Tag: homerecording

The Rando Stuff Inside My Head

Auditory doodle produced on my laptop with Logic
Pen, watercolor, and pencil doodles

I do a lot of scribble-doodling while I’m sitting in a meeting (trying really hard not to tell off the man-child who’s interrupting the female presenter to tell us all about how she’s wrong and he has his fingers on the pulse of the One Right Way to teach… I failed, by the way), or while I’m avoiding some task or other. Sometimes the doodling is auditory… Weird, trance-ish, stuff. Usually layers and layers of tracks that accidentally include both 4/4 time and 3/4 time that smoosh up ok and wind up sounding like heart palpitations. I kinda like the auditory randomness that looks like my notebook doodles, but I don’t have anything really to do with it, ya know?

I remember listening to a podcast, I think it was Dharma Punx, but not Noah Levine — anyway, the other guy, the one from New York who hasn’t been accused of sexual misconduct (as far as I know, anyway). So, listening to podcast, right — and he said that people want to feel safe, seen, and soothed.

We want to feel safe. Not have our nervous systems constantly in fight or flight. Fair. So soothed. What’s that? He meant the ability to calm down, as I recall, and it starts with parents who validate and mirror our emotions, I think (the memory is OLD and recently dislodged) but to me, that sounds like what I mean when I say connected. We have people (or just others, generally, non-human people, whatever, but not just ourselves alone, doing solitary in the echo chamber of our own head, right?) and we know this little family is ride or die. If we’re feeling fucked up, we have an avenue back to safe. Back to calm.

Cool. So seen. Seen.

I’ve spent “half of my life / just tryin’ to fall behind” (thx Regina Specter), trying to melt into the floor, disappear into the background. But I like, I can’t. Anyone who knows me in person just choked on whatever they were eating/drinking when they read that I try to blend in and be beige because I am 100% a failure at remaining unseen. Well, un-caught.

See, I feel as though I am pierced through by the uncomprehending glare of others, not seen in the sense Dharma Punx dude was talking about (see what I did there? ROFL. snort. rolling my eyes at my own cringy self.)

What does it take to feel seen? I suppose it takes the courage to display one’s authentic self. No one can see and jive with what you’ve kept wrapped up in a cupboard under lock and key. But in the past, jeebus fekkin chucks on a string, accidental slippage of the mask has always elicited a smackdown.

The normies do not like me, yo. They do naaahhhhht.

But I’m fucking killing myself trying (and forever failing) to pretend that the inside of my head looks like a proper gray plastic office cubicle.

It doesn’t. It looks (and sounds) like that rando shit up there.

The Song About Perfectionism is Stridently Imperfect

I wrote the first version of “Loki’s Laughing” during the height of COVID shutdowns. It lay there, incomplete and in rough recorded journal form (page turns and all) for three years before I pulled it out to really look at it again – which is kind of a funny story all on its own. I had been chatting with a friend about how paralyzed I felt, creatively. So paralyzed, in fact, that my song about creative paralysis was stuck in limbo. She wanted to hear it, so I uploaded it to SoundCloud for ease of sharing… and then 300-odd people wound up listening to my unfinished, unpolished journal entry within 48 hours, which was both thrilling and horrifying.

Thinking about the song again got me thinking about the feelings behind it.

From the time I was about 13 years old (when I started learning to play my dad’s old 12-string guitar) until I was 36 or so, I was an active artist. I played shows and open mics (in a few countries), I entered (and sometimes won) contests of visual art and poetry, and all my free time that wasn’t spent hiking or biking involved the creation and performance of art in some form.

But right around the time I turned 36 – so, just a little under 10 years ago from the time of this writing – I stopped creating. Altogether. I just shut down.

It was as if this horrific Paralyzing Spirit of Perfectionism took over and hollowed me out. Suddenly, after decades of creating freely, I just couldn’t. I was consumed by the fear that I would somehow create something that would trigger a cascade of online vitriol. And my fear of trolls absolutely invaded my skull. Imaginary bullies followed me into my living room. Before I even sat down with the piano or began to daydream about a story, legions of imaginary bullies were screaming at me. It was ridiculous.

What happened when I turned 36 was that I got my first smartphone.

And what had completely paralyzed me was my very first observations of the comments section on social media like YouTube and, well, the whole of Twitter.

I was tying myself in knots because I was terrified that some bored jerk on Twitter (or Tik Tok or whatever) was going to – what? Be mean to me? I spent my childhood being teased on the playground. I’ve been told I was a weirdo all my life. What’s new? What was so scary about it happening on the Internet that I was suddenly a committed devotee of rotting in unremitting, barren paralysis?

I think it’s because the Internet was suddenly in my pocket. Or bag. Or on the table next to me. I think it’s because the potential for bullying felt like it was omnipresent. Inescapable.

Social media can be a tool, if we approach it as one facet of a rich and truly multifaceted life. If the vast majority of our time is spent outdoors in the sunshine (or rain or wind or snow), or with people, plants, and animals in the actual meatspace of embodied life, if we devote ourselves to working with our hands and reading books (with pages that we can turn) and writing with a pencil and paper – if we re-inhabit our bodies – and occasionally check in on Instagram… I think, maybe, that the Internet might be a cool way to connect.

But if it takes over our skulls, if it masters us… naw. Fuck it.

Throw it away.

We can do better.

We used to share printed zines and have pirate radio shows. We used to write paper letters and meet up in libraries and coffee shops and parks. We used to ride our fucking bikes around the godsdamned neighborhood.

And ya know, that was actually pretty fucking cool.

Well anyway, here’s a video I made to go along with a song I made (with my brother). A stridently imperfect song about being creatively paralyzed and how ridiculous that really is.

Because we’re all gonna die. And the bullies are just as scared of the vast, open question that is the end of life as anyone. So fuck it. Might as well create something now.

Screenshot 2024-03-03 at 4.37.46 PM

Aural Painting

My brother and I have been talking music a lot lately. He played trombone, studies classical music in his free time, and reads books on stuff like arrangement and voice leading.

I’m more of an impressionist. How can I smear this sound across your ears and get you to feel something like the catastrophe that I feel?

Chris paints Rembrandts in sound. There’s a clear story, introduction, rising action, climax, denouement. His musical phrases are characters that enter and re-enter the scene, strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more (until they show up in a motif as part of the finale).

You know what I mean.

I’m more like a four-year-old who someone gave a box of very expensive paints.

I’m smearing color across my face (and everything else) in rapturous joy (or misery) with psychedelic abandon and the kind of confidence one can only have when one knows ZERO music theory. My “songs” are generally more of a free-verse poem, half-sung, half-chanted, and sitting alongside musical notes that may or may not form some kind of chord progression.

So it’s fun to work with him. I’m learning a lot. And he hasn’t killed me yet, so there’s that.

Sometimes, out of our talks, I do get an idea for song structure.

The other night, I was making dinner, listening to music, and the Great Algo sent to my headphones an old song, Untouchable Face, by Ani DiFranco. It’s a song about having Big Feelings for someone who’s already in a happy, stable relationship.

(The chorus is “Fuck you, and your untouchable face. Fuck you, for existing in the first place. And who am I, that I should be vying for your touch? Who am I? I bet you can’t even tell me that much.”)

And, just because it’s a fun song and I haven’t heard it in ages, I thought about covering it about a dozen different ways as I listened to it on repeat: musical theatre, punk rawk, lounge singer…

But it occurred to me that the kind of feelings one has in that situation are like a loop. You get stuck on repeat. So I made this loooong loop of the bass line and had it set to an upright bass and a cello. And then went about making a kind of trance-loop-echo chamber piece that I think is a pretty accurate aural representation of being caught in the soft gauze of ones own looping thoughts.

I’ll never make radio music. Or dance music. Or doin’-chores music. But I will keep scratching out these images of emotion caught in a moment. With the technical skill of a four-year-old who got their hands on some very expensive paints.