BIBLE-IN-PROGRESS

Green and Yellow

2011-02-07T06:51:00.001-08:00

Blogging was suspended over the last couple few weeks as I struggled to finish up mixing and mastering while simeltaneously getting through the last run of the Picasso exhinit at work. Work brought about 7-day work weeks through January thanks to extended hours atthe museum and my restuarant and inbetween, I was doing all I could to get songs ready for mastering on the 25th. Throughout the month, Johnny and I mixed at Avast Studios and then worked with Conrad Uno to do furthur mixing and editing before going to master with Ed at RFI on the 25th. hen I did go in, there was still editing to be done to the mixes and no way all 16 songs I brought in to master could be done in a day. Ed said he'd rather take his time over the next couple weeks to work on the songs, especially since they jump all around stylistically and dynamically to not be a straightforward mastering job.

So I dropped my songs off and felt a release and weight lfited from not having any way to work on these recordings any furthur for the time being. The restauarant and museum closed for furlough on the 30th and I flew out that night to spent a week and a half in Kensoha, where I'm writing this blog.

Yesterday was the Super Bowl and I'm hard-pressed to say I was to excited about it one way or the other. This year, I paid attention even less than I usually do to football with everything going on right now. That said it was a fun game to watch though I was careful not to take too much homestate pride in the win as to not feel like a complete carpetbagger. I was actually napping during the Blac-Eyed Peas performance to catch up on some sleep before the second-half. When I read reviews later saying how atrotious they were I had to check it out for myself. Lo and behold, the rumors are true.

Should be receiving the first draft of the master from Ed anyday now, which I'll make adjustmenst too then go back and tweak with him next week in Seattle. The last few days, I've been playing some of the unmastered mixes for friends and family after not heari8ng them myself for a couple weeks and I gotta say, I didn't want to crawl under the kitchen table and start recording all over again, so that's good.

In and Out

2011-01-10T03:48:00.000-08:00

The last week or so, I've developed a sleeping pattern than involves going to bed aound 4:30 or 5 in the morning, waking up at 9 for work then coming home at 5 or 6 and crashing for a couple hours before I get up again and so the main chunk of my day then goes from about 8 to 4. This pattern started developing when I got back from Massachusetts, I blame the time difference and the jet lag. But when I found I couldn't shake the pattern after a few days, I realized my body and mind were telling me I had to be awake during those solitary night hours to work not only on editing mixes for the mastering coming up, but also to work on new songs.

I came back from Christmas vacation with a clear focus in regards of how to further develop my new material but resigned myself to having to wait until after mixing and mastering the new albums throughout January. I knew the mixing and mastering alone would require concentration that would be hard to achieve since this month at work is unusually brutal (working my 7th straight day tomorrow) but I've been finding myself more stressed out and frustrated than usual without being able to pinpoint why until I started casually working on the new stuff during the late late hours and realized that it may just be necessary to keep a mental balance by working on both the writing of newere songs and the mastering of the older.

As I comb over the recordings for their final framings, I find myself more self-aware of how the sequences hold up both individually and also in the context of my whole 8-albums-of-8-songs concept. I'm in the thick of knowing exactly what story I want to tell and what chapter needs to be told next. Putting together a collection of songs in the writing stage means much rewriting and discarding of songs, finding the perfect combination to fulfill all the desired standards one collection of songs should have. Much was written this year about Bruce Springsteen in the wake of his release of songs that were discarded from Darkness on the Edge of Town 30 years ago and WHY they were discarded, because even though some of the songs were better in a one-on-one comparison to certain songs on the album, a song in question chosen for the album fit the theme and sequencing of the album better. All for the greater good and so forth. Bruce has been one of my biggest heroes since high school and I learned early on back then going through all the bootleg cassettes I could get my hands on of the importance being able to discard songs in the name of trying to find a cohesive statement that works as a piece of art and as a representation of who you are when you write and put that album together.

I know everyone doesn't share these grand sweeping notions for what an album should be but that's how I do it and why I'm doing this big insane project that's taking years and is almost impossible to explain during the long completion process; I do it because I believe songs when put together in the right context have the potential to tell a bigger story and reveal larger truths than individual songs by themselves can. Over the last year, I've squeezed in bursts of time to try to go forward on songs that would represent my thinking and personal struggles over the past couple years, not in the lyrics specifically but in the emotional peripherals inherent in the eventual combination of songs to be presented together. I have a pretty good sequence of 8 songs now and I've gained confidence over the last week while working on them that they thus far hit all the marks concerning what they need to contain. And it helps to have two separate sleeping allotments over the course of the day, because then there is more time spent emerging from or descending into sleep, and inhabiting the state of mind that drifts between the conscious and the unconscious.

Be Cool

2011-01-07T00:54:00.000-08:00

"So what do you want this to sound like?"

Johnny will ask the above question before spending 3 or 4 hours getting acquainted with the song and all it's individual instrumentation and production before, somewhere along the way, starting to formulate his own vision of the song in regards to the technology available in the studio to help mix said song. Mixing, of course, being the process where the engineer hired to mix sets the volume levels of the individual instruments and apply different effects when appropriate. In other words, his job is to make me (and the band) sound cool.

These days, most musicians mix on Pro-Tools or an equivalent software at their home studio, which allows for constant tweaking of the adjustments required for a good mix of a recording. One can look at this development two ways: it's good in that you can keep adjusting until you reach the ideal version of the song you hear in your head OR you keep second-guessing and purging any sense spontaneity. I go the old school-route in regards to recording and mixing, doing both almost exclusively in professional studios. This means that for both the recording and mixing stages of the project, I have windows of time to work in, dictated mostly by how much money I have to spent to do either. Judging by the long amount of time it takes me to finish an album, time isn't the biggest consideration in finishing, I just want to work at it till it sounds cool and I've done the best I could with what I have to work with. If I run out of money and the recording or mixing isn't up to standard, I'll wait a few months and earn more money to go back in the studio.

Even with that noble philosophy, compromises have to be made all the time, and a decision an engineer makes while recording or mixing can completely alter the direction of the production and you won't realize until it's too late. In those case, you have to make further decisions on the song that incorporates all the twist and turns that have come before, as you try to make it to the original destination via slightly (or sometimes completely) different route.

Johnny and I were in Avast on Sunday and Monday doing the last 4 mixes for the new albums and it went great, probably the smoothest mixing I've ever done and arguably the best sounding mixes I've ever been bestowed with. I was excited to go to Avast for the plate reverb they have. The mixing process with Johnny is, I'll give him notes on what I have it mind for the song than leave him to work for 3 or 4 hours. I come back and he plays me what he's come up with. I take notes while listening and then we start developing the mix in subsequent incarnations over the next couple hours to try and closer match how I hear the song in my head as opposed to how he initially interpreted it. But a great thing about these last mixes is I didn't have to do a lot of adjusting to his original mix. Usually, we'll mix nine or ten different version of the song to choose between for the final album, but in this case we only ended up doing 3 or 4 of the two of the songs because they were dead of on the money. The third song was the one time where I was initially disappointed while listening to the first mix but during tweaking, I realized with three easy adjustments, his mix was still there with the couple of crucial elements restored to make a collaborative vision of the mix.

Listening to mixes done this way in the days following the session is more enjoyable than those mixing sessions slaved over in person because you're listening not just to yourself but someone else's craft of FRAMING yourself, so the potential narcissism (or most of it anyway) takes a backseat in the name of admiring a fellow collaborator's work.

But while I'm very happy with the turn-out, there is still much work to do before next week, involving choosing which mixes to use for the final album and editing those with Conrad and Johnny next week. Hence, the lack of sleep mentioned in the last blog.

Gotta Get Right

2011-01-06T00:46:00.000-08:00

Lunch shifts. Unless you're the opener and have to show up at 10, you get to the restaurant at 10:20 (if the bus isn't late, more on that later), punch-in by 10:30 and work a half-hour finish the set-up that the opener started by the time the place opens at 10:45. Somewhere in there is "stand-up," a in which the on-shift manager goes over with the staff events of the day and specials. During most of the year, the first hour of the shift from 11-12 is fairly slow and by 12 or 12:15 you start to be in the thick of the rush, which doesn't start letting up til 2 or so. You keep taking tables til 3, when lunch is over and happy hour begins with new servers coming on the floor to relieve you and you pray to God you don't get sat at 2:54 and have to stay another half-hour at least just for that table (actually, most people that come in late for lunch don't have to go back to work and take their time lounging around). And that's the lunch shift.

Sometimes I'm ashamed to describe my job to people who have to spend 8 hours a day in offices, but I'm getting better about that. I find most people that work in offices brag about hours or even whole days of doing nothing but surfing the web and/pr streaming movies on Netflix. Anyone who's worked a halfway busy restaurant or bar knows that you're lucky if you can get 30 seconds to piss when you need to. Back when i smoked and worked with a lot of people that smoked, I learned to be the master of the 45-second cigarette, suck baby suck. In fact, I learned to smoke from WORKING in restaurants at my first job waiting tables when I was 20. I was the only guy on an almost all-female waitstaff and smoking was a convenient way to try and get to know some of these girls, though like many a beginning smoker, it was pointed out to me that I wasn't inhaling at first.

But I digress. When it's not busy at my restaurant, a lunch shift constitutes an hour-and-a-half to two hours of non-stop work, with a couple hours before and an after of more leisurely paced activity and "sidework" (i.e. the stocking of supplies and condiments needed throughout the shift). Some servers socialize more than others. Bussers and hosts in particular will milk the clock as much as possible even when they're not on the floor since most of their income comes from hourly wage instead of tips, the reverse of it works for a server or bartender. I tend to keep to myself throughout most shifts, even when it's slow, for two reasons: a) I have a lot on my mind, especially in regards to what is usually written about on this blog and tend to gravitate in my downtime towards what I'm working on off-hours, and b) I'd usually rather bust out the sidework rather than stand around talking to get the hell out of there as fast as I can. Take napkins. You can never have enough folded napkins to reset the restaurant with, and you have to have a certain amount folded before you leave for the day. I start folding napkins right when I come in and squeeze in bursts or 10 here and there throughout the shift so when my last table leaves, I can just clean-up, polish some silverware, reset some tables and go. It's more common to get a stack of napkins at the end of your shift and fold for a twenty minutes or so but again, any minute I'm spending there is a minute I can be working on songs or writing blogs like this one. Getting out is sometimes tough. You can have finished your last table two hours ago and have been doing sidework non-stop for two hours and be just about to walk out the door, when a manager who hasn't seen you do said sidework will ask you to help run food for the happy hour rush or set some more tables. Sometimes you just gotta sneak out knowing full well you did your part and won't be missed.

Right now it's busier than it's ever been at the restaurant since I've started working there 3 years ago, though not the busiest restaurant I've worked at. The sales we ring at lunch now and the rush that lasts from when we open at 11 to about 2L30 or 3 now, feels more in line for a moderately-successful restaurant, but since we're in effect part of the Seattle Art Museum, we live or die by what exhibits are in the museum. Having a Picasso exhibit is the equivalent to those oldies stations that play hour-long Beatles blocks on Sunday morning, closest thing to a sure thing you'll get.

I never expect to get much sympathy about how draining it is to work these shifts, in which you exert all mental and physical capabilities in the service of food and beverage, so I don't bring it up a lot, especially to those with full time jobs working overtime. And piling on trying to play, write and record music as a collective burden is tough to get people to relate to. Ultimately, I DO only have to work a few hours everyday but at a time like now, when I'm working hours a day to try and finalize the mixes for mastering in a couple weeks and completion of this huge project, I find myself turning in at 4:30 and getting back up at 8:30. In between, gotta run, gotta see the girlfriend, gotta relax a little(usually via a couple episodes of whatever TV show I'm going through on DVD at the time), practice, do peripheral tasks like artwork, work on finding a photographer, website, and so on and on and on.

Sometimes it seems like all too much but when I lie awake at 4:30 thinking about it, I realize again, as I've been writing about I just want to be done, but be done right.

Late in the Evening

2011-01-02T02:40:00.001-08:00

It's late, again. Since I got back from the East Coast, my sleeping pattern has been more screwed up than usual. I find myself staying up til 4, getting up at 8 (have to for work) than taking a long nap later in the day. The shifts have been killer at the restaurant this week, with a non-stop onslaught of patrons who come to the museum to check out the Picasso exhibit while on holiday then come in the restaurant to complain about the menu. The ratio of newbies vs. regulars is the restaurant therefore completely goes in favor of the newbies, which means every table needs a comprehensive guiding through some of the menu's more confusing aspects. I might be only working 4 to 5 hours a day but it's full section from beginning to end. And this week with sleeping pattern thrown off, I sleepwalk through first few tables until I'm too busy to be tired then bust my ass til end of shift after which I board bus and proceed to fall asleep for a few seconds before waking up abruptly four or five times on the way home.

It's a new year, but I'm still finishing off the old one this month, or rather the last couple years. I looked at a journal from Jan/Feb of '09 and there I am, in the thick of writing the songs I'm finishing recording now. That's just the way that it goes but until this month, I haven't been quite as eager to finish as I am now. I've worked on and off over the past year, mainly last summer, on a group of new songs that are all starting to coalesce individually. But instead of working on them tonight, I had to prep for mixing tomorrow with Johnny. Writing songs and getting them through each stage towards completion helps me be more aware of surroundings on a day-to-day basis and offers throughout the process clues to what Prince would say is "this thing we call life." Mixing is, on a creative level, doing the grunt work for a former version of yourself. Sometimes you get to collaborate with that version and late in the game add a new twist to the proceedings but more often then not, you're minding the store and making sure the songs come out of the process unscathed. That said, it's extremely gratifying to hear end results after all the work but at this point I wish there was more time to write. But work at the restaurant for now will continue to be intense for the next couple weeks as we're open 7 days a week instead of the usual 5 to accommodate the bum rush for the end of the Picasso exhibit, meaning even less free and writing time than usual, since I'll be cramming mixing throughout the month in there as well.

Well, almost 3 again. Let the alarm setting commence.

The In-betweens

2010-12-30T21:02:00.000-08:00

Wrapping paper is and cardboard mailing boxes (most from Amazon) are still strung around my room, needing to be picked up. Got back from Christmas on the East Coast in midst of the blizzard on Monday, by some miracle my flight wasn't canceled even though my girlfriend's and her brother's were. Must be cause I had to transfer in Phoenix instead of New York.

Last mixing session for the two albums (more on that later) is this weekend, expanded from one day to a day and a half from Sunday night through Monday. Did a preliminary session with Johnny a week or so ago. I decided to take an extra half day to remix New Duds for the Captain, ran out of time mixing it at Egg last month and an overall philosophy was missing on the track anyway. Trying a bizarre idea that actually thus far seems to work, I took a sample of Kate singing on "Train Wreck," flipped it backwards ala Beatles (like John at the end of "Rain") and that became the new hook, which makes for a powerful effect and display of song and album's idea of portraying the tenuous grasp emotion can have on memory (or vice versa).

All year I've been working on 16 songs, knowing it was two distinct groupings of 8 but not sure whether to try and pass them off as one on one CD or release or to try and press them separate and pass them out at the same time or release one first than another a few months later. I'm now leaning towards the last option, so I'd press up and pass out The Sugar Nile as an EP with little fanfare and use it as a first wave to promote The Water balloon album a few months later. Still ironing out exact details, but I'll be mastering both at the end of January.

In the meantime, I've finished remastering the first couple 8-song sequences of my project. I'm proud of the way these sound now, a definite improvement in sound quality from the first masterings and the new editorial choices regarding length or alternate mixes feel right and earned, especially on The Youngest Sister. I'm working on artwork for the new stuff plus this, it should all be ready for unveiling at the same time.

That's all for now, had some musings to export but those will wait for a non-business orientated blog, maybe soon.

Raindrops

2010-12-13T02:08:00.000-08:00

...and almost back now to pseudo-full functionality, albeit with still charred throat and phlegm-filled sinuses (sorry). However, all mental capabilities have been temporarily routed to serve Finishing Christmas Shopping, so not a lot of work done today, though I did do one fairly extensive lyric sketch I'm looking forward to working on a bit in the coming days. Also seem to have left my mobile sketchbook in my locker at work, said sketchbook had a few lyric brainstorms I was hoping to get through but not until Wednesday now, sigh...oh well, plenty more to do. Currently downloading some mp3's my Dad just sent me tonight of some recordings he made in his early twenties, reportedly versions of "Both Sides Now" and "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head," excited to hear these ("Raindrops" will be a good song to hear after the flood'filled weekend Seattle just had)

Work had a less overall annoying clientle than brunch last week, a bit slower too. By the end of the shift, I was drained from still being under the weather and going to bed a tad late last night after getting home late from the Sat night shift. Got two days off now to do what i will with my time without having to lie in bed and rest and get better, as nice as that was to do.

Which Sandwich

2010-12-12T00:10:00.000-08:00

Woke up feeling like crap again this morning, but a little less so. For one thing, I slept 8 straight hours. Before work I had Paseo's, felt good to enjoy real food again instead of just soup. At work I felt a little wonky at first but my energy level got up to speed fast during the dinner rush and by the end of the night (which is now) I feel almost normal save for my throat which feels like 100 rotting spiderwebs have been glued to it.

Haven't done any listening to the new remaster for a couple days and no listening to album mixes for over a week now. The mind is clearing it's slate of dead-end reactions and opinions and readying for all new "fresh" reactions, hopefully.

Report From Quarantine

2010-12-10T23:44:00.000-08:00

Woke up to get ready for work this morning, but my body just wouldn't let me do it. OK body I guess, I'll listen to you even though I sure could use the money during this holiday season.

Hours later, I get a call from Johnny Sangster. The Fleet Foxes want to use Avast the same day I do and because they're a tad more high-profile than me, the studio would sure like to help them out. I comply and put session off til Jan 3rd but only half-joke that maybe I could get a price-break for being so accommodating.

Meanwhile on Fringe (just finished 2nd season finale after watching all day), shit's getting real. Here's to better spirits and less swollen throat tomorrow.

A Different Kind of Hack

2010-12-09T23:16:00.000-08:00

Bummer of a day. Woke up with my cold even worse than it was yesterday, thought about calling into work but needed the money too bad not to go in. I recalled being a kid and seeing my Dad go out to work in cold winter weather sick as a dog but doing it because, as he'd tell me, when you're an adult you can't always call in sick. But it was slow enough today so I could bail at work just after the lunch rush finished around 2:30. Usually when I'm feeling a little under-the-weather, I'll eventually get distracted by the momentum of the shift and "forget" about being sick but today there was never a moment when I wasn't conscious of my sinus congestion or increasingly swelling throat. Later at home I took Nyquil and napped without feeling a whole lot better. It's a shame, because my mind is still buzzing and giddy from not having to work on the new remaster in my head as much but my body isn't up for letting the mind do it's thing. It's still mad at the mind for staying up til 3 or last night when I should have been resting off this cold, not making it worse.

Take a Load Off Fanny

2010-12-09T00:48:00.001-08:00

I slept pretty good last night, pretty for having a horrible cold at least. I woke up this morning feeling like a weight had been lifted off with more to be removed soon.

I use my Blackberry as my primary mp3 player, and now that I'm nearly done with my remastering project, I can delete a bunch of files off the Blackberry so I have more room to carry around other listening options. I feel the same about my headspace right now, that I've been carrying in my day-to-day thinking all the particulars and options of both this remastering project and the new album project, leaving not a lot of room for other streams-of-thought I might want to spontaneously wade through. So good already I feel about this remastering, not only as an individual accomplishment but part of the last few month's ongoing plan-in-action coming to fruition, that I can now look at my wipeboard list of new songs to work on and for the first time could have fun looking over what was there and having fun thinking about what to do with them. I also keep going over different possibilities for artwork and photo shoots coming up without thinking,"I really need to be thinking about either the remaster or the new album stuff." I feel pretty dialed in with the new album recordings. Before doing final prep for yesterday's mastering session, I reached a point (one of many) where I could NOT think about or work on the recordings anymore. One of the advantages of working on these projects simultaneously has been the ability to work on one until I my head is swimming, go work on the other then come back to the first project with a fresh perspective. So whatever problems I left off thinking about for the new album, I'm looking forward to tackling with a little less weariness in the coming days. All I have left to do on the new album for mixing is two songs that Johnny is doing in a couple weeks and after that will be mastering in January.

So now I need to hone in on presentation. It's important to develop a graphic/artwork layout for the new album that can apply to new packaging for the older albums. The idea right now is to have one sort of uniform cardboard sleeve design that will apply to each of the albums but each individual album having it's own featured picture as the cover and different rack and personnel listing on the back. This will allow me to order bulk CD's of each of the album then have a uniform raw packaging materials to put together as I need. I want to have the albums presented in CD form as all part of the same "series" while having enough of an individual flair to not seem rigid. This is all theoretical so far and has been for years but I hope to find a graphic artist or two soon that can help.

It was also back to work this morning at the restaurant after two days off and, as mentioned above, ridden with cold. I wanted to have a sick day like I used to as a kid, curled up and watching TV while drinking orange juice and 7-Up. It was slow enough at the restaurant so that I couldn't really lose myself in action and forget how crappy I felt but it was still busy enough to have to work and function on a coherent basis. But I finished soon enough and stopped by Bartel's on the way home for two kinds of tea and extra honey before headed home for a Fringe marathon, occuring between bouts on wipeboard musing and blog entry.

First Thoughts on a New Master

2010-12-08T01:07:00.000-08:00

I might now venture into hyperbole or off-the-cuff reactions I'll later disavow, but I'll accept it as part of the blogging process for now, at least so I can have an enthusiastic entry here for once.

I'm blown away by the work Ed did today on my remaster. My first album, The Katie Sermon indeed sounds better but in subtle, not-so-flashy ways that in the grand scheme of things are tweaks rather then major leaps in quality. But the improvements done to my second album, The Youngest Sister, have me reeling and satisfied in a way I gave up on being in the matter of these recordings. I have no illusions about them being Abbey Road outtakes (in terms of recording or compositional quality) but enough improvements have been made that I'll be proud to send them off into the world, only three plus years after they were initially recorded and mixed. At the time, I mastered with another guy in town who did what I thought was a decent job at the time but as the weeks wore on, I just couldn't bring myself to print up copies to pass out and sell. I passed out out some copies at shows but after a few months decided to write the album off as just the second chapter of my eight chapter series of albums and finish the next album so everyone could focus on that.

Over the next couple of years, as I've played these songs out with the band, the arrangements condensed. Certain songs lost certain verses and new textures were added. So when it came time to remaster this set of songs, I was motivated not only by my unhappiness with the sound quality on the original master (many of these songs had layered low-fi guitars that sounded like thick mud in the original mixes and thin mud in the original master). but also by my desire to do shorter edits on some of the songs and bring out layers lost in the original mixes and mastering. I've been experimenting with said edits over the last few months but didn't know how they would all truly sound together until today. I've listened to this new version of the album three times already and can't believe how good it sounds, at least compared to how it used to sound. The flow of the album is no longer dependent on the listener being tolerant of a whole world trying to be crammed into each song, only what needs to be focused on now.

My reactions may change in the days to come but for now it feels good to get back something I worked so hard on and had written off as at least a partial failure. Much thanks to Ed for his work on making both albums a unified whole and part of the larger project as well, a lot to ask.

I'll Fight

2010-12-07T00:58:00.000-08:00

And the days started to go as they do when grip on routine slips, formalities are purged in the name of weariness and blogs are yet again unwritten.

Since writing my last entry, I've been back in at Egg Studios for the last scheduled round of mixing there, leaving only mixing to remain on two songs with Johnny in a couple weeks. The two mixing days at Egg came during the snowstorm a couple weeks ago here in Seattle, which forced me to stay overnight at the studio. I found this to be good psychologically for remaining in the mixing state of mind but not so good for my sinuses, which came under the attack of cat hair attached to the blanket I slept under that night. The two days proved themselves quite productive and everything that needed to be done got done though a few things I wish I had more time to work on mixing wise got the short end of the stick. As it was, we had to end the session early on Tuesday, the second day, and do the last couple hours and last song on Wednesday. Momentum was a little lost and I didn't get to flesh out the mix of that last song quite as much as I wanted to but I have ideas of how to make up for that in a couple weeks.

While in the studio for mixing, there was last minute recording done on a song called "A River That Don't Know It's A River." Michael had to come in and do a one line overdub on "Summer Camp" and while he was there I had him do a mandolin part on "A River..." which had been recorded during the same sessions a year and a half ago as 12 of the songs for the album had been (with Michael being absent from the basic tracking sessions since he was living in Boston at the time). I did a vocal that took about a half hour or so and then me and Conrad probably spent 45 minutes mixing it. I figured that tracking and mixing for the song combined had taken under three hours, somewhat of a record for me, I think.

That following Sunday, I ran the Seattle Marathon, my first ever marathon. It was good weather that day (the snow long melted by then) and I was in good health. I came in just under my modest goal of 4:30. I ran, as I always do, with Ipod on and had quite a few different playlists prepared for whatever struck me as I went. However around mile 15, the Ipod quit in the middle of Jeff Tweedy singing,"I'll fight, I'll fight, I'll fight for you I will..." I assumed I'd run out of power even though I charged it the night before and so I ran the next few miles sans music, just the way I started off running in high school and almost never do anymore. It was nice but I checked the Ipod again around mile 20 and it kicked back. Hallelujah! I needed anthems to get through the last leg so put on the whole Born to Run album and then finished the last couple miles with the last Arcade Fire album on, crossing the finish during "Rococco." It felt good, like something had been proven and a ceremony had been undertaken was my own (depsite the presence of 1600 other people there).

In the time since and in the cracks of time I had between mixing and marathoning, I've, as always, been working at the restaurant, still quite busy on a daily basis thanks to the Picasso exhibit. I've been so busy, I haven't got to actually SEE the exhibit which I'm vowing to change this week. Haven't approached anything resembling burnout yet but on my fifth or sixth day in a row in the week, I will feel the heat from trying to do too much during the day. I haven't gotten to work on new songs since mixing began in late October but I did check out the stuff I'd been working on through last summer and early fall the other day with a fresh perspective and was pleasantly surprised by what was there. Looking forward to finishing mixing and mastering next month so I can go back to working on the new stuff.

In the meantime, I have a mastering session tomorrow with Ed Brooks at RFI for a double whammy remaster of my first couple albums (and the first two chapters of The Blue Moon Bible), The Katie Sermon and The Youngest Sister. I've done the brunt of the work as I've gone along while working on the new album but I've spent the last couple weeks concentrating solely on this master, which involves making final decisions for which mixes to use, edits to makes and little decisions to make such as how long a gap should be between two certain songs. At this point, it feels like it should be pretty straightforward though I spent today triple-checking a couple decisions I've made and vowed not to reassess after double-checking them. I thought about putting some bonus tracks on this remaster but decided you have to earn the right for people to care about your outtakes or alternate versions, which I haven't done yet. I also like the idea of just keeping things simple.

Here's a Tip For 'Ya

2010-11-18T23:15:00.000-08:00

Back to the overlap between waiting tables or recording music. Or allow me to start the comparison if I didn't properly a couple of blogs ago...

It occurred to me today in the middle of a rather bland though not quite dreary shift today that nuance is a grand overlap between between the two grand tasks at hand. Waiting tables is all about multitasking and to to do your job right and make the guest feel important, applying nuance to certain tasks can be the difference between the guest thinking you're a great waiter or a terrible one. For instance, when delivering hot tea to an old lady, you can half-ass it and just bring the cup with the hot water and tea bag in it and a plate for her to put the tea bag on. Or you can bring a sugar caddy, put a lemon on the plate and if you're feeling really adventurous, a little honey and milk on the side. Feeling adventurous isn't always an option, and for those options it's best to ask first or wait and see if they ask for the extras before going through all the trouble. Usually it's enough to make sure the traditional elements are in place and not just the string hanging out of the water. Each task while waiting tables has the half-assed way and the all-out way. I can't honestly say I take the all-out way every time but I try to at least meet it halfway.

Performing music obviously requires nuance as well, everyone knows that, but many don't realize the thousands of little nuances that go into producing a recording, mainly in the minor adjustments of volume and sound that have to be made for a recording to sound natural (or unnatural, depending on the intended effect of the recording). Waiting tables should too in theory look effortless though I find when I'm busy, it's good to at least subtly indicate as such to your tables and more times then not they will sympathize. Of course this depends on the restaurant you're working at too, this theory doesn't quite fly as high when I think of certain establishments I've worked at with not as a forgiving clientele as my current employer.

For a typical mix of a song (as being done on my current project), I prep first by going through all the rough mixes I have of the song and see what needs to be edited out in the way of instruments and parts that just aren't working or would work better if quieted during one passage and brought back up during another. Usually by the time we start mixing, I've done most of the editing and arranging as we go so that mixing is mainly adjusting sound levels, not figuring out which instrument should be featured at any given time. So after all the prep comes the actual mix, this involves creating many different versions of the mix with mainly only subtle differences to go through later and pick out the best parts of. Once the best parts of each mix are picked out, a master mix (or "Frankenstein mix" as I like to call it) is assembled from all the other mixes by cutting and pasting and wha-la that song is done. But to create that Frankenstein, much MUCH listening has to be done and many MANY nuances have to be noted before a satisfactory end result is achieved and hi-fives can be received.

As I mentioned a couple blogs ago, I like to to try and not fall in ruts when it comes to waiting tables and talking to a guest. It's important an effort is made to make each encounter unique, even if only in the smallest possible ways. I realize the mindset used to do so is exactly the same (though on an obviously larger scale) as trying to make a mix of a song fresh, interesting and overall representative of the song, much like a spiel given to a customer should be representative of both myself and the restaurant. In a way, this aspect of waiting tables can all be considered practice for this particular arena of music-making, as well as the performing aspect. But it's not exactly a consolation to think that way on a slow day filled with cheapo tippers.

Minimal/Minerals

2010-11-16T23:53:00.000-08:00

Not much to pontificate on today, ran twenty miles for marathon training earlier and feeling pretty wiped out. Was back at Egg yesterday, brought Allison back in for last minute backing vocal additions. Other than that, just got some editing done to prep for the last two days of mixing next week though got to get in one mix proper before the day was done.

On Saturday, I played my first show of any kind since last May but just did a quick set for a birthday party at the Seven Seas, a small dive bar/Chinese restaurant in Lake City right next to the Shanty. Was going to do it just me and Ken, but when I got there I was introduced to "Kevtone," who claimed to be Camper Van Beethoven's first drummer. Whether true or not, the guy was pretty good and so I did a quick set calling out beats and signaling dynamics as a not-so-power trio (a soloist would have been nice). We played Crossing Russell Road/Abercrombie Girl/Waiting on the Waffle/Elizabeth Street > I've Just Seen a Face (Beatles cover)/Salted Caramel Shake/Panthers Medley > These Arms of Mine (Otis Redding)/Water Balloon (fast).

Back at Egg next Mon and Tues to finish off mixing there for both the remaster of the first couple albums I'm doing next month and the new album to be mastered in Jan or so. For the new album, I'll hopefully only have two more to do with Johnny and one to finish with Michael, fingers crossed....

The Sprawl and The Spiel

2010-11-07T18:02:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna try an experiment this week and see what happens, though a portion of my instincts are loath to take part. What I'm going to try doing is see how this blog works if it tries to depict not only the struggles of a 32-year old independent musician but also his struggles in his day (and night) job of being a waiter. It's occurred to me as I finish up the release I've been working on that because it, for better or for worse, is a pseudo "concept album" regarding being a professional waiter, I will be in future months asked to explain the relationship between for professional and artistic compartments of my life, if only by acquaintances.

Anyone who's been a server for a while has to realize that a part of being a good server and being well-guarded by one's guests involves making them feel as if you're NOT reciting information to them that you recite a hundred times a day, but are reciting it for their benefit only. As a way of "method acting" by role as a waiter, I almost always make sure that I never repeat myself from one table to the other in both my greetings and explanations of the menu or even saying goodbye. Their is a limited range in which to both do the job and come across as personable without repeating the same spiel, that's why I savor even the tiniest variations and justify these variations as making one interaction different from the next. Vocabulary is a huge help. If sometimes I go overboard in hitting the thesaurus and using non-common descriptors just to sound a little different, well hey it works, it IS different. If you're not careful though, fancy language can come across as elitist and annoying and there goes your repoire with the guest. Notice I didn't say "tip," because if you let every word uttered and action taken be motivated by tip and not pleasing the guest and making them feel like numero uno, they WILl see through the facade.

And the overlap with being a songwriter here should be obvious, comparisons of being a performer and being a waiter aside (for now). Songs may constantly hit the same subject matter and use the same chords but the variations that are there are what make them different. And finding the variations that express the situation or emotion to be depicted is what songwriting is all about, not reinventing the wheel every time out. I'm going to contradict what I said a few sentences back and say a good number of diners will NOT notice in fact if a waiter or waitress just does the same spiel over and over because they won't be there every time of course, but I as the waiter WOULD know. In the same way, some people can write the same song over and over with the variations used between songs not counting for much or anything. Some build careers and are very successful at following easy patterns but how fulfilled are they at the end of the day? I'm sure they would circle a number on their bank statement for me, but that's probably not everything, I don't think anyway...

Well, that wasn't so hard. Tune in next time, when I compare something else to make an easy point but only barely altering what I've written today...

Not My Lover (On The Beat)

2010-11-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Beat starts, mechanical but alive. Perhaps it is merely mechanical but the familiarity MAKES it alive. This is one of the most famous and best-selling recordings ever made yet I never heard it until at least 8 or so years after it was released due to restrictions placed by my parents upon what music I could listen to when growing up. But now that doesn't matter, it's just as familiar to me as to everyone else who loved it and/or got sick of it through the 80's and 90's because I myself loved and/or got sick of it through all the wedding receptions I used to wait tables at, when the song would be cued up at some point in the evening's celebrations and the crowd would shout at the recognition of The Beat.

Last night I was at an awesome show in Seattle here that had four Icelandic muscians playing The Crocodile with 4 of Seattle's best and brightest, including my friend Nathan Wade and including Rusty Willoughby and Rachel Flotard, whose new album "Cobirds Unite" was produced by my mixer/engineer Johnny Sangster (and who also plays keys as part of the band but was absent last night due to the acoustic format of the show). I love this album and have been playing it non-stop for a couple months now and it felt good to hear it and be blown away by it right before I was to start working with Johnny again on my own recordings. At the show last night, Nathan Wade and Pétur Ben started things off by swapping songs and sitting in while the other was playing. For the third song, Pétur Ben announced he was going to play a cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." The crowd cheered. I gasped though perhaps only internally. As mentioned in the last blog, Michael and I have been mixing one song now for the last three weeks and about a week and a half a go it hit me what the template was for the production and mixing on the song. It was The Beat. My song too starts off with drum machine beat and maintains cold steel focus throughout the song and it's arrangement to keep a heartbeat threatening to simmer into Code:Red territory but always keeping control, even as chaos occasionally swirls around it. I've been listening to the song to and from work every day, on my daily runs anywhere from 5 to 10 times at a time and in the dark of night before I go to sleep, always focusing on The Beat and how everything in the arrangement, even Michael's voice is slave to it, how the snare seems calmer in the verses before cracking menacingly in the choruses and beyond.

Perhaps this is only how I myself am hearing The Beat and what I wish to make the beat in my own song be. That's fine by me. But last night when Pétur Ben and Nathan Wade played the song last night acoustically, it occurred to me that without The Beat, there is sympathy towards the woman being sung to instead of the anger and paranoia that the singer in Michael's version feels, all because of that menacing and unrelenting beat and what it threatens to do.
s

Baby on an Oven

2010-11-05T00:17:00.000-07:00

Three current mixing situations:
1) Mixing with Johnny at Electrokitty, which means he works a song for 2 or 3 hours then calls me in to see what I think of what he's done. For the next two hours, there is negotiation and a little bit of hurt feelings while, depending on the length of the song, anywhere from 5 to 10 mixes of the same song are done. We start by listening to Johnny's first mix, tweaking slightly upon that for two or three more mixes and then doing some extreme maneuvers while there is still time to experiment. The clock runs out and then we have to move on to the next song.
2) Mixing with Conrad at Egg is more interactive than it used to be. It used to be a situation similar to Johnny's, but now I usually work with Conrad step-by-step instead of first hearing his interpretation on the song and working off that. I'm confident enough now with him that while he's offering up different compressors and effects, I can be dictating track levels and panning placements before we start cranking out the different mixes. After mixing with both Johnny and Conrad, I take notes on what is best about each mix in order to make a master mix edited from all the individual mixes.
3) Mixing with Michael at his house the last couple times has involved me coming over after 9 and after the kids including new baby have been put to bed (or in the case of the baby, on top of the oven where the hood fan apparently lulls Madrona to sweet non-crying slumber). We go in the basement and start playing around with the one song we're doing. Because this isn't a studio situation, we adjust and tweak as we go instead of creating a bunch of mixes to make a master from. And because the song was recorded track-by-track instead of starting with a a full band playing together, the arrangement is refined as the process goes even more than usual. This can go on forever and nights like last night, it threatens to. But listening to last night's progress today, it's obvious how the 7 or 8 little decisions made last night already add to a whole that moves progress along, somewhat.

Since Conrad's going to Africa next month, I'm finishing up my mixes with him this month a little earlier than I expected but that's fine, doing all these mixes in a row is keeping me extremely focused. By the end of the month, I'll have mixes for all but three of the songs being worked on, with two to still be mixed by Johnny next month (though at Avast this time, not Electrokitty) and of course the third being worked on by Michael. Not a lot of ceremony or promises of the moon made to band members or whoever surrounding mixes this time. These are just modest versions of songs that have hopefully well-representing arrangements. Combined, all these songs say something more than they do by themselves without interfering with their individual meaning. And so it goes.

In a Modest Way

2010-10-31T19:59:00.001-07:00

Time slipped away from me again. The routine was developed to put flags in the ground. To look over the shoulder at in order to gauge distance. But then, once again, I found the need for a mile with no flags at all waving when the look behind was taken.

The last three weeks or so have revolved around final mixing of the songs I've been working on and off on for what will be two years next week. I used to get awfully excited when working on recordings, I couldn't wait to share them with friends, family, loved ones and the world. Rights would be wronged and every misunderstanding would be made up for in pure, hard-earned expression carved in stone to stand as indisputable.

I've learned since that following your own drummer has the consequences of not everyone understanding exactly what your beat is. There can come one or many points when writing and recording a song that the lyrics, music and performance all come together to BECOME that expression of emotion that was made possible when the song was originally conceived. But the expression inherent in the song won't always be looked for and certainly won't always (if ever) be obvious. It has to be enough that the song is a document that YOU know is out there for these that wish to fully read into it.

10 years ago to this night, I was in a car accident that should have killed me or at the very least, very seriously injured me. As it was, I got out with only a touch of glass in my knuckles and a very mangled and twisted car. As each Halloween passes, I've gained more and more distance from that night until now when I am once again haunted by being so close to not living and accounting for the time I've lived since and what I have done in it. Most of my writing and the songs I've recorded have really, when it comes down to it, been about accounting for the time lived since then and trying to make sure that any stray moment recalled can be, if desired, seen to fit into a grand scheme and a purpose I have yet to completely discover.

Unbearable

2010-10-13T00:31:00.000-07:00

These are the dark days. These are the full days. But when it comes down to it, they're not that different at all.

What really separates how busy one is from when one is not, except lack of communication with his or her's friends and loved ones? If a tree falls in the forest, etc.

So much time has been spent through the last summer up until now swiping a net in the air and seeing if a butterfly flies in. Or even a mosquito. Meanwhile the bear trap in the backyard has caught an actual honest-to-God creature that is dead and is waiting to be skinned and used for food, clothing and what have you but that's a lot of hard work to turn one bear or buffalo into all those things. And it's certainly not as much fun as throwing a net into the air or sea and seeing what you scoop out. If I was a fisherman, I'd probably be the type to keep everything I catch even though I should be the type to throw each fish back, for lack of wanting to actually skin or eat the damn thing.

And so it goes with filling oh so many notebooks and gigabytes over the years with words that aren't so much whittled down into a handful of songs that actually get played and recorded and heard by people, but more aptly are categorized as falling by the wayside never to be returned to again. I have a hard time forgetting those lost songs though and honestly, I don't think of any song as being truly "lost" or even bad, just unfinished or unrevised, and if it hits a certain stage of completeness, simply unrecorded.

I can make these designations and classifications til the cows come home (hah hah for you Beth) but to casual acquaintances it's all the same. Whatever time you put into music will always be just "put into music" and never broken down into the abstract (swiping nets through the air for butterflies i.e. looking for and writing songs) and the practical (skinning the bear i.e. recording songs then trying to get them heard), it's all the same. It's hard to even make the designation to loved ones which is when things really get depressing: if you can't make those you really care about understand you what hope is there for anyone else?

In the end, it usually doesn't bother me that Average Joe and Jane can't or won't make distinctions within the artist's routine, or that said Joe and Jane leave no gray area between success or failure: in their minds, you're either Justin Bieber or a street musician playing for change. I'm spoiled living in Seattle in that a great many people here propagate the idea of the "indie musician" to the extent that most people I talk to can put you in this classification instead of street bum (like they probably would where I'm from). Where does this stop? To what extent can you NOT care about the way you are perceived in order to do what you do in peace without self-consciousness threatening to invade from everyone you sense instantly writing you off?

Such a feeling has a name and it starts with "in" and ends with security. At this stage of the cycle, it usually turns to motivation, to work work work and try to accomplish until the feeling temporarily subsides, until it comes back again. There is a time for trying to catch butterflies and there is a time for skinning the bear. Time to grab my knife.

Clobberin'

2010-10-08T18:33:00.000-07:00

"It's clobberin' time!" was the Thing's call-to-arms in The Fantastic Four (do I need to say the comic, not the movie(s) which I can't remember anything about?), which seems an apt description thus far for the month of October. Only a mere few weeks ago, October was a wide open slate of possibility to project upon and now it's filled with imposing dates that cast shadows over every moment of the little free time I seem to have.

I did know going into October that it would probably be quite busy at work but this notion didn't really hit home until last night, when the big Picasso exhibit (opening today) was previewed for the members and I ran around for 8 hours straight without a break. Quite tired today, but had to hit the Greenlake trail to keep in shape for the Seattle marathon next month.

I also scheduled dueling recording projects throughout the month, the first being a session at Egg with Conrad to finally finish mixing and editing for the remastering of my first couple albums and the second being mixing with Johnny for a couple days to work on the new album. Planned to do the session with Conrad earlier in the month but it worked out where I have to do it a few days before I mix with Johnny, so a lot of prep work to do before.

Also, I'm scheming a photo shoot to do next month with Cathy, the first real "band" photo shoot I've done (partially since I don't really have a consistent band to try and nail on film) to coincide with artwork for the upcoming album and the website I'm slowly getting together.

In addition, I'm trying to keep on top of my "chops" since I agreed to do this small birthday show next month for Sindy and Ray who books the Shanty, my first gig since May. So far no drummer for this one but I guess I won't worry quite yet.

And there's still a bunch of new songs that need attending to that I'm squeezing in tweaking here and there on. all these activities are tough to slam from one in to the other, buffer time is always preferred but I guess there's no slice of the pie to spare for that quite yet. I'm sure that's not the first mixed metaphor I've done in this blog, or maybe it is, but no time to revise it.

It's Later Than You Think

2010-09-23T00:21:00.000-07:00

So after writing a blog yesterday about keeping "decent" waking hours, what do I do? Stay up until 3 AM even though I have to be at work at 9 the next morning for a double-shift. Granted, I didn't know at the time I'd have to work a double, that was a surprise, but still...

When it came down to it, I was craving the late-hours to get some good thinking done that I found unable to do earlier in the day. I believe because of this "mediation session," I ironed out a few sequencing problems on the group of songs I'm just starting to mix. And if nothing else besides working for the green was accomplished today, I got to toss around the solutions thought of the night before in my head n-between talking to restaurant guests to refine them even further.

Been home now a couple hours, checked out the season premieres of both Modern Family and Glee, finding both to be mostly overwhelming. When Glee ended last year, i swore up and down I wouldn't watch it this year, just because the bad stuff always outweighs the good and the bad stuff drives me crazy. But it's tough not to want to keep up on the one show (or maybe two, counting American Idol) show the Average Joe or Joanne brings up when talking about popular music. I sadly find it much easier to relate my overall ideas on what music can be when I have a pop-culture totem to reference in my blabbering.

I'll save a lengthier dissection of talking about Glee for another time. For now, me and my immune system are fighting off the barrages against us after 11 straight hours of close contact with other people's germs via dirty dishes. Lovely.

The Non Wee-Wee Hours

2010-09-21T12:07:00.000-07:00

Most weeks I have Monday and Tuesdays off after working Wednesday through Sunday at the restaurant. For the first half of the summer, Monday and Tuesdays were days to shut off from the rest of the world and work on my songs around relaxing and reading or watching DVDs. The last couple months have shifted the routine a bit, by plopping obligations into my two-day weekend or rejiggering the work schedule on a week-to-week basis so that the schedule isn't dependably consistent anymore (that's the restaurant biz for ya...)

In addition, since I've begun increased running workouts in July, my bedtime has gradually gone back from around 3:30 or 4:00 AM to 2 AM and now this week around 12:30 or 1 AM. When I tell most people I go to bed so late, a laugh is usually the first reaction and if I'm complaining about being tired, there is a notable lack of sympathy. A late bedtime is usually equated with laziness, as is a late rising time. Many (including myself) still hear in their heads Ben Franklin's old maxim of doing both early to make one "healthy,wealthy and wise."

But many artists and writers work in the abstract where planning and scheduling are concerned, and many like myself I suspect find the subconscious is most receptive to being expressive in the wee-hours of the morning when possibility for distraction or interruption is at a low. I find when I do keep a bedtime now of 3 or 4, I'm only working on a song or writing up until bedtime about 25% or so of the time, usually preferring to work only earlier in the day or evening. But I always like knowing that the twilight hours are there to hunker down in as a way to crawl around in the intricacies and possibilities of what a song can be. I dare say too that many pots-of-gold found after traveling long-winding (and winded) rainbows are usually found within these hours.

My overall philosophy with writing is to basically have none, to not become so bogged down in one school of thought or method that tedium and repetitiveness sets it. So in the interest of differing from my summer hours and output, I'm now on a waking and working schedule only slightly ahead of the normal 9-5 workday. I've always been anxious about having a writing schedule so close to the traditional work schedule because I didn't start writing songs to have it seem like a job, you know? And I'm certainly not getting paid to write songs. However, convenience for now dictates that getting up and having a rush of memories related to previous jobs or even going to school as a kid will be productive for a couple of reasons. First off, the songs I'm working on right now are a mediation om the difference between such schedules as I've written about here, leading into meditations on in what ways one really changes that matters and sticks. And secondly, trying to train for a marathon and wanting to run mostly in daylight requires me to have more flexibility during the day if I wake up and go to bed earlier. My girlfriend works usually until 7 and if I want to hang out with her, the more I get done before 7, the better. Previously, I'd wait for her to fall asleep and then start writing again if I felt like it but now I can try and get done more during the day and relate a little more closely to the people and situations I'm writing about in the process. I suspect though it's only a matter of time (post-marathon?) that inspiration starts craving those wee-hours (and fabled pot-of-gold) again.

MR. BLUE SKY

2010-09-20T11:34:00.000-07:00

Just had my first shower in a couple of days. Was down in San Diego on Saturday night for my cousin's wedding. Stayed in a godawful Comfort Inn that had a rushed-job clean applied and an overall unwelcoming odor + aroma. The day before the wedding, I flew into Orange County with my girlfriend to stay with my sister and her husband. My brother was also there and we were all going to drive down to San Diego together. Just before leaving, my brother and I went for a run on Huntington Beach. I was looking forward to a sunny California run but alas, the fog and chill was in lock at 9 AM though it was still fun to see hardcore surfers emerging from the cold cold ocean.

The Wednesday before I'd woken up excited and ready to start mixing with Johnny. But the hours after the activities mentioned in the previous blog, Johnny somehow contracted food poisoning, meaning the day's activities had to be put on hold. I couldn't believe it, yet the pessimist in me laughed. The whole day before was sunny. the pre-mixing editing went smooth and I felt extremely focused and positive about how the session would go. I was waiting for the ball to drop but it seemed liked it wouldn't. I didn't find out Johnny had food poisoning until the next morning so the whole night before was like Christmas Eve to me. I woke up out of sleep two or three times , so excited that two songs I'd been working on for two years were about to finally BE FINISHED.

The whole rest of the day, I felt imbalanced and thrown off my game. All the preparation from from the days before into getting into the necessary mindset for mixing was now wasted and the process would have to be gone through again at a later date since packed schedules for myself, Johnny and the studio make an immediate reschedule impossible. I also had a tough time trying to channel my energies into the songs I've been practicing and writing over the last few months.

Since I was in high school, I've ran to stay in shape. I was never a competitive runner though now I wish that I was. And ever since starting to run, I've always wanted to run a marathon. The few times that I've tried scheduling to do one, I've let other circumstances stopp me from being able to do so. The closest I came was when I was going to do the Chicago marathon back in Oct 2003 then suddenly packed up and moved to Seattle the month before. I'd seriously started thinking about doing the Seattle marathon in Nov of this year about a month ago, when I'd finally starting getting back into shape and doing daily instead of weekly runs around Greenlake. The problem with running in Seattle is when the weather turns gloomy in the fall, motivation is hard to keep up. I've always been susceptible to both gray-sky discouragement AND allergies, especially in the fall, and especially in Seattle.

So it was with all of the above in mind I decided to register for the Seattle Marathon 2010 last Thursday, overall as a way to remember that focus needs to be kept in the face of circumstances that can't be controlled, especially gray seasonal weather or food poisoning.

Traveling always helps with focus too, and traveling to see any of my family especially. I write quite a bit in my songs about my family but I think of those people in the songs as past versions of the people that exist now, much like the "me" in my songs is usually a past version of myself. If I were trying to capture "who someone is," I'd ultimately just think of my friends and family as potential characters for a story or song. However, there are times when a family member tells a story that includes a detail I'd forgotten and may have been recently wondering about in the context of writing a song and lo and behold there it is. When that happens, I usually just have to shake it off and come back to the present, so I'm not the guy sitting in the corner with his mind's eye camera on, figuring out how to use the people in his life for his own gain only.

...AND WE'RE OFF

2010-09-15T00:06:00.000-07:00

Today was the first day of starting to mix. I walked up the stairs on Johnny’s loft studio where two summers ago I was working on finishing the last album. Walking in and shaking his hand felt good. It also felt good to load the tracks into the computer and realize there were less of them then last time. The approach has been streamlined and the proceedings will be all the easier for it.

I’ve been working hard all summer on concepts and songs to finish my great big project of 8 albums of 9 songs apiece. When friends ask what I’m working on, I feel as if I have a long way to go still before something that defines my idea of self-expression will be ready for unveiling. But then today, in starting to mix two songs for an album I finished recording back in May, I was excited to realize that while slaving over the summer on new songs I had forgotten how proud I am of the songs already recorded. I also feel I am able to hear these songs objectively after not working on or even playing them out over the summer. When all these 16 songs are mixed come November or December, they will form a collection that I believe will stand as more than the sum of it’s parts and something I will be quite proud of, as well as being part of the larger project I am working on as a whole and maybe even going so far as to help people understand that project better than I can currently explain.

After doing some editing at Johnny’s studio today, we’ll be at Electrokitty Studios (where most of my last album was mixed) tomorrow, doing a 12-hour day of mixing the two songs at hand. Here’s hoping for a smooth and enjoyable ride down a familiar and now comforting path.

September Songs

2010-09-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

So August is gone, September is here. I’m always big on months to designate what any given time of the year SHOULD feel like. So far in September, we’ve alternated between extreme autumn and mid-summer classifications. If you split the difference, lo and behold….September.

Summer ends as August does, I don’t care what the calendar or weather says, just like summer begins when June does. And with summer ends, or any season, I need assessment. I need to look and say, just what did I do this summer, did I do what I wanted to do? I’m not the type of guy to project completely unrealistic goals then sit around and do nothing. On the other hand, I’m not the type of guy to type the script and follow it to the last punctuation. Split the difference and you have reality.

My project of remixing and remastering my first two albums is coming along, just one more day at the studio needed for that before I do the actual remastering. Was hoping to do so at the end of September but it’s looking more like November, which means my plan of passing out a remastered CD as a placeholder for an actual new album to come next year won’t quite come as soon as I wanted.

I start mixing said new album tomorrow with Johnny. I’ll be employing him for 4 or 5 tracks on the album, notably the more densely recorded tracks that I need help sifting through. The session has come up awfully quick after seeming in the distance through the summer. I’m not sure I’m as enthusiastic about mixing as I initially wanted to be but after ruminating and pontificating, I decided on two tracks I can do that shouldn’t be quite as challenging to wrestle down as other tracks will be. Starting easy will hopefully be a good moral booster for the rest of the project as well.

And then there’s the group of songs I’ve been working on in earnest (in more ways than one)since April , pen in one hand, guitar in the other. I wanted to start playing them for my girlfriend, bandmates, friends etc on the casual to see how they come off as such, but find myself furiously revising just to be able to workshop the songs, which is good and healthy. The problem with a self-conceived interlocking group of songs is you can decide to swap one song out for another only to find the rest don’t make as much sense as they used to. For now these songs are still only percolating, no hot jams to run into the studio with quite yet but I got stuff to do in the studio anyway.

To try and help with not overthinking this group of songs, I’ve started sketching out another group of songs that has some unusual collaborative aspects to them that I’ll remain mum on for the moment but that I hope could be a quicker turnaround for writing, recording and production BECAUSE of these aspects.

The window is tightly closing for a show to book in November or December when I would be able to possibly try out some of these newer songs or simply be able to do a show to remind people I’m around. I’ve hesitated from wanting to book a show again until either it’s time to do one or until I’ve conceived a great set. Because it it might be time to do one, the motivation to conceive set is being worked on more, so we’ll see what happens in the next couple of weeks.

Shooting now to try and have a website up by November or December, did quite a bit of content work for it over the summer, just have to find a web designer to help convert ideas into actuality.

That’s the progress report this time around, I hope to start doing shorter and more frequent blogs that will be a little bit more digestible and touch upon subjects mostly one-at-a-time, I’ll keep my fingers crossed and see how easy it is to type then.

SCHUYLER JONES GOT MARRIED

2010-08-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

Summer's almost over and no one believes me. Ominous signs loom. Still, better to just keep at the fight now with slight precautions implemented.

On the way up to Schuyler's wedding, I began to wonder if I could be the drummer. Dave couldn't make it, so Creeping Time was minus their rhythm man. I'd been a drummer from 4th grade to 10th grade or so. I loved drumming. I used to put on Guns n' Roses Use Your Illusion II and play along with what I could. Also, I knew all Creeping Time's songs, how Dave played and the kit would only be snare and hi-hit. I gave it a whirl at soundcheck and it sounded alright and so it went.

The wedding was great. Small but not too small and beautiful weather to match a touching ceremony with sincere declarations of love and lifelong commitment while acknowledging what it took to get there and what it might take to move on from the day. I thwacked my way through the reception and at the end asked Ken if I myself could serenade the bride and groom for a song. i asked for a request and Crystol asked for "Elizabeth Street." Four years ago, I had dreams about playing this song at my own sister's wedding but I didn't explain myself to the family very well and perhaps the song didn't fit anyway. So it felt good to play the song at a wedding, it seemed like it wanted to be there.

After the reception there was much playing through the night. I remember singing "Wild Horses" with all my heart then looking up in surprise to see a small crowd. There would be a small circle of chairs and Michael would do a song, then Ken then me all while accommodating some guy there who said he was a drummer and could really thrash out a beat if his 17-piece kit was there and not just the hi-hat and snare. I walked over to the keg at some point and overheard a group wishing there had been a "real band" at the ceremony but screw them. the bride and groom and wedding party were happy, that's what counted. The next day we drove back into town and I got to pocket a cut of the payout. I was a working musician.
The next week I found myself playing Creeping Time again but this time in a recording studio and this time backing up James and this time playing a piano. James chose me to play on the session precisely for my limited abilities and because I wouldn't be wandering all over the keyboard. The session was recorded using an old 3-track which meant there was no going back and fixing mistakes, if you make a mistake, the whole take is ruined. At the end of the day, with two songs in the can, it felt as is something had been accomplished, not just partially. Michael was hosting the jam at Pies and Pints so we all went over and swapped songs, it was nice.

The next night I was at Carlos and Allison's in West Seattle (deep West Seattle it appeared but not really) with Michael, doing the last couple overdubs on a song Michael and I have been working on for months as time and opportunity affords. Carlos laid down a 5-string bass part and Allison sang a little and played an obnoxious flute part (on my orders).

The Thursday before I was at Egg Studios, re-recording Nathan's Wade's vocal part on a 5-year old recording for a remastering. Before he came in I spent hours working on a remix to the song that begins the whole blessed project, struggling and struggling. I was standing at the mic with Nathan, duking out phrasing possibilities and mentioned that he wasn't singing like the original way he did. "That vocal's gone," he said."It's never coming back."

Sure, I said, but what if one of one your vocals got wiped out, wouldn't you sing it the way it was?

"I wouldn't be doing this." he said."I let go of things"

Implying that I don't.

WE'RE GONNA BUILD SOMETHING THIS SUMMER

2010-08-14T01:01:00.000-07:00

Feeling pretty good right now, I've had a lot of irons in the fire this summer in lieu of trying to play any shows. I've nearly completed work on preparing for a remastering of my first two albums (more about this in a second), started to mix the recordings I've been working on now for the last year, all while trying to write the next album. Didn't get a lot of heavy writing done this month until a few days ago, when I sat down with songs I've been working on since last April or so and set about to try and get them in final draft form so I can start the demoing and initial recording process. On top of all this "real work," I've been prepping content for a website to be launched in early-winter. I have a lot a really cool ideas for the sight to make it unique and custom-tailored to represent my overall project

Preparing for the remastering involves pretty much what it would if I was a bigshot reissuing some iconic album, which means going through all the different mixes made for the projects to see if in hindsight the best mix really WAS chosen. There's also the matter of outtakes to add as "bonus tracks," which seems a little bit pretentious to me to put forth if only a handful of people listen to your music. Part of what I'm attempting to do in remastering my first two albums is to create a souvenir of a the time when these albums were put together and the different musicians I was playing with at the time. I'll be putting at least a couple tracks for the live-in-studio KEXP session I did at the time to show what the band I was playing with at the time sounded like live and how we'd reinterpret the songs differently when playing them out. What I don't want to do is put a bunch of unreleased songs on that have nothing to do with the songs that are on the actual albums. and that may still turn up on future albums as part of the overall story being told.

And while I haven't done much physical mixing for the next album, I've gone through the rough mixes pretty exhaustively and outlined my mixing strategy fairly thoroughly. I should get a big chunk of the 16 songs mixed through September and the rest done in October.

As documented on this blog, I've been working on songs for the next album since the year begin, mainly by taking a few days out of each month to go inro "deep writing" mode and work and think about nothing except working on the songs throughout the day. In between these "deep writing" songs, the songs are teased and worked out as a performer instead of purely from a writer's perspective until it's time once again to do a detailed polish. Over the summer, I've gradually narrowed down and even consolidated the songs until I now have 8 songs that have the potential to make a mighty powerful sequence. In some cases I've used very old music I've written with lyrics freshly conjured and sometimes vice versa. It's nearly to the point of being able to demo the songs, start playing them for people and refine overall arrangements without worrying about chords, melody or lyrics as much, for the foundation will be laid. Very excited...

For a bigger reason to celebrate, tomorrow is Schuyler's wedding. Summer ain't over yet.

Folklife (Slight Return)

2010-07-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

Spent the last couple days starting to go through all my old MySpace blogs in attempt to assemble a make-it-up -as-you-go-history/myth of The Blue Moon Bible project. The idea is to edit these blogs down and write current-day commentary on each of the entries, filling in what I may have missed or was too polite to say at the time. For the live shows, I can attach pictures, recordings and links to YouTube video if there are any and for the studio blogs attach demos and rough mixes to show the progress of certain points of the project as I go. In addition to other efforts I've been making, I think it's a good way to personalize my website and make it an extension of the Blue Moon Bible Project in general, adding concise optional details of what goes into the project without ruining things by trying to overexplain.

It also helps me feel as if writing these blogs is more useful than it can seem at the time of writing, when you only count the worth by how many people you think will read it. I've always thought of these blogs as more of a working journal concerning all things music that people are welcome to look in on or not rather than a two-way conversation.

That said, I realized while going through them that I never did a blog for my last show in May at Folklife which was on May 28 at 2:30 in the afternoon. It was me, Ben Obee om bass, Allison, Michael, Justin and Isaac on drums/percussion, and James Apollo on keys. James was using the house provided keyboard which sounded terrible, big mistake to use that. We did Sugar Nile/Candyland/Water Balloon/Crossing Russell Road/Grenadine/Water Balloon (fast), pretty much the same set as the Showbox Sodo show minus Alexandra. But the playing was tight and the crowd was great, a bunch of dancing teenagers and adults alike soaking things up. It had rained throughout the morning but was dry when we went on and I gotta tell ya, I love playing in the afternoon when atmosphere dictates it. The crowd is drinking but mostly sober and so is most of the band for that matter hah! It was a good show to end the spring/late summer on and pick up from when we start doing shows again.

5 Becomes 2, 2 Becomes 3

2010-07-29T01:23:00.001-07:00

Summer's flying by. Just looked at last blog post, written nearly a month ago and the state of mind, if not state of progress seems identical to today's. Was back in Egg on Monday for first time since early May. Didn't touch the stuff I've been working over the last year and a half but instead got to work on edits and remixes for the upcoming remaster of my first couple albums. It hit me at some point during the day and again while listening to the results the day after the session, that in the three or four years since I did these albums, the little and big things I wished I did different I'm now doing different, with the justification that it's alright to change things because it's part of a bigger project. I keep reminding myself that Walt Whitman revised Leaves of Grass around 8 times before he died and arguably kept making it better and better (there's a reason why the "deathbed" version is recognized as the "official" one, and not the first edition which only had nine poems or so if memory serves). I wrote about "putting right what once when wrong" but since Monday's session I feel like I'm halfway to doing that and having versions of my albums that have slightly clearer and more focused mixes, especially in the case of The Youngest Sister. Most of those songs were written as I was recording them and it was only after I started playing them out live and realized the music couldn't sustain the epic number of dynamic swings many of them had. I theorized in the years since that editing down the original mixes somewhat would make for leaner and better arrangements and I believed I've proved myself right. "Tire Swing (for Joanna)" was edited down from six and a half minutes to 4 minutes and "Fire at Captain Mike's" was edited down from 8 minutes to 4! I wished I would have had the taste and focus three years ago to make the editing decisions I'm making now, but I was too close to the material and couldn't let go of all I wanted to cram in to express, not realizing you can often in rock n' roll express much more via brevity.

I also ended up remixing both "Elizabeth Street" and "Tender Years," for both of those going with more stripped, intimate mixes and in both cases using the more natural and expressive scratch vocals instead the more labored later takes. Listening back to these new mixes, I felt if I'd gotten my recordings back from the haze of overthinking and hazy decision-making. I've realized in past years that sometimes a remix or different take on a song can be exciting merely BECAUSE it's new and once the freshness fades then it's realized the original mix or take on the song was a better representation of the song itself. So in doing these new mixes and edits, I'm careful to be TOO spontaneous and stick with the thoughts and feelings towards these new versions that I've developed over the last few years whenever listening or thinking about my recordings and wanting to rid myself of regret. I never produced more than 100 copies of The Katie Sermon or The Youngest Sister (though TKS is on ITunes, hard to get stuff off there) and when I made up 1000 copies of The Salted Caramel Sinner a year ago, I still had enough regret stopping me from completely putting as much work into exposing it as I could have. So there's not much danger in stomping on someone's sentimental notion of the way one of my albums should sound.

If that was the case, I'd think twice about another decision I've made regarding remastering and finally distributing these albums, which to alter the running order of the songs on each of the albums. This decision is tougher to explain, it's not just a matter of thinking,"Gee, Song A would have sounded better before Song B instead Song C." Each song placement in the song sequences has multiple purpose for being chosen for the slot, all the Track 1's have something in common, all the Track 2's, and so on. I originally conceived the 8-song blueprint to use for each of the 8-albums to be broken into Side A's and Side B's (ala classic vinyl) so that the first song on Side A would be "answered" in a certain way by the first song on Side B (Track 5). Subsequently, the second song on Side A would be 'answered" by the the second song of Side B (Track 6) and so on. I found in reexamining this idea that the execution made each song sequence more jagged then it needed to both stylistically and narratively. I found that if i followed Track 1 with Track 5, it's "answer" track and following THAT coupling with Track 2 and Track 7 and so on, it made for a MUCH stronger 8-song sequence then the old blueprint. All along I'd been thinking of the first song as Travk 1 then the second on as Track 5, so why not lay it out that way. Playing The Katie Sermon, The Youngest Sister, The Salted Caramel Sinner and the two new albums I'm working on right now, the overall musical flow seemed naturally smooth where before they were purposely rocky, meant to evoke the feeling of an Ipod shuffle setting. I feel now that this new alternate pattern makes for a better way to get to know the songs and the project overall. I then decided the "horizontal sequences" made by placing all Track 1's together or Track 2's and so on further echoed the more linear narrative of the new pattern, since Track 1's sequence was chosen one at a time instead of trying to match it with a later track. This is all very confusing to everyone except me, I understand, but it's also explaining to anyone who cares that reordering the songs on the coming remasters is not an arbitrary or whimsical decision but part of a new draft of my great big song-novel.

Going back to Egg Monday for just a few more hours of work, which I'll try to talk about next week. Wheels are in motion. New songs have been set aside only for a couple days while I ponder more technical issues instead of compositional ones.

PUTTING RIGHT WHAT ONCE WENT WRONG

2010-07-08T11:22:00.000-07:00

Lordy, lordy, almost two months since the last blog post. Not a lot of people reading this thing but I was hoping to be better documenting the summer’s activities for future record. As it is (and to cite a cliché) the summer is flying by, with it only seeming to arrive weather-wise in Seattle over the last couple of days. I’m in the midst of a nice flurry of activity, all recording-related since I opted not to book any shows this summer.

First, off, work continues on writing songs for the last three 8-song sequences of The Blue Moon Bible project. I’d say I have about 60 or 70 percent done at this point but I won’t know it’s a tough call to know how much you’re working on will be used until each sequence as a whole is done. While I was back home in Wisconsin in the early part of June, Sean and I sat down and banged out a new song called either Test Drive or All the Ladybugs Are Dead that I really like. Otherwise, just a lot of nose-to-the-grindstone and elbow greasin’ going on. I will say I don’t think I’ve ever written better or feel like the culmination of all I’ve learned as a songwriter is in the process of occurring, but I think most good songwriters will tell you that usually happens when you’re deep in the process and only later can a comparative or objective opinion be made (if then).

With recording done for the 4th and 5th sequences of the project, what’s been left has been to develop a mixing strategy/timetable/ As it stands now, I’m planning to mix the 8 songs for the 4th sequence between now and September, to have ready for mastering in October and digital download/distribution in November, and then, shoot for mixing the next 8 songs late this year or early next year. As it stands, these first 8 songs are a lighter load, since one, From the Pulpit, was recorded and mixed during the last album sessions and another song,”Everyone Loves Libby” is being recorded and mixed-as-we go with Michael’s recording set-up instead of at Egg, leaving only 6 songs to be mixed in the confines of the studio. I’ll be doing 2 of those, Don’t Come to New York City and Sugar Nile, with Johnny Sangster, who mixed most of the last album. He proved to be highly effectual at sifting through dense arrangements and paring things to down to brass tacks, and only these two numbers of the eight songs have the elaborate production that requires such a perspective. The rest are relatively lean on production and layers and I’ll be mixing those with Conrad at Egg starting at the end of this month.

I’m also finally starting to get the website project underway and to do so, I’m working on remastering the first 3 sequences of the project. The last album, The Salted Caramel Sinner, doesn’t need much tweaking but the first two sequences, The Katie Sermon and The Youngest Sister respectively, require a bit more work. I was never happy with the way The Youngest Sister turned out but in retrospect, the original mastering job made a muddy production even muddier. With both The Katie Sermon and The Youngest Sister, I’ve contemplated for the last couple years what sort of license to give myself in what to do when remastering. With any project, there’s always regrets and both little and big changes that would be nice to make to match what you believe was the original vision of the project and was not quite achieved. There’s always a danger in going back and changing things (see George Lucas) because sometimes what you perceive as mistakes or flaws are actually part of the original outcome’s charm. However, Ifter much thought I’m giving myself a little bit more license on this remaster than I would a “normal” album because these two albums are part of a larger whole. Walt Whitman kept revising Leave of Grass up until his death so if I know I can make my overall project better by eliminating some of the earlier flaws without compromising each song’s integrity than I think it’s in my own best interest to do so. Besides, it’s not like I have a huge fanbase I’d be disappointing and I think the musicians that played on these recordings will welcome both sonic and aesthetic upgrades to the recordings.

To produce the remasters, I’ve been going back through the original mixes and evaluating those to see if I made the right choices in which mixes to use. So far, the answer is mostly “no.” On The Katie Sermon, I made the poor production choice of mixing a song, then recording on top of THAT and then mixing the overdubs with this mix, which makes for muddy and often over-production. So for a couple songs I’ll be going with just the original clearer mixes with fewer overdubs and more of a “live” feel. I’ll be remixing “The City Girls and The County Girls” which I thought was 80 percent of a good mix but flopping out on the back end.

For The Youngest Sister remaster, I’ll be taking even more drastic measures and using the “Whitman Did It’ card as far as I can push it. Most of the songs on TYS were brand new and hadn’t been developed live at all and the recordings, Tire Swing and Fire at Captain Mike’s, suffered from bloated arrangements on the recordings that completely destroy the pacing of the album as a whole. Fire at Captain Mike’s to my ears has less of these problems and I really really love the original arrangement and mix but it’s still awfully long, and when we play it live now we usually don’t do the second verse or the extended outro and cutting those down would change an 8-minute recording to a 5-minute one so there you go. And Tire Swing just doesn’t work at all an arrangement, with too much jerking around from loud to soft throughout, so I figured out a nice way to edit out two of three bridges and bring the whole thing to down to 4 minutes from 7 (!). Quite a difference. Other alterations to the album will include different, less-muddy mixes for Dear Jonathan Richman, The Youngest Sister and Empty Parking Lots. It’s funny to realize now how often I used to choose muddier mixes, thinking I suppose that they would provide an ambiguity or “mystique” that would cover what I perceived as arrangement or performance flaws. But now I’m not as embarrassed about the singing or whatever and the band always played great in the studio so hearing it clearer is better.

As also mentioned, The Salted Caramel Sinner needs less sonic tweaking but I’ve gone back and forth over the last year with whether for the website and future digital downloads whether to use the master I made all of these CD’s still sitting around with, or to go with an earlier version. See, during the mastering process, I ended up speeding up 5 out of the 8 songs again, thinking it would cover up certain flaws and in some of the cases regretting it. I go back and forth whether I like the sped up versions for certain songs and ultimately now think natural is better and to go with the original speed for the remaster/future downloads. So what if I have all these CDs still sitting around here and at my parent’s place back in Wisconsin? I’m fine with two versions floating around, I think it’s kind of cool.

Other current tasks at hand are, as mentioned earlier, recording and mixing Everyone Loves Libby with Michael as well as possibly getting to record with Kate this month for the first time in three years! Stay tuned for more changes.

That's a Take

2010-05-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

A good engineer is hard to find . A band or guy going in the studio has no idea, especially in this age of predominant home recording where most commonly, YOU are your own engineer. In my own personal mindset of recording, this is akin to being your own doctor or lawyer: even if you have the capability and education to do the task, the overall goal at hand is better accomplished with an outside party. An engineer needs to be trusted enough where you can completely revert to primal state, he needs to be trusted just as much as a therapist. I find when I have singers I really respect next to me or listening while I’m doing a take, I tend to focus more than I usually do and be more “professional,” but often it’s important that no one is listening except the engineer while vocal takes are being performed. This is BECAUSE vocals are being performed out of the moment and the task at hand is one of theatre, to ACT as if you are in the same room as the band on record, and responding to them in kind. This can be helped by obvious ways of shouting out to the ghosts on the record as smoke-and-mirrors self-trickery that you are all together and in the moment. Obviously such a mindset in action LOOKS ridiculous to an outside observing party, the reversion to the primal often tests waters ultimately unusable but needed to be noneoftheless explored to be realized as being so. Once, I was doing a vocal take for Empty Classrooms on the last album that ended with me meowing like a cat over and over loudly. Michael’s wife came by just at that time to pick him up and the first thing she heard and saw was me screaming like a cat and Michael sawing away at his violin like e saw through mozzarella cheese. After we were finished, she said,”THIS is what you guys do at the studio all day?

Since being a teenager, I’ve found it necessary to rehearse and sing in a sympathetic environment where I can have the confidence and inhibition to sound terrible while working on a song or technique I’ve never tried before. I used to think this meant needed complete solitude but unless you can afford such living arrangements, you need to live with people who understand what you need done. The last place I lived in was either all musicians in the house or people who moved in knowing musicians in the house would be constantly practicing, sometimes to the very wee hours. Now, I have a roommate who is also a musician but who keeps very different work hours and is more often than not gone during weekday hours when I’m home and practicing. It’s actually quite a luxury compared to rooming situations had in the last ten years. But back to the recording studio environment, where the idea is to have the freedom and inhibition of a practice situation but with an engineer present and recording. In a situation where you are not producing yourself or have a band that has equal say in how the recording turns out, there is always someone else to offer an opinion and ultimate say on the proceedings. In the solo performer/producer’s situation, while the engineer’s opinion can be helpful and taken into account, ultimately you have to decide all the small decisions to make throughout the recording process and how they should add up to a whole goal being achieved.

I first started going to Egg Studios almost five years ago and from the very first session, Conrad Uno was the most sympathetic and attentive engineer you could hope for. He had a long history to indicate that this would be the case (Google him if you don’t believe me) but it nevertheless was a revelation to have an engineer listen so closely and tune into the needs of the client at hand as to where they would probably want to back up the tape and fix a small error. In the years that have followed, I’ve gone through a myriad of cycles containing frustration, elation, grief, joy and everything in between at Egg. During certain periods, I visit once or twice a month and other times go 6 months without being there at all. Each time I step in though, I’m picking back up on what I consider my life’s work and I know everything behind the doors while I’m there for my money will go towards getting the goals accomplished as I see fit and learn to do so. As the years have gone by I’ve learned to trust Conrad more too, not just with his impeccable taste and skill when it comes to judging how a certain take might be but also with his general sense of how not to clutter up tracks and what’s important to keep focus on. The mixes for the first album I did there that I used to think were too bare bones and not complex enough have proved over time now to be the most effective and most representative of the songs. And when I do have to do vocal takes, I have no problem getting into character as I need to, knowing I won’t be judged because the process is understood by an engineer who’s seen it all and knows there’s no wrong way, only questionable results.

"somewhere, beyond the sea..."

2010-05-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

Hi there, I’ve gone off the grid for the last couple weeks , at least off the gird of keeping up with doing an on-line blog. I’m at a point in my life now where I’m trying to more consciously gauge levels of productivity and correspond said levels with outside circumstances in order to better understand the ebb and flows that come with said productivity. I’ll try to catch up over the next week with what’s been going on over the last week, including posting another blog I’ve written but not edited about a studio session a couple weeks ago. About two weeks ago, Michael and I completed the last studio tracking sessions at Egg for this group of songs we’ve been working on. Neatly enough, this session was on May 3rd and the session last year in which we did the brunt of the basic tracking was on May 4th, meaning we finished just under a year before the date. There’s grey variables too, me and Michael still need to put the last couple of overdubs on “E.L.L.” a song we’ve been recording with his home set-up but obviously there’s a touch more leisure in that recording circumstance than the gun-to-the-head approach of the paid studio environment. We’re also using a couple songs from a Nov ’08 tracking session and one song recorded during the last album’s sessions.

But still, the hurdle has been leapt and the mountain climbed…..the first mountain anyway. The most crucial part of the process, completing tracking for final vocals was the last thing to do be done besides a few in-studio overdubs with Michael. I’ve spent the last couple weeks casually going over the rough mixes without starting yet to go over what to leave in and what to leave out. I’ve also stopped going over the same songs I’ve been going over for over a year now in and out everyday in practice and getting to give them a break and a little breathing room. Last night Michael Allison and I did a stripped-down show at Tully’s in Wallingford (a local Seattle corporate coffee chain, second to Starbucks). I didn’t attack setlist possibilities or arrangements as tightly as I have been but since I knew it was just the three of us I knew I could relax and just have fun, which indeed proved to be the case. Having the Tully’s Director or Media film us was a little bit of a surprise but other than we just set up and played, got to do a couple we haven’t done yet live either and a few we haven’t done since last fall. The set was

Candyland/Alexandra/Abercrombie Girl/Ice Cream Truck (Dating Pool cover)/New Duds for the Captain (Allison lead vox)/Don’t Come to New York City/Crossing Russell Road/Waiting on the Waffle/Empty Parking Lots (Michael lead vox)/Panthers Medley

Thanks to Jerin and Kelly for setting up the show and the bag of Tully’s schwag after. Afterwards we went down the street to May Thai where old Harborrats bassist Mark Livingston was playing with Joe as Sommerset Bakery. Mark is going to fill in for bass once again next month for a birthday show I’m doing at the High Dive on June 16th. Ran into Jeff Allen too, who was Mark’s drummer when he used to play bass, nice to see everyone again.
I’ve written a lot lately about working on new songs to complete the whole Blue Moon Bible Project. I haven’t gotten to really roll my sleeves up to get dirty after the deep writing session I did last month, just working a riff here and a lyric there but now that tracking is done for the songs being recorded, I’ve been starting to dip my toe (and at least a whole leg now) back in the water of developing the new ones, doing a few more brainstorming drafts of certain lyrics before I check out the big stack of paper I accumulated last month. The nice thing about going back and forth with different sets of songs at different stages of the writing and recording process is I only a vague memory now of what is on all those sheets of paper. So before I refresh my memory, I write down the elements that HAVE stayed with me thus by default some of the most valuable elements. I’ve never completely subscribed to the “if it’s good, you’ll remember” school of documentation but AFTER writing everything down, it’s always essential to take note of what you DO remember and why. Going back and forth between recording and writing different songs also helps not to burn-out on either sets.

I've been listening to both the new New Pornographers and Hold Steady lately (and by girlfriend osmosis, the new National which sounds good but need to do a “private” listening session rather than just Beth’s car). The New Pornos are one of my favorite bands and for my money have put out albums that get better and better, with the last one Challengers being one of my favorite albums ever. This album couldn’t help but disappoint on first listen, especially since I remembered these guy’s albums usually take me a few listens to dig into all of it and indeed the more I play it the more I’m having fun picking different things out. Don’t think it will rate quite as high as Challengers for me but that’s funny cause all the reviews I read of Challengers said it was a step down from Twin Cinema.

Speaking of step down, I’ve been fascinated this week by the on and off line responses to this week’s episode of Lost,”Across the Sea,” featuring the origin story of Jacob and the Man in Black. I’ve been an obsessive Lost fan now ever since jumping on the train relatively late in the game during the 4th season but haven’t looked back since. There’s always debate over the merits of certain aspects of the show but it’s been a little shocking and a little scary to see how badly some people hated this week’s episode. I felt that the reveals in the episode were consistent with the ambiguity that has always been a part of the show and expanding that ambiguity rather than trying to close it (which would destroy the range of interpretations and meaning the show could possibly have). A good deal of the critics I’ve read haven’t been reacting critically or rationally it seems but more from a primal I-WANT-ANSWERS mindset as they realize they’re not GOING to get answers as the show goes into it’s final lap. Real life doesn’t provide easy answers but people want TV shows too as a solace that answers can be found. One of the reasons why I love Lost is it presents both possibilities, that answers to the bigger mysteries can be found while pointing the direction to even larger mysteries to be solved. In reading reactions to this week’s show, it seems to me most people just don’t want to think that maybe there’s no easy resolution to LIFE not just this TV show. As much as I respect what the writers to the show did, I worry of an audience miscalculation on the creator’s part that will taint the accessible reputation Lost has and should have for years to come. But of course this all depends on how the show ends in it’s last 3 ½ hours left. Me, I’m going to have a hell of a week sending off one of my favorite shows of all time (been using the word “favorite” a lot in this blog, I do realize) . I’ll be going to my usual Lost viewing party Tuesday, a New York Times simulcast with the creators of the show on Thursday, and then down to Portland with Beth to see the finale Sunday, whew! After that, or maybe a bit before, I’ll write a little more about finishing tracking for the album. ‘Til then…

IN THE ROUGH

2010-04-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

Last week I went into Egg knowing I’m pretty close to finishing tracking. In past projects, tracking overlaps into the beginning of mixing and then I’ll start mixing and think that a certain song needs a couple more parts or a re-do on the vocal. As with a few components on this album, my instincts can reach a decision now with the benefit of experience and in the case of tracking, I’m just a quarter-inch away from having the coverage I need to begin mixing. “Coverage” is a film term referring to shooting a scene from a bunch of different angles so you have flexibility in how to edit the scene together later. That applies to mixing in how one should have a good source amount of performances and overall textures for the recording. At this point (or for this album), I think I only slightly overrecord what would be more-or-less a “live performance,” meaning each musician would only get one track per song.

Last Monday, I had Allison in through the afternoon, first to do some relatively simple backing vocals, made even more simple by the fact that we’ve been doing the songs live so we didn’t have to fuss around with what might or might not work too much. Then we moved on to the main course of the afternoon, which was recording her lead vocals for a song called “New Duds for the Captain.” Though we haven’t been doing it live, we worked out the phrasing in advance instead of going purely for the spontaneous approach. I think all the work really paid off and the vocal really came off fantastic. The song is a bit low for Allison’s range but my idea to skew it low in order to add some resignation and melancholy to the performance worked.

I also had Scott Andrew come in for a vocal cameo on the gang-vocal song "Summer Camp,” which right now would be shared vocals between Scott, Michael and James. The song is tentatively planned to be paired with a song by Andrew Hall from The Dating Pool called “Ice Cream Truck” that me and Allison sing. Scott only has 4 or 5 lines in the song but it was actually hard to direct him what to sing since he had to be reacting to another vocal track already recorded and another one that isn’t. I think taking the relaxed approach performance-wise was key and we got coverage of a few takes that gave a nice range to pull from later
And speaking of “Ice Cream Truck,” me and Allison recorded about 9 takes of that live with me her and an acoustic. Fun fact: Andrew and I were roommates for a couple years and during last Monday’s session I also recorded a solo demo of a medley segueing James Apollo’s song “How Hard (A Heart of Gold Can Be)” with Sean Lambrecht’s song “Better Than Good.” James is my current roommate and Sean and I shared a house back in Kenosha years ago, so in one session I effectively recorded three songs by three different roommates of mine. So if you ever want me to record one of your songs, well, there you go….

After Scott left, I got down to business of doing some lead vocals. Started at 7 though and the session ended at 10 so it wasn’t a huge window to work in and just when I felt like I was getting on a roll, we had to stop, to resume again this Thursday. I got some good work done though, partly by using an economical time-saving method of recording involving doing a rough mix of the song as the vocal is being recorded so that you don’t have to do a separate rough mix later. This means you can’t stop the recording when you blow a line, but I found that worked better and allows for a lot less nitpicking and instead provides a nice number of takes to make a master composite take from. Once apiece during Grenadine and Crossing Russell Road, I had what I like to refer to as “blackout takes” where through the course of a take, the studio walls fall down and you are no longer on the planet, just deep in the murky waters of the song being sung, to the point of veering on the edge of blackout as every atom of concentration and emotion is being directed into the song. This phenomenon can occur without a good performance being captured, but in this case (and the best cases) I felt I had no separation from what the song was as I was singing, only that song existed for me at that moment and every decision in terms of singing the song did nothing but serve the song. Ideally, every recording should get a performance like this but the reality is (especially on low-budget productions) the teeth don’t always sink in that far.
In the week that’s followed the session, I’ve had to balance producer mode with singer mode, analyzing the vocal takes from last Monday while still keeping on top of the songs performance-wise to still be done or redone this Thursday. When I first started recording 13 years or so ago, rough mixes were the most exciting thing in the world to listen to. To hear the first semblance of vision realized as you imagined a song and/or recording should sound come back to you is a thrill rarely equaled. I now somewhat sadly regard said thrill with trepidation, knowing it can unconsciously fill in blanks that still need to be filled on the song and destroy the little objectivity you start with. I find the first listen produces the most practical and helpful reaction at this point, before the temptation comes to lull yourself into narcissistically enjoying the rough mix more than you should.

Having a pretty solid running order for the album, I CAN play rough mixes in sequence to help judge which subtleties of different vocal takes pop out to either distract or enhance. At this stage too, I start to see how different intros, instrumentals, or other parts of certain songs might be dragging down both the individual track and the album sequence as a whole. I’ve had the aesthetic with this whole album to have lean arrangements for the songs and cut liberally since the last album had songs all over 5 minutes. Overall the pace is pretty tight and fast just how I wanted, which I thought might help the two songs on the album that ARE over five minutes, “Don’t Come to New York City” and “Water Balloon,” go by faster. Instead I find they both seem to go on that much longer and for me halt the intended pace of the album. “Water Balloon” in particular has an extended Broadway-esque intro in a separate key and then an extended outro, both parts mean to bookend the main song with a separate lyric-thread. This past week I went to a book reading at the new Elliot Bay bookstore in Capitol Hill by esteemed and legendary rock critic Greil Marcus, who just came out with a remarkable new book interpreting the music of one of my heroes, Van Morrison. Marcus read a quote by Morrison from the book taking about that when he‘s done writing the song he sings the syllables, and the singing of the syllables contains or should contain more information than the lyrics alone do. In recent years I‘ve gotten better about letting the emotion of the vocal performance elaborate on and expand the lyrics instead of trying to put all the information into the lyrics themselves. It‘s a delicate process to decide what should be told in the lyrics and what you hope or assume will come out in the performance.. Interestingly, Marcus also talked a great deal about whether it’s relevant or not a song really “happened” to a person, if whether the facts stated in the lyrics are autobiographical or not reflect integrity in the work. Marcus’s assessment was an unsurprising and resounding “no” and even though for this project I utilize only conscious autobiographical details,. I agree with him. Unless you’re one of the few people mentioned in my songs, it’s all my subjective point of view to the listener and might as well be fiction. If someone knows me or does some digging and realizes these are real people and incidents being sung about, who’s to say I’m not misremembering or unfairly depicting what happened? The question is, is it a good song? Is there a reason for these people and incidents being mentioned or sung about other than the fact that they “really happened?” All excellent food for thought and I'll address the issue in future blogs but funnily enough, the AV Club at the Onion came out with an essay that same night on the very subject here :

.http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-story-of-my-life-is-there-such-a-thing-as-an-h,40415/

With these suggestions in mind, I listened to the songs I mentioned in condensed form and found they actually seemed to express and convey more, instead of overwhelming the listener with more detail than necessary. For Water Balloon, I think the same reaction I’d want people to get from the information originally conveyed would be still be had by way of ambiguity instead of more stated fact. And more importantly, the shorter version makes for a better song.

Deep Writing Diving

2010-04-14T02:02:00.000-07:00

This past weekend (I use the term “weekend” in a relative terms, my weekend as a restaurant worker is typically Monday and Tuesday since the restaurant and museum it is housed in are closed Mondays and Tuesdays, this week I happened to have Sunday off too) I underwent a ritualistic process that I will dub for the sake of this blog as “deep writing.” I’ve always been well, not superstitious about talking about writing, but at the very least, wary of steering into pretentious or redundant waters. In my mind, nothing’s worth talking about until it’s done, though over the years I’ve learn to share stage-by-stage excitements a little more with friends or loved ones without worrying too much about if I’m tooting my horn or jinxing myself. In my always fluctuating day-to-day routine, I currently put in two to three solid hours of practice, with the center of these practices being the 16 songs I’ve been recording and starting to perform over the last year. I usually rotate at least two or three older songs in so I stay in touch with the songs that are already part of what I’ve dubbed the Blue Moon Bible project. I usually use the remainder of the practice to run through various songs-in-progress which, if I have time during the day, get a little bit more attention separate from the main practice. Otherwise song and song ideas are worked on in notebooks and in my head on the bus, around the house and before bed in spurts. I know longer feel the paranoia I once did that I have to keep track of every single idea in notebooks, partly out of fear of forgetting and partly for suspicion that I’ll need to trace an idea back to a devolved state at some point. If working as a waiter all these years has taught me nothing else, it’s at least taught me how to let an idea develop in my head over the course of a shift (or shifts) without worrying about forgetting it. But sometimes there can be quite a few ideas gestating at once, crossing over which each other and all demanding individual attention, like a nursery full of babies, with their cries for care building and building until drastic measures must be taken. Hence, Deep Writing.

Deep Writing is not just having a house to yourself (I live with a roommate, another musician who has a complete opposite work schedule and who I sometimes go for days without actually seeing, this past weekend he was in New York playing a gig). It also means complete seclusion from social contact and the outside world, save a stray trip to the Grocery Store, 7-11 or video store. Phone calls and e-mails are permitted but as a rule the isolation is needed and necessary to completely concentrate and ride trains of thought that otherwise would not have the time to travel as far as they could in just 2 or 3 hour bouts during a regularly scheduled day. I often have more informal or unplanned Deep Writing sessions when my girlfriend and/or roommate may be out of town and I just happen to want to be a homebody after working 5 straight days of talking to people for a living. In those cases, the days usually alternate towards watching many episodes of a particular TV show on DVD with the usual practice routine and hour bursts of various forms of writing. With real Deep Writing, it’s good not to be halfway through a season of say Big Love and be too curious as to what will happen in the next episode. To combat distractions, it’s good to have a blend of specific and vague goals. In the case of this past weekend, I had one particular song that was starving for attention and I spent nearly all day Sunday (save for a 3 hour practice session with the usual songs) on one song, going back and forth between the guitar and the paper. After hitting the 6-hour mark on the one til 1 AM, I watched a half-hour from Saturday Night Live the night before (Tina Fey and Justin Bieber, Justin’s dancers are something else) and fell asleep.

Having put good work into the primary concrete task at hand (the song worked on the day before), I could work Monday with more abstract notions. I’m currently chasing the overall goal of working of completing the 6th and 7th sequences of my 8-sequence project. Since the last sequence is mostly written and fixed, these two sequences remain to finish the writing of the project as a whole. The 6th sequence involves writing songs for singers other than myself to sing or covering songs myself that I didn’t write 9or blending the two ideas in some cases), so in general getting to play with the idea of other voices and characters. The 7th sequence is quite different in tone and working on the two in tandem lends a nice reciprocation to the proceedings thus far. I spent most of Monday and the first part of today (Tuesday) brainstorming concepts and imagery by both free-writing and digging through previous drafts and notebooks to see if I find anything good. Both processes can be roughly compared to panning for gold and sifting through more sand than not throughout. The song I worked on Sunday all day had already been through these filtering processes including being picked at through various work shifts and bus-rides. It’s still quite daunting to think of working on new songs and realize all the hours that will go into deciding exactly what that song should be. Part of the process is often making the process itself look effortless and making the song being sung a natural expression instead of forced one. I’ve learned over the years to enjoy each stage of the process and have realized by this point whatever gets unused for one song may be used for the next and may at the very least, strengthen the focus and meaning of the song at hand

Whether writing a couple hours in the day or Deep Writing over the course of 2 and ½ days like this past weekend, I’ve learned to save time at the end for a “cooling off” period so that when the outside world IS rejoined, the head isn’t necessarily still completely intoxicated with the infinite possibilities presented while in the throes of conception. So I quit my free-writing today around 2 then did my usual practice til 5:30 before leaving to meet my girlfriend, hungry for human interaction again.

DEAD ROCK STARS

2010-04-10T12:34:00.001-07:00

Went to see Spoon last night at the Moore. Was a tad disappointed at the straightforwardness of the set but Deerhunter’s set before it went completely off-the-rails when the lead singer started playing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” then went into a rap about Kurt Cobain (it was the anniversary of his death) that went a good 15 or 20 minutes. It started off ridiculous then somewhere in the middle, hit upon a true sentiment about being 12 years old and having rock n’ roll mean everything to the point where one guy’s death can be so profound. Not to sound like an old fuddy-duddy but who could knock themselves off nowadays and come off as such a martyr to a impressionable and hero-starved adolescent? I don’t know, but I sure had a lot of time to think about it as Deerhunter’s tribute kept going and going, culminating in one long held-note delayed into a furthur 5-minute wash.

The night before I played as part of Seattle Soundbite, an annual (going on three years now) affair of local restaurants putting on a mini-Taste of Seattle with booths and samples while bands make up a bill that have at least one member in a local restaurant. This year they chose the bill by vote and we ended up getting 3rd. place The Soundbite has been going on as many years as my restaurant TASTE has been open and I’ve been working there so I always thought it’d be cool to play and especially this year since I’ve been working on and recording songs that take place at restaurants as part of a lyrical thread. I also had the bright idea to have half the band dressed as servers and the other half as chefs or line cooks. It worked well for everyone else but I wore my actual work uniform, which is all black with a ridiculous long flowing apron. Still, immobile as I was , it gave me the effect of feeling like I was at work and perhaps gave a nice visual compliment to the songs. Method singing anyone?

It was the second set in a row we did after the Neumo’s show last month featuring the material we’ve spent the last year recording, did almost the exact same set with one song Don’t Come to New York City cut because we had a little less time to play. Otherwise the songs were Sugar Nile/Candyland/Water Balloon/Crossing Russell Road/Alexandra/Grenadine/Water Balloon (reprise). After Russell Road, Michael shouted, ”Let’s play that one again!” It’s Allison’s favorite to play too, before the last show she said we should end with it but the way the set is now, it can’t really end with anything but the fast Water Balloon. Overall the set went nicely with a respectful, attentive crowd that was fun to play for. If things weren’t quite as tight or the monitors onstage weren’t as good as the Neumo’s show, it was only because the circumstances were more exceptional at Neumo‘s. For this show too, Carey on trumpet was gone, in Japan for the week and Justin was gone too with Dave back in the drummer’s seat playing with Isaac on percussion and switching for the last couple songs. Also added John on Hammond for double keyboards (like Springsteen!), Michael stuck to violin partly because he broke his mandolin in Boston. Ben Obee once again filled in on bass and it looks like he’ll do Folklife with us too since Ken is unavailable right now to play.

Earlier in the week, I was at Egg Studios just for a couple hours in the afternoon. First priority was to make an instrumental rough mix of New Duds for the Captain that Allison could practice singing a a lead vocal too before taking a shot at recording on the 19th this month.. I was planning on doing some vocals too but Conrad was a little sick so I didn’t stay too long. We did spend an hour or so editing an interesting track that’s a medley of sorts called “Libby with An L/Katie Don’t Come Around Here Anymore.” The first half depicts a young waitress named Libby who’s working at a restaurant for the first time and gets really attached to the staff and then the second half, as indicated by the title,, concerns the other half of the cycle with a staff mourning a former co-worker that quit because she got too burnt out. Michael Spaly sings lead vocals for the Libby section and Nathan Wade sings lead on Katie with me and Allison (so far) doing backing vocals. This track corresponds with and parallels “The City Girls and The County Girls”, the 5th track on “The Katie Sermon,” the first chapter/sequence of the 8 -albums-of-8-songs project called The Blue Moon Bible. Since the 5th sequence will parallel the 1st sequence (and 6th parallels 2nd, 7th to 3rd and 8th to 4th) and the Libby/Katie medley is the 5th track on the 5th sequence, then it should be in execution the answer to a question that “The City Girls and the County Girls“ asks. Usually these parallels will be less explicit and obvious, but this is a good example of one way the overall project works because The City Girls and the County Girls literally asks a question, which side are you going to choose between the two choices offered. Of course, the point of the song is that the choices perceived by the people in the song aren’t really choices at all but stereotypes to discard with the real-world experience to be gained. That song had Nathan Wade, Scott Andrew, Michael, and Ken sharing the lead vocal.. One way to look at the Libby/Katie medley would be that it shows how two of the characters singing in the previous song (City Girls) have changed perspective down the line. In Michael’s case, on Libby, he takes pleasure in seeing the fresh-faced waitress get hired while still in school and use her workplace as a kind of transitional home between school and “the real world.” Nathan’s character in Katie however focuses more negatively on what could happen to the Libby character down the line, she’ll grow up and move on to her “real life” while the rest stay behind in THEIR real life. This track was about 5 minutes long but now is down to about 3:15, nice and compact perhaps too compact but we’ll see.

It’s at the stage of the project too where the mixes done at the end of every session are no longer necessarily “rough” but saved as possibilities to use in the final master. Conrad also excitedly showed me how the he had just had the original board from Stax studios repaired so that all the channels were fully functioning whereas before only one or two at a time could be corralled. I’ve been listening to the 2nd Stax Complete Singles boxed set over the past year which was recorded between ‘68 and ‘72, the same time they started using that board. Sadly, that means Otis Redding probably never sang through the board (he died in Oct ’67) but the dates are unknown enough where it could still be a possibility. Still, all the different singers and recordings I love so much that came through that board are mind-boggling to contemplate. The next full session band I do, I want to go straight through the board on tape. In the meantime, the rest of the overdubs and mixing for this project will be traveling through sacred ground..