Using You

To those few of you who come here fairly frequently, MJ, D-Ray, Fred, the one who's server is in Sunnyvale, the one in Kelowna and the few from other places: I'm sorry I don't post more often.

The reason is quite simple; if I don't have anything to say that's interesting to me I'd rather just shut the hell up. I mean, there's a reason I play in an instrumental band.

If something unusual happens or my interest gets peaked about an aspect of my musical life it tends to gurgle around in my slushy brain for a few weeks. I'm always trying to find the why and how of these things or the connection to a bigger issue. If I can't force some sort of conclusion out of my experience or observation I tend to let it drop. Yup, I'm taking a very limited topic blog and reducing the chance of a steady readership even more by deliberately restricting my output.

Hmmmm, and is there a reason I'm not famous yet? :)

This isn't a pity-fest, far from it. I simply wanted to say thanks to those of you who find what I write even moderately interesting. I don't want anyone thinking I don't notice and appreciate the modest attention I get on these here internets.

So thanks folks. Thanks for the comments, thanks for occasionally pushing my hit counter into double digits and most of all thanks for letting me use you. I put a great deal more effort into these post than I ever did writing a journal, and the reason for that is the public nature of it. If you folk didn't visit I'd have never come to some very important conclusions about my life and its relationship to music, cause frankly, without an audience I'm a lazy sot. The cheque's in the mail.



(Oh and BWE, that comment your brother made was classic, a perfect example of why playing live is so much fun. If it'd been me I'd have tried to get him to repeat it into a live mike, but then I'm a cruel sort.)

Redux

So the day passes. I calm down. I no longer feel like beating the guy till he's as damaged as the woman he hit. I mean, I don't believe he's an evil man. The look on his face as he sat in the back of the police car was not one of triumph. He made a mistake but unfortunately someone else is paying the price for that mistake. And that my friends is the crux: the consequences of poor driving are far out of proportion to the punishment that our laws provide. Consider this, the man drove away after the police were done with him. At the very least someone who's put another person in hospital should not be allowed to drive away.

I can't say this often enough: driving a car is the most dangerous thing most people do in a day. Complete care and attention is the absolute minimum that the task requires. I beg of you, think about that for moment the next time you get behind a wheel.

Anyway, I was calm until I left work. There on the street was a small pile of sand, a dark red stain in the middle. The cops had put it down to soak up the blood. I stood there and watched as cars slowly tracked it to the west, each one carried away a tiny piece of that poor woman, unknowing and uncaring. Lynch mob. Justice ragged and personal, it sucks to know that I have the capacity for the these feelings, god help me if I'm ever in a position to act on them.

Anger

A woman is lying in the crosswalk in front of the store right now. She's old and she's hurt. Hit by a fucking SUV turning the corner and not paying attention. This woman is elderly, a mother, her grey haired daughter ran up as I was watching, crying "What happened." Her mother is crying in pain and bewilderment. Have you every heard a grandmother cry. A woman who's probably seen most of life's ups and downs, has given birth and probably buried a few people too. And now she's lying in the middle of the street crying as strangers watch helplessly as the abulance guys work.

I am so angry, I can barely keep it together.

For those of you with cars: driving is the most dangerous thing you do every day. 1.3 fucking million people are killed by cars every year in this world and over 500 million are injured. One of whom is right out front of my workplace right now. An inattentive driver has reduced a grown adult to a state helplessness that no one should be reduced to.

Anger doesn't even begin to touch it. PAY ATTENTION OR YOU'LL BE THE ONE ON YOUR CELL PHONE TO YOUR LAWYER. fuck

Whammer

The gig a couple of weeks ago is now but a fuzzy memory and now we've gotten down to work. Make no mistake about it, recording stuff is work. When you play live mistakes are gone instantly. Every beat is a new beginning, provided you don't make too many mistakes, the audience won't really notice. But recording, well, it's for keeps.

A live performance is about getting the band working together as a single unstoppable unit whose goal is to make the maximum impact on the audience. A hammer. When it's working right those listening will get what you're on about whether they want to or not. They might not go home knowing the chorus or humming that pretty little turnaround from the last bridge, but they should have felt the emotions you intended to convey. Of course on a bad night all they go home with is the emotional equivalent of a smashed thumb, but hey, that's why bars serve booze.

Recording is a whole 'nuther kettle of metaphor. Because any mistake you make is permanent, it's less about drive and unity of momentum and more about getting the details right. It's like building watches: little tiny pieces slotted into their places just so. Everything has to fit 'cause there's no place to hide when it can be played back over and over.

The process of getting the details right often sucks the life out of a great song. It's a common experience were the band was great in performance but the CD bought at the merch table sucks. There's a thing called "Red Light Fever" where performers who know the material inside and out still tense up when the recording light is lit. When you're trying not to make mistakes it's inevitable that you're going to play cautiously and caution isn't exciting.

So how the hell do you build a watch that's also be a hammer?

We're recording the band as a whole, where everyone plays at the same time rather than overdubbing each part separately. This help keep the energy up but it means that if any one of use has a bad take the whole track is lost.

We've also been employing tricks like playing two takes in a row without stopping in the hopes that the second will be a little less stressful. Segmenting the songs as much as possible so that a mistake in the last section won't ruin the whole take helps too.

All in all everyone seems to be enjoying this session a lot more than the last one. I'm not sure why. Maybe we're getting better at it. I know for myself I'm really enjoying the process of watchmaking.

We've isolated the instruments as much as possible and everyone is using headphones to hear each other. I love this. I can tailor who's in my ears and make it whisper quiet if I want. Sweet indeed. I've found all I really need is the drums to be clear and present with just enough bass and lead guitar to know where I am in the song.

Now that I can hear myself and the drums clearly I'm finding that it's getting easier and easier to fit my rhythm into what E's doing. Our parts are beginning to dovetail together in a way that they never did before. This is immensely satisfying. I'm getting a kick out of it that rivals what I get from hearing an audience respond.

There's satisfaction in swinging a hammer, it's primal and visceral. But there's satisfaction in an intricate job done right as well. In some ways it even goes deeper. Hammers are all about the moment and immediacy and because of that the feeling they create fades quickly. (Insert drug reference here.) But watchmaking speaks to grander things. Putting it all together correctly is a reflection of the intricacy of our world and perhaps even the universe as a whole. Each part has its role and the sum can't be achieved unless everything is working properly. This is as true for songs as it is for ecosystems and I think on some level we can feel that. Maybe it's hubris, treading on ground that is meant for the gods alone, or maybe we're just inseparable from our baroque clockwork universe. We are in it, and of it to such an extent that creating our own little universes is what we're meant to do.

If so, it doesn't matter if we can get the watch to be a hammer; the attempt is enough.

Time

Tack, Thock, Tack, Thock... I'm not sure why my dress shoes make different sounds left from right, but I like it. It's musical. Black and a little pointy in toes, their wooden heels tap out a duple rhythm as fundamental to humanity as death and taxes. It makes me smile as I hurry back after donning my stage duds.

Saturday was the band's first gig since last summer. Well, to call it a gig is stretching things a mite. The P eople's P edal, the bike share co-op I work for, had it's AGM and to entice members to attend we held an after party. The total audience was maybe 10 people, of whom at least half were either sleeping with, or related genetically to, one of the band members. That didn't matter at all.

The band cracked wise and tasteless, the audience laughed and heckled and the women...the women danced. It was fine night.

We didn't play exceptionally well, but there were moments of ferociousness. Moments of drive and energy greater than the sum of our parts. There were even moments of rockdom, where tongues got stuck out and secret devil signs were made.

I'll be 40 in a couple of months. I don't feel it and I don't really look it, but there it is. I'll never be a rock star despite how I acted on stage this weekend.

I had a single moment of clarity during the set, a moment where I could picture how we might look to a disinterested observer. A bunch of never-were's kidding themselves that they're 20 years younger and a whole lot hipper.

Oh, I had a moment of clarity all right and I didn't care one whit. Instead I fell on the first chord of the chorus like an angel robbed of grace, got my head banging and grinned at K as he and I smacked the ever-lovin' shit out of the rhythm. It was glorious.

For that 45 minutes time had stopped being a matter of birth days and hair thinning on top but thickening in orifices. Time was kick and snare, verse, chorus, bridge, the count in and the pregnant pause before the big final chord. Time was ours to play with, to subjugate and subdivide, to throw out into space where it was caught by the feet of women.

I've long since lost count of the number of gigs I've done, but this one was special.

Tack, thock, Tack, thock...time is inexorable, but every now and then, it's beautiful too.

I can tap into my feelings of grief at the drop of a hat, or milk carton for that matter. I've jokingly told people that I can cry on demand, and in truth, I can. All it takes is a little method acting, a conscious decision to think about all the things that hurt and boom, waterworks.

I'm still trying to decide what kind of songs to work on. I had felt that getting all of the angst out would be a good idea, but now I'm not so sure. A while ago I read this, and while some of the arguments in the comments were over my head, the basic gist rang true to me.

The Freudian notion of repression might not be what I'm doing. I feel sad lots, I think about and clearly remember the things that led me to my current mental state. Is that repression? Somehow I don't think so. If it's not repression, what good am I going to do by writing songs about it?

What if expressing the sadness is merely reinforcing it, building up neurons in the areas of my brain devoted to those feelings. What if I'm practicing sad? Wouldn't it be better to practice happy? And how the hell would I do that anyway?

The best argument I have for writing sad songs* is that I can sing them with conviction. Total honesty even. It doesn't take me any effort to inhabit that sort of song. I'm a lousy singer and not having to "fake it till ya make it" on the emotional expression appeals to me. Hell, it might be the only thing I have going for me as a singer.

My musical life is shifting again and making this question relevant. The band is recording again and around the time that finishes our practice space could go away. If that happens and we have a recording that most of us are happy with, well, I suspect the band will fold. There really isn't a lot of motivation in the group anymore. So, it looks like the digital recorder is going to be my primary musical outlet in the near future. Which means writing songs, which means making a decision.

What's it to be: sincere sadness or cartoon joy?

*No, not because they "...say so much." No offense to Mr.'s John and Taupin, but that's got to be the worst lyric in the history of pop.