short term. I can’t save the world until I figure out how to save 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)

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.

Progress report: Fr. Hifta Ryphtor

I suggest listening to the second audio clip in the previous post — the updated mix — while reading this.

It’s kind of scary to me how “right” I’m doing the current (coming fairly soon, hopefully) album, Fr. Hifta Ryphtor (assuming I don’t change the title), at least by the values I’ve been preaching lately on this blog. By which I mean, philosophically and artistically right… actually following my own advice, for real. And I’m using the word “scary” in a literal sense here. Not scary in a bad way, but scary enough that there’s a leap of faith involved in making it.

I’ve hit on this topic a few times in my So You Want To Make An Album series, but it bears repeating, and in plain English: if you have the luxury of working in your own studio, and not paying for recording time, it’s best to only plan the album out in a skeletal way, leaving plenty of holes open, so you still have something creative to do at every stage. In other words, don’t divide the project into creative work and busy work, and do all the creative work first, leaving nothing but busy work. Don’t pre-plan every detail in every single song, and then pound out the overdubs in an assembly line manner. It’s like giving your muse a temp assignment and then locking it in the closet after you think you’ve “milked” it. Instead, get it involved, and keep it involved every step of the way.

This is scary, and does require a leap of faith. I have gaping holes in my track list, and songs with incomplete lyrics. Yet I can tell from the material I have, like having enough puzzle pieces filled in to see the overall shape of the picture, that this is going to be a fucking fantastic album.

This is not how it was for Open the Window or Through Forbidden Black Doors. On both of those projects I nailed down the song order before so much as putting down a drum track, and clung to it religiously. Then I typically felt like some songs were behaving, while other songs were being difficult. There wasn’t an issue of not having any high quality material for either of those, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t demonstrating total trust in the muse. Great stuff still managed to come out, but I didn’t understand that I was putting the brakes on it, making it harder than it had to be. I got so frustrated with all the seemingly external obstacles constricting the flow of my projects, not realizing I was creating those obstacles. Unfinished Business and Leave of Absence were steps in the right direction, but with production quality sometimes taking a back seat to artistic exploration.

Still, I’m not saying this with regret; this is all part of The Great Learning, and it was necessary for me to experience that to the extreme in order to be where I am right now. Would I go back and do it differently? That’s a useless question. (For one thing, I have, in a sense, “gone back and done some things differently”, but that’s not what I mean.) If I were to change the past, I wouldn’t have the present as it is. It’s really as simple as that.

Oh, and another awesome thing about this album: no “boy-girl” themes (sorry, Mike Love). Nothing about relationships, heartbreak, lust, jealousy, or anything like that. Granted, when I have touched on those subjects in the past, it was always in my own way, bravely putting my passive-aggressive, co-dependent neuroses on display, so I’ll at least give myself credit for that. But one thing that really appealed to me about Dark Side of the Moon, way back in my musical infancy, is that the album isn’t about some external object of your desire; it’s about YOU, the person listening to it. And I’m happy to say Fr. Hifta Ryphtor seems to be my first album to have that consistently going for it as well.

Edit 10/16/07: I still haven’t escaped the “really old shit being released as new” pattern, mind you. I’m working on cleaning up Happy Birthday Pump Prototype, and reminded by this song that time is, really, in fact, going by, and I’m not entirely caught up to it. But the poor freakin’ instrumental has never been on an album before, and a lot of people liked it. Consider it the “token 1980s-styled drum machine song”. It’s kind of in the spirit of Propaganda’s Dream Within A Dream. No, I don’t know anything else about that band. I’m a cold-hearted one night stander that gets the musical influence he needs and then isn’t there the next morning to listen to the rest of your album.

Pulling a Radiohead…

For those of you that either link/bookmark straight to the blog, or use an RSS reader (and therefore skip the news page that keithhandy.com directs people to), you can now download and listen to Leave of Absence 2 in its entirety in 224 kbps mp3 format before deciding to purchase it! Nicely packaged CDs will continue to be available on lulu.com at a reasonable price if, like many people (myself included), you like physical objects.

I’ll soon write a more extensive post/page revealing more than you ever wanted to know about every single click, bang, and whirl on Leave of Absence 2.

Send some thanks to my friend Brooke for encouraging me to enter the twenty-first century. And be sure to check back for more music to come.

Some random thoughts on “wage slavery”

Some random thoughts on “wage slavery”:

1. Not everyone who works feels like a “slave”.

2. Most people who don’t feel this way get something positive out of work besides money and benefits, whether they admit it or not; they like to get out of the house, they like their co-workers, their job gives them a sense of purpose, etc.

3. No one has a perfect situation at work, but there’s a difference between having unpleasant inconveniences to grumble about, and feeling like their job is destroying their spirit.

4. People on opposite sides of this dividing line should have a better understanding of each other, and not think their situation applies to everyone else — be it “I go to work every day, so should you”, or “I’m taking a stand, so should you”.

5. It would not necessarily be good for society for everyone in the world to work independently, or even for smaller companies.

6. That said, it would definitely not be good for society for everyone to work for a large corporation, especially under existing laws and politics.

7. It should probably be illegal for health insurance companies to offer lower rates to employees of corporations than they will to an independent individual.

8. “Independent” is a subjective term; part of the reason we go to work is to be independent of our parents, but we are simply transferring the dependence to an employer in order to separate our financial dependencies from our emotional dependencies. If we freelance, we become dependent on our clients.

9. In many cultures, extended families are considered normal. In western civilization, we refer to “losers living in their parents’ basements”, and the real estate industry counts on us to keep this shameful stigma intact.

10. That said, the more independent-minded you are, the more you’re going to need to get your own space. But to have another home you’re always welcome to return to is better than living in fear.

11. Most people see money as an end, not a means, and will rationalize sacrificing all their time and energy (i.e. their life) on this basis.

12. If a person who didn’t have to work were to be content watching television all day, then he is not missing out on much of an opportunity by being at work, so it is hard for him to understand when someone actually has something to do that they are being held back from.

13. None of the jobs I’ve worked at have ever provided any substantial value to society.

14. Reform would not require every single person to change their lifestyle.

15. Conditions for low-wage workers are poor because workers unilaterally accept those conditions. But, they are conditioned to accept those conditions, so it is a self-perpetuating cycle.

16. People act how they are treated.

17. A person treated badly in situation A will often act badly in situation B. So poor treatment within a company can have effects outside the company.

18. “Slavery” in this context is probably an insult to actual slaves.

19. Just because something is better than something else, does not mean it is good enough.

20. Work would ideally be measured in productivity, not time. Not just by employers, but by the public mindset. The phrase “putting hours in” should be reserved for criminals doing jail time.

21. A wage is a guarantee that you’ll still get paid on a day when business is poor. But it’s already worked out in advance that you’ll be underpaid for the busy days more often than you’re overpaid for the slow days.

22. Because it’s not a problem for all people, not all people will perceive it as a problem. (My own emotional sense of it as a problem actually wafts in and out. Because this very list is so soft-spoken, I’m practically talking myself out of giving a shit!) Without using radical sounding terms like “wage slavery”, or trying to incite riots, there must be constructive ways of bringing fresher ideas into the public consciousness. I don’t even think there are really 22 distinct thoughts here; maybe the essence could be put into three or four. A lot of it is stigma-based, which is hard to uproot. People believe in that 40 hours. It has a magical quality to it. If you put in that 40, you’re a good citizen.

Probably everything I’ve said here can be struck down with logic, or at least pragmatism. For example, say a factory pays its workers based on the number of parts assembled. Now watch as the workers steal each others’ finished parts, misrepresent their output, or work so fast that their quality goes down the tubes. It’s like you can’t devise any system without factoring in the zillions of ways unethical people will try to cheat it. But in planning ahead for that, you wind up treating innocent people with suspicion too, resulting in lower morale.

I’m no utopia strategist; my way would just be to say, well, people don’t actually want to work here, so maybe these things shouldn’t be manufactured at all.

I’m such a wimp…

New adds (Friday morning):

23. A part of me wants to commit a bizare kind of “half suicide” in which I would continue to exist in physical reality, but cease to have any financial identity or any interaction with money.

24. I’ve gotten very good at “imaginging there’s no such thing as money” (sing it to the Lennon tune if you like), and it makes the people checking their watches in traffic jams and long lines appear to have very neurotic behavior patterns.

25. It’s not illegal to be broke, but we’re conditioned to feel that way.

26. I would like very much to be adopted as a pet.

27. I wish our culture had apprenticeship programs that provided food and lodging as you learned a skill or trade for no money.

28. I don’t want to fill out another form as long as I live.

29. I particularly don’t want to write out my address and phone number in longhand ever again. Nor do I want to remember where I’ve worked.

30. I believe that life is abundant and scarcity is artificial. There’s enough in the world for everyone, but they don’t want you to know that (clichéd and paranoid sounding, but I think it’s pretty accurate).

31. The higher your rent, the less time you get to spend there.

32. When you’re asleep, a studio apartment doesn’t feel any different than a luxury mansion.

33. I often see a bumper sticker that says “live simply so that others may simply live”. If more people embraced this, it would go a long way towards resolving all the issues I’m gently ranting about here.

34. The lilies don’t worry, the birds don’t worry — some guy in a book.

35. “Being responsible” doesn’t mean following orders. Take responsibility for how you are treated. If you are being treated badly, leave.

36. Time is not money, chop chop. The context in which that phrase had some validity is not the entirety of the cosmos.

37. Value is determined by perception. We all know this, but think about the broader implication here. If it’s all smoke and mirrors, then what’s the real value of the stuff in our wallets?

38. At the beginning of the month I fill out a small slip of paper and hand it to a person I don’t know very well, and they leave me alone for a month. It’s still just numbers, paper, and abstractions, albeit regulated so you can’t just “make money up” as an individual. (But apparently you can “make money up” pretty easily if you’re a corporation.)

39. I have been “in debt” for twenty years, so for my entire adult life I’ve felt like nothing I have is really mine. So of course I feel some resentment about this, and some of that is expressing itself in strange ways in some of these thoughts, but it is therapeutic. I’m pretty sure I’ve already paid well more than everything I owe, if you took interest and penalties out of the equation, and I would like to completely pay off the rest — but what I “owe” at this point is on their books, not in my heart.

So you want to make an album? (part 19)

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

Installment 19: My song sucks!

Aural fatigue is not just your enemy when your fingers are on the faders — it’s your enemy when you’re deciding whether or not to even bother keeping the track and/or finishing what you started. A tell-tale sign that you’re being taunted by aural fatigue is that you can hear the sound of your music, you recognize that it’s your music, you’re able to identify it as such… but it’s just dead to you. You’re hearing it, but you’re no longer hearing what’s good about it.

And maybe a large part of what would be good about it isn’t even there yet, but it doesn’t matter; before you reached this state, you were able to hear the stuff coming out of the speakers and the stuff in your head equally well. Now you just hear a bunch of familiar yet disappointing sounds.

The first thing to do is obviously to acknowledge and accept that this is what’s happening. It’s frustrating, but at least it takes some of the burden off of you to know that this feeling of disappointment is normal, universal, inevitable, and temporary. It’s also somewhat unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll go for a long stretch where you should be burnt out, but instead you get on a “producer’s high” where you just can’t stop listening to the playback over and over. Other times you’ll put it away and come back to it a few days later with fresh ears, and it’s still not happening for you.

The problem is, music is never entirely rooted in physical reality. No matter how careful we are to prop up our end of it with a tight rhythm track, solid singing, and pristine mixing, the other end still has to be propped up by that elusive, cosmic je ne sais quoi. In less flaky terms, if we’re not in the mood for the song, we’re not going to like it, no matter what we do with it. We need to go back to its source — why did we write it? If we lose touch with the “why”, we might as well be doing commercial jingles, because that’s approximately how much faith we have in our own message.

Before we go back to that song, we need to go back to the feeling that inspired it. Think method acting. Who or what is it about? Even if it’s only an instrumental, there was something on your mind just before you stumbled on the riff that started it all. Granted, once your music is “out there”, anyone who listens to it and enjoys it will have a different context and a different set of associations — but if you lose sight of your own personal context and associations along the way, your song will turn into a meaningless pile of notes before you can even get it out the door. This is true whether you’re playing and singing, or just adding those last-minute EQ and compression tweaks to the final mix.

One thing that I find frustrating, or at least surreal — and don’t get me wrong, this is a good thing overall — is that as I write more songs, my perspective on life evolves, to the point where in order to work on an older song, I literally have to back myself up to a more immature way of looking at the world. So why don’t I just throw the old stuff away and start fresh? (This is what most people do.) Because personally, I like to leave a trail of crumbs showing my progression — an ongoing record of where I’ve been, spiritually, philosophically, and emotionally. Not to mention, I have a sentimental attachment to my old melodies and chord progressions. But I can’t just work on them in a detached, clinical way. So why don’t I just leave them in their existing state? Because I’m a completist, and it will nag at me if I know something could sound better with reinforced drums or vocals, even though the song itself won’t be any more sophisticated. Humor me.

Okay, we all need to be coddled now and then, and you’re no exception, so here’s the short version: your song doesn’t suck. If you’re not in the right mindframe for it anymore, make the best objective decisions you can about how to wrap up the session, avoid making rash, irreversible, subjective decisions, step away from the equipment, and focus on dialing back into the song’s ideal version in your head. This may mean returning to the situation or people you originally wrote about — either actually going back to them, or visualizing it as clearly as possible. Get your mind re-entrenched in the context first, and then think about the song. As soon as you can hear it clearly in there again, you can resume working on it out here.

From the management

Dear Mr. Handy,

It has come to our attention that you are in love with yourself. The term for this is narcissism. Actually, it’s been painfully obvious all along, but your most recent posts just push it to a new level. Please rectify this situation at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,

The Management

I don’t know… I mean, yeah, I’m self-absorbed, because you do kind of have to create and maintain your own little universe if you want to be prolifically creative. But I think what I’m in love with is music… and the idea and process of original music, which, in order to be original, has to be related back to me… am I wrong?

Beep

Speaking of cassettes, I threw a lot of them away so that I can hopefully whittle the collection down small enough to fit in one carrying case. A few that I kept, though, were from my old-skool answering machine (I lost a part of myself with the obsoletion of the art of creating twisted, non-sequitur, perfectly-timed 20-second outgoing messages — if that beast had kept kicking, I would have kept using it forever).

All I can say about these is: dear everyone, as a whole, you are so freakin’ confusing. Who the hell are you all? (That’s not a literal question — yes, I know all your names, I just mean, like, collectively.) And also, I feel like a dick. I’ve been a dick to everyone, in the name of “fighting the system” or something. Sorry. (But thanks for the funny ones.)

Oh, and anyone who gave me their phone number in 1994… it’s not good anymore. Yeah, I actually tried some of them.

Psychology question

Okay, so assuming most forward-thinking people have rejected Freudian psychology on the basis that the past is over (not to mention I’m pretty sure we really don’t want to hump our mothers), what if we believe that time is an illusion and therefore the past is not gone, per se, but just in a different place than we are now? It seems pretty easy to bring it back into existence when I go through old cassettes, go to reunions, or rack my brain for autobiographical details for this blog, etc. — so does this mean it still should be dealt with, since it’s not “in the past” so much as “in a particular box”?

Speaking of autobiographical details, there was a gap in my So You Want… series where I stated flat-out that I don’t remember deciding to do an album in my own name. But I seem to have found a missing link in the evolution of that idea. A cassette labeled Knocked Senseless helped to jog that memory. Actually, the box was labeled, but the cassette, which was not in the box, was not labeled, so I thought it had gone missing over a decade ago. The little piece of splicing tape connecting the tape to the leader had long since come off at both ends, so I had to take it apart and fix it — twice — just to listen to both sides. And since it was still labeled as a promotional demo that had been given to me (which it was, before I taped over it), it could have easily been mistaken for trash.

When I say “evolutionary link”, I’m not kidding — it really is the mutant bastard frankenbridge between the Episodes album and Open the Window. It’s only a demo-quality mockup, mainly for me to listen to in the car and “think about it”, but does include rare early versions of Cheap Thrills and Hard, aka B. D. Caterpillar, that I don’t have anywhere else. Shortly after this, I went through one of those “dark night of the soul” thingies, and the tone of my song selection shifted from callous (it’s hard to believe Children’s Abortion Workshop was still making the list) to hypersensitive (Lullabye for a Fallen Angel). But the main point is, I was already conceiving of a self-credited solo album while taking those classes in Buffalo; I just wasn’t announcing it yet.