So Long, Hollow Mountain

My enthusiasm for the music I have made ebbs and flows, and sometimes in one day it goes from high tide to low tide very, very quickly.

How to know which way to go with all of this? In one way, I feel like forging ahead as-is, continuing my slog through the mixing and songwriting process and adding onto this project brick by brick until I feel happy with it and ready to let people listen to it. This would certainly be my normal approach. In another way, I feel like going further out on my own--learning to play the drums, learning to play everything, and continuing to write songs until I am convinced that every one is a glistening gem. Recording and mixing the whole thing on my own, as an island. In another way, I want to go back into pre-production, focusing on the basics, and then to reach out to a producer who I like and who can help me figure it all out. Or perhaps I'll release what I've done for free or "pay what you want" so that I can move onto whatever method of creation now feels the truest. Every day is a mixture of these conflicting impulses, and while I don't mind continuing to float along in between all of them, I would like to come to another epiphany soon. 

My teaching job is over, and I heave a sigh of relief. It was a very difficult job and I am glad to be done, and to move onto things both more ephemeral and more permanent. Soon my girlfriend and I will know if we have a house, and if we have the house, we have a basement, and if we have a basement I have the blank canvas for a recording studio with much more aural flexibility. It is this sort of possibility that makes my indecision more urgent--I feel like every time I change environments, the change is an opportunity to reconfigure my brain a little bit and to try out new modes of working. So the most recent solution to the problem that I've come up with is to release the songs that I am happy with as an EP, and to keep the other songs in mind as I write more material for another album. What do you think?

The Disillusionist

I don't know where to start in recounting the last few days, but I'll try and keep it short.

The recording session went nearly flawlessly. Some of the rhythm tracks (bass and drums) need a little tightening up, but not much at all. It was one of the most satisfying musical experiences I have had, seeing everything come together so quickly. I wrote the final song for the session on the subway going to Queens, and for another hour in Astoria Park. Sort of a Randy Newman vibe that the rest of the record does not entirely share. It's a song about a conflicted sense of disenchantment with city life, something which almost every New Yorker I have ever been friends with has had to deal with at some point. The guys learned it in 15 minutes and nailed it in two takes. It will close out the album, I think.

As for the record as a whole, I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but for me it is an artistic breakthrough, regardless of how it gets released or received by people familiar with my music, and I think will stand up over time to any music in a similar vein. Gray Lodge Wisdom was sort of treading water for me musically, I think because my energy levels and my thought processes had been so decimated by the cancer treatment. Those changes were largely temporary, thank god, and I'm really happy with how that album came out, especially because it brought me some closure and took my music to new emotional places. It also was a freeing album because I outsourced a lot of the arrangement work to some extremely capable friends. This new, as-yet untitled album will be freeing, too, but due to different configuration. Partly it is the new instrumentation, helped along by the very capable session work of Sean Walsh on drums and Roy Williams on bass, both seasoned musicians in countless genres. Interestingly, both Roy and Sean are primarily guitarists, and among many other things they play together in the band that Sean fronts, The National Reserve. Neither of them were terribly familiar with the tunes when we started the recording process, and this was by design on my part--I wanted to capture the spark of successive revisions in each take that was recorded, and to also be able to go back and emphasize certain spontaneous and organic elements. That sense of discovery and realization is apparent on all of the songs to an extent. Maybe more importantly, having a rhythm section has lent my songs a depth that they have never had on earlier albums.

It's also important to note that the direction that the recordings took had a lot to do with how Roy and Sean clicked as much as it had to do with the structure of the songs. Sean drew on a lot of Spanish, Central and South American rhythms in his drumming, and Roy's bass playing was taking some cues from 70's power pop and a little funk. Those influences took on a life of their own on several songs, and when combined with the sometimes overbearing intricacy of my guitar parts, ended up being something unique and flexible.

I am really going to enjoy refining the sounds that we got and deciding on how things are going to be arranged. And I have really enjoyed doing all of the engineering myself so far. The studio where I work, The Buddy Project in Astoria, is such a satisfying and efficient environment because of its small size--everything in its right place. I can't wait to finish this thing and let you guys hear it. I don't know how long it will be, but it will be worth it.

Heavy Hangs The Promise

Well, I have one song left to write, and then all that's left is recording this thing, naming it, and figuring out what the best way will be to release it. It'll be a pretty logical progression from my last album, which could be said for the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that…but I'm looking forward to fleshing out the differences in arrangements and production. I'm taking a quick trip to the city to record with a drummer friend in a couple of weeks, and those drum tracks will serve as a foundation for the majority of the tracks on the record. 

The lyrics on this album are more nuanced than my usual output, I think. Some are political, some are imagistic, some are personal. I'm not 100% happy with all of them, but that doesn't bother me so much. Lyrics don't always need to stand on their own, and the fact that so many of these particular lyrics do is something that I'm proud of. Some are deep, some aren't--just like life, right?

My favorite musical find recently is a songwriter from Los Angeles named Tim Carr (timothyglenncarr.com). My friend China (thechoircroaks.com) e-mailed me about him. She saw him open for Jherek Bischoff over there and she said she was blown away by the performance. I'm looking forward to seeing him myself sometime. 

Where Am I Being Led?

I always have to undergo several crises of confidence and identity in between making my albums--it's a fundamental part of my creative process--and I think that's true to some extent for everyone that I know who makes music or art. One of the essential arguments that I always have with myself has to do not so much with which songs to include or how to approach the songs from a production standpoint, but with what kind of songs to write. Sometimes I will write a song and decide that I don't like the subject matter, so I'll make another three or four versions, all with different lyrics, until I land on something that I'm happy with. Other times I just won't know whether I want to continue going down the rabbit hole of the post-American Primitive style that I have found myself drawn to when I play guitar, or whether I want to try something new or at least a little different from my usual comfort zone. 

It's that second kind of indecisiveness that has led to so much of my searching over the last six months. I have played around with a Prophet synthesizer, programmed drums, and more electric guitar than usual. I have committed (at least so far) to recording most of this record at home, which might not seem like much given the prevalence of home studios these days, but for me it's a seemingly eternal struggle, trying to reconcile my desire for sonic consistency with competing desires for complete sonic control and relative thriftiness. It's freeing to be able to sprawl out and try out idea after idea for an indeterminate amount of time, but it comes with its own limitations. Like Robert Frost said, writing free verse poetry is like playing tennis without a net. But like T.S. Eliot said, no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. It's those two competing philosophies that I bounce between when it comes to the relative freedoms and limitations that come with recording on my own. 

Right now, I find myself at that familiar impasse. Yesterday I slipped in the ice outside and, while I didn't seriously injure myself, I scuffed up my left hand a little bit. Playing guitar with that hand is like recording in the little room that I have to myself, with my growing nest of equipment--there are all sorts of unspoken obstacles, but they force me to be creative in new ways. I hope that I can find my true path for this album soon.