I think today is a good day to tell you about my in-progress EP.  Let's pretend I'm a journalist and use the 5 W questions, shall we?

Photo by Joshua Chan

WHY?

I wrote a great deal of songs during the pandemic.  Most of these, you'll never hear.  They're not all winners, you know.  As I kept writing, several of the songs ended up being about Black experiences. As they say, write what you know.  Now, I've written about this sort of thing before. After all, writing songs is how I process emotions and try to deal with my anxiety and depression and life in general. Eventually, I had written enough songs that I thought were good enough to not discard. I'd like to share them.  That's what songwriters do, you know, we generally prefer to share what we write. Instead of staggering these songs across multiple releases, I decided to collect them all into one project.

WHO?

The songs on this project are all very much about Black experiences. That being the case, I thought that the best way to approach recording them would be to enlist the assistance of people who would most be able to personally relate to the subject matter.  The artistic aesthetic for this project is that all personnel are Black. This includes musicians, engineer, mixer, mastering engineer, photographer, videographer, and graphic design. If you've read my blog or heard me talk about music, you know that I consider collaboration to be a highly valuable and important part of making art. This is an opportunity for me to work with some very talented people who I've never worked with before. I feel like the enthusiasm they are bringing to this project can only enhance the final product.

WHERE?

I am recoding at The Dreamcatchers Recording Studio in Reynoldsburg, Ohio. Rizo is the gentleman at the controls.

WHAT?

This is going to be an EP.  In addition to the detail about the personnel above, it will be different from my past work in two major ways.

First, every single song on this project is told from my point of view. By saying that, I don't mean that I've never written a song from my own point of view before.  "North of Sixteen", from Echo in the Crevices, is very much a first person story, and it's a very clear narrative. "Goodbye", from Anxious Inventions & Fictions, is another example of me being the voice speaking in the song. This certainly isn't the case all of the time. Songs like "I Am a Number" and "Your Anthem" are observational.  Songs like "Little Light" , "Le Soldat", and "She Speaks in Metaphor" are purely fiction, but plausible. My most recent single, "Wapakoneta", consists of a kernel of true memories buried in a fabricated story. This new project however... this is extremely personal. I am the voice on all of the songs. I am open, I am vulnerable, and I am speaking the truth. Note that you won't find any instances of me pushing for social or political causes or changes on this EP. (If you're looking for my thoughts in those areas, feel free to reach out to me in person.) I am saying things that are true, and then saying how I feel about them. The listener is free to draw their own conclusion. Being this open is scary.

Second, every song on this EP is in a different genre. Usually, piano is my tool of choice for writing songs. Piano provides a blank slate. There are a nearly unlimited amount of choices one can make as far as arrangement and instrumentation when starting with piano. As I arranged the songs, I tried to put together arrangements that would best serve each song. After I got three songs into the project, I noticed that they were all different genres. At that point, I decided to lean into it. Yes, each song is a different genre, but they all sound like me.

There is another detail about this project that I'll keep secret, but it is a secret that I have shared with the lovely people who subscribe to my mailing list. They are the first to know what I am up to, and I share inside information with them that I won't share elsewhere. If you'd like to join them and step into my world, please sign up here.

In a nod to Jimi Hendrix, the name of the EP will be I Am Experienced.

WHEN?

This blog post is going up on Monday January 17th, 2022.  In the United States, that is a federal holiday called Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Some people in the United States might spend a few minutes on this day thinking about topics such as racism, prejudice, and equality. Some people might spend a few minutes thinking about how to not be partial in one's individual interactions with other humans, or what the world might be like if everyone had an altruistic love for their fellow person. Many people ask themselves when, if ever, anything will improve. Those are all valid thoughts, and I'm not going to address them here. I will say that I have made some art in which I talk about my feelings, I am working hard to get it professionally recorded, and I will share it with you as soon as I possibly can.

If you don't feel like reading the story, but are curious to hear the song, please scroll WAY down to the end of this entry, and there will be a link for you.

The Who & Why & What

Some very dear friends were going to move away.  This wasn't the kind of move where the prospect of never seeing them for the rest of my life was a possibility (although in the midst of a pandemic now, who knows), but this move was far enough away that visits would be few and far between.  So, as one does, I was considering a gift.  Here's the problem... gift giving is hard for me, more so in a situation where distance is involved.  Food/drink gifts, while delicious, don't last very long.  I don't have the wherewithal to come up with practical household gifts, and besides, they were already settled in a home, they were just going to a different home and ostensibly bringing their stuff with them.  Not being able to turn my brain off at night is a nearly quotidian issue for me, and many nights the question of what kind of gift to give was the source of my insomnia.  What could I - a generally useless and insignificant being - possibly give someone without it being hackneyed or trite?  Hey, I write songs.  How about a bespoke song?  That's unique and that's sincere, which means the proper sentiment gets across no matter how awful it ends up being.  Ok, problem solved, now to work...

The Where

I knew the destination of the move.  That being the case, I did more reading about the location than I'd like to admit, looking for extra details that I might be able to shoehorn into a song.  Relevant lyrics from the song:

Say hello to the Badlands
Prairie dogs and Minuteman
Needles in the Black Hills
Porcupines with their quills

Say hello to the Big Bird

I'm not going to spell the place out to you, I'm going to depend on your profound knowledge of geography and history - or conversely, your Google skills - to tell you The Where.

The How

Brainstorming sessions. Writing text.  Editing text into lyrics.  

Deciding on a mood.  Well, it's somewhat melancholy, but hey, they're not dying - at least not any faster than the rest of us are - and we very well might cross paths again.  Ok then, minor key for the verse, then have a pre-chorus that modulates from minor to major, then major key in the chorus in order to give that optimistic and hopeful feeling.  Settled.  Pick the chords.  No, not that one.  Yes, that one.  Ok.  Chords.... find a melody.  Agonize over the piano at finding a melody.  Have a look at those lyrics.  Oh, that's not good enough, and that won't work with the melody.  Edit the lyrics again.  Gently massage the lyrics and the melody until they are able to combine.

Back to the lyrics.  How do I say "I love you and I will miss you" without explicitly saying those words?  We're writing songs here, need to be artistic and just a tiny bit oblique.  Ok, well, the general purpose of the song is as a goodbye present, how about making that the theme?  Enter my interest in etymology.  (If you think that word should contain an "n", well, that really bugs me.)  The word "Goodbye" literally means "God be with you"... over the centuries English has shortened that four word farewell into one seven letter word.  Ok now I have my chorus hook.

Goodbye means God be with you
God be with you as you go
Goodbye is temporary
Just until the next hello

The When

There is more than one When.

The first... well, there was a moving day.  I wanted to have the song finished, recorded, and gifted by moving day.  I finished the song probably a week before the departure, as far as the final first draft.... then spent time messing around with the arrangement or the lyrics, not liking the edits, revising back to the original idea, pruning here and there again... yeah, it's a process.  By no means am I an engineer, but I recorded the song at home the way I do all of my demos... I even threw on some vocal harmonies.  I bounced it to mp3, and emailed it to my friends on the day they left.  Mission accomplished.

The other When.

I was putting songs together to take to Patrick Himes at Reel Love Recording Company in February 2019, in preparation for tracking on my second solo album.  "Goodbye", well, I didn't hate it.  It kept growing on me.  I thought it had potential given the right instrumentation and production.  I brought it with me, along with a bunch of other songs on pre-production day.  It survived the initial cut down... and as tracking started on a few songs and an album began to take shape, I ended up thinking that this one absolutely HAD to be on it.

There were obstacles.  I wrote this song on piano, but I do not have the piano chops to do it justice.  Patrick plays piano - because Patrick plays everything - but he had done that previously on "Convalesce" (from Defacing the Moon), was already playing acoustic guitar and pump organ on this one, and I wanted the chance to work with another talented musician who I admire.  I decided to ask Nathan Peters.  You might know him from such bands as Vinyl Dies,  Lioness, TV Queens, and the legendary Captain Of Industry. Nathan so kindly said yes, and between the chord chart and my very very low quality home recording, was able to figure out what the song needed from the piano part.

Ah, the bass part.  Well, I wrote the song on piano, and was unable to come up with an accompanying bass part that I thought was good enough.  I reached out to Eric Cassidy for ideas.  He had a great idea, and was kind enough to record a video of himself playing the idea slowly enough that I could learn it.  One problem, it involved a quick note change that required holding a chord shape for the change... this type of thing is baby easy for guitarists - and for bass players that are much more talented than me - but I don't often play chords, and when I do, I certainly don't slide around from chord to chord.  Great idea, how to execute cleanly?  It turns out that I couldn't execute it cleanly.  Every time I would play it, I'd either mess up the chord shape on the slide, or make too much fret noise, or not have all of the notes held well enough so that one of them wouldn't sound muddy.  Here's where the studio magic comes in... I played the root note of the chords, then we used overdubs for the harmony notes.  I'm not ashamed to admit it, I'm just not good enough to do it another way, it is what it is.  We got the sound we needed to get.

The vocals.  Take after take after take.  When flat, try again.  When sharp, try again.  My verse harmonies worked out ok.  Patrick had a fantastic idea for an additional harmony in the verse that I hadn't considered... after he sang it for me a few times so I could get it, I went and recorded that as well.  What we have now are really nice harmonies in the verse with three parts, and all of the parts are me.

(I feel I should mention and thank community drummer Brian Hoeflich here, but make clear that there was no obstacle whatsoever as far as his part is concerned.  He did - as per usual - excellent work.)

The Summary

"Goodbye" is track 3 on Anxious Inventions & Fictions.  (If you have the Deluxe Version on CD, it is track 11.)  I am proud of it.  I said what I needed to say, which is the main point of writing songs.  The recording sounds clean, and makes me seem like a much more talented musician than I actually am.  Sure, I didn't actually HAVE to professionally record this song... but I thought the song was good enough to deserve it, and the folks I gifted it to deserve to hear it at its full potential instead of only the horrible version I did at home.

Click here to listen to "Goodbye" on the platform of your choice.