Song Assassins, 2008

The following are my "song assassins" of 2008. I don't claim that these are great songs.

Most of them are not even new.

What these do represent are tunes that just "killed" me. They made me stop what I was doing, and just listen. They made me go find the CD in my collection and play it, repeatedly, for a few days straight. They inspired me, spurred me on to (ideally) better art.

They made me believe.

As the 2008 went on, I jotted these down as they revealed themselves. Here they are:

February - Always in Love (Wilco)
February - For All the Right Reasons (Jayhawks, Rainy Day Music)
March - Stolen Car (Bruce Springsteen, The River)
April - Midnight Man (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!)
April - In the Morning (Norah Jones)
May - Dixie Chicken (Little Feat, Dixie Chicken)
June - La Cienega Just Smiled (Ryan Adams, Gold)
July - Mercy (Duffy, Rockferry)
August - The Sun Also Sets (Ryan Adams, Easy Tiger)
August - The Step and The Walk (The Duke Spirit)
October - Two Silver Trees (Calexico, Carried to Dust)

Going Back to Babylon

100 miles from Babylon, i felt the tremble of the earth
my shoulders began to shudder, and my cough started to get worse

the earth had lost its center, i heard the voices in my head
but everything sounded different, and nothing made any sense

la la la la la la hey

we raised our bricks and mortar, built a superhighway to the sky
said, “to hell with the infidels”, turned our backs and waved goodbye

turned up the music on our stereos, feasted in the middle of the storm
thought we’d stay so happy and contented, i’m not so sure anymore

Take me back … goin back to babylon

hang all of the martyrs, hang all of the dead
hang the one’s who misunderstood and chose to sleep in instead

hang the poor and stinking, the sick and the blind
break me off a turkey leg, and pass me that bottle of wine …

Adventures in incredulity, v1.0

A few months back, a leader in our faith community got up and made this cool announcement about how iTunes had lent its support to one of our CDs and we had made the charts there.

A few days later, he received an e-mail from someone who had attended the church that day, expressing their “disappointment” that he was endorsing a band that was not explicitly Christian.

Come again?

This is nothing new, believe me. I’ve heard rumors of it, but being on the direct end of it is something differently entirely. You want to scream, shake their shoulders, sit down with them, reason, but in the end all you can do is silently shake your head and keep on doing what you’re doing.

Frankly, it also hurt. I don’t quite know when faith became something you lived out and struggled with only on Sunday mornings, but it’s obviously shifted. I don’t know what this person expected to find when they listened to Maida Vale’s music: “Jesus is a friend of mine?” (either you know, or you don’t)

Somehow the expression of full-humanity, of longing and fulfillment, of love and rejection, of sin and redemption failed to connect with her. If we have to turn our backs on being fully human in order to be a Christian band, then perhaps we don’t want to be a Christian band.

Maybe we weren’t ever a “Christian band”.

But maybe if struggle, transcendence, fun, desire, and doubt can be part of faith, then, well, we’ll let you put two and two together.

Outside, autumn begins its cool whispers of peace and decay. Inside, Emmylou Harris rises gently above the quiet murmur of the shop. She echoes a sound from fifty years ago, splices of it mixed into the interludes of the music. The music is achy with longing; white soul for those who acknowledge neither concept.

The acoustic guitars thump and sing, fat and gray in the company of angelic harmonies and archetypal melodies. We all know this music. It is written in the celtic, anglo-saxon souls of Caucasians. We have strayed and betrayed ourselves, attempting to leverage ourselves into the gladiatorial arenas of hip-hop and "modern" music, but we need to face it.

We are mountain people. Even the most mixed breed of us is stuck with the pipes and the drums from the highlands, pounding wild and distant in our hearts. The grouse and heather cling to our thighs as we run, as we flail to flee our past.

Emmylou, and artists like her bring those pasts back to confront our empty, unanchored eyes. We have drifted, for we have forgotten who we are, and when you can’t remember who you are, it’s even more difficult to latch on to who you’d like to be. It recedes in the distance, fleeing your reaching, outstretched hand.

Emmylou touches the soul in our stomachs. She reminds of us the essentials of life, that we—like her songs—are uncategorized, brilliant as a flower, and luminous in our mortality. We cultivate beautiful deaths so that our stories can be told in their aching, seductive beauty.

She has soul. She has country. She has modern rock and roll. She has gospel. It is not “country” music, it is human music. She is a psalmist.

The CD is Dead, Long Live the CD

I firmly agree, with most current commentators, that the CD is dead. Electronic delivery of music is now the overwhelming choice of consumers. Old news, I know.

However, there are two aspects of the current (and future) state of music retailing that intrigues me.

First, there’s the aspect of musical quality, which I blogged about a few weeks ago. There are simply things in the compression of sound that get lost. I firmly believe it. As Buddy Miller put it in No Depression, when you listen to a great CD, it can “make your heart hurt”; a similarly great mp3 often just lacks that certain something, the certain center, warm mid-range that Neil Young would love. T-Bone Burnett, producer of the amazing (and amazing sounding) Raising Sand, similarly grouses against the sound quality of iPod music. (BTW, I own a iPod and LOVE being able to take my music anywhere.) He and some colleagues are brainstorming new e-delivery formats that will enhance the quality of music, but there’s nothing in production yet.

Second, there’s the idea of the CD as “artifact”, as a piece of visual art, a piece of cultural “swag”. Frankly, I think there’s still life here. Granted it is not “mainstream market” life. It becomes “niched” life, where it will be purchased by audiophiles, artists and musicians who want to read liner notes, see who played on what, and engage the visual artistic direction of the CD’s author.

So I think we are at a very interesting time in the life of music commerce. I believe in the “economics of free”, that electronic music (content) will be increasingly freely accessible to people, who will pass the good stuff around, and delete the bad stuff. iTunes will continue to dominate the retail business, and CDs will continue to shrink as a percentage of music sales.

Simultaneously, however, I think CD sales will increasingly become appealing to the niche of people who want to hear the highest quality (note: I am not debating the quality of vinyl versus CDs here; they are different media with different tonal qualities and characteristics) they can get, AND can also possess the “artifact”.

In short, I think the most successful selling CDs in the near-term are going to be (a) really great sounding, and (b) really great looking. Iconic. Compelling. Something that makes that certain group of people true fans, maybe?) say, “I’ll buy the music on iTunes, but I want to OWN that THING, that piece of physical, visual art.”

The CD as music retail is dead; long live the CD as art.

It DOES make a difference…

And now a bulletin from the ultimately useless department.

A few months ago I decided to invest some money into some CDs that I really enjoy. I’d heard rumors from some respected musicians (Buddy Miller for one) that there is a significant difference in the listening experience between CD and mp3 (or mp4 or any other type of compression-focused music). I hadn’t really believed in it: to my mind, most of the folks making this claim seemed to be portly, middle-aged men with six-figure incomes who really enjoyed spending their weekends combing record stores for obscure vinyl.

But I decided to give it a try; I picked one of my favorite CDs (Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) that I’d purchased through iTunes (note: not downloaded illegally), and brought it home.

Wow.

There were guitar parts that weren’t “there” in the iTunes version; a richness to the vocals that had completely flown over my head.

My resolution is to now keep on this course and replace my “iTunes only” CDs that I really enjoy with CD versions (not audiophile enough for vinyl… yet). For the musos out there: try it, you’ll be blown away.

Okay now we're REALLY done.

To studio on Friday night. 9:30pm start time to review tracks and prepare for mastering. 4 hours later, we are still reviewing, trapped inside the rabbit trails of guitars that are too loud and drums that have no crack and pop.

We argue.

We drink a beer (or two).

We argue some more.

We sweat.

Six hours later, we are crafting and nudging our little sonic babies until we sit in rapt silence and glimpse a shot of the glory, enfolded in cascading notes and rhythms.

This is what the kingdom is. This is why we do what we do.

Only a few more days, kids.

That’s a wrap.

Friday we wrapped tracking for the record. Nathan was the honorary “last to give,” adding some light percussion to the tracks. However, we weren’t quite equipped with all the instruments and toys that we were envisioning, so we had to get inventive, and a little bit lo-fi. How lo-fi? Well, a large container of Lowry’s Seasoned Salt served as one shaker, a smaller container of sea salt was the other. Hand claps were supplied by the Case family children. It’s a family affair.

So what’s next?

First we sort through the five vocal tracks for each song, the 8 - 12 guitar takes for each song, the eight backup vocals for each song, and try to arrange and get all the “colors” into the right light. Then we’ll turn it over to a good friend for mixing, pick the final tracks and sequence them (critical) send it out for mastering, and then finish the art work.

All told, another 4 weeks of work.

But it’s worth it.

I know I’m biased, but these tracks really glisten and shine. I hope the heart, soul, and creativity that we poured into them will translate to everyone. There are new textures, new sounds, and we can’t wait for people to hear them.

See everyone soon.

Studio Blog – Guitars, Day 1

We were supposed to begin tracking guitars today, beginning with Justin’s parts. Maida Vale guitars are going to be the biggest mountain for us to climb, since they provide most of the hooks and melodic/harmonic content in the band.

This was meant to be exciting, because we are doing a lot of this record ourselves—on our laptops, in our houses. So we had a spot all set up for doing the electrics, along with five of our collective amps, all our pedals and guitars. We wanted to establish some options for each other. We were going to do Justin first, because he had to fly out of town the next morning for the whole week. This was the one day we had to get all of this stuff done, which is plenty, considering he plays banjo and lap steel as well. Lots of things to do.

Then he got sick.

Some kind of flu virus just took him out, and we effectively lost a day. We’ll have to rethink the remaining schedule, and adjust on the fly in order to get this thing done by April or May. Stratton has us on a tight schedule…