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.

Flurries of Bliss

“…if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” -Joseph Campbell

I just opened an Amazon card and bought a bunch of music-related stuff…a melodica, glockenspiel, books on global music marketing and “amping” my Myspace page…I feel good about that totally impulsive investment.

“Following your bliss” might seem abstract to me sometimes but today it’s not…just doing something small like what I just did, even though it took money, makes me feel like I’m still feeding my spirit despite all of the setbacks, anxieties, and self-destruction of recent years, and I’m still following a blissful path that includes commitment to my creativity–and more so, to close relationships. I think “following” can be misinterpreted as “well if you’re not doing it the EXACT way you had planned then it’s not bliss.” Can bliss be planned? I think only choices within this moment can turn you towards bliss. And that’s where patience, openness and strength is so important and can be maddening to the me-me-me-now-now-now side of the artist (i.e. me)

I think small bouts of bliss can create the right path for yourself, but you have to fully savor those moments instead of wondering why can’t I have more of these?, and keep angling for them to happen even when that voice tells you it’s stupid, grow up.

I am spending the next few days with family away from frost-fixated Chicago, in the balmy climes of Florida, and I’m clearing my head of all music-related things, bringing only my slightly frustrating book on Zen (the author says to go on a walking meditation and uses her recent retreat in the Australian rainforest as an example…yes, I’d love to recreate that experience on the concrete streets of Chicago!) that I lost under my couch for a week (purposefully?) and East of Eden which I will finally finish, hopefully. A very intense, beautiful but demanding book that requires me to be in a certain mind space in order to fully arrive at its words.

Mini-bliss moment of the day #1: Standing in front of the puppet cart on Michigan Avenue–the only one in the audience, and when I turned to leave and looked back, the little dog puppet waved at me. Thank you charming puppet man.

Mini-bliss moment of the day #2: Today the background music of a sushi takeout place I go to was a music box version of Beatles songs–all tinkly, spare and demure.

Image by Grainne Finn

Spiderlings

Reading something like this both inspires and depresses me. I think that simultaneous mood helix is what keeps me from reading “Eat Pray Love.”

 http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/sharpdarts/080214/

And then I read my horoscope…
“Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Jon Carroll described the behavior of certain young spiders in the Sacramento Delta. When one of these “spiderlings” is ready to leave its birthplace and go in search of adventure, it spins out a long gossamer strand, climbs aboard, and leaps into the unknown. Floating in mid-air, it’s carried by the wind to who-knows-where, eventually landing in its new homeland. While I’m normally a big advocate of having goals and making plans, this is one of those rare times when I advise you to act more like the spiderlings.”

Yeah I know, I should be doing work not living in my dangerous daydreams.

new nectar

At rehearsal this weekend I was increasingly flustered, banging my bassist’s beautiful Martin guitar against the ceiling (what is it with me and Martins? I dropped my first one down the stairs!) and tangling up the cords to the amp and the guitar pod, suddenly projecting all of my impending anxiety over the upcoming studio sessions on to my surroundings and inability to disengage said cords from their rats’ nest. I kept telling myself, be mindful, be mindful of what you’re doing, as I’ve been reading a book on Zen lately called “Untrain Your Parrot.” Sometimes I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about (“heartmind”?) but I like some of the tips she gives, like a phrase called “now vow how bow”. No, not Wow Bao. Now Vow.

But of course that internal prompt had the total opposite effect. Luckily my drummer is a true gentleman; he asked his wife who, when she’s not teaching world drumming with him, is a bartender. She sweetly brought me a delicate little tumbler of amber-colored liquid, comfort of the Southern kind, shaken and strained with Roses lime. Oh my goodness. Somewhere between a shot and a girly drink, I do believe I’ve found my new cocktail. I soon loosened up and even started doing my nerdy sway dance while playing the songs. But I didn’t feel totally sloshed either. It was the perfectly-sized tonic. Tipsiness prevails over forced mindfulness!

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