Ever plug someone's name or user-handle for one of your social-networking sites into a searchable email system (let's say, gmail) and confirm your impression that the relationship is grossly one-sided?
Perhaps it's you who never talks to them. Maybe you aren't really that invested. Maybe they're doing all the work.
Or maybe you have become someone's social-networking pal because your mutual friends all sing their praises, but it turns out that for all that you've quipped in their blog when they were quippy, or offered a shoulder to cry on when they needed one .... and when they've even thanked you for that ... they have never once commented on anything you've written in your own blog, never once initiated contact.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Accountability
There's been a lot of discussion lately about problems with the leadership of gay communities, particularly following the No On 8 campaigns. There's a lot of talk about holding the leadership more accountable in the future. I want to take a step back from that and talk about some questions I think are critical in seeking that kind of accountability.
*****
My experience of gay community organizing is that we've been stuck for years mostly focusing on the first question. We take the temperature of the overall gay community and we hear what most people want and we start organizing on that basis. In the 1970s there was a high focus on encouraging people to come out and be gay, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was the response to AIDS, in the last several years it's been marriage, both in the sense of social recognition and in the sense of the legal and economic protections it affords those who have a marriageable partner. All of these have been important issues, on their own face, as well as because of the number of people in the community who care passionately about them.
But if the Proposition 8 loss has reminded us of anything, it's that the will of the majority should never be the only important factor. (Any of you who were reading along and curious, or uncomfortable, merely because I kept talking about the "gay" community, rather than some other mushy but more nuanced thing: gold star. The gay majority (however you want to define it) IS important, but the minorities within the community count too. Just as the gay minority counts within the larger heterosexual world.)
So we have these other questions we ought to consider.
How well does a community serve its most vulnerable members?
Example: gay teens, or transgender people. How do we do here? Looking around the people I know personally, what I see is general agreement that our vulnerable community members are important too, and frequent action to make that sentiment count. I would argue that, wonderful as that really is, it's not nearly as prevalent a sentiment as it could be, and often ONLY a sentiment. Actions still speak louder than words; problem is, the vulnerable parts of our community could use a LOT of action on their behalf.
How does a community deal with internal disagreement or dissent?
There are all kinds of possible answers to this question. "Deal with" does not have to mean "agree that everyone's views are equally valid." There are people with all kinds of odd ideas out there, some of which they hold passionately, but not all of those ideas are going to work for significant numbers of us. Moreover, many of these ideas don't point to anything a community should try to act on. So "dealing with" disagreement needn't mean "trying to address all points of view equally." But it probably should NOT mean routinely telling people who hold certain viewpoints that they are wrong, or that they should shut up or wait 'their turn', while insisting that the community cares about them, or shaming them that they are letting the community down if they walk away from it while it steadfastly refuses to hear them out. There should at least be mechanisms for supporting members of the community whose concerns are not being addressed as quickly as others' are, and for finding ways of reiterating the community's commitment to everyone it claims to embrace, even if some are moving ahead faster than others, and even if it's GOOD that some are moving ahead faster than others.
How does a community present a united front when it encompasses a diversity of people or opinions?
This is a legitimately tricky one; it's almost impossible to be perfect about it, and in the US we have a strong tendency to dismiss imperfect solutions as wholly worthless, an attitude that often blinds us to possibilities for partial progress.
My impression is that the gay/etcetera communities have tended to handle this by insisting that we should sweep our differences under a rug--the classic move of a victim protecting itself. I think that has sometimes proven effective in the short term, but as long-term policy it seems likely to produce larger fractures within the community. One still hears pronouncements, routinely, that "everyone" in the community needs to be "on board" with Idea X or Action Y "or else". This is handling diversity by insisting we're not diverse. Also known as preaching to the choir. I think that gets trickier all the time, the more that the "choir" is embedded in much larger crowds, in which so many of us can overhear each other all the time, via modern communications. What I notice the last several years is a great deal of free-floating frustration amongst people who are tired of being preached to as if they're members of the choir when they've already declared that they're not. And what I also notice is that MOST of us are choir members or non-members in many different ways.
How do leaders respond to critique?
How do community organizations change tactics when portions of the communities they serve report that the current tactics are serving them poorly or harming them outright?
These last two are especially important in cases where the tactics happen to satisfy a significant majority of the community while heightening the vulnerability of some other portion. It can require creative thinking to change tactics or strategies that continue to meet the needs of the majority while potentially being LESS damaging to some internal minority(s).
*****
So here's what I have to say about the community leadership in the wake of Proposition 8. Many of the problems people are noting now have been present for years. And there have been people speaking up about that for just as long.
Here's the rub: prior to the Prop 8 debacle, the people who were speaking up about the problems of the leadership tended to be members of internal minorities, and/or people who were looking at accountability on ALL of these points, not just the first one.
What's changed now is that the problems of the leadership have come to the attention of the gay majority, because the leadership's problems resulted in something that hurts the majority.
There's a prominent leader from the LA area whose name has come up several times recently in articles or discussions friends have pointed at. I worked briefly with this person several years ago. Accountability to the rank and file was important to this person, as far as I could tell, mostly in a "firefighting" sense: if the rank and file had a concern, the leader was smart enough to have a sit-down with the upset people and talk it over and try to defuse it long enough to carry on as usual.
What was lacking was real attention to the substance of internal disagreements, and substantive change on the basis of what the rank and file was saying. This was particularly true in terms of organizational tactics, when the majority was being served by the tactics, but an internal minority ... or two, or three ... was feeling hung out to dry. The leader in question clearly felt that as long as the majority was being served well enough, seeking even better solutions that would have the side effect of not hanging internal minorities out to dry was a waste of time.
Problem is: any member of the rank-and-file, any *group* within the rank-and-file, can be dismissed as a disgruntled minority. And in communities as complex as ours, that's a mindset that the leadership gets a lot of practice at. Remember: this is a community in which we have a long history of calling each other "drama queens," rather than listening seriously to each other.
As the No On 8 campaign went forward, clearly there was a lot of concern among the rank and file. But the leadership has gotten a lot of practice at ignoring bitching from the rank and file .... and I would argue that the rank and file has sometimes collaborated with that tendency, by shouting down dissent.
So now the majority is awake to what some of the community was saying all along. It's not just that we don't hold our leaders accountable enough ... it's that our entire accountability model needs rethinking.
The questions above are only part of it. Other factors include things like: checking the actual results of tactics against the original goals, and figuring out what really works, versus what we hope or believe will work. Or: ponying up either money or time in at least as much quantity as criticism.
I'll come clean with my own stake in this: there's a part of me that's rather gleeful at seeing certain people I didn't get on with get their comeuppance.
If I stop making it about me, though, I worry that I'm not hearing much in the way of holding future leaders accountable in a smarter way. Indeed, I don't think I'm hearing much "accountability," so much as a lot of expression of frustration.
Long term, I don't think the community gets it that expressing frustration is not the same as a) activism or b) holding leadership accountable.
The current mindset in the community is precisely the kind of situation I would not want to become an activist in. I hope some of these kids organizing on Facebook don't wind up getting held accountable to the same overly-simplistic, frustration-without-action standards that have often applied in the past.
- How well does a community serve its majority membership?
- How well does a community serve its most vulnerable members?
- How does a community deal with internal disagreement or dissent?
- How does a community present a united front when it encompasses a diversity of people or opinions?
- How do leaders respond to critique from the rank and file?
- How do community organizations change tactics when portions of the communities they serve report that the current tactics are serving them poorly or harming them outright?
*****
My experience of gay community organizing is that we've been stuck for years mostly focusing on the first question. We take the temperature of the overall gay community and we hear what most people want and we start organizing on that basis. In the 1970s there was a high focus on encouraging people to come out and be gay, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was the response to AIDS, in the last several years it's been marriage, both in the sense of social recognition and in the sense of the legal and economic protections it affords those who have a marriageable partner. All of these have been important issues, on their own face, as well as because of the number of people in the community who care passionately about them.
But if the Proposition 8 loss has reminded us of anything, it's that the will of the majority should never be the only important factor. (Any of you who were reading along and curious, or uncomfortable, merely because I kept talking about the "gay" community, rather than some other mushy but more nuanced thing: gold star. The gay majority (however you want to define it) IS important, but the minorities within the community count too. Just as the gay minority counts within the larger heterosexual world.)
So we have these other questions we ought to consider.
How well does a community serve its most vulnerable members?
Example: gay teens, or transgender people. How do we do here? Looking around the people I know personally, what I see is general agreement that our vulnerable community members are important too, and frequent action to make that sentiment count. I would argue that, wonderful as that really is, it's not nearly as prevalent a sentiment as it could be, and often ONLY a sentiment. Actions still speak louder than words; problem is, the vulnerable parts of our community could use a LOT of action on their behalf.
How does a community deal with internal disagreement or dissent?
There are all kinds of possible answers to this question. "Deal with" does not have to mean "agree that everyone's views are equally valid." There are people with all kinds of odd ideas out there, some of which they hold passionately, but not all of those ideas are going to work for significant numbers of us. Moreover, many of these ideas don't point to anything a community should try to act on. So "dealing with" disagreement needn't mean "trying to address all points of view equally." But it probably should NOT mean routinely telling people who hold certain viewpoints that they are wrong, or that they should shut up or wait 'their turn', while insisting that the community cares about them, or shaming them that they are letting the community down if they walk away from it while it steadfastly refuses to hear them out. There should at least be mechanisms for supporting members of the community whose concerns are not being addressed as quickly as others' are, and for finding ways of reiterating the community's commitment to everyone it claims to embrace, even if some are moving ahead faster than others, and even if it's GOOD that some are moving ahead faster than others.
How does a community present a united front when it encompasses a diversity of people or opinions?
This is a legitimately tricky one; it's almost impossible to be perfect about it, and in the US we have a strong tendency to dismiss imperfect solutions as wholly worthless, an attitude that often blinds us to possibilities for partial progress.
My impression is that the gay/etcetera communities have tended to handle this by insisting that we should sweep our differences under a rug--the classic move of a victim protecting itself. I think that has sometimes proven effective in the short term, but as long-term policy it seems likely to produce larger fractures within the community. One still hears pronouncements, routinely, that "everyone" in the community needs to be "on board" with Idea X or Action Y "or else". This is handling diversity by insisting we're not diverse. Also known as preaching to the choir. I think that gets trickier all the time, the more that the "choir" is embedded in much larger crowds, in which so many of us can overhear each other all the time, via modern communications. What I notice the last several years is a great deal of free-floating frustration amongst people who are tired of being preached to as if they're members of the choir when they've already declared that they're not. And what I also notice is that MOST of us are choir members or non-members in many different ways.
How do leaders respond to critique?
How do community organizations change tactics when portions of the communities they serve report that the current tactics are serving them poorly or harming them outright?
These last two are especially important in cases where the tactics happen to satisfy a significant majority of the community while heightening the vulnerability of some other portion. It can require creative thinking to change tactics or strategies that continue to meet the needs of the majority while potentially being LESS damaging to some internal minority(s).
*****
So here's what I have to say about the community leadership in the wake of Proposition 8. Many of the problems people are noting now have been present for years. And there have been people speaking up about that for just as long.
Here's the rub: prior to the Prop 8 debacle, the people who were speaking up about the problems of the leadership tended to be members of internal minorities, and/or people who were looking at accountability on ALL of these points, not just the first one.
What's changed now is that the problems of the leadership have come to the attention of the gay majority, because the leadership's problems resulted in something that hurts the majority.
There's a prominent leader from the LA area whose name has come up several times recently in articles or discussions friends have pointed at. I worked briefly with this person several years ago. Accountability to the rank and file was important to this person, as far as I could tell, mostly in a "firefighting" sense: if the rank and file had a concern, the leader was smart enough to have a sit-down with the upset people and talk it over and try to defuse it long enough to carry on as usual.
What was lacking was real attention to the substance of internal disagreements, and substantive change on the basis of what the rank and file was saying. This was particularly true in terms of organizational tactics, when the majority was being served by the tactics, but an internal minority ... or two, or three ... was feeling hung out to dry. The leader in question clearly felt that as long as the majority was being served well enough, seeking even better solutions that would have the side effect of not hanging internal minorities out to dry was a waste of time.
Problem is: any member of the rank-and-file, any *group* within the rank-and-file, can be dismissed as a disgruntled minority. And in communities as complex as ours, that's a mindset that the leadership gets a lot of practice at. Remember: this is a community in which we have a long history of calling each other "drama queens," rather than listening seriously to each other.
As the No On 8 campaign went forward, clearly there was a lot of concern among the rank and file. But the leadership has gotten a lot of practice at ignoring bitching from the rank and file .... and I would argue that the rank and file has sometimes collaborated with that tendency, by shouting down dissent.
So now the majority is awake to what some of the community was saying all along. It's not just that we don't hold our leaders accountable enough ... it's that our entire accountability model needs rethinking.
The questions above are only part of it. Other factors include things like: checking the actual results of tactics against the original goals, and figuring out what really works, versus what we hope or believe will work. Or: ponying up either money or time in at least as much quantity as criticism.
I'll come clean with my own stake in this: there's a part of me that's rather gleeful at seeing certain people I didn't get on with get their comeuppance.
If I stop making it about me, though, I worry that I'm not hearing much in the way of holding future leaders accountable in a smarter way. Indeed, I don't think I'm hearing much "accountability," so much as a lot of expression of frustration.
Long term, I don't think the community gets it that expressing frustration is not the same as a) activism or b) holding leadership accountable.
The current mindset in the community is precisely the kind of situation I would not want to become an activist in. I hope some of these kids organizing on Facebook don't wind up getting held accountable to the same overly-simplistic, frustration-without-action standards that have often applied in the past.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Aha--There's The Black Dog
Someone I know online slightly was talking recently about how he practices optimism and how it has helped him not be prone to things like depression or guilt over past mistakes.
I volunteered a response about how I'm the same way.
But let's be honest. I wish I didn't have to practice optimism so hard, sometimes.
I'm feeling fairly unloved this morning. I've been having weird stomach distress the last few days, not sure what it's about, so that's not helping. Creatively, I feel blocked. Rehearsal on some new music is not going well, I'm VERY conscious of my low skill level compared to what's going to be needed eventually, and I'm not doing a very good job of reminding myself that practice will bring more skill in time.
It's hard not to notice that while a few of my friends will move mountains to spend time with me, or to stay involved in my life, most people only want to interact when I make it convenient for them. My recent show keeps feeling like an example of that .... Matt came all across the country to see me, one other friend took time out of his schedule (and as far as I know, he's not a big fan of rock music so that was especially meaningful, as I see it) ... and most other people just SAY they'll show up and then don't. Actions speak louder than words.
I'm even being kept waiting by someone who I made time for in my schedule today when what I really wanted to do was focus on myself.
Most of this is transient feelings that will resolve on their own, but I don't think it pays to ignore them. I have to practice optimism in the face of them.
I volunteered a response about how I'm the same way.
But let's be honest. I wish I didn't have to practice optimism so hard, sometimes.
I'm feeling fairly unloved this morning. I've been having weird stomach distress the last few days, not sure what it's about, so that's not helping. Creatively, I feel blocked. Rehearsal on some new music is not going well, I'm VERY conscious of my low skill level compared to what's going to be needed eventually, and I'm not doing a very good job of reminding myself that practice will bring more skill in time.
It's hard not to notice that while a few of my friends will move mountains to spend time with me, or to stay involved in my life, most people only want to interact when I make it convenient for them. My recent show keeps feeling like an example of that .... Matt came all across the country to see me, one other friend took time out of his schedule (and as far as I know, he's not a big fan of rock music so that was especially meaningful, as I see it) ... and most other people just SAY they'll show up and then don't. Actions speak louder than words.
I'm even being kept waiting by someone who I made time for in my schedule today when what I really wanted to do was focus on myself.
Most of this is transient feelings that will resolve on their own, but I don't think it pays to ignore them. I have to practice optimism in the face of them.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Late Afternoon Light
I wonder if I should bring my little point and shoot camera with me to work more often. The late afternoon light is gorgeous right now as it paints the red brick of Memorial Hall in orange tones, gray/blue sky behind it. I'm seeing it partly through the purplish sheers they use as curtains in much of this building.
It's late fall light, no question about it, I don't think this shade of orange really obtains in summer with the higher angles of the sun. As much as I am given to lamenting the shortness of days at this season (as much as that really does seem to affect me), there's real beauty at this time of year.
Probably not the easiest thing to capture photographically, but then that would be part of the challenge. ;-)
EDIT: Ten minutes later. Memorial Hall is fading, but the white marble or concrete of the William James Hall tower is stunning.
It's late fall light, no question about it, I don't think this shade of orange really obtains in summer with the higher angles of the sun. As much as I am given to lamenting the shortness of days at this season (as much as that really does seem to affect me), there's real beauty at this time of year.
Probably not the easiest thing to capture photographically, but then that would be part of the challenge. ;-)
EDIT: Ten minutes later. Memorial Hall is fading, but the white marble or concrete of the William James Hall tower is stunning.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The Noise Is Restful
I don't remember which of my friends I must have seen toting Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise a few months back, but it looked "craveable" (in the words of Whorange style maven Tula Jeng). So I picked it up on its recent softcover release and dove into it.
Ross makes 20th century "classical" or "made by composers" music accessible by re-embedding it in the historical times it was made in and the personal lives of the people who made it. And as a sometime maker of music in a popular idiom, with tangential forays into stranger stuff, I have a certain interest in how other people have done things.
Not to mention the fact that a great deal of the popular music I enjoy has either been influenced by composers, or has influenced composers. Some of what seemed striking or strange about 20th century high-art music is now so taken for granted that we're all soaking in it anyway.
At the moment I'm listening to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, and some of the echoes (whichever direction you think they go in) with Eno, or Talking Heads, or Sigur Ros, are easy to hear. On the subway this morning I took in Olivier Messiaen's Quartet For the End Of Time. Last night it was The Rite Of Spring, and sure, I'm aware that my catching up with the Rite marks me as someone VERY late to this party, but what the heck.
Ross is totally engaging about why any of these things might be interesting, at least in terms of intellectual or musical history ... and his enthusiasm is compelling enough to make trips to the music store worth it. Indeed, there's a substantial audio area on his web site where one can listen to clips of many of the things he talks about in the book or venture further afield to Napster or wherever. He makes playlists and recommends things to download and all kinds of good stuff.
Plus he's totally gay and now he's my fantasy musical boyfriend.
Ross makes 20th century "classical" or "made by composers" music accessible by re-embedding it in the historical times it was made in and the personal lives of the people who made it. And as a sometime maker of music in a popular idiom, with tangential forays into stranger stuff, I have a certain interest in how other people have done things.
Not to mention the fact that a great deal of the popular music I enjoy has either been influenced by composers, or has influenced composers. Some of what seemed striking or strange about 20th century high-art music is now so taken for granted that we're all soaking in it anyway.
At the moment I'm listening to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, and some of the echoes (whichever direction you think they go in) with Eno, or Talking Heads, or Sigur Ros, are easy to hear. On the subway this morning I took in Olivier Messiaen's Quartet For the End Of Time. Last night it was The Rite Of Spring, and sure, I'm aware that my catching up with the Rite marks me as someone VERY late to this party, but what the heck.
Ross is totally engaging about why any of these things might be interesting, at least in terms of intellectual or musical history ... and his enthusiasm is compelling enough to make trips to the music store worth it. Indeed, there's a substantial audio area on his web site where one can listen to clips of many of the things he talks about in the book or venture further afield to Napster or wherever. He makes playlists and recommends things to download and all kinds of good stuff.
Plus he's totally gay and now he's my fantasy musical boyfriend.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Paisley Prick
There's a certain kind of queer man, whether queer in gender traits or in sexual object choice, who finds it confusing and difficult to make sense of his queerness and retreats to one of the sterner religious dogmas in an attempt to, if not sort himself out, then hold himself down.
The gay community is chock full of people who, even if they didn't grow up in a religious family, found themselves turning to religion as a means of dealing (or not dealing, which is a form of dealing) with being gay or differently gendered.
Some of them are good friends of mine .... though usually, we became friends many years after they came out of the closet and, often as not, out of religion as well.
Since this temptation to use religion against oneself is common enough among gay-as-in-totally-gay men, how much more tempting it must be for men who might actually feel themselves drawn to women as well as to men (assuming, for the rest of this post, that their queerness is at all about object choice, rather than gender identity).
It's not uncommon to find Kinsey 1ish or 2ish men who are scared shitless of their interest in men, not JUST because they're dealing with internalized homophobia, but ALSO because they perceive (not always inaccurately, it has to be said) that nobody, particularly chicks, will believe that they really go both ways. Supposing they want the hole 9 times out of 10, their motivation for dealing with the pole issue isn't all that obvious.
You meet one of these guys who's actually checked his own head about it, rather than run from it, and you've usually met someone with a fair amount of personal ethics and courage. Not to mention, often a good lay, in the sense that chucking one's self-repressions tends to do wonders for performance in the sack.
But many of them are so afraid to open Pandora's Cock that their clinging to dogma is all the stronger for having an actual crack in the armor. Nobody who starts out with a shred of possible heterosexuality knows whether he's going to keep liking pussy once he's tried dick, and it's not necessarily even helpful to point to openly bisexual men one might know who have a devoted following of hot chicks following them around, turned on by the fact that these guys know their way around cocks and vaginas, because a) most people don't take the time to find out that there are such guys, and b) it's easy enough to disbelieve in fairies no matter how many of them you meet--particularly if they're a kind of fairy the other fairies say is just a myth.
The middle ground is an unpopular place to be, and plenty of people who genuinely fall into it torture themselves about it, with the full approval of the world at large. The self-torture gets read as "commitment" and "principle" rather than "OMG get over it, it's not so bad." It's similar to the way that some of the most strident "you have to make up your mind and commit to your gay identity, bisexuality is a cop-out" gays are Kinsey 5's who "experimented" plenty with girls and probably yen to keep doing it. Scratch a fundamentalist, religious or sexuo-political, find someone with more issues than National Geographic.
Catch someone like this out in the real world, and maybe you can point him at a support group for safely exploring sexuality or gender identity. You take his sacred-holy-text thumping for the poor clingy life-saver it is and you smile and nod and hope they do some therapy.
You don't take it seriously ... or too personally.
If you catch someone like this and he's a rich pop star, then he might be named Prince, and you might enjoy his music. You still don't take his homophobia seriously.
Or too personally.
After all, this is someone who thinks he "owns" video rights to his cover of someone's else's song.
We're not talking about psychologically well-adjusted here.
The gay community is chock full of people who, even if they didn't grow up in a religious family, found themselves turning to religion as a means of dealing (or not dealing, which is a form of dealing) with being gay or differently gendered.
Some of them are good friends of mine .... though usually, we became friends many years after they came out of the closet and, often as not, out of religion as well.
Since this temptation to use religion against oneself is common enough among gay-as-in-totally-gay men, how much more tempting it must be for men who might actually feel themselves drawn to women as well as to men (assuming, for the rest of this post, that their queerness is at all about object choice, rather than gender identity).
It's not uncommon to find Kinsey 1ish or 2ish men who are scared shitless of their interest in men, not JUST because they're dealing with internalized homophobia, but ALSO because they perceive (not always inaccurately, it has to be said) that nobody, particularly chicks, will believe that they really go both ways. Supposing they want the hole 9 times out of 10, their motivation for dealing with the pole issue isn't all that obvious.
You meet one of these guys who's actually checked his own head about it, rather than run from it, and you've usually met someone with a fair amount of personal ethics and courage. Not to mention, often a good lay, in the sense that chucking one's self-repressions tends to do wonders for performance in the sack.
But many of them are so afraid to open Pandora's Cock that their clinging to dogma is all the stronger for having an actual crack in the armor. Nobody who starts out with a shred of possible heterosexuality knows whether he's going to keep liking pussy once he's tried dick, and it's not necessarily even helpful to point to openly bisexual men one might know who have a devoted following of hot chicks following them around, turned on by the fact that these guys know their way around cocks and vaginas, because a) most people don't take the time to find out that there are such guys, and b) it's easy enough to disbelieve in fairies no matter how many of them you meet--particularly if they're a kind of fairy the other fairies say is just a myth.
The middle ground is an unpopular place to be, and plenty of people who genuinely fall into it torture themselves about it, with the full approval of the world at large. The self-torture gets read as "commitment" and "principle" rather than "OMG get over it, it's not so bad." It's similar to the way that some of the most strident "you have to make up your mind and commit to your gay identity, bisexuality is a cop-out" gays are Kinsey 5's who "experimented" plenty with girls and probably yen to keep doing it. Scratch a fundamentalist, religious or sexuo-political, find someone with more issues than National Geographic.
Catch someone like this out in the real world, and maybe you can point him at a support group for safely exploring sexuality or gender identity. You take his sacred-holy-text thumping for the poor clingy life-saver it is and you smile and nod and hope they do some therapy.
You don't take it seriously ... or too personally.
If you catch someone like this and he's a rich pop star, then he might be named Prince, and you might enjoy his music. You still don't take his homophobia seriously.
Or too personally.
After all, this is someone who thinks he "owns" video rights to his cover of someone's else's song.
We're not talking about psychologically well-adjusted here.
Metablogging about Blogging
When I started blogging nearly six years ago, I didn't understand how important it would become in my life. My first LiveJournal entry notes my uncertainty about what I was going to do with a blog (in slightly dismissive terms that always make me chuckle in retrospect). If I recall correctly, I signed on mostly because I had a couple of friends who had blogs, and I had a vague idea that as a system administrator, I should keep abreast of some of these technologies the way end-users experience them.
It's fair to say that my social circle expanded by about 500% within my first year on that service. I wasn't unaware of the rather large population of potential "people I might have something in common with" out there; I just had lacked a medium in which I could make connections that mattered to me. IM and hookup sites and various other things hadn't really called to me; even Usenet had palled after about six months. Suddenly I was hooked, but more than hooked: the connections really did go both ways.
Like a lot of queer men (though not just queer men) the blog environment did become a dating service as well as a venue for other social interactions. As many of us have noted, though, blogging put dating (and sex) into a more comfortable zone than cruising on more traditional hookup sites. By the time I slept with someone I knew from LJ, I usually knew them fairly well. Sex, while still fun as "just" sex, usually wasn't "just" sex, but friendship by other means.
I was always as prone as anyone to online drama. Maybe more so. I learned a great deal, in my first couple of years on LiveJournal, about my own propensity to get sucked into other people's excesses of feeling, and my own capacity for generating more heat than light. The number of occasions on which I felt overwhelmed and pondered dropping out was large; once a month wouldn't be a bad guess. But for a long time I was aware that hanging in was forcing me to confront some of my difficulties dealing with my own feelings, let alone others'. Growth wasn't always easy or pleasurable, but it was growth.
Somewhere in 2005 and 2006 I suppose I hit my stride. Early 2006 was the last major time I smacked myself with acting out my "issues" on line and losing a friendship over it.
In retrospect, it seems likely that my personal trajectory mirrored larger community trends.
Other web communities (MySpace, Facebook) or technologies (Twitter) began coming to the fore. Those of us who had moved into blogging during 2003-05 began to move elsewhere. Sometimes it was a matter of finding something that worked better for each individual than blogging; sometimes it was a matter of having wrung everything out of the blog experience; sometimes people left under a cloud, whether one they created themselves, or one generated by others that felt too suffocating.
I hung on through these changes, regretting the absence of many people I'd enjoyed interacting with easily and quickly in blogspace--even if I kept up with them via other means--but still deriving benefit from the relationships that remained.
About a year ago things started to change. Maybe it was just my own personal growth; having one more pointlessly negative interaction with someone I was misunderstanding, or who was misunderstanding me, no longer felt like a growth experience.
But I suspect there was a broader change going on as well. Blog interactions, at least on LiveJournal, are capable of all the intellectual and emotional depth one could hope for, but that was never the majority of the interactions. Some of it was just fun ... and some of it was, always, just kind of annoying or poisonous.
Many of the more thoughtful, calmer people moved on a long time ago.
I've been hanging on because the rush of discovering how many people might enjoy interacting with me, back at the outset, was so powerful. I'd *never* felt that connected to so many people .... even at times when the connections were difficult.
These days, I have more trust in the idea that I can establish close connections, but I notice that many of my blog connections are *not* particularly nourishing. Some of that is my doing: I don't have as much time to invest as I used to.
But some of it just is what it is.
Kubler-Ross's grief stages would be appropriate here. I would say that I am getting to "acceptance."
Clearly, LiveJournal is not the only "blog" venue out there, as a post here indicates. For a long time, it did have a feeling of community that I haven't turned up elsewhere .... and yeah, I've gone looking.
Part of the process of accepting that some of what was there is gone and won't return, though, is the realization that some of it, I don't need or want any more. At least, not enough to put up with some of the downsides, even if those were always there too.
It's fair to say that my social circle expanded by about 500% within my first year on that service. I wasn't unaware of the rather large population of potential "people I might have something in common with" out there; I just had lacked a medium in which I could make connections that mattered to me. IM and hookup sites and various other things hadn't really called to me; even Usenet had palled after about six months. Suddenly I was hooked, but more than hooked: the connections really did go both ways.
Like a lot of queer men (though not just queer men) the blog environment did become a dating service as well as a venue for other social interactions. As many of us have noted, though, blogging put dating (and sex) into a more comfortable zone than cruising on more traditional hookup sites. By the time I slept with someone I knew from LJ, I usually knew them fairly well. Sex, while still fun as "just" sex, usually wasn't "just" sex, but friendship by other means.
I was always as prone as anyone to online drama. Maybe more so. I learned a great deal, in my first couple of years on LiveJournal, about my own propensity to get sucked into other people's excesses of feeling, and my own capacity for generating more heat than light. The number of occasions on which I felt overwhelmed and pondered dropping out was large; once a month wouldn't be a bad guess. But for a long time I was aware that hanging in was forcing me to confront some of my difficulties dealing with my own feelings, let alone others'. Growth wasn't always easy or pleasurable, but it was growth.
Somewhere in 2005 and 2006 I suppose I hit my stride. Early 2006 was the last major time I smacked myself with acting out my "issues" on line and losing a friendship over it.
In retrospect, it seems likely that my personal trajectory mirrored larger community trends.
Other web communities (MySpace, Facebook) or technologies (Twitter) began coming to the fore. Those of us who had moved into blogging during 2003-05 began to move elsewhere. Sometimes it was a matter of finding something that worked better for each individual than blogging; sometimes it was a matter of having wrung everything out of the blog experience; sometimes people left under a cloud, whether one they created themselves, or one generated by others that felt too suffocating.
I hung on through these changes, regretting the absence of many people I'd enjoyed interacting with easily and quickly in blogspace--even if I kept up with them via other means--but still deriving benefit from the relationships that remained.
About a year ago things started to change. Maybe it was just my own personal growth; having one more pointlessly negative interaction with someone I was misunderstanding, or who was misunderstanding me, no longer felt like a growth experience.
But I suspect there was a broader change going on as well. Blog interactions, at least on LiveJournal, are capable of all the intellectual and emotional depth one could hope for, but that was never the majority of the interactions. Some of it was just fun ... and some of it was, always, just kind of annoying or poisonous.
Many of the more thoughtful, calmer people moved on a long time ago.
I've been hanging on because the rush of discovering how many people might enjoy interacting with me, back at the outset, was so powerful. I'd *never* felt that connected to so many people .... even at times when the connections were difficult.
These days, I have more trust in the idea that I can establish close connections, but I notice that many of my blog connections are *not* particularly nourishing. Some of that is my doing: I don't have as much time to invest as I used to.
But some of it just is what it is.
Kubler-Ross's grief stages would be appropriate here. I would say that I am getting to "acceptance."
Clearly, LiveJournal is not the only "blog" venue out there, as a post here indicates. For a long time, it did have a feeling of community that I haven't turned up elsewhere .... and yeah, I've gone looking.
Part of the process of accepting that some of what was there is gone and won't return, though, is the realization that some of it, I don't need or want any more. At least, not enough to put up with some of the downsides, even if those were always there too.
No On 8 Rally
About 25 minutes of video from this past Saturday's "No On 8/Marriage Equality" rally at Boston City Hall.
Speakers in the video clips include Sue Hyde of NGLTF, US Congressman Mike Capuano, US Congressman Niki Tsongas, and trans activist Gunner Scott.
Plus a lot of crowd scenes and captures of interesting protest signs.
Speakers in the video clips include Sue Hyde of NGLTF, US Congressman Mike Capuano, US Congressman Niki Tsongas, and trans activist Gunner Scott.
Plus a lot of crowd scenes and captures of interesting protest signs.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Such A Fool
I'm still quite proud of our first live performance a couple of weeks ago, so here's one of the clips from it.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Recent Happenings
Last weekend, I attended a rally protesting the passage of Proposition 8 in California.
Some video I took:
Some video I took:
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Forgive Me, For I Have Not Posted
Things are busy, in a good way. Band rehearsals are ramping up a bit. This is the first time we've gone weekly, rather than every other week. The momentum has been sufficiently in the "forward" direction to make it seem useful to press on a little faster.
Gotta take a look at my expenses ... the rehearsal studio time is NOT cheap and weeklies may be more than I can afford. Then again, for now, I can do it.
Even though we're using the larger rooms with the better PAs to give Eric and I *some* prayer of hearing our vocals over the din.
I'm trying to decide whether to spring some new material on them tonight, even without song charts .... or see whether I thought to draft any song charts over the last couple of weeks. I'm itching to get on with it, though to be honest, having gotten as far as we have with only three or maybe four full-band rehearsals, to be getting this far along on 6-8 songs, is nothing to sneeze at.
I'm just itching to do even more. ;-)
Gotta take a look at my expenses ... the rehearsal studio time is NOT cheap and weeklies may be more than I can afford. Then again, for now, I can do it.
Even though we're using the larger rooms with the better PAs to give Eric and I *some* prayer of hearing our vocals over the din.
I'm trying to decide whether to spring some new material on them tonight, even without song charts .... or see whether I thought to draft any song charts over the last couple of weeks. I'm itching to get on with it, though to be honest, having gotten as far as we have with only three or maybe four full-band rehearsals, to be getting this far along on 6-8 songs, is nothing to sneeze at.
I'm just itching to do even more. ;-)
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Vocal Rehearsal
One thing that came out of last week's full band rehearsal is that Eric's upper range was working for him a lot better than lower down. This seems to be a bit of a rule of thumb for singers anyway: that a lot of people start off feeling "more comfortable" in the lower part of their range but SOUND better higher up. If you're not Johnny Cash or Stephin Merritt, don't go too low. I've had to learn the same thing myself. My first solo show featured several low-baritone songs as warmups and EVERYONE who commented on my singing said I was better later in the show.
So we took some time last night to work out some more vocal arrangements for Eric, so that he can do harmonies in a part of his range that works better for him and sounds better overall. And that came together quite well.
In fact, a couple of songs in which I consciously chose not to write too many lyrics for the choruses, concentrating on holding long notes and vowels, had been suffering from a bit of tedium with just my voice. With just one harmony, the choruses start to pop again. This is very yay.
There's another song in which the second verse is twice the length of the first and third, and what I've been trying to do is go up an octave in the second half of the verse, for dramatic effect. Problem is, my falsetto isn't robust enough to be reliable. I'm okay in rehearsals if it's one of the first things I sing, but if I've overextended myself at all, forget it. Well, guess who can sing the part? Indeed, he'd been thinking of suggesting to me that he take it, even as it had been occurring to me to pass it to him. If I can work on my chops to the point of getting up there myself, maybe we'll double. If not, I'll stay in the original octave and we'll harmonize. WIN.
Doug was going to try to make it later on but didn't show. No problem ... however, I happen to have heard Doug sing and I'm pretty sure he will add something very good when he gets the drum parts down and joins in vocally as well.
So we took some time last night to work out some more vocal arrangements for Eric, so that he can do harmonies in a part of his range that works better for him and sounds better overall. And that came together quite well.
In fact, a couple of songs in which I consciously chose not to write too many lyrics for the choruses, concentrating on holding long notes and vowels, had been suffering from a bit of tedium with just my voice. With just one harmony, the choruses start to pop again. This is very yay.
There's another song in which the second verse is twice the length of the first and third, and what I've been trying to do is go up an octave in the second half of the verse, for dramatic effect. Problem is, my falsetto isn't robust enough to be reliable. I'm okay in rehearsals if it's one of the first things I sing, but if I've overextended myself at all, forget it. Well, guess who can sing the part? Indeed, he'd been thinking of suggesting to me that he take it, even as it had been occurring to me to pass it to him. If I can work on my chops to the point of getting up there myself, maybe we'll double. If not, I'll stay in the original octave and we'll harmonize. WIN.
Doug was going to try to make it later on but didn't show. No problem ... however, I happen to have heard Doug sing and I'm pretty sure he will add something very good when he gets the drum parts down and joins in vocally as well.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Audio Hardware
I posted a somewhat giddy note in my LiveJournal yesterday about the really nice rehearsal I had with a full band a couple of nights ago. The material works well in that setting and I'm looking forward to rehearsing them more.
THIS post is just a quick note that I ordered a piece of useful audio hardware the other day, and it arrived in the mail last night.
An old buddy of mine pointed out that some of my mixes suffer from being done on headphones; he noted that you get a false image of the stereo field that way. Thing is, my iMac outputs on a stereo 1/8 port (female) and the mixer I drive my monitors with take 1/4 or XLR inputs, mono. Guess what was hard to find in the shops? A cable with a 1/8" stereo male end that splits to two 1/4" outputs, male or female.
I'd have preferred a longish cable with two 1/4" male ends but settled for a short cable with 1/4" female ports to which I can plug standard cables. Haven't tested it out yet, but got TWO of them. Figure next time I mix, I can do an even better job.
THIS post is just a quick note that I ordered a piece of useful audio hardware the other day, and it arrived in the mail last night.
An old buddy of mine pointed out that some of my mixes suffer from being done on headphones; he noted that you get a false image of the stereo field that way. Thing is, my iMac outputs on a stereo 1/8 port (female) and the mixer I drive my monitors with take 1/4 or XLR inputs, mono. Guess what was hard to find in the shops? A cable with a 1/8" stereo male end that splits to two 1/4" outputs, male or female.
I'd have preferred a longish cable with two 1/4" male ends but settled for a short cable with 1/4" female ports to which I can plug standard cables. Haven't tested it out yet, but got TWO of them. Figure next time I mix, I can do an even better job.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Continuing MIDI Geekery
My comment to Alan this morning was "the simpler they make the software tools, the MORE enticing it is to spend entire days composing and arranging."
I forced myself to get out of the house yesterday and catch a film ("Iron Man," for future reference--enjoyed it) just so I wouldn't keep fiddling with new tracks that benefit from the new controller.
Besides the "Cuddleslut" song (which got a thumbs up from a buddy) I've been working on a backing track for the DE track "Land Line", which I've been promising both Eric and Ryan I would hash out better. That was yesterday's big effort.
This morning I've been working on a version of Book of Love's "Boy". Eric and I have both been wanting to cover that, and Eric may actually sing lead on it, to give me a break in the set.
Late last week, though, I was actually working on Numan's "Airlane," which is one of the close inspirations for "Cuddleslut."
That's four, count 'em four, pieces in the works in the last few days. None of which I worked on at the office. I've been busy enough with real work, there.
I keep meaning to get back to "Good Men" so I can give Ryan more ideas for lead riffs, too. He's been out of town the last few days and has said he probably won't have more parts worked out for this coming Tuesday. That's okay because we'll probably be breaking in a drummer ... but I feel as if I'm not getting enough done for my sidemen.
Yeah, even though I've worked out a full backing track and have a cover song half-tracked for my bass player. ;-)
The sun is shining and I am feeling noshy, so I think I will get myself OUT the house.
Because I'm spinning ABBA's The Visitors and the drum pattern for "Soldiers" is caaaaallllling me, begging to be stolen. MUST. RESIST.
I forced myself to get out of the house yesterday and catch a film ("Iron Man," for future reference--enjoyed it) just so I wouldn't keep fiddling with new tracks that benefit from the new controller.
Besides the "Cuddleslut" song (which got a thumbs up from a buddy) I've been working on a backing track for the DE track "Land Line", which I've been promising both Eric and Ryan I would hash out better. That was yesterday's big effort.
This morning I've been working on a version of Book of Love's "Boy". Eric and I have both been wanting to cover that, and Eric may actually sing lead on it, to give me a break in the set.
Late last week, though, I was actually working on Numan's "Airlane," which is one of the close inspirations for "Cuddleslut."
That's four, count 'em four, pieces in the works in the last few days. None of which I worked on at the office. I've been busy enough with real work, there.
I keep meaning to get back to "Good Men" so I can give Ryan more ideas for lead riffs, too. He's been out of town the last few days and has said he probably won't have more parts worked out for this coming Tuesday. That's okay because we'll probably be breaking in a drummer ... but I feel as if I'm not getting enough done for my sidemen.
Yeah, even though I've worked out a full backing track and have a cover song half-tracked for my bass player. ;-)
The sun is shining and I am feeling noshy, so I think I will get myself OUT the house.
Because I'm spinning ABBA's The Visitors and the drum pattern for "Soldiers" is caaaaallllling me, begging to be stolen. MUST. RESIST.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Numanoid
I referred to my new little synthpop ditty as "shit" the other day, but it was in the sense of "shit like that is easier to write with the new keyboard controller."
In fact, it's not shit at all. It is very simple, but that's what I was going for.
So many of my favorite pop songs are built on very simple foundations. I'm attracted to muso stuff where there's fifteen bazillion chord changes and modulations and whatnot, or a little bit of modal play, but then I go back to the Hunters and Collectors catalogue, or early synthpop, and hear how much musicality people can cram into a I-V progression.
I am loving this little piece. Mostly I-V, a little vi-IV. Not only could Gary Numan have written it, it's got those long drawn-out held synth notes a la early Icehouse, where I'm just playing with letting the timbres have at your ears. I wasn't deliberately going for a "Great Southern Land" vibe, but I got there. (YES all my references and touchstones are from 1977-1983). (Except Hunnas!)
After Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar I wasn't sure Dirigible Ego was going to do a lot more instrumentals (I have another project for experiments and instrumentals) but this is definitely a Dirigible Ego song. An instrumental. Maybe I should just have at least one an album, no matter what, kind of like Simple Minds in the early days.
Gotta work on the drum kit ... especially the snare sounds, which are a little too uniform and wimpy.
But overall, wow. I have surprised myself again. Can't stop listening to the damn thing.
Working title has been "Numanoid" but I think I will rename it "Cuddleslut." It just has a happy vibe like that.
In fact, it's not shit at all. It is very simple, but that's what I was going for.
So many of my favorite pop songs are built on very simple foundations. I'm attracted to muso stuff where there's fifteen bazillion chord changes and modulations and whatnot, or a little bit of modal play, but then I go back to the Hunters and Collectors catalogue, or early synthpop, and hear how much musicality people can cram into a I-V progression.
I am loving this little piece. Mostly I-V, a little vi-IV. Not only could Gary Numan have written it, it's got those long drawn-out held synth notes a la early Icehouse, where I'm just playing with letting the timbres have at your ears. I wasn't deliberately going for a "Great Southern Land" vibe, but I got there. (YES all my references and touchstones are from 1977-1983). (Except Hunnas!)
After Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar I wasn't sure Dirigible Ego was going to do a lot more instrumentals (I have another project for experiments and instrumentals) but this is definitely a Dirigible Ego song. An instrumental. Maybe I should just have at least one an album, no matter what, kind of like Simple Minds in the early days.
Gotta work on the drum kit ... especially the snare sounds, which are a little too uniform and wimpy.
But overall, wow. I have surprised myself again. Can't stop listening to the damn thing.
Working title has been "Numanoid" but I think I will rename it "Cuddleslut." It just has a happy vibe like that.
Monday, May 12, 2008
MIDI Controller
In all this time (about two years now) that I've been playing with GarageBand, I've never really used a regular piano-style keyboard to input musical notes. The little "piano" graphic window you can use the mouse with in GB is fundamentally useless, but the "musical typing" window is just useful enough that I went with it.
I'm pretty sure I could use my fancy, expensive Roland keyboard as a MIDI trigger source instead, but I don't think I ever have. The instruction manual for that thing is endless, even after three years I find it a bit daunting. When I want to use the Roland, I run it in as an *audio* source, not a *MIDI* source. I just don't want to have to keep another USB connector around and figure out which device to turn on first and all that crap. (My brain is oddly Luddite about such things.)
What I've wanted for a long time is a MIDI input keyboard. I saw one at about the same time that one of my professional colleagues gave me my first introduction to GarageBand (he raved about how good it was; I'd been assuming it must be a toy).
But every time I looked at the price tag on a MIDI keyboard, versus what I thought I needed to accomplish, I kept convincing myself it wasn't really going to be worth it. I could hack along with the "musical typing" function and then drag the notes around in the program window if the timing was off. Which it always is, I'm far from a great keyboard player.
A recent conversation with Shannon Grady convinced me to give the M-Audio product line another look. What could be simpler than walking into an Apple Store and just getting a two-octave MIDI keyboard?
I really really should have done this long ago. My compositions just took another little quantum jump.
Here's the thing. I've gotten much more fluid about using looping to rehearse draft ideas for songs and then lay them down. But although the Roland can loop, if the major part of the song is in GB and then I have to attach the Roland to start practicing keyboard parts on top of that ... too many steps for my Luddite brain.
I mean, frankly, the programming interface on the Roland is just clunky. Compared to a full fledged GUI like GarageBand. I know there are GUI tools for the Roland (I've even loaded them, once, in the distant past, despite being a Luddite) but my dim recollection is that GB is still superior.
So here I am with my new toy and it makes it EVER so much easier to rehearse keyboard lines and then record them RIGHT into the program when basically satisfied. The only drawback (and it is a real one) is that I can only trigger the sounds native to GB. The Roland does have 768 nice sounds, about 150 of which I think I actually LIKE. So there is more to do with the interface.
But the M-Audio unit has semi-weighted keys (which the Roland does NOT), and it collects genuine MIDI attack and aftertouch information (which the Roland does, but then it dumps it to that little information window which is SO difficult to use fluidly).
I got a great deal more done just yesterday than I have in a while.
******
Now it may be time for a little more discipline.
Part of the reason I'm doing all this composing at home is that rehearsing a band is time consuming. When we go into the studio, it quickly becomes apparent that even *I* don't recall all the chord changes and melody lines for my songs perfectly, and I live with the things much more fully than my sidemen do. It takes time to get everyone rehearsed, work things out, make choices about parts, and so on.
Meanwhile, although my creative burst from circa late March and April has been tailing off a little, the juices are still flowing. So I keep coming up with new song bits.
In addition to the two songs I blogged about last week and the week before (which now carry the titles "Monday Morning" and "Sun Breaks Through") I've got a couple more things in the crucible .... another one generated out of looping some fumbly acoustic guitar arpeggiating, like "MM" and "SBT"--and that one has some draft lyrics--and then a pure, simple synthpop song in a vaguely Gary Numan tradition, which is 100% an artifact of this new MIDI keyboard, which allows me to compose that kind of shit EVEN faster than before.
Thing is, I could speed up the process of band rehearsals if I didn't spend QUITE so much time hacking at new songs.
Ryan has come up with some great ideas for lead guitar parts, but that said, it's obviously a bit of a slog for him at times, and I think it's partly because I'm not giving enough guidance. He came up with a descending figure in the verses of "Good Men" that made me wet myself with glee. I think he also repeats it basically the same each time he hauls it out. Perhaps, as the composer, it's up to me to step in and say "here are some variations I want you to make on your brilliant riff."
What I *ought* to do with this new MIDI controller is work on some of those ideas.
Same with Eric's bass lines. He's pulling out some GREAT stuff. It's also clear that I need to give him more time to rehearse, and a better beat to play with. Our rehearsal last week featured NO drummer--because I still haven't talked to Doug--and NO beat track--because I forgot my Nano with the beat tracks at home, heading out to the studio in a rush.
This is my gig. I have to be more prepared. Hacking away on new material is fabulous and great, but not if I set things up so that my sidemen don't get enough attention from my for the stuff I'm asking them to do.
So there's a bit of planning and preparation remaining to do.
I'm pretty sure I could use my fancy, expensive Roland keyboard as a MIDI trigger source instead, but I don't think I ever have. The instruction manual for that thing is endless, even after three years I find it a bit daunting. When I want to use the Roland, I run it in as an *audio* source, not a *MIDI* source. I just don't want to have to keep another USB connector around and figure out which device to turn on first and all that crap. (My brain is oddly Luddite about such things.)
What I've wanted for a long time is a MIDI input keyboard. I saw one at about the same time that one of my professional colleagues gave me my first introduction to GarageBand (he raved about how good it was; I'd been assuming it must be a toy).
But every time I looked at the price tag on a MIDI keyboard, versus what I thought I needed to accomplish, I kept convincing myself it wasn't really going to be worth it. I could hack along with the "musical typing" function and then drag the notes around in the program window if the timing was off. Which it always is, I'm far from a great keyboard player.
A recent conversation with Shannon Grady convinced me to give the M-Audio product line another look. What could be simpler than walking into an Apple Store and just getting a two-octave MIDI keyboard?
I really really should have done this long ago. My compositions just took another little quantum jump.
Here's the thing. I've gotten much more fluid about using looping to rehearse draft ideas for songs and then lay them down. But although the Roland can loop, if the major part of the song is in GB and then I have to attach the Roland to start practicing keyboard parts on top of that ... too many steps for my Luddite brain.
I mean, frankly, the programming interface on the Roland is just clunky. Compared to a full fledged GUI like GarageBand. I know there are GUI tools for the Roland (I've even loaded them, once, in the distant past, despite being a Luddite) but my dim recollection is that GB is still superior.
So here I am with my new toy and it makes it EVER so much easier to rehearse keyboard lines and then record them RIGHT into the program when basically satisfied. The only drawback (and it is a real one) is that I can only trigger the sounds native to GB. The Roland does have 768 nice sounds, about 150 of which I think I actually LIKE. So there is more to do with the interface.
But the M-Audio unit has semi-weighted keys (which the Roland does NOT), and it collects genuine MIDI attack and aftertouch information (which the Roland does, but then it dumps it to that little information window which is SO difficult to use fluidly).
I got a great deal more done just yesterday than I have in a while.
******
Now it may be time for a little more discipline.
Part of the reason I'm doing all this composing at home is that rehearsing a band is time consuming. When we go into the studio, it quickly becomes apparent that even *I* don't recall all the chord changes and melody lines for my songs perfectly, and I live with the things much more fully than my sidemen do. It takes time to get everyone rehearsed, work things out, make choices about parts, and so on.
Meanwhile, although my creative burst from circa late March and April has been tailing off a little, the juices are still flowing. So I keep coming up with new song bits.
In addition to the two songs I blogged about last week and the week before (which now carry the titles "Monday Morning" and "Sun Breaks Through") I've got a couple more things in the crucible .... another one generated out of looping some fumbly acoustic guitar arpeggiating, like "MM" and "SBT"--and that one has some draft lyrics--and then a pure, simple synthpop song in a vaguely Gary Numan tradition, which is 100% an artifact of this new MIDI keyboard, which allows me to compose that kind of shit EVEN faster than before.
Thing is, I could speed up the process of band rehearsals if I didn't spend QUITE so much time hacking at new songs.
Ryan has come up with some great ideas for lead guitar parts, but that said, it's obviously a bit of a slog for him at times, and I think it's partly because I'm not giving enough guidance. He came up with a descending figure in the verses of "Good Men" that made me wet myself with glee. I think he also repeats it basically the same each time he hauls it out. Perhaps, as the composer, it's up to me to step in and say "here are some variations I want you to make on your brilliant riff."
What I *ought* to do with this new MIDI controller is work on some of those ideas.
Same with Eric's bass lines. He's pulling out some GREAT stuff. It's also clear that I need to give him more time to rehearse, and a better beat to play with. Our rehearsal last week featured NO drummer--because I still haven't talked to Doug--and NO beat track--because I forgot my Nano with the beat tracks at home, heading out to the studio in a rush.
This is my gig. I have to be more prepared. Hacking away on new material is fabulous and great, but not if I set things up so that my sidemen don't get enough attention from my for the stuff I'm asking them to do.
So there's a bit of planning and preparation remaining to do.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Rehearsal
Note to self: when putting your guitar on, don't whack yourself in the face with it. Emulating the "look" of the kid on the cover of War is dumb.
Don't exactly remember how or why I did that, toward the start of rehearsal; perhaps I was about to whack the mike stand with the guitar and pulled it back a little too hastily. In any case, ow, split lip. But rehearsal (which was just starting) carried on fine, once I got the bleeding stopped.
Rehearsed in a rather large, nicely appointed room at JamSpot tonight. Expensive room, it was all that was available, but it worked nicely. There was a floor monitor right by my mike ... no need, nor even a temptation, to oversing to be heard over the instruments. So my voice is fine.
Eric and Ryan are learning the material nicely and adding good things to it. A couple of these songs are going to kick ass when we've got more time and practice under our belts. Next step, I think, is to see if Doug will come in and do some drums.
Won't listen to the rehearsal CD until tomorrow at the earliest. I know there were plenty of flubs, many of them mine ... but let's leave this as a memory of a really strong rehearsal for now. Time enough to critique tomorrow.
Don't exactly remember how or why I did that, toward the start of rehearsal; perhaps I was about to whack the mike stand with the guitar and pulled it back a little too hastily. In any case, ow, split lip. But rehearsal (which was just starting) carried on fine, once I got the bleeding stopped.
Rehearsed in a rather large, nicely appointed room at JamSpot tonight. Expensive room, it was all that was available, but it worked nicely. There was a floor monitor right by my mike ... no need, nor even a temptation, to oversing to be heard over the instruments. So my voice is fine.
Eric and Ryan are learning the material nicely and adding good things to it. A couple of these songs are going to kick ass when we've got more time and practice under our belts. Next step, I think, is to see if Doug will come in and do some drums.
Won't listen to the rehearsal CD until tomorrow at the earliest. I know there were plenty of flubs, many of them mine ... but let's leave this as a memory of a really strong rehearsal for now. Time enough to critique tomorrow.
Sun Breaks Through
The signs and symptoms
Are breaking through
You thought you had this bird in hand
But it somehow got the best of you
The signs and symptoms
Break into life
And all the planets in your plan
Become the stuff that parts a man and wife
It can't be helped now
It's only luck
It can't be helped now
And I'm sorry but you're really fucked
Again
And then the sun breaks through
And you feel all right
The sun breaks through
Maybe it's all right
Ah, the sun
Ah, the sun
Breaks through
The signs and portents
Are spinning plates
You set your life on the edge of the knife
But you reached the fork a little too late
The signs and portents
Will have their way
You paid the clown to settle down
But he tells you that you cannot stay
It can't be helped now
You know it's true
It can't be helped now
And I'm sorry but you're really screwed
Again
And then the sun breaks through
And you feel all right
The sun breaks through
Maybe it's all right
Ah, the sun
Ah, the sun
Breaks through
It's a lie
Can you bear it?
It's a lie
If you share it
Again
The signs and symptoms
Are getting rough
You play your hand the best you can
But your partner finally calls your bluff
The signs and portents
They can't forgive
You wonder how you'll work it out
But somehow you're just gonna have to live
It can't be helped now
Heads or tails
It can't be helped now
And I'm sorry but it's epic fail
Again
And then the sun breaks through
And you feel all right
The sun breaks through
Maybe it's all right
Ah, the sun
Ah, the sun
Breaks through
copyright 2008 Pete Chvany
Are breaking through
You thought you had this bird in hand
But it somehow got the best of you
The signs and symptoms
Break into life
And all the planets in your plan
Become the stuff that parts a man and wife
It can't be helped now
It's only luck
It can't be helped now
And I'm sorry but you're really fucked
Again
And then the sun breaks through
And you feel all right
The sun breaks through
Maybe it's all right
Ah, the sun
Ah, the sun
Breaks through
The signs and portents
Are spinning plates
You set your life on the edge of the knife
But you reached the fork a little too late
The signs and portents
Will have their way
You paid the clown to settle down
But he tells you that you cannot stay
It can't be helped now
You know it's true
It can't be helped now
And I'm sorry but you're really screwed
Again
And then the sun breaks through
And you feel all right
The sun breaks through
Maybe it's all right
Ah, the sun
Ah, the sun
Breaks through
It's a lie
Can you bear it?
It's a lie
If you share it
Again
The signs and symptoms
Are getting rough
You play your hand the best you can
But your partner finally calls your bluff
The signs and portents
They can't forgive
You wonder how you'll work it out
But somehow you're just gonna have to live
It can't be helped now
Heads or tails
It can't be helped now
And I'm sorry but it's epic fail
Again
And then the sun breaks through
And you feel all right
The sun breaks through
Maybe it's all right
Ah, the sun
Ah, the sun
Breaks through
copyright 2008 Pete Chvany
Friday, May 2, 2008
Kludging
Regarding the last couple of posts: I've done a bit of playing around with running some different rhythm loops under the main loops in those two songs that sound too similar to one another.
I find that if I put a different rhythm on one of them, let it sit in the background, stereo-separated (hard-panned left and right on two different tracks), right from measure one .... and on the other song, run an additional rhythm loop ONLY during the first couple of measures before the guitar and bass kick in, then drop it out .... that the particular similarity of the songs' introductions is reduced, and the differences between them are highlighted a bit.
Haven't ripped the current versions to my Nano to let repeat listenings inform me whether it's really enough. But the next major thing would be to stop tweaking the production and get more backing instrument parts on them. And recut the vocals. The laptop mike is pretty awesome for rough takes, but I'm wondering about doing more fully-rehearsed vocals.
It's all VERY interesting, process-wise. And the amount of interest I have in process, rather than only in outcome as in my youth, continues to be a good aspect of all this.
I find that if I put a different rhythm on one of them, let it sit in the background, stereo-separated (hard-panned left and right on two different tracks), right from measure one .... and on the other song, run an additional rhythm loop ONLY during the first couple of measures before the guitar and bass kick in, then drop it out .... that the particular similarity of the songs' introductions is reduced, and the differences between them are highlighted a bit.
Haven't ripped the current versions to my Nano to let repeat listenings inform me whether it's really enough. But the next major thing would be to stop tweaking the production and get more backing instrument parts on them. And recut the vocals. The laptop mike is pretty awesome for rough takes, but I'm wondering about doing more fully-rehearsed vocals.
It's all VERY interesting, process-wise. And the amount of interest I have in process, rather than only in outcome as in my youth, continues to be a good aspect of all this.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Another
Got another "bedroom rock" track demoed last night. I'd had the verse chord progression sitting around for a while and a few lyrical bits. Hacked some lyrics together Tuesday evening.
A drawback is that it sounds rather too much like the earlier track. At work yesterday, during some downtime when I was caught up and nothing was happening, I scanned through some GarageBand rhythm loops to find something that felt appropriate. Damn if, when I laid the guitar track down over it, it didn't turn out that the rhythm and guitar patterns sounded WAY too close to the first. Slightly different rhythm, slightly different strum, but not different enough.
I think I've determined that my default strum tempo on an acoustic guitar, at this point, is 68-72 beats per minute. That's part of the problem right there: not enough tempo variation.
Gonna have to work on some different strum patterns, too.
And do more with picking and arpeggiating, not just hold down chords all the time.
I suppose the similarity of keys (one in C, the other in Em/G) doesn't help.
Once I realized this problem, I found another rhythm track that still works, but isn't quite as similar. Gives things a little different feel. They're still very close.
Of course, this is one reason to crank things out fast like this: find out where your default strengths AND default weaknesses are. It's still pretty cool that I knocked these things out so quickly. The sound quality through the little laptop mike, with the string muting and fret buzzing issues of my guitar playing (more obvious on an acoustic), and my singing so as not to peg the mike, give the tracks a quality we can charitably describe as "interesting."
But hey. Two years ago could I have banged out this much this fast? A year ago? No.
A drawback is that it sounds rather too much like the earlier track. At work yesterday, during some downtime when I was caught up and nothing was happening, I scanned through some GarageBand rhythm loops to find something that felt appropriate. Damn if, when I laid the guitar track down over it, it didn't turn out that the rhythm and guitar patterns sounded WAY too close to the first. Slightly different rhythm, slightly different strum, but not different enough.
I think I've determined that my default strum tempo on an acoustic guitar, at this point, is 68-72 beats per minute. That's part of the problem right there: not enough tempo variation.
Gonna have to work on some different strum patterns, too.
And do more with picking and arpeggiating, not just hold down chords all the time.
I suppose the similarity of keys (one in C, the other in Em/G) doesn't help.
Once I realized this problem, I found another rhythm track that still works, but isn't quite as similar. Gives things a little different feel. They're still very close.
Of course, this is one reason to crank things out fast like this: find out where your default strengths AND default weaknesses are. It's still pretty cool that I knocked these things out so quickly. The sound quality through the little laptop mike, with the string muting and fret buzzing issues of my guitar playing (more obvious on an acoustic), and my singing so as not to peg the mike, give the tracks a quality we can charitably describe as "interesting."
But hey. Two years ago could I have banged out this much this fast? A year ago? No.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Surprise
I'm really pleased with how I can surprise myself. Today's surprise was, not surprisingly (I know, I know, I'm too clever) about music.
I had a house guest the last several days and he was lovely and amazing and we hung out with each other and a lot of mutual friends and that was all wonderful. Including playing an American Idol-based karaoke game on a friend's Wii in which I did fairly well at singing stuff like "In The Air Tonight" and "Tainted Love" and didn't feel TOO bad at wishing I'd done even better.
Lovely as it was, I was sort of chomping at the bit to get back to my regular routine. Problem is, I also wore myself out having a nice time (we were all up especially late the night of Wii karaoke because we also watched a Harry Potter flick until nearly 1:30 a.m.)
So I ended up cancelling tonight's rehearsal with Eric, my bass player.
But tired as I was ... and a bit depressed today, what with poor weather and lingering tiredness, which always affects my mood .... I still wanted to write.
I hacked around with some simple ideas in C and spouted some lyrics and ended up writing a quick ditty. I've been meaning to try writing a little more simply, I-IV-V progressions, not move all over the place, which in one sense is a sign of my increasing sophistication and in another sense is about me not knowing how to take full advantage of any single chord I've got.
Anyway. Came home tonight and worked it out a little more on acoustic guitar. Which we know I still don't play all that well. But it was sounding okayish.
Laid down a rough track on my MacBook--no metronome, keeping my own tempo. The microphone in this thing is still surprisingly awesome for quick-and-dirties. Guitar and voice. Sounded pretty decent.
I decided to figure out the tempo. Found a rhythm pattern that kind of fits. Re-cut the guitar, no voice. Added a synth bass line. Added the vocals again (first two verses and choruses. Put in a little piano. Put in a bit of backing vocal harmony.
Um .... suddenly I have half a song? With acoustic guitar cut in one take? That sounds halfway okay .... you know, nothing that would be totally out of place in a Robert Pollard "I hacked this together kind of fast" way.
Like I say: surprise.
I sort of need a vacation from hanging out with fun people, which is my usual vacation from work. I had been thinking it would be neat to go away totally by myself for a week, with only a guitar and a laptop, not hang out online so much, and spew forth as many songs as I was/wasn't feeling like writing real fast.
As a dry run for something like that, this evening was WAY fabulous.
Who knew I was getting so quick at knocking things out? Boy, if my old Berkeley classmates could hear me now. Actually, I should point Aoife at some stuff. Maybe this is something I should let her hear. I suspect she'll agree I've come a LONG way.
I had a house guest the last several days and he was lovely and amazing and we hung out with each other and a lot of mutual friends and that was all wonderful. Including playing an American Idol-based karaoke game on a friend's Wii in which I did fairly well at singing stuff like "In The Air Tonight" and "Tainted Love" and didn't feel TOO bad at wishing I'd done even better.
Lovely as it was, I was sort of chomping at the bit to get back to my regular routine. Problem is, I also wore myself out having a nice time (we were all up especially late the night of Wii karaoke because we also watched a Harry Potter flick until nearly 1:30 a.m.)
So I ended up cancelling tonight's rehearsal with Eric, my bass player.
But tired as I was ... and a bit depressed today, what with poor weather and lingering tiredness, which always affects my mood .... I still wanted to write.
I hacked around with some simple ideas in C and spouted some lyrics and ended up writing a quick ditty. I've been meaning to try writing a little more simply, I-IV-V progressions, not move all over the place, which in one sense is a sign of my increasing sophistication and in another sense is about me not knowing how to take full advantage of any single chord I've got.
Anyway. Came home tonight and worked it out a little more on acoustic guitar. Which we know I still don't play all that well. But it was sounding okayish.
Laid down a rough track on my MacBook--no metronome, keeping my own tempo. The microphone in this thing is still surprisingly awesome for quick-and-dirties. Guitar and voice. Sounded pretty decent.
I decided to figure out the tempo. Found a rhythm pattern that kind of fits. Re-cut the guitar, no voice. Added a synth bass line. Added the vocals again (first two verses and choruses. Put in a little piano. Put in a bit of backing vocal harmony.
Um .... suddenly I have half a song? With acoustic guitar cut in one take? That sounds halfway okay .... you know, nothing that would be totally out of place in a Robert Pollard "I hacked this together kind of fast" way.
Like I say: surprise.
I sort of need a vacation from hanging out with fun people, which is my usual vacation from work. I had been thinking it would be neat to go away totally by myself for a week, with only a guitar and a laptop, not hang out online so much, and spew forth as many songs as I was/wasn't feeling like writing real fast.
As a dry run for something like that, this evening was WAY fabulous.
Who knew I was getting so quick at knocking things out? Boy, if my old Berkeley classmates could hear me now. Actually, I should point Aoife at some stuff. Maybe this is something I should let her hear. I suspect she'll agree I've come a LONG way.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Cyberspace
Reach me while you can
Oh you lonely man
I'll give you something to believe
Meet me up in space
I'll help you find your place
If you can live on what we breathe
I know you're looking for
A way to be much more
And I'm the net to break your fall
You'll find your brothers here
They'll hold you fast and dear
If they find time to take your calls
Millions flock to me
Longing to be free
Trying to forget the past
They talk for hours and hours
Like they've got super powers
And maybe some of it will last
But deep inside my webs
The tide still flows and ebbs
A star still flickers out and fades
So let me take you up
I'll fill your every cup
And maybe someday we'll upgrade ...
To a better dream
A better dream
To a better dream
A better dream
Oh you lonely man
I'll give you something to believe
Meet me up in space
I'll help you find your place
If you can live on what we breathe
I know you're looking for
A way to be much more
And I'm the net to break your fall
You'll find your brothers here
They'll hold you fast and dear
If they find time to take your calls
Millions flock to me
Longing to be free
Trying to forget the past
They talk for hours and hours
Like they've got super powers
And maybe some of it will last
But deep inside my webs
The tide still flows and ebbs
A star still flickers out and fades
So let me take you up
I'll fill your every cup
And maybe someday we'll upgrade ...
To a better dream
A better dream
To a better dream
A better dream
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Rehearsal
Huh. No sooner do I consider updating here than I notice that my last post was about how far to go with a song that, indeed, I rehearsed just last night.
The big change in my work recently is that I've picked up a bass player, whom I've rehearsed with several times, and last night "auditioned" an old guitarist friend ... and we played the song I discussed in my previous post, the political one.
Among other things.
My focus lately is not on the politics of that song, but on the fact that in the second verse (which is eight couplets rather than four like the first and third verses, for extra drama) I'm trying to jump up several steps (an octave, maybe??) halfway through the verse for EXTRA extra drama. And I'm consistently not in voice to sing it very well up there.
So there I am struggling with my vocals while also trying to hear whether the guitarist is doing something I want him to do.
Being a band leader is .... interesting. My bass player and I have good rapport, but I don't think it's giving away state secrets to say that having to teach him and work on things is sometimes, not frustrating so much, but ... dunno. Tests my limits a bit. I have to say things like "that was good but it doesn't work for me." When part of what I'm feeling is "OMG someone wants to play my songs, I shouldn't criticize ANYTHING they do."
The guitarist hauled out some nice licks last night that were COMPLETELY wrong for the song. Thank God he asked me, to my face, immediately afterward, "that was too western sounding, wasn't it?"
If I'd written a country song I would have fucking loved the part. It was good. It just didn't fit at all.
And I hate saying "no" to people, apparently.
But I'm learning.
And then he did some different stuff the next time and it was better.
And the bass parts are coming along nicely. A lot of it is about rehearsal now, for him.
Still. My god, what an effort sometimes. It's like I'm "on" all the time. I'm the boss. Nothing happens unless I make it happen.
It's not more difficult than doing it all myself. It's just DIFFERENTLY difficult.
Rewarding too, of course. The work with the guitarist was ... ragged .... if I think about the parts that need work or that I have to decide about. But he hauled out some things that a) I would never have thought of and b) that were like YAY when I heard them. I mean, I've worked with this guy before, I had a clue about what I was getting. Some of what he brings won't fit. Other stuff will be brilliant. I just have to see if I can get him to substitute anything that isn't brilliant right away with something else.
And I really need to figure out how to hit those high notes. They're within the range of my falsetto .... but I need to be able to figure out how to come up to them from the earlier lines that are down below them, and still project with power, without busting my throat.
Skills building .....
The big change in my work recently is that I've picked up a bass player, whom I've rehearsed with several times, and last night "auditioned" an old guitarist friend ... and we played the song I discussed in my previous post, the political one.
Among other things.
My focus lately is not on the politics of that song, but on the fact that in the second verse (which is eight couplets rather than four like the first and third verses, for extra drama) I'm trying to jump up several steps (an octave, maybe??) halfway through the verse for EXTRA extra drama. And I'm consistently not in voice to sing it very well up there.
So there I am struggling with my vocals while also trying to hear whether the guitarist is doing something I want him to do.
Being a band leader is .... interesting. My bass player and I have good rapport, but I don't think it's giving away state secrets to say that having to teach him and work on things is sometimes, not frustrating so much, but ... dunno. Tests my limits a bit. I have to say things like "that was good but it doesn't work for me." When part of what I'm feeling is "OMG someone wants to play my songs, I shouldn't criticize ANYTHING they do."
The guitarist hauled out some nice licks last night that were COMPLETELY wrong for the song. Thank God he asked me, to my face, immediately afterward, "that was too western sounding, wasn't it?"
If I'd written a country song I would have fucking loved the part. It was good. It just didn't fit at all.
And I hate saying "no" to people, apparently.
But I'm learning.
And then he did some different stuff the next time and it was better.
And the bass parts are coming along nicely. A lot of it is about rehearsal now, for him.
Still. My god, what an effort sometimes. It's like I'm "on" all the time. I'm the boss. Nothing happens unless I make it happen.
It's not more difficult than doing it all myself. It's just DIFFERENTLY difficult.
Rewarding too, of course. The work with the guitarist was ... ragged .... if I think about the parts that need work or that I have to decide about. But he hauled out some things that a) I would never have thought of and b) that were like YAY when I heard them. I mean, I've worked with this guy before, I had a clue about what I was getting. Some of what he brings won't fit. Other stuff will be brilliant. I just have to see if I can get him to substitute anything that isn't brilliant right away with something else.
And I really need to figure out how to hit those high notes. They're within the range of my falsetto .... but I need to be able to figure out how to come up to them from the earlier lines that are down below them, and still project with power, without busting my throat.
Skills building .....
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Politics and Art
Politics and art are a tricky combination.
When I was in graduate school I was a BIG fan of didactic, political art. And damn the torpedoes. My field was the turn of the 20th century in American literature, an era that had plenty of troubling issues worth an artist's time to think about and make art about. It was also the early 1990s, and although I wasn't out of the closet myself at that point, it was impossible not to notice the real issues going on around me, with HIV and AIDS, with government policy, with the end of the Cold War, and so on.
I was never NOT aware that putting strong political statements about the times you live in into your art can "date" your work as fast as clinging too tightly to an of-the-moment fashion. And the beauty and artistry of the art can suffer, too. It's easier to be strident and call people's attention to things than to delve into them in a way that connects heart AND head. Art's path to truth needn't be linear to be a true path. Didactic art can get too linear.
Still, didactic art that really tries to talk about Big Questions can be damned exciting. So I was often passionate in my defense of novels from my period that were not necessarily "great literature" but were literature AND great because they captured something about their times that "better" works didn't.
But now it comes time to make more art of my own and, not surprisingly, I have to wrestle with questions of whether and how to incorporate my personal convictions into my work, and whether the works in which I'm passionate but more vague are stronger than the ones in which I'm specific, and the specificity sometimes robs the work of the room for interpretation and personal reaction that can be the key to audience's really investing themselves and their own passions.
In theory one can have it all--if not in each work of art, then in the arc of one's whole career--but that merely defers the confrontation or moves it to a different level.
I've had a song kicking around for a couple of years, with the working title of "Good Men." It's a political song. I notice that I'm both attracted to it and have strong needs about it *because* of its political content, and that it scares me in ways that some of my other work doesn't. I think what's scary is the feeling that it would be all too easy to be crappy in this context. And many are the types of crap I could make.
The gist of the song, originally, was that I had gotten a little tired of seeing gay men ranting on internet hookup sites about how there were no "good men" out there. It's not that I don't know my share of bad gay dating stories, either ones that have happened to me or to my friends. But I know plenty of great gay men, so the lament about how there weren't ANY good men ANYWHERE often struck me as an overstatement. Look around. Great gay men are everywhere. Whether each of us is guaranteed one as a life partner, yeah, that's trickier, but it's a different question.
Thing is, the original thrust of the song was kind of snarky. And not in a good way. I'm blessed with a pretty good relationship, and so I don't have to wrestle with whatever feelings of loneliness might be troubling people who say "there are no good men." (Well. Except to the degree that one can feel lonely even in a relationship. But that's Adult Commitment 202 or 303, and the song was about Adult Dating 101, Male Same Sex Version.) It didn't feel particularly productive to write a song about how other people were whiny.
The thing that held my attention was the snippet of chorus I came up with. Which centered on a question: where are the good men we dream of?
At my age, although I came out just after the worst of the original HIV crisis, it's pretty hard not to recall how devastating that time was. I have one lover who is the ONLY person left alive from the friendship circle he came out into. And he's only a year older than I. It's become somewhat rote to talk about how an entire generation of gay and bisexual men was lost. Obviously it wasn't an ENTIRE generation .... I know several people in my own age bracket and older. But it was indeed a HUGE number of people. My ex Woody, who worked in GLBT community centers in the 1990s, can still talk about going to one or two memorial services a week. Often for people he'd known fairly well.
The answer to the question "where are the good men we dream of?" became pretty apparent to me the more I thought about it. "Gone."
As I say, this song has been kicking around for a while. Nearly three years ago, in the summer and fall of 2005, I was briefly in a band project with some friends from work. I know this tune was in the works at that point because I remember playing it for them.
Politics aren't the only tricky thing about art, of course: technique matters, too. My songwriting technique wasn't particularly solid at that point (whatever it may be now, it's definitely a lot better). The song didn't have so much a chord progression as a lead keyboard line that suggested a progression. My MIDI keyboard was the shiny new toy at that point and I was exploring it for all it was worth. And it was a GOOD lead riff (well. Decent, anyway. Very good considering my underlying skill level at the time). Problem was, the chorus and verse sounded a lot alike. And the melody over it was a bit repetitive.
The project fizzled out for a variety of reasons not long after that, and I filed the song away for future reference. Went on to other things, practiced my craft.
Beyond the musical limitations of the song, though, something else was troubling me. I was serious and passionate about the topic of how there was a generation of gay and bi men gone. It was something that we used to talk about the lingering impact of when I did men's health organizing. The lack of role models. The fact that a lot of gay and bi men my age are sort of "pioneering" the process of living into our 40s and 50s because so many men 10 or 20 years older than us never made it this far. How hard that feels.
Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world--which I'm never not noticing, even if I care a great deal about the queer communities--there's a whole 'nother series of crises putting young people in harm's way. Particularly the war in Iraq.
What blocked me about the song three years ago wasn't just the musical stuff I needed to get more experience about. There was a BIG part of me that didn't want to just write another impact-of-AIDS song. Not if it meant rehashing the 1980s and 1990s and ignoring my own time .... when friends are STILL vulnerable to HIV, but when there's a lot else going on too.
Trying to talk about the waste of human life due to indifference and apathy in ALL their forms--indifference to queer men, treating younger men and women as cannon fodder for wars whose justification never looked fully solid even at the outset, and dead wrong now .... well, that really was beyond my abilities.
Three years have gone by and I've taken another poke at it.
I feel quite a bit more confident now. Among other things, I have much better ideas about how to differentiate the verses and choruses. It hasn't taken me much effort to chuck some simple solutions at that part of the problem. ("Simple" now that I know more.)
The first verse of the old song contained some strong images that I've kept intact. And they've provided some jumping-off points for later verses.
I'm still ambivalent about the results. I have this funny feeling that nobody would necessarily perceive the original link to the history of the HIV crisis if I didn't write a long blog post about it. *I* know which lines in the first verse are directly about that.
The rest of the song sort of veers off into my frustration about the Iraq War and the culture of political inaction around it. Which I'm part of myself.
And a big part of me thinks that writing a song about how so many of us have been less active than we ought to have been is just one more failure to do enough.
I mean, I can't tell you how much I do NOT want to be one of those people who writes about saving the whales, or some other form of tilting at windmills, without really DOING something.
I fully believe that making political art IS a form of action. But it's a tricky one. It's VERY easy to get misled that you've accomplished more than you have.
And to make crappy art in the process. Failing at both the art AND the politics.
And yet, the song has a good shape in its current form. I can imagine investing my own emotion in the process of working on it further, of singing it. Sometimes the meaning of these things, and whatever impact they wind up having, comes out in the doing, not in the thinking about doing.
It may take on additional life if I sit and connect with it more deeply. If I open up more fully to the rage behind the frustrations I'm working out in writing it. Or if I put it across in a way that lets other people connect with whatever feelings THEY have about all this.
Or. Not.
Hard to tell, sometimes.
When I was in graduate school I was a BIG fan of didactic, political art. And damn the torpedoes. My field was the turn of the 20th century in American literature, an era that had plenty of troubling issues worth an artist's time to think about and make art about. It was also the early 1990s, and although I wasn't out of the closet myself at that point, it was impossible not to notice the real issues going on around me, with HIV and AIDS, with government policy, with the end of the Cold War, and so on.
I was never NOT aware that putting strong political statements about the times you live in into your art can "date" your work as fast as clinging too tightly to an of-the-moment fashion. And the beauty and artistry of the art can suffer, too. It's easier to be strident and call people's attention to things than to delve into them in a way that connects heart AND head. Art's path to truth needn't be linear to be a true path. Didactic art can get too linear.
Still, didactic art that really tries to talk about Big Questions can be damned exciting. So I was often passionate in my defense of novels from my period that were not necessarily "great literature" but were literature AND great because they captured something about their times that "better" works didn't.
But now it comes time to make more art of my own and, not surprisingly, I have to wrestle with questions of whether and how to incorporate my personal convictions into my work, and whether the works in which I'm passionate but more vague are stronger than the ones in which I'm specific, and the specificity sometimes robs the work of the room for interpretation and personal reaction that can be the key to audience's really investing themselves and their own passions.
In theory one can have it all--if not in each work of art, then in the arc of one's whole career--but that merely defers the confrontation or moves it to a different level.
I've had a song kicking around for a couple of years, with the working title of "Good Men." It's a political song. I notice that I'm both attracted to it and have strong needs about it *because* of its political content, and that it scares me in ways that some of my other work doesn't. I think what's scary is the feeling that it would be all too easy to be crappy in this context. And many are the types of crap I could make.
The gist of the song, originally, was that I had gotten a little tired of seeing gay men ranting on internet hookup sites about how there were no "good men" out there. It's not that I don't know my share of bad gay dating stories, either ones that have happened to me or to my friends. But I know plenty of great gay men, so the lament about how there weren't ANY good men ANYWHERE often struck me as an overstatement. Look around. Great gay men are everywhere. Whether each of us is guaranteed one as a life partner, yeah, that's trickier, but it's a different question.
Thing is, the original thrust of the song was kind of snarky. And not in a good way. I'm blessed with a pretty good relationship, and so I don't have to wrestle with whatever feelings of loneliness might be troubling people who say "there are no good men." (Well. Except to the degree that one can feel lonely even in a relationship. But that's Adult Commitment 202 or 303, and the song was about Adult Dating 101, Male Same Sex Version.) It didn't feel particularly productive to write a song about how other people were whiny.
The thing that held my attention was the snippet of chorus I came up with. Which centered on a question: where are the good men we dream of?
At my age, although I came out just after the worst of the original HIV crisis, it's pretty hard not to recall how devastating that time was. I have one lover who is the ONLY person left alive from the friendship circle he came out into. And he's only a year older than I. It's become somewhat rote to talk about how an entire generation of gay and bisexual men was lost. Obviously it wasn't an ENTIRE generation .... I know several people in my own age bracket and older. But it was indeed a HUGE number of people. My ex Woody, who worked in GLBT community centers in the 1990s, can still talk about going to one or two memorial services a week. Often for people he'd known fairly well.
The answer to the question "where are the good men we dream of?" became pretty apparent to me the more I thought about it. "Gone."
As I say, this song has been kicking around for a while. Nearly three years ago, in the summer and fall of 2005, I was briefly in a band project with some friends from work. I know this tune was in the works at that point because I remember playing it for them.
Politics aren't the only tricky thing about art, of course: technique matters, too. My songwriting technique wasn't particularly solid at that point (whatever it may be now, it's definitely a lot better). The song didn't have so much a chord progression as a lead keyboard line that suggested a progression. My MIDI keyboard was the shiny new toy at that point and I was exploring it for all it was worth. And it was a GOOD lead riff (well. Decent, anyway. Very good considering my underlying skill level at the time). Problem was, the chorus and verse sounded a lot alike. And the melody over it was a bit repetitive.
The project fizzled out for a variety of reasons not long after that, and I filed the song away for future reference. Went on to other things, practiced my craft.
Beyond the musical limitations of the song, though, something else was troubling me. I was serious and passionate about the topic of how there was a generation of gay and bi men gone. It was something that we used to talk about the lingering impact of when I did men's health organizing. The lack of role models. The fact that a lot of gay and bi men my age are sort of "pioneering" the process of living into our 40s and 50s because so many men 10 or 20 years older than us never made it this far. How hard that feels.
Meanwhile, out in the rest of the world--which I'm never not noticing, even if I care a great deal about the queer communities--there's a whole 'nother series of crises putting young people in harm's way. Particularly the war in Iraq.
What blocked me about the song three years ago wasn't just the musical stuff I needed to get more experience about. There was a BIG part of me that didn't want to just write another impact-of-AIDS song. Not if it meant rehashing the 1980s and 1990s and ignoring my own time .... when friends are STILL vulnerable to HIV, but when there's a lot else going on too.
Trying to talk about the waste of human life due to indifference and apathy in ALL their forms--indifference to queer men, treating younger men and women as cannon fodder for wars whose justification never looked fully solid even at the outset, and dead wrong now .... well, that really was beyond my abilities.
Three years have gone by and I've taken another poke at it.
I feel quite a bit more confident now. Among other things, I have much better ideas about how to differentiate the verses and choruses. It hasn't taken me much effort to chuck some simple solutions at that part of the problem. ("Simple" now that I know more.)
The first verse of the old song contained some strong images that I've kept intact. And they've provided some jumping-off points for later verses.
I'm still ambivalent about the results. I have this funny feeling that nobody would necessarily perceive the original link to the history of the HIV crisis if I didn't write a long blog post about it. *I* know which lines in the first verse are directly about that.
The rest of the song sort of veers off into my frustration about the Iraq War and the culture of political inaction around it. Which I'm part of myself.
And a big part of me thinks that writing a song about how so many of us have been less active than we ought to have been is just one more failure to do enough.
I mean, I can't tell you how much I do NOT want to be one of those people who writes about saving the whales, or some other form of tilting at windmills, without really DOING something.
I fully believe that making political art IS a form of action. But it's a tricky one. It's VERY easy to get misled that you've accomplished more than you have.
And to make crappy art in the process. Failing at both the art AND the politics.
And yet, the song has a good shape in its current form. I can imagine investing my own emotion in the process of working on it further, of singing it. Sometimes the meaning of these things, and whatever impact they wind up having, comes out in the doing, not in the thinking about doing.
It may take on additional life if I sit and connect with it more deeply. If I open up more fully to the rage behind the frustrations I'm working out in writing it. Or if I put it across in a way that lets other people connect with whatever feelings THEY have about all this.
Or. Not.
Hard to tell, sometimes.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Top Of My Lungs
I think it was the Behind The Music episode on Heart in which Ann Wilson talked about having to *discover* that high-powered voice of hers. Apparently she and Nancy had been playing and singing for years, as kids, but it wasn't until they got the band together and started playing live that Ann was pushed by circumstance to really reach for some of those high-notes-with-power that she's well known for.
I'm thinking about this because I'm pushing myself to keep at my vocal technique. It's a truism that most untrained singers sing too low in their range (or below it). I took no more than five "adult education" singing classes twenty years ago and that was one of the FIRST things the teacher told us. She said it's particularly true for men, who believe that we're supposed to have lower voices than (whoever).
Nevertheless, when I started writing and singing my own songs I often composed fairly low in my range. A) There's any number of bass and baritone rock singers whose tone I admire (Philip Oakey, Stephin Merritt, etc), and B) it genuinely felt more comfortable.
More than one friend has reported back to me that the songs in which I reach higher in my range happen to be the ones that work better for them. And that some of the low songs don't work. No matter how I feel about my voice, this is good information.
I've often felt kind of like the comment that Geena Davis makes about her kid sister in A League Of Their Own regarding high pitches: can't hit 'em, can't lay off 'em. Except for me it's the LOW pitches. ;-)
Since I have no objection to learning to sing better *anywhere* in my range, though--other than some emotional discomfort I know better than to give in to--I've kept at working the higher end of my range as well.
Yesterday I came home from brunch with a good friend and the house was empty, so I plugged in my guitar and started rocking out live on some of the new songs I'm working on. Part of the process I'm trying to go through this time it to have played and sung these things more often before committing them to media.
Got partway through one song that isn't too low in my range, necessarily (the new material incorporates some of my learning about where I should place my voice better) .... but started to feel as if I was missing a bet by not letting myself go higher. But I'm not quite smart enough to change keys on the fly. So I just went up an octave.
And, perhaps a little like Ann Wilson, I found I had some notes in me that I hadn't thought of.
Everything wasn't fabulous .... the verse I was in ends on some high notes that maybe *aren't* in my range, if I'm up in that octave. (Or that I'll have to keep working at.) Maybe I'd have to re-key the song down a step to be able to go up an octave. I probably want to sing the earlier verse in the original octave, save the reaching-higher for the middle bit. That would suit the emotional arc of the tune.
Still. Some high notes. Pretty good tone and pitch. Loud, too.
I was all kind of "whoah." That was me singing that. Interesting.
Practice makes better.
I'm thinking about this because I'm pushing myself to keep at my vocal technique. It's a truism that most untrained singers sing too low in their range (or below it). I took no more than five "adult education" singing classes twenty years ago and that was one of the FIRST things the teacher told us. She said it's particularly true for men, who believe that we're supposed to have lower voices than (whoever).
Nevertheless, when I started writing and singing my own songs I often composed fairly low in my range. A) There's any number of bass and baritone rock singers whose tone I admire (Philip Oakey, Stephin Merritt, etc), and B) it genuinely felt more comfortable.
More than one friend has reported back to me that the songs in which I reach higher in my range happen to be the ones that work better for them. And that some of the low songs don't work. No matter how I feel about my voice, this is good information.
I've often felt kind of like the comment that Geena Davis makes about her kid sister in A League Of Their Own regarding high pitches: can't hit 'em, can't lay off 'em. Except for me it's the LOW pitches. ;-)
Since I have no objection to learning to sing better *anywhere* in my range, though--other than some emotional discomfort I know better than to give in to--I've kept at working the higher end of my range as well.
Yesterday I came home from brunch with a good friend and the house was empty, so I plugged in my guitar and started rocking out live on some of the new songs I'm working on. Part of the process I'm trying to go through this time it to have played and sung these things more often before committing them to media.
Got partway through one song that isn't too low in my range, necessarily (the new material incorporates some of my learning about where I should place my voice better) .... but started to feel as if I was missing a bet by not letting myself go higher. But I'm not quite smart enough to change keys on the fly. So I just went up an octave.
And, perhaps a little like Ann Wilson, I found I had some notes in me that I hadn't thought of.
Everything wasn't fabulous .... the verse I was in ends on some high notes that maybe *aren't* in my range, if I'm up in that octave. (Or that I'll have to keep working at.) Maybe I'd have to re-key the song down a step to be able to go up an octave. I probably want to sing the earlier verse in the original octave, save the reaching-higher for the middle bit. That would suit the emotional arc of the tune.
Still. Some high notes. Pretty good tone and pitch. Loud, too.
I was all kind of "whoah." That was me singing that. Interesting.
Practice makes better.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Continuing On
How things change when you forget to update your secondary blog in a while. Today I'm taking a break from Live Journal (there's a bit of a political protest going on because LJ's new owners have showed some cluelessness about customer relations, combined with some actions that make some folks worried that the cluelessness is the flip side of some potential censorship). So here I am, and I notice that I've said almost nothing about how productive and interesting the last few weeks have been.
Well, they have. In my last post here, I noticed that I'd broken a bit of a creative logjam. Boy, did I ever. I finally got a LOT of my semi-finished music tracks into a "finished" state. As with anything like this, I can think of a billion things that I wish I'd done better with those tracks. But it was time to let them go, put them out in the world, stop fiddling with them. So I did.
The end result was a almost-thirty-minute-long collection of instrumentals with a linking motif or two that I called "Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar," and an almost-hour-long collection of "pop songs" released as "Spring Hill Light And Power." Both went up on a new web site, http://www.dirigibleego.com, for my Dirigible Ego "band" project.
Um. Yeah. 90 minutes of music.
I've been getting positive comments on the material from various friends. Including from other musicians, *including* from people whose own work had been among my inspirations over the last few years. So while I'm still intensely aware, at times, of "how the song sounds in my head" versus "how it REALLY sounds out in the world," I can't deny that people have had positive reactions to what I've done. Sometimes unexpected ones .... in the sense that, sure, people are interested in part because they're my friends, but when they mention liking a track that I was ambivalent about (which. um. could be ANY of them, on any given day), or when they're moved by something I wrote. Yeah. That's good.
In particular, as I keep saying, I got a lot more confidence in my vocals, and more skill at rendering them well.
So that was a couple of weeks ago, and things have moved right along. I think I said, in my last post, that I was hoping to get some things out the door because I was getting backlogged on "new" material and wanted to stop obsessing over the old stuff. That remains the case. My Nano this morning carries draft demos of five new songs, and that isn't all of what I've got in work.
Add to that: one friend has stepped forward recently to say that he'd like to play with me. He likes my stuff, he wants to contribute ... and he's actually *come over* to the house twice now to start rehearsing.
This is kind of a big deal. A *number* of my friends have said, in the past, that they'd like to collaborate with me. Sometime. But most of them have lived at a distance, and *all* of them are at least as busy as I am. Or something seems to get in the way. More than once I've emailed someone a track I was working on and ... not heard for a long time. I've gotten VERY good at talking back to the little voices inside that say "they wanted to work with you until they heard how weak your material is." It's life: there are a lot of people I would "want to" work with that I haven't, or don't have time to. It's not really a comment on anything other than the impossibility of having it all. (Good lord, my family member Pepper has been *begging* me to play music with her for *years*. I just can't get motivated .... we're stylistically distinct enough that it just hasn't called to me yet.)
So to have someone actively seeking to work with me, because he likes what I'm doing. Yeah. That's really great.
It's a very new collaboration, it's already forcing me to take leadership and ownership of what I do. That's new territory, a bit scary, so I haven't made any big announcements about who it is or that we're working together. I need to give it time to breathe, time to let myself inhabit it.
But it's really awesome.
Of course, I'm laying down vocals for some of these new demos and thinking "Gah. I'm much better than I WAS and not at all where I WANT TO BE." ;-) So the struggle continues.
Still. These new demos represent so many levels of improvement over the past, in terms of imagination and how fast I can get new clunky ideas out and less-clunky.
Truly, for all the self-doubt (that I suspect I would carry around with me even if I were, let's say, Bono), my God, I seem to get a lot done.
Well, they have. In my last post here, I noticed that I'd broken a bit of a creative logjam. Boy, did I ever. I finally got a LOT of my semi-finished music tracks into a "finished" state. As with anything like this, I can think of a billion things that I wish I'd done better with those tracks. But it was time to let them go, put them out in the world, stop fiddling with them. So I did.
The end result was a almost-thirty-minute-long collection of instrumentals with a linking motif or two that I called "Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar," and an almost-hour-long collection of "pop songs" released as "Spring Hill Light And Power." Both went up on a new web site, http://www.dirigibleego.com, for my Dirigible Ego "band" project.
Um. Yeah. 90 minutes of music.
I've been getting positive comments on the material from various friends. Including from other musicians, *including* from people whose own work had been among my inspirations over the last few years. So while I'm still intensely aware, at times, of "how the song sounds in my head" versus "how it REALLY sounds out in the world," I can't deny that people have had positive reactions to what I've done. Sometimes unexpected ones .... in the sense that, sure, people are interested in part because they're my friends, but when they mention liking a track that I was ambivalent about (which. um. could be ANY of them, on any given day), or when they're moved by something I wrote. Yeah. That's good.
In particular, as I keep saying, I got a lot more confidence in my vocals, and more skill at rendering them well.
So that was a couple of weeks ago, and things have moved right along. I think I said, in my last post, that I was hoping to get some things out the door because I was getting backlogged on "new" material and wanted to stop obsessing over the old stuff. That remains the case. My Nano this morning carries draft demos of five new songs, and that isn't all of what I've got in work.
Add to that: one friend has stepped forward recently to say that he'd like to play with me. He likes my stuff, he wants to contribute ... and he's actually *come over* to the house twice now to start rehearsing.
This is kind of a big deal. A *number* of my friends have said, in the past, that they'd like to collaborate with me. Sometime. But most of them have lived at a distance, and *all* of them are at least as busy as I am. Or something seems to get in the way. More than once I've emailed someone a track I was working on and ... not heard for a long time. I've gotten VERY good at talking back to the little voices inside that say "they wanted to work with you until they heard how weak your material is." It's life: there are a lot of people I would "want to" work with that I haven't, or don't have time to. It's not really a comment on anything other than the impossibility of having it all. (Good lord, my family member Pepper has been *begging* me to play music with her for *years*. I just can't get motivated .... we're stylistically distinct enough that it just hasn't called to me yet.)
So to have someone actively seeking to work with me, because he likes what I'm doing. Yeah. That's really great.
It's a very new collaboration, it's already forcing me to take leadership and ownership of what I do. That's new territory, a bit scary, so I haven't made any big announcements about who it is or that we're working together. I need to give it time to breathe, time to let myself inhabit it.
But it's really awesome.
Of course, I'm laying down vocals for some of these new demos and thinking "Gah. I'm much better than I WAS and not at all where I WANT TO BE." ;-) So the struggle continues.
Still. These new demos represent so many levels of improvement over the past, in terms of imagination and how fast I can get new clunky ideas out and less-clunky.
Truly, for all the self-doubt (that I suspect I would carry around with me even if I were, let's say, Bono), my God, I seem to get a lot done.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Breakthrough
This blog hasn't focused on music quite as much recently, but I've been working away. Yesterday I had a bit of a breakthrough.
What with being in California for two weeks at New Year's--where I didn't have access to musical instruments, other than a default training keyboard my brother has for the kids, but which they keep in the parental bedroom so the kids don't pound on it--and then somewhat sick on and off when I returned, plus the fact that I've gotten turned on to doing some painting again .... with all that, I hadn't done much with music so far in 2008. Not the end of the world, these things come and go. But before Christmas I'd been trying to put some time in on things every day when I could, treating it less as something to do when "inspired" and more as a daily part of life. I'd been missing music when I was away, but once I was back ....
Also, over the last couple of years, I've built up quite a stock of semi-finished tracks. It's nearing two years since I took my current job, which required me to buy a Mac (since I support those at work), which led me to Garageband, which got me doing more recording. But very few tracks have gotten finished. I'd been intending to put some of them to rest at last, and here I was not working.
When I was home sick the week before last, that started to break a little bit. But it broke with me listening to old records and wanting to cover those songs. Which is fine, but not the same as working on my stuff. Still .... Gary Numan's Replicas album got me to turn my keyboard back on, bless it.
And then I started fooling around with some riffs of my own. New ones ... which, again, is NOT the same as working on existing material. But: another step closer.
Yesterday, though, I had a big breakthrough. I woke up to an empty house, Alan and Pepper already having left for church. I find it easier to record vocals when I'm alone--something I'm sure I need to get over, but these things take time. And it's definitely easier to do any even noisier stuff with an empty house. So I thought to myself, well, let's get a little done.
The latest Garageband has more flexibility for doing looped recording, which is especially helpful for vocal takes. I hadn't really explored this feature, so I went after it.
And suddenly I was getting a LOT done, on a variety of tracks.
I can't recall if I've blogged about my ambivalence about vocal recording, previously. I don't know too many singers who *don't* have some ambivalence about their own voices, so it's kind of redundant to speak of, but it's something I've been confronting a lot over the last couple of years. I think the "experimental" nature of how I started out yesterday helped me avoid a little vocal tension I have sometimes carried into other sessions, even at home alone. And the ability to do multiple takes at a time was a huge relief.
I consistently made myself do three or four takes at a go, even if I thought the first or second was good enough. Good discipline!
Alan and Pepper were out for quite a while, so even as my voice started to wear out, I was checking through other tracks, listening for instrumental things I could work on as well.
I've been intending, for a while now, to put out a CD of my various songs. I don't pretend that I am an especially skilled recording engineer, so I know that the sound quality of such a collection will be variable. But I'm at the stage where I have a variety of solid pop songs in place, assuming I just **make myself finish some of them**--writing more lyrics for songs that need them, recording better takes of vocals, and just plain **letting go***. I want to get something out there so my friends who are interested can hear .... and so I can clear the decks, stop working on those songs (unless a recording contract should fall from the sky, or I put a band together to take them to the next level, or whatever). Be ready to move on to newer material without feeling like I'm simply abandoning so many half-finished efforts.
Heh. I say "pop songs" .... well, some of them were written as basic pop songs, and work decently as such. Others are more experimental. I guess, in the back of my mind, I've sort of being hoping to write more well-formed pop songs to go with the experiments, on the theory that I could end up with a record kind of like the second Human League album, "Travelogue," which mixes some slightly out-there instrumentals with some VERY out-there songs that, nevertheless, are all based on pop-song forms.
Maybe the most recent Human League album, "Secrets," is a better model: it harks back to "Travelogue" in mixing pop songs and instrumentals, but the pop is a little less weird, given Phil Oakey's greater interest in standard pop songs than the other original Human League members.
Anyway ....
I have more semi-complete pop songs than I thought I did (I mean, I knew I had a bunch, but I get so focused on the ones I'm most interested in lately, I lose track of how many others there are) and a BUNCH of interesting little experiments. Many of which are in very good shape.
So all of a sudden, it's sort of an embarrassment of riches. Rough-hewn, often silly .... wow, I wrote some VERY silly songs a year ago .... but I have a collection.
I just need to polish a few of them up (the ones that need or can even benefit from said polishing) and then let them go.
What with being in California for two weeks at New Year's--where I didn't have access to musical instruments, other than a default training keyboard my brother has for the kids, but which they keep in the parental bedroom so the kids don't pound on it--and then somewhat sick on and off when I returned, plus the fact that I've gotten turned on to doing some painting again .... with all that, I hadn't done much with music so far in 2008. Not the end of the world, these things come and go. But before Christmas I'd been trying to put some time in on things every day when I could, treating it less as something to do when "inspired" and more as a daily part of life. I'd been missing music when I was away, but once I was back ....
Also, over the last couple of years, I've built up quite a stock of semi-finished tracks. It's nearing two years since I took my current job, which required me to buy a Mac (since I support those at work), which led me to Garageband, which got me doing more recording. But very few tracks have gotten finished. I'd been intending to put some of them to rest at last, and here I was not working.
When I was home sick the week before last, that started to break a little bit. But it broke with me listening to old records and wanting to cover those songs. Which is fine, but not the same as working on my stuff. Still .... Gary Numan's Replicas album got me to turn my keyboard back on, bless it.
And then I started fooling around with some riffs of my own. New ones ... which, again, is NOT the same as working on existing material. But: another step closer.
Yesterday, though, I had a big breakthrough. I woke up to an empty house, Alan and Pepper already having left for church. I find it easier to record vocals when I'm alone--something I'm sure I need to get over, but these things take time. And it's definitely easier to do any even noisier stuff with an empty house. So I thought to myself, well, let's get a little done.
The latest Garageband has more flexibility for doing looped recording, which is especially helpful for vocal takes. I hadn't really explored this feature, so I went after it.
And suddenly I was getting a LOT done, on a variety of tracks.
I can't recall if I've blogged about my ambivalence about vocal recording, previously. I don't know too many singers who *don't* have some ambivalence about their own voices, so it's kind of redundant to speak of, but it's something I've been confronting a lot over the last couple of years. I think the "experimental" nature of how I started out yesterday helped me avoid a little vocal tension I have sometimes carried into other sessions, even at home alone. And the ability to do multiple takes at a time was a huge relief.
I consistently made myself do three or four takes at a go, even if I thought the first or second was good enough. Good discipline!
Alan and Pepper were out for quite a while, so even as my voice started to wear out, I was checking through other tracks, listening for instrumental things I could work on as well.
I've been intending, for a while now, to put out a CD of my various songs. I don't pretend that I am an especially skilled recording engineer, so I know that the sound quality of such a collection will be variable. But I'm at the stage where I have a variety of solid pop songs in place, assuming I just **make myself finish some of them**--writing more lyrics for songs that need them, recording better takes of vocals, and just plain **letting go***. I want to get something out there so my friends who are interested can hear .... and so I can clear the decks, stop working on those songs (unless a recording contract should fall from the sky, or I put a band together to take them to the next level, or whatever). Be ready to move on to newer material without feeling like I'm simply abandoning so many half-finished efforts.
Heh. I say "pop songs" .... well, some of them were written as basic pop songs, and work decently as such. Others are more experimental. I guess, in the back of my mind, I've sort of being hoping to write more well-formed pop songs to go with the experiments, on the theory that I could end up with a record kind of like the second Human League album, "Travelogue," which mixes some slightly out-there instrumentals with some VERY out-there songs that, nevertheless, are all based on pop-song forms.
Maybe the most recent Human League album, "Secrets," is a better model: it harks back to "Travelogue" in mixing pop songs and instrumentals, but the pop is a little less weird, given Phil Oakey's greater interest in standard pop songs than the other original Human League members.
Anyway ....
I have more semi-complete pop songs than I thought I did (I mean, I knew I had a bunch, but I get so focused on the ones I'm most interested in lately, I lose track of how many others there are) and a BUNCH of interesting little experiments. Many of which are in very good shape.
So all of a sudden, it's sort of an embarrassment of riches. Rough-hewn, often silly .... wow, I wrote some VERY silly songs a year ago .... but I have a collection.
I just need to polish a few of them up (the ones that need or can even benefit from said polishing) and then let them go.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Drat!
I wish this blog didn't risk sounding like a broken record, but I seem to be in relatively low spirits today. Since that was my frame of mind last time I posted here, it could seem like it's my permanent condition. Actually, I had a good two-week vacation in between, which lifted my spirits a lot.
It's just the couple of days since I came home that have been increasingly drab.
I suspect it's the weather. Really, really. It kind of sucks to think how important that feels. This morning it's sunny and I'd love to think my mood would rise with the light. But it's also cold and the days are short. Whereas when I was in California and it was warmer and the days slightly longer, hey presto, I did better.
Sure, the rigors of a full time job may apply as well. But honestly, my job is just not that tough, and there are many aspects of it I enjoy. I am having a hard time believing that the plummet in my mood the last couple of days is just about "waaah, I have to sit at a desk."
Yesterday afternoon I was overtaken by a growing sense of disillusionment or .... despair?? I don't know quite what to call it. It only sharpened as I traveled homeward, even as I looked forward to being home and cocooning. I sidestepped some of it by doing pleasant things once I was home, but there was part of me that kept looking at the clock thinking "is it too early to go to sleep? Should I just turn in?"
I woke rested but not in better spirits. This morning, I'm getting things done and carrying on, but I feel bleakish.
It really sucks.
It's just the couple of days since I came home that have been increasingly drab.
I suspect it's the weather. Really, really. It kind of sucks to think how important that feels. This morning it's sunny and I'd love to think my mood would rise with the light. But it's also cold and the days are short. Whereas when I was in California and it was warmer and the days slightly longer, hey presto, I did better.
Sure, the rigors of a full time job may apply as well. But honestly, my job is just not that tough, and there are many aspects of it I enjoy. I am having a hard time believing that the plummet in my mood the last couple of days is just about "waaah, I have to sit at a desk."
Yesterday afternoon I was overtaken by a growing sense of disillusionment or .... despair?? I don't know quite what to call it. It only sharpened as I traveled homeward, even as I looked forward to being home and cocooning. I sidestepped some of it by doing pleasant things once I was home, but there was part of me that kept looking at the clock thinking "is it too early to go to sleep? Should I just turn in?"
I woke rested but not in better spirits. This morning, I'm getting things done and carrying on, but I feel bleakish.
It really sucks.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
