Back On Track
Oct 29, 2007 Waiting
Well folks, it’s been a long time. Which is not to say that I haven’t been working. Oh, I have. Instrumental parts, vocals, harmonies, lyrics. The usual struggles. Just behind the scenes.
Incognito.
But I’m coming out to show my face. Maybe it’s the showy spirit of Sexyween. Or maybe it’s because I miss performing, and I need some sort of audience to listen to me ramble. But most likely, it’s the seminar I listened to yesterday on “How To Make Yourself Do Just About Anything,” and the new Statement of Purpose I’ve drafted as a result.
You see, all this time I’d been working on this album, and claiming it was my number one priority, but I was fooling myself, because I wasn’t following the most important rule for getting what you want:
“Take what you want, as long as you pay first.”
Sure, I knew I’d have to make sacrifices, both creative internal ones and external ones, but I didn’t have a handle on what those were. Every time one came up, I had to decide - is this more important than the album? And each one of those decisions cost me a little bit of willpower and eroded a little bit of the importance I’d assigned to this project.
But that changes starting today. I’ve thought long and hard about what sacrifices I’ll need to make to get this project finished, and I’ve accepted them. I’ve made a list, signed it, and put it up on my wall, a few feet away from my newly signed Statement of Purpose, my new daily schedule, and my new timeline.
This is not to say that I have nothing to show for the past few months. La Da Da Dee is done, and if I do say so myself, it is awesome. Silly Pop Song has a new breakdown section, inspired in part by all the Aretha I’ve been listening to. (Actually, it’s been mostly You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman over and over again. That song is a triumph of arrangement, performance, and composition. The piano intro is sheer magic) If We Were is so close; I just can’t get my falsetto to operate the way it used to.
More to come, more to come. And if anyone’s interested in the science behind these changes, check out Phillip J. Eby at dirtsimple.org. Brilliant stuff.
Tags: Waiting
Day 24
Jun 6, 2007 Waiting
If you have it, put on Stevie Wonder’s I Believe When I Fall In Love and listen to the piano going into the chorus right at 1:13. If not, you’ll just have to read this entry instead.
On the subject of timing, Questlove in a recent blog entry:
and FEELING is something you aint getting now. this is why i fucks with Rell….even in his program shit and cats telling me “it sounds like a 3 year old programed it…..you don’t hear the chorus rushing on beyonce’s “Green Light”?! that IS the point! that is what made prince the shit: embracing electronics but STILL maintaining a HUMAN feel. all them flaws Pharrell got in programming and chords and whatnot is the VERY thing i like about working with him.
And then
before i met Dilla i too felt out of place cause all the drummers from these parts of town were as perfect as one could get. and here i go tryna approximate some part time drummer from the backwoods of TN who probably played on a trash can drum kit all off beat—but that is what made my personality. FEELING!
Now I’ve never been a big fan of the Roots, but Questlove is without a doubt my favorite drummer. His work as a musical director is awe-inspiring (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party? Jay-Z Unplugged? Voodoo Tour?!!!), and his knowledge and understanding of the music of the past few decades is truly terrifying.
I’m not saying this to blow smoke up his ass - there are plenty people on MySpace doing that already - I’m trying to illustrate just how heavy it was for me to read that. This is a question I’ve been struggling with for a long time, and it’s become more and more important as I start to revisit some of these songs and fill in the cracks. The last time I talked about it, I was still vacillating. I knew I shouldn’t work so hard to clean up my “mistakes,” but it was just so hard to listen to them and think about other people listening to them critically.
But Questlove is so so right. And it was just what I needed to hear, just when I needed to hear it. Because Far Side needs to be loose and sparse on the verge of falling apart in order to work, and before today, I was too chicken to make that happen. Too concerned about it not sounding “professional” enough or “slick” enough.
But you know what? I have to do what I do. My music is my music. My feeling is my feeling; my flaws are my flaws. I’m going to make this album my way, and some people are going to hate it, and I am going to take that as a sign that I did something right. I’m psyched.
Oh yeah, worked on Far Side today. Piano parts blah blah blah drum programming yackity-shmackity.
Over and out.
Day 21
Jun 3, 2007 Waiting
More work tonight on Far Side. I redid one of the verses and made it sort of stark. I tried some reversed harmonies, but immediately it sounded like I was trying to do Radiohead. The song is Thom Yorkey enough as it is.
But it’s turning out well. It’s meant to be haunting, and working on it for hours today has gotten me into a very weird place. Sort of sad and hopeless, but at the same time knowing that it’s only because I’ve really immersed myself in the song. That everything is in fact OK.
Bizarre.
Also, Arthur and the Geniuses have our first gig tomorrow night. Just a few songs, but stage time nonetheless. I think it might be my sister’s first onstage performance ever, or at least as an adult, so I’m excited for her. She’s gonna rock. We’re all gonna rock.
Rock.
Days 19 & 20
Jun 3, 2007 Waiting
I’ve been working for the last two days on “The Far Side of Town.” It’s so nebulous right now. I’m not even sure if that’s what the song is called.
It started life, as many of my songs do, as just a musical idea that I fleshed out in Logic with nonsense lyrics. Then I added some lyrics so that I could start performing it, but I found that the way the original was recorded, as much as I liked it, didn’t work live. I had to change the melody of the chorus and revamp the structure.
So now I have these two very different versions of essentially the same song. That’s what happens, I guess, when you make the switch from a virtual band of unlimited instruments to a group of 1-4 actual people. But the question becomes, how do you reconcile them? Do you treat the live version like a software fork, letting each one develop separately based on its own needs and trajectory? Or do you try to combine the two, making one master version that will work in both settings?
Hmm. More on this as it develops.
Day 17
May 31, 2007 Waiting
Lovely rehearsal tonight for our mini-gig on Monday. Come on out; it’ll be great.
After: spent a while tweaking sloppy timing in In The Days. Spent another while pondering whether the sloppiness I’d just tweaked was what made the song work. Undid tweaking. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Tried out some different drum sample kits for La Da Da Dee. The verdict: the one I already had was the best.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move it along.
Tags: In The Days, La Da Da Dee, Waiting
Day 16
May 30, 2007 Waiting
So, after a long day of work, then a visit to the doctor about the soft-wrapped marble that my throat has turned into, and an attempt to make dinner without falling asleep, I tried to get down to work tonight. I started in on 4ths again, trying to make some sense of the weird groove I put together last night.
Now, 4ths is a pretty serious song. It’s about futility and sadness and inevitably death. Tough stuff to deal with when you’re not in the right frame of mind. But I was determined to put in my hour, and I wasn’t ready to tackle any of my other arrangements tonight. So I slogged through for 45 minutes, trying stuff out, listening, playing, goofing off, dragging my feet. And at the end of all that, I had big fat nothing.
So I opened up La Da Da Dee to see if I could get the bridge to a sort of compromise between the current boring tight version and the old sloppy but lively version. I couldn’t.
Bah. I couldn’t focus; I kept just playing around on my sampled drums instead of working. Then I thought, you know what, you work hard at this shit, give yourself a break. So I decided to have a little fun.
I don’t usually post samples in process, especially stuff as blatantly derivative as this, but making it put a smile on my face at the end of a long day. I hope it does the same for you.
“Ride Out?” (or maybe “Lie Down?”)
And if anyone can tell me where I jacked that drumbeat from, I’d greatly appreciate it. I’ve been racking my brains…
Day 15
May 29, 2007 Waiting
So I just spent another hour working on La Da Da Dee. The keen readers among you may remember that just yesterday, I proclaimed that song “done.” But you can never underestimate the need to revise, to perfect, to tweak. I started by just making innocuous fixes here and there, cleaning up the timing of a piano part, adding quiet strings to supplement a build in the 2nd verse. But by the time I hit my stride, I had completely dismantled the first section of the bridge and built it back up again.
Eek.
Now I’m not sure which version I like better. The first one was too sloppy; every time I listened, I winced a little bit at the poor timing and the slapdashedness of the parts. So I redid the parts, one by one, thinking them through, practicing them, and making sure they worked well with each other. By the time I was done, that section was much cleaner. Much prettier. Hmm. Much duller?
I recall a conversation with a friend a couple months ago; he was suggesting that I get some other people playing on my album. His argument was that getting someone who actually played drums, for example, to play the drums would result in measurably better drum parts, and therefore a better album.
I resisted, of course. I had no good counterargument at the time, but over the course of the next few days, I thought about it. Why am I so resistant to having other people play on this album?
And then I remembered. That the true goal of artistic work is not empirical quality. It’s self-expression. I have things to say, and no one else says them the way I do. I have met literally dozens of better singers and better instrumentalists than myself, better ears and better stage presence and better looks, better whatever. But none of them could make this album. Not necessarily because it’s better, just because it’s mine.
What does that have to do with this bridge section? Well, it’s one thing to state your grand theories to the people; it’s entirely another to be able to stick to them. Every time I listened to that part, sort of pretty with airy vocals and strings, I remembered the Sufjan Stevens album Illinoise I’ve been listening to recently, and a little voice in the back of my head said “Sufjan wouldn’t have been so sloppy.”
Bah. So now I’ve got this new much prettier section with boring timing. What to do, what to do.
After that, I got to work on 4ths, which is definitely going to be the weirdest song on the record. I hadn’t touched it since January, so I wasn’t sure what would happen. I just left what I had alone, and started futzing around with a groove for the rest of the song. I like what it’s turning into; it’s very different from everything else on the record so far. More like the stuff I used to do when I was just fooling around with Logic and didn’t have to worry about song structure. Something nice to croon and scat and growl over.
Tags: 4ths, La Da Da Dee, Waiting
Day 14
May 28, 2007 Waiting
And La Da Da Dee is done.
Well, not done, exactly. But in a complete form. An arrangement I like from beginning to end. The drums could use some reworking, and the languid section of the bridge still isn’t right. But it’s at the point now where I could give it to someone and say “Here is a late draft of a song on my album.” Last week, the best I could have said was “here are some ideas for this song that’s going to be on the album.”
I love this working every day thing. I was talking to a friend about it; he was concerned that by forcing myself to do it every day, I was turning it into a job. I am! I now have the best job in the world! I love doing it, but most importantly, I have to do it. Even on the days when I don’t want to. Because something good will come out of those days whether I want it to or not.
This was actually one of those days. I put off getting down to work until 10 in the evening. It was just too hot. But I managed to pull it together and slog through. The turning point was a bit of self-indulgence, starting to work out harmonies for the chorus and the 2nd verse. My voice is total crap right now, so most vocals that I record are going to get redone, but I like to work out harmonies early so I can build parts on top of them. I recorded some harmonies, and the whole song really began to make sense. The chorus melody is the best part of this song, and it is coming together in this Sly and the Family way that I first envisioned two years ago and completely forgot about. Yes!
It’s amazing how one little piece of magic can give everything around it such a jolt. I really like the way this song is turning out. I can’t wait until it’s done.
Tags: La Da Da Dee, Waiting
Days 12 & 13
May 27, 2007 Waiting
I’ve been working some more on La Da Da Dee. Cleaning up those bridge grooves, filling out the 3rd verse, trying to get the ups and downs right. I don’t like programming drums for slower songs. It’s too easy to subvert the groove with a misplaced fill. I just looped a basic 6/8 patten and recorded everything over it. Then when I find a moment that needs accenting, I’ll throw in some goodies. All very simple, though. I’m from the ?uestlove school of drumming; keep it simple as it can be. Now if only Arthur and the Geniuses could find a drummer who agreed.
It’s still a little disjointed. Parts will jump in out of nowhere on accented points, and fade away as easily. I’m finding that cellos really help to smooth things out. Just a simple line in the background provides a real nice pad. I’m totally lazy about my patch choices though. I’m just using the same basic Kompakt “Cello Arco” patch that I always use, and it doesn’t quite sound right. I suppose I could find something better, but I’d rather figure out the meat of things now, when it feels like I have all the time in the world. In a couple of months, when I start to panic, it’ll be nice to have something easy to work on.
But on the whole, i’m getting pretty close to have a full arrangement of this song. Once I do, that’ll make six full arrangements, two on the way, and one that just needs a day of piano and vocal recording. Of course, those “full” arrangements will still need tweaking, and the more I work on these songs that I wrote anywhere from one to three years ago, the more I think about writing new melodies. I’m constantly writing new tunes, but I don’t have time anymore to develop them as songs. I might sneak some on to this album as instrumental or, dare I say it, nonsense interludes. (Gasp!)
Tags: La Da Da Dee, Waiting