In the beginning

Introduction

I’m starting this blog as a place where I can share my thoughts and experiences about writing, recording and performing my original music.  I imagine I’ll also be delving into more general thoughts on the creative process because creativity is pretty much my favorite thing about the human experience.

Verse One

I do not come from a “musical family”.  My father loved music but to my knowledge never tried making it himself.  My mother was shamed at some point in her early life and told “you have a terrible singing voice”, so that’s what she believed for her entire life.  I myself was told at an early age (not by my parents) that I was a bad singer, which has surely fueled my inner critic but my love of all things musical has been enough to keep me going.  At an early age my parents recognized my attraction to music.  My mother loved to tell the story of how as a toddler my father would pick me up and dance around with me in his arms as I waved by chubby little hands in time to whatever music was playing.  They called me their little conductor.  I think I may have been 10 years old before I realized they meant “symphony conductor” and not “train conductor”.

Pre-chorus

When it came time to consider college I was all set to study music composition.  While I hadn’t written a great deal of original music by my teen years I had been taking piano lessons since the age of nine and was rarely satisfied to simply play the music as it appeared on the sheet.  I was much fonder of memorizing music and then improvising variations.  Not long after I started writing down these variations my mother found my scribbled notations and was openly skeptical that I was “writing music”.  I suppose in her head the creation of music was some magic beyond the grasp of “normal people”.  Of course by that time she should have known that I was no “normie” if only by my circle of friends, but by the time I announced my intension to study music in college no one was surprised.  Alas, I did not thrive in college.  I chaffed at the apparently random structure of the programs and resisted the notion that I was paying tuition in order to fill a seat in classes I had no interest in taking.  Year’s later a friend suggested that an important lesson from college is learning how to navigate and tolerate bureaucratic bullshit.  I failed this lesson, miserably.  I foolishly thought I was going to college to write music.  What I learned was that the burned out staff of the music department were only concerned in stamping out more music teachers (i.e. little versions of themselves).  I stayed for exactly three years.  I lasted that long because of one professor; Dr. Gary Smith.  Unlike his colleagues his goal was to educate and inspire young musicians.  If there had been at least one other educators like him I might have stayed for a degree but I decided to leave academia and venture out into the larger world.

Chorus

With a part time job working at a public library I started auditioning with local rock bands.  I was perhaps too picky and in my search for truly talented musicians I missed the opportunity to perform rough music on shitty stages in dark and smoky dive bars.  Honestly, you learn a lot from those sorts of gigs.  They not only temper your ego but allow you to get up and suck in front of an audience.  Allowing yourself to get up and suck in front of an audience is one of the most valuable experiences anyone can have.  You discover that it doesn’t kill you (though you felt certain you would die of shame for forgetting the middle eight of that ballad).  You discover that the mistakes your inner critic crucifies you for are rarely even noticed by the drunken inattentive audience but most importantly you discover that it is infinitely better to be up on that shitty stage than down at a table in the dark shitty dive bar.

Verse Two

“Second verse, same as the first”.  No, actually not.  After ten years of playing keyboards in rock bands pretty much everyone who knew me was surprised when I bought a guitar and started playing Indigo Girl songs.  I was tired of being stuck behind a piano or a keyboard.  I wanted to sit in the park or a beach and just write and sing simple three chord songs and ain’t no instrument better for that than a guitar.  Well, maybe a ukulele but I wasn’t secure enough in my masculinity to go there.  Much to my pleasure songs started pouring out of me once I learned to strum basic cowboy chords.  Musical rhythm had always come easily to me and the vast majority of music that I loved was all based around the rhythm of guitars.  I actually started selling and giving away most of my old synthesizers.  A decision I did not regret when I could show up at a gig with just an acoustic guitar and a capo (gone were the days of hauling multiple keyboards with a plethora of accompanying cables and gadgets). To this day my guitar playing is pretty basic.  I play fast, bouncy rhythm guitar and let others handled the solos and more complex picking parts.  Playing rhythm guitar and singing is my happy place.  In the studio I still play a lot of keys and the last few years I’ve written a few ballads at the piano so at some point I may find myself looping back around to my musical origins but it’s still a lot easier to show up at a beach party with a guitar in hand.

Bridge

Covid changed everything.  Well, in fairness to the virus I suppose it’s more accurate to say 2020 changed everything.  The pandemic was the backdrop but coming up to that year there was a lot of things in my life getting ready to boil over.  With the passing of my mother and the enforced social quarantine I lost a lot of my coping mechanism and my 20 relationship with my wife dissolved.  I could no longer kid myself about how draining the relationship was for me nor could I kid myself about my wife’s refusal to even try and do her part to help save us.  I ended things between us and decided that since covid made fire dancing an impossible career (it really only works in a live, in-person performance setting)  I decided to get back to songwriting and recording.  Over the course of my 20 year relationship I pushed fire dancing to the front of my life (primarily as a way to try and keep a close relationship with my wife) and put music on a back burner.  I never really stopped writing songs but I had recorded very few of them and now with the prohibition on live gatherings I realize it was the perfect time to focus on recording.  I’ve had a home recording studio since I was in college (I will write a separate blog on the evolution of that) but rarely had I put in the time to create full arrangements of my songs.  Now was the time!

And I’ll leave you here for now.  My main goal with this blog is share my creative process in writing and recording music.  I will at time dive into the nerdy technical detail of recording and at other times wax poetic about the emotional struggles that both fuel and interfere with my creative flow.  I know it will help me to put things into the finite expression of words and perhaps it will help or at least intrigue you, my readers.  Home recording studios are the new temples for musicians here in the 21st century.  A place more affordable and accessible than the big pro studios of the past but also a place that can overflow with distractions that impair the intensity of purpose.  More on that later….