Preproduction

As some of you may know, I am a musician.  Therefore, I’ll let you in on the creative process, and how it slowly starts from song idea until it becomes a completed track on an album.

I am a conceptual songwriter.  I try to tell a story, however small, with each song.  An album could be an entire story, or it could be one part of a story.  My last album before this one which I’m currently planning is called As A Matter Of Fact.  The songs were written largely in Winter of 2004-2005, and rehearsed and recorded Summer of 2005.  After a break until Spring of 2006, I completed recording  in Fall 2006  and released the album in March 2007 to little fanfare.  The content of the songs varied, as some dealt with the breakup of a long term relationship, while other embraced single life, and were ultimately life affirming.  Since these songs weren’t recorded in one time frame, the album feels a bit disjointed, but I enjoy that mismash of feelings towards it.

The album before that one, called The Distance Between, was completed quicker but had a better preproduction.  Those songs were written over the Summer of 2003, and recorded in one fell swoop over Winter of 2003-2004.  I spent the time to see what each track’s similar sound would be.  Then I compiled the tracks to be used, and threw in a new song or two over the course of the recording.  These songs were written while in a relationship, and the concept behind the record was one week in a long distance relationship. That was an album that came together after a lot of hard work.

Before that, I tried by trial and error on how to make an album, even though looking back, they are more like home demos, that you are embarrased about from their earnest simplicity.  I had a release in 2002 called Thinking Back, and a 2001 release called Jasper Makes Music.  They were both recorded on my 4 track tape recorded, mainly with acoustic guitar and a little bit of bass.  Also, my vocals hadn’t settled into my current singing style, and I could still hit all the high notes.  The lyrics for Jasper Makes music was about a conceptual album about a relationship, although I didn’t really know how relationships were like, since I was just out of high school, and entering college sans a steady girlfriend at the time.  Thinking Back was a hodgepodge of songs that didn’t make the concept album before, and dealt with being a kid in high school.  Still, the album deals with more real issues, at least to myself at the time, than Jasper Makes Music did (for the most part).

This album is going to be a return to my roots, in simple four track albums.  I want to make an album that’s not augmented or overshadowed, but instead complements the different sides of my songwriting.  Still I wanted to remain topical, at least to an extent.  The idea of this record is going to be smaller doses.  To that extent, I’m going to be putting together a couple of EPs, and we’ll see if it puts together a solid complete album.

How do you put together a concept album without any adornments?  What’s the concept?  I guess we’ll have to find out.  However, the first EP was recorded this past December (with the exception of one song), and is called D Sides (or Decides, that’s for you to figure out)…

D Sides / Decides Track Listing:

Amanda (Mostly Instrumental Version)

Brooklyn Heights

Cats On The Prowl

Don’t Worry (Baby)

Amanda is a song that I wrote about a ridiculous adventure that we had early on in our relationship.  She had just started as an intern at her new job at an art and design company, when she came home with a cut on her finger.  Only this could be more serious than a normal cut.  She had sliced it accidentally with an exacto knife, and if it didn’t stop bleeding by the time she took off the bandage, she needed to have her finger cauterized.  She did, and we spent the night in the ER, from a work maiming, and I wrote a silly song about how she might be clutzy, but I still love her.  She liked the song, until someone thought that people might be laughing at her expense (which wasn’t my intentions), and then the lyrical content was no longer approved.  Either way, for this EP, I wanted to give her the version she deserved, without any negative connotation.

Brooklyn Heights is a song about wanting something more in a living situation.  We had moved into a place that was a little too small for our living needs, and in haste, moved into a substandard living arrangement.  The new apartment we moved into had leaky bricks, leaky windows, radiators that couldn’t shut off, showers that ceased to provide hot water, and a maintenence man who installed a stove in a way that caused a prolonged gas leak in our apartment.  We broke our lease after the gas leak and about 8 months of figuring out what we were looking for in an apartment.  This song sums that up.

Cats On The Prowl is written from the perspective of a traveller, through the metaphor of a cat searching for the next warm spot to lay it’s head.  It picks up where Brooklyn Heights left off, but throws in the fact that we got a few cats.  I like the song a lot, and it’s starting to grow on me.

Don’t Worry Baby is the type of song that stays simple, and builds from a solid fountation.  It gives advice about how to stay calm in tough times, and says that there are always alternatives.  It helps someone to weigh their options, and then tries help build confidence in their decision making skills.  This description of the song is probably about 5 times as many words as was used on the original song, but needless to say, the rough version of this song was recorded in the bathroom of the apartment from hell.  Due to the poor quality of the recording, this may make it to the album as a secret song or a last track…  We’ll see / C.

The next EP to plan, is going to be call See Sides or C Sides.  I’m sure you can see where this is going….

The Back Catalog

These past few days, I’ve been moving apartments. I’ve come to realize that I have a lot of music in various formats. Specifically, five shoeboxes of cassette tapes, four boxes of CD cases, three CD books, two crates of vinyl, and an iPod of mp3s. On the sixth day of moving, my true love gave to me….

But there has to be some explanation for why my living room is currently home to a vast array of music media.  I suppose that’s what the Back Catalog is for.  Some people are sports fans.  Some are video game nerds.  Some are comic book dweebs.  I am a music geek, and I’m admitting it.  Now buy my album, or at least give props if it’s due.

Originally created on November 30th, 2007 with the beginning of the Back Catalog Blog.

AIE: 6191 out of 7625: Sunndial Song – Apples In Stereo

Note: I am finishing parts of previous AIE drafts as the project nears completion.  Otherwise, I’d be stuck with lots of half finished drafts…This draft was originally started on November 26th 2008 at 5PM.

In theory, Apples In Stereo should be my favorite band right about now.  I’ve always been a big Beatles fan, ever since I’ve discovered my parents’ vinyl Sgt. Peppers album and figured out how to work the record player myself (vague recollection makes this memory seem at approximately the age of ten), and I’ve recently been exploring the Elephant 6 collective a bit further (starting with Neutral Milk Hotel and expanding from there).  Oddly enough, I’ve known of Apples In Stereo for a while, and had some random samplings of theirs throughout the years, but never really gotten that into them.  I only have one album currently, New Magnetic Wonder, and haven’t given it a good listen more than once.  Each time an Apples In Stereo track comes on in my Alphabetical Ipod Experiment, I want to hear more.  Still, due to the nature of the experiment, I haven’t been able to listen to more than a song of theirs at a time.

I’m starting to wind down the experiment (of listening to all of the songs on my IPod in a alphabetical order by song title).  So far, I’ve been through two pairs of headphones, over 6000 songs, a move, a cat surgery, a recession, an election, many hours of overtime, open mikes, and subway rides throughout New York.  I still have a lot to be thankful for, and I forget that many positive things are starting to happen in my life.  Thanksgiving is a time to remember that there is more in our lives than the usual day to day aspects, and sometimes the things to be thanksful for are the fact that, there are still so many more songs to go, and there will always be new songs to look for if we want to.

Still I haven’t as of yet gotten into Apples In Stereo, and I may not until well into the new year.  But there is a time and a place for every new band, and soon the Apples In Stereo will make it’s debut as a fun band to listen to.  In the mean time, I’ll be waiting for that day, while I listen to one of my classic new standbys, Nada Surf.  The thing about Nada Surf, is that they write about being on the outside looking in, and about how life on the road can be an isolating one.  As a musician, there is much I can relate to with that, even in their positive mindset which often pulls through from their outsider status.

Completed Draft on New Years Day 2009 – Weightless by Nada Surf 7030 out of 7625

Fingernails, Finger Patterns, Peak Moments

You can tell a lot about a person from looking at their hands. When I was a child, I bit my nails. It was a nervous habit, and a common one for a youngster. But there are many people who still bite their nails, as a habit, coping mechanism, or a way to relieve stress. When I visited my grandparents, I saw my grandfather’s nails. Years of biting them had whittled them down to tiny nubs, and my mother mentioned to me, “That’s what happens when you bite your nails.” Soon after I stopped biting my nails, as young Matt wanted to have all of his body parts in tact when he got older.

Likewise, my girlfriend Amanda also bit her nails as a child, and learned a lesson about nail biting from her grandfather. Apparently, when she was little, she spent a weekend at her grandparents’ house. When her parents got back to pick her up, she was sitting on the porch with her grandfather, chewing her nails with her grandfather for the first time, sitting in his lap.

Once I stopped biting my nails, they grew back in full force. Soon I had to clip them once a week, something that I hadn’t had to do before. When I began playing guitar as a teenager, I had to clip them more frequently. In order to press down on the fretboard, your chord hand needs to have short nails. I began to learn guitar, using a pick in my left (strumming) hand, and chording on the right. For years I played guitar with a pick, which began to limit my guitar playing to a certain extent. Instead of feeling the natural rhythms of the song, I was using a small piece of plastic in between two fingers, while the other hand had the privilege of direct contact with the guitar. After playing on my own for quite some time, I decided to attempt some fingerpicking. I grew out the fingernails again on my left hand, and used them as my pick, after seeing a picture of Bob Dylan with long nails on one hand. Once I dropped the pick, I felt like I reached a new peak in my performing. Now I felt like there was a new height which gave me much more control of the rhythms of the songs.

Music, like most other things, is a series of peaks and plateaus, as if you were climbing a mountain. There will be a time when you feel like you are flattening out for a stretch, and not really progressing. But if you think about things a different way, like dropping the pick, then all of a sudden, you have a leap up the mountain, going to the next peak in your performance.

I had another jump to the next peak in my guitar playing this past winter, after playing a quiet set at a local coffeehouse. I had been in the process of various things, including a move, and hadn’t been playing out as much as I had been in the recent past. This was the first three hour show I had played in a few months, and I was starting to show signs of fatigue by the third set. An older regular stopped me after the set and offered his advice. “Let me show you something. I can always tell when someone does this or doesn’t by the way they play the guitar.”

He proceeded to show me a finger exercise technique that I had learned back when I was first starting out on guitar taking lessons in junior high school. Back then I kinda brushed off the boring practice techniques in favor of first learning basic chord and rhythm techniques, and then stopping lessons to create my own songs. But he showed me these basic patterns, and I remembered them, although I hadn’t really practiced them much prior. After the show, I tried them out the next day. It was difficult at first, although I kept at it for the next few days. After a while, I had become much more dexterous on the fretting/chordal hand, and it was my “peak moment” where I had taken it to the next level.

Single Servings, vol 1

In this day and age, if you have an iPod, you are probably prone to having a trigger finger. If you’re listening to an iPod (or other similar Mp3 player device) in the car, or at your home, you’d probably skip through the ballad, song with a long intro. For the song with the strange lyrical tone, that skip button will get pressed, usually within the first fifteen seconds. Now, it’s understandable that if you aren’t in the mood for something, you don’t have to listen to it. What if we were able to skip through Bohemian Rhapsody, because the first minute is kinda mellow? Would we have to wait until Wayne Campbell played it on his cassette deck in the Myrthmobile in order to take a listen years later to Brian May’s bitchin’ riffage?*
It’s come to the point, where artists are now starting to take the trigger finger phenomenon into account when creating new music. John Mayer recently described how he included different outros to every song on his latest album to combat the trigger finger phenomenon. Never in music’s history has the bridge of a song been so important (or unimportant, if you’re trigger finger minded). The new idea is, get in, or get skipped. If you take a listen to most pop songs nowadays, they have become just the hook. What’s the point of building up to a triumphant chorus, if you’re already 5 tracks down the shuffle in the time that it takes to get to the prechorus? This means dire consequences for the recording artist. No longer will we hear songs with verse/chorus/verse structure. Or we will, but they will be subjected to the trigger finger, where the precious verse/chorus/verse song may never make it out of the intro.

Perhaps the death of the album began with the compact disc. With all other medium prior to the disc, in order to hear the songs, you needed to either place a needle at a specific location, or hold down a fast forward until you reached your exact location. Convenience was forsaken in order to take the time to listen to what came first. CD’s changed all of that. Now, if you made a mix CD for someone, they could get the gist of what you were trying to say through your combinations of songs by pressing the next track button fifteen or so times, in the span of about two or three minutes. How sweet, you put a dozen songs that have cute titles! If I don’t take the time to listen, I don’t even realize that “Every Breath You Take” is a song about a stalker! To quote Wayne once more, “Stacey, we broke up Six Months ago! Get a clue!”

But ever since the compact disc came out**, the Staceys of the world have become content listening to their mix CDs one track title at a time. However, I’ll take a Cassandra any time of the day, who will love me for the mix tape that she will need to dedicate an hour and a half to, just in order to figure out what I’m trying to say, through my combination of song choices, and deeper lyrical meaning.

Still, now with the popularization of the iPod, we have begun a new phase in phasing out music. Now that the album is long gone, it’s time to conquer a new foe. Song, get ready to die! And don’t look so smug Hook, since you’re next…

**********

* Yes, I am fully aware that Bohemian Rhapsody did not have much worldwide Karaoke recognition until the popularization of this fine feature film. Forgive me of my slightly ironic statements of semi-obscure nineties pop culture references.

** Or perhaps since the dawn of time.

Welcome to “The Back Catalog” or “blog” for short

It’s about time I got serious about this whole blogging thing. I hear it’s the hippest thing since the printing press for people that are all about words. I’ve had a series of short lived blogs spread out among various internet sites, some which have been a bit better kept than others, although the intention of this blog is to compile, sort out, and keep a record of all of my music related bloggings, both previous, present and future. So, a little back story, to catch you all up to speed before we set upon this journey that is to become the “new blog”.

I’m a musician. I play music, sometimes frequently, sometimes infrequently. I make records every couple of years. I play shows at least every couple of months. I have bands every once in a while. I work with a bunch of musicians, at an office job for musicians. I am that rare breed of musician that has the day job that deals with music, but isn’t selling guitar strings for a commission. I do tech support for people who are looking to record. I made mix tapes in high school. I was a college DJ. I own a record player, and a couple of crates of vinyl, including records made during this millennium. I started a musician’s rights organization with some band mates so we could get some rehearsal space to play in, and it ended up nearly taking over my last two years of school. We ended up creating an on campus music scene at one of the largest State Universities in the country.

So that’s enough about me. For the most part, I’m going to keep quiet when it comes to talking about myself, and I’m going to try to keep the focus on music. Whether it be the process of promotion, production, or other types of inner workings of the music industry, or whether it be criticism, analysis, or enjoyment of music, The Back Catalog will be the place to find musings on music. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some cats to yell at.