Ordinance is an Ugly Word

This whole event promoters ordinance thing really worries me, as a musician and concert-goer. It seems once again bureaucracy is blaring its misguided horn and the voices of real people try to respond in the midst of its honking.

“The ordinance will reduce the amount of music in Chicago, make events more expensive for consumers, dampen the large and growing economic engine that is Chicago music, and create a much less supportive business climate for Chicago’s small music business community.”  -Chicago Music Commission

So, if an independent musician wants to have a CD release party at a club, I need to have $300,000 in insurance?

Or if someone wants to throw a benefit for an injured musician at a venue, same deal?

Hmm. Well, all I can do  (besides attend the city council meeting) is continue working on the album. I go in this weekend to the studio again. I’m spending so much money on this little baby. But I have started to become less and less anxious about the outcome and rest in the knowledge that I’m a musician no matter what–and that will lead me to the next waterfall of creativity and opportunity.

 

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.

Gem in the Piles

I recorded this weekend, which I’ll write about later, but I wanted to mention an album I pulled out from the incriminating piles of junk in my house, and that I subsequently rocked out to: Loneliness Knows my Name by Patrick Park (2003). It’s one of those albums that I overplayed so much, I didn’t touch for a year or so, but now it sounds sweeter than ever. It passed the “Don’t Touch Me for a While then Pick Me Up and Either Still Love Me or Wonder Why You Ever Did” test!

PP sounds a bit like Elliott Smith but with more muscle and growl, and the album is an intoxicating blend of Beatlesesque sunshiney harmonies, some countrified, dilapidated folkiness, and literate, heartfelt grandson-of-Bacharach songwriting. Every song is a masterpiece, incredibly catchy and rousing, and the album listened through in one sitting will pierce and buoy you.

 

Hope he puts out another album soon. I think it’s cool he hasn’t yet (he’s probably digging even deeper for those amazing songs to come forth while straddling this rooftop.)

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.

I Will Possess Your Blahg

I recently discovered the music blog Stereogum. I like this blog because it’s a bit more interactive and conversational than other music sites; they allow you to hear the music they write about, and even have an ongoing “mix” of new artists. The writing is laidback, funny, and informal. They recently gave a heads up to the first single from Death Cab for Cutie’s new album, “Narrow Stairs.”

A good friend of mine introduced me to DCFC. I think it was a few months after “Plans” had been released, and we danced around to “Soul Meets Body” one day in her apartment (I think a requirement to be my friend is an ability to dance goofily together at any given moment.) She had given me a copy of the CD, and I found it a bit too earnest/maudlin/emo. But gradually I fell for the song and most of the album. Unabashedly romantic and unembarrassed about it, that song especially seems to me an ecstatic embrace of two people coming together, and the thrilling power of music to represent that. The moods of the album, contrary to my first listen, are varied–romantic ecstasy, mourning/acceptance of death, nostalgia for childhood. You can tell that Ben Gibbard labors over making his lyrics clean, direct, and precise, like the best poet (although he recently denounced calling songwriting “poetry” in a recent interview with American Songwriter, saying that they are two totally separate things, which I have come to agree with more and more.) I went on to see the band live, and while I was annoyed with the crowd of under-20 O.C. fans and the cavernous Riviera was probably not the best venue for them, there were moments of supreme musical transcendence from the band.

In the American Songwriter article, Gibbard reveals that the new album is totally different from Plans, which was meticulously..uh…planned, with overdubs from each member of the band–at one point Gibbard says he was playing video games in another room while his bassist tracked, and he felt uncomfortable about that. I can see his point, but I think that’s what gave Plans its signature sound–it was elegantly coherent rather than passionately spilled. The new record was recorded all live, with minimal overdubs and few takes. I admire their balls-out new approach, and I can understand as artists they wanted to go in an entirely new direction to elude stagnancy or pigeonholing. But I have to say I was mildly disappointed by the plodding new track. The bass line is sexy, the guitars trickling and throbbing gradually into the song are sexy, but the sexiness goes on for way way way too long! When Gibbard finally starts singing, it’s beautiful and catchy of course, but I felt let down by the slightness of his lyrics and the puny bridge. Then the song sort of ends abruptly, making the whole interminable prelude seem like a dumbbell to the feathery conclusion. Still, maybe this is just another example of how I initially don’t get what Gibbard and co. are trying to do, and eventually I’ll see the light. Maybe I just need to dance around to this track too and I’ll fall for it equally as hard. Regardless, I’m excited to hear the album in its entirety.

 Here is the Stereogum feature, with the full track.

I’m Glad I Bought That Ugly Crystal

Next week I enter the studio for the second time this year to continue work on my debut album.   Oh, that word “debut” makes one sound like such an ingenue! But I feel like I’ve been around the block a few times with music. Not exacly “rode hard and put in wet,” a phrase that’s trickled down through the women in the family, but still…I’ve seen my ups and downs with this music thing. Luckily these last few months have brought me back to a place of wonder towards music, with some distance from the ego’s crowing.

Many know I have struggled to shed the “coffeehouse ingenue singer/song writer” thing, like clothing whose style that I have gradually outgrown but still wear because I haven’t found the clothes that truly suit me. (I remember a roommate once told me I had the right pieces in my wardrobe, I just didn’t know how to put them together right.)

I think sometimes it’s just a matter of not wanting to be like everyone else, of thinking that the music you’re doing is somehow different, so you say “Oh no, I’m not a singer/songwriter.” Many women artists want to be seen as on par with the boys so they do electronic beeps and boops or take on weird monikers. It’s when that self-consciousness disappears that women can truly be artists, not worrying about impressing with their technically proficient but stiff guitar riffs (I have to say that’s the vibe I got from St. Vincent when I saw her perform…talented, but utterly self-conscious, making cold hipster banter in order to gain credence with her followers.) 

Everything is a bit derivative these days, unless you’re Joanna Newsom. And even she uses forms from way back when. So I am happy for now being a singer/songwriter.  Um…who else would wear that hat? I certainly couldn’t.

Anyway. I’ve spent the last four years gearing up for this album. Writing, tossing out songs, thinking songs are amazing, next day thinking songs are shit, recording melodies into my cell phone, losing cell phones, trying out a band, playing with band to less than stellar responses, disbanding rather quietly and guiltily because I like said band members, finding new players, buying crystal from kooky lady who tells me I’ll write better songs, rubbing crystal when I’m stressed out, new better songs start to come (maybe crystal’s doing, maybe not), learning piano again with fingers awkward as popsicle sticks slapping against water.

All the while worrying that this will be one huge effort that will amount in a thin line of haze, not the big bountiful white clouds that gallop across the sky. But I counter that with knowing at least I will have tried, and I can tell my children someday that I tried and did this thing and it was a lot of fun and beautiful for the most part. And they’ll be like, “No way, mom, you were in a band? Did you have groupies?” like that really dumb commercial for a brand that has totally escaped me, where the kids are berating/disbelieving the dad that he was in a band, because he seems so uncool now, and he and the mom blithely try to convince them. If I were that dad, I’d be like “Shut up! All of you! You’ll never know my dreams!” And then storm off to the basement to jam. Teehee!