Housepainting Music

I attempted to paint my apartment back to white yesterday. I got through most of one wall.

I went through several CDs (Joanna Newsome, too intricate; Arcade Fire, too indignant) before I finally picked the right one to paint a wall to:

The Last Beautiful Day-New Buffalo

Because it’s cheery, weird, and spacious. You can squeegee in time to the beat.

Thanks, Sally.

 

Making an Album on Your Own, Part 1

I feel like it would be good to just put this out there for musicians who might be going it alone in making an album. Of course I still have that feeling where “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, eeek!” but I have learned a few things I thought I’d share. Part 2 will appear when I’m finished, I guess!

Finding a Band: 

• Network with people you know and trust. I’ve found that musicians are more than willing to help each other out, but you have to ask! 
• Offer payment to your players, even if they want to do it for free. If they insist on doing it for free, do something nice for them in return! (Admittedly, I still owe someone a massage gift certificate!) If you go with studio musicians, make sure they connect with the project and aren’t just doing it for pay. Studio musicians are worth it for those instruments you want to really shine.

The content:

• Understand that the songs you rehearse and record with the band might not make the final cut. You will spend money on tracks that might not see the light of day if you want to end up with something really cohesive. Try to see your album as a whole dramatic statement, and weed out the songs (as beloved as they might be) that are weighing that statement down.
• Understand that you might still be writing even when you thought the album was done. Most likely, those songs will probably end up on the record and stand out because they’re the culmination of all of your output and effort over this period of album-making. Don’t stop writing while you’re recording! Keep your muse energized.
• Remember the attention span of your listener. I’m not the type of writer to sit down and say “oh, I’ll write an upbeat song” and then “oh, I’ll write a slow, intense one.” But in choosing the final tracks, pull the songs that play against each other in mood and tempo. Again, sometimes you’ll have to kick out a track that sounds too much like another one.
• In arranging, you can always pull parts from those kicked-out songs, or use the “cuttings” method from other songs that didn’t make it. Sometimes a stray lyric or riff will fit perfectly with your final songs.

Recording

• You can choose to record it all yourself, but realize this process will take a long time to master. Personally, I thought I was going to teach myself Logic and do it all myself, but this made me panic. I do want to learn eventually, but having to spend so much time focusing on learning recording when I wanted to really focus on the content of the songs and arranging didn’t make sense. I had already pretty much mastered Garageband, which I’ve been using to arrange the songs.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help in the process. I finally decided to go into 2 studios/engineers I trusted, and feel confident enough in my arrangements that the sessions would translate what’s been in my head to the recording. I’m also asking an old friend to put finishing touches with guitars/other instruments on his Protools…and he’s 1000 miles away in Austin! The recording of the album doesn’t have to be conventional. Josh Rouse recorded his most recent album in Spain but sent the tracks to a drummer in Nashville. In this era, you can make the process as global as you’d like.
• Have fun in the studio. Take it seriously, but laugh too. Solid preproduction will ease the nerves. By that I mean arranging as much as possible, having your task list at hand, and rehearsing enough to feel comfortable with the songs.

Overall outlook

• Stay in the present and savor this process. Don’t think about “what am I going to do with this when I’m done???” I admit, I’m having those feelings and I have bought several books on marketing, and am vaguely thinking about the publicity side of things. But I’m trying to stay loose about it and not freak out. Just relish being a musician and being given the gift to express. Recording is extremely fun; you’re creating your musical love letter to the world. The business stuff can happen afterwards.

 

 

 

Au Revoir, Winter

spring is coming.

I lucked out and got a single ticket to the sold-out Bon Iver show last week, trekked through a freezing rain to hunker down in the intimate theater for an amazing night. Go see him if you haven’t.

What struck me most was his humility, the way you could tell he was so honored to be there, catching his cute little grimace at a misplayed note, and wondering where on earth does this unearthly music come from?

What floors me more is the simplicity of his recording process, and how such beauty can come forth from such humble tools.

I feel myself getting more and more complicated arranging my songs, but I also feel like I’ll balance the lusher tunes with the ones I like to call “dusky”–fragile and spare. I’m having so much fun with the Line 6 guitar pod that lets my electric guitar take on 500 different sounds. Still, I’m going to limit my tools to that, a piano, a 12 string and cello/violin. If I saturate myself with more choices, I think I might go into a creative panic (the kind where you’ll never know what exactly was the best sound, the most optimal arrangement, etc.)

I’m trying to really go with my intuition, but it’s difficult. I feel like I don’t know what the hell I’m doing sometimes. But to be the arranger has allowed me to open up some really interesting spaces in the songs and become more and more excited about a new strangeness to this album. My beau told me one song sounds like Mogwai! In my arrangements right now, I feel like I’m a painter slapping on lots of paint onto a canvas. I’m trying to stay between minimalist and baroque.

Though I do love Mi and Lo. Spartan, spare beautiful folk weirdos! I would like to record something totally austere someday. (Though maybe not PJ Harvey White Chalk austere. That album still hasn’t grown on me.)

 

 

Lyric Pop-era

Do any other Chicagoans think it’s strange the most beautiful days in April usually fall on a weekend, and the weekdays are rainy and gray? It’s all too uncanny. Of course I’m jealous of those who have consistently beautiful weather. But I also don’t mind the rain…it makes me want to curl up and read. I just finished a good intelligent page-turned called “A Company of Three” by Varley O’Connor about actors in the 70s. Now I need to read “A Prayer for Owen Meany” which is one of my beau’s favorites, although the first paragraph didn’t really ignite me. Oh, and finish “East of Eden”!!!

Listening to Bon Iver’s “For Emma Forever Ago” mostly everyday, and nothing else (although I got this great Putamayo African Lullabies sampler at work that has some amazing musicians on it, especially Habib Koite whose album I need to get. Ah, the benefits of being the contact for publicity materials!) But Bon Iver…there’s not a more beautiful album out right now. And of course, his whole story of moving to a cabin in desolate Wisconsin to record his masterpiece just makes me love it more. It makes me feel like you don’t have to be so  ”connected” (the Web, shows, being in a big city) to create music.

I read in a New York TImes Magazine article a few months ago on Rick Rubin that when he produces artists, he tells them during the album-making process that the best songs are written at the very end. I think I have written my last and final song for the album, and will probably just record me and a guitar. I don’t know if it’s my best, but I’m glad I finally wrote a song with a chorus that is entirely la-la-las. Choruses can be so burdensome for a songwriter.

Last night I also realized most of the songs on the album are about exiting a dark time…so the title “Light Year” works well. (Honestly I named it after a book that really affected me, Light Years by James Salter.) I would call the songs romantic lullabies or bittersweet anthems of hindsight and hope.

The Third Thing

When my sister and her boyfriend visited me in the studio a few weeks ago, she said I looked completely blissed out, all flushed cheeks and smiles. And I was. Of course it reminded me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 classic “Flow”, which explores how you reach this blissed-out state through losing yourself in a task, artistic project or mundane activity like washing the dishes. My mom lent me the book long ago and it’s still resting on my bookshelf. I’ve been meaning to dig into its very, very small type. But maybe I don’t need to read the book, because I already understand what it means to reach that zone. It seems a bit counterintuitive to analyze the state, although I’m sure there are eloquent nuggets in the book.

I think I’m lucky in that my boyfriend also knows this “flow” state with his own work. When we are at home both working on our projects, and slip into each other’s zone to give a peck on the cheek then slip back to our own private worlds, I’m incredibly contented. It’s taken me a long time to realize that to have a ”third thing” in our relationship is a sanity-booster, whether it’s our own projects we discuss with each other, or tennis, or playing terrible versions of Billy Joel songs on the piano together, or even our obsession with the Wire. The poet Donald Hall coined the phrase and describes third things as “essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.”

I’ve had to mature from too much dependency on my partner to fulfill my every need to knowing third things can bring us a shared flow, joy and sanity, and that also I have a ”secret garden” in my art and my other relationships, but a secret place that I can share with him because he is my family now. 

* Donald Hall writes on the third thing in his book The Best Day, the Worst Day, chronicling his marriage to Jane Kenyon–you can read the excerpt here.

A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990