December 8, 2010
Almost Done
The new album is almost done. Honest. I've had friends and fans asking after it for months now. We have an appointment in the mastering studio on December 21, and after that, we'll send the album to be replicated. In early February (or maybe earlier), 1000 cds will show up on my doorstep. And that will be that.
Can't wait to FINALLY share this project with all of you!
October 1, 2010
Flaws
I’m sitting here in the studio this afternoon, working on EQing one of the songs on my album, and it just dawned on me that one of the markings of a good musician is not only understanding one’s flaws and limits, but being okay with them.
When you record your voice into a microphone and then play it back, every wonderful overtone comes through, and so does every single flaw. Every pitch problem, every challenge with articulation, every phrasing mistake, comes through clear as day.
And not only do I hear the flaws in my voice, so do the two other people working on this mixing process.
We spend a lot of time making excuses for our limitations. In our culture, we’re obsessed with perfection. This is no surprise to any of us.
I just read an article about the Japanese concept of wabi sabi. Translated, it means a view of the aesthetic where beauty is “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete.” In short, it’s finding beauty in things that are flawed.
Things like my voice and my guitar.
Things like ME.
Let’s have a party to celebrate our flaws. Let’s dance and sing and chant, “Imperfection is glory. Imperfection is right. Imperfection is beautiful.”
When this CD is finished and you unwrap your copy and put it in your CD player (which I dearly hope you do), I hope you hear some lovely music, well-written and well-performed. But I also hope you hear the flaws and adopt wabi sabi so that together we can celebrate just how perfectly imperfect this music is.
September 30, 2010
Leaving
I’m leaving this side of the country today, flying to the East Coast where I’ll spend the next six days mixing my new CD. It’s an exciting adventure for me, and it’s also the first time I’ve traveled anywhere without children for the past five years. I’m sitting at the airport right now, guitar propped up on the seat beside me, drinking a cup of coffee and writing a blog post. Amazing. Totally amazing.
I left the house in the dark hours of the morning. My husband and two children were sound asleep in their beds. Before heading out the door, I walked into each bedroom and kissed the sweet cheek of the person sleeping. First my son, my two-year old, whose smell still evokes a kind of maternal instinct deep in my heart; then my five-year old daughter, whose hair smells like cherry from the shampoo she uses, which I love. And finally my husband, who stirred enough to tell me he loved me, then rolled back to sleep
Three sleeping people under one roof. The three people I love most in the world.
Leaving is a funny thing. There’s a small sense of relief at being just me, at being responsible for only myself for the next six days. But it’s complicated by feelings of sadness, longing and guilt. The sadness is at not sharing life with these dear ones for a block of days. So much happens in just one day when you have children, and to miss something important feels sad.
The longing stems from that innate sense I have to belong to something bigger than me, something important. At my house, as a mama, I belong to my family, and often I’m the center of the wagon wheel around which they revolve. I’m their stability. I’m their axis. And it’s an important job I play, one that I long for when I’m away.
And yes, I also feel a sense of guilt at abandoning my primary job in life, that of mama. I’m choosing ME over MY FAMILY for a few days, and that’s a complicated choice to make.
Being a mama in this modern age means making these kinds of choices every day. I choose to work because I feel alive when I’m making contributions to the world, when I’m teaching and writing and working. I choose to just work half time because I also love spending time with my children and creating a home for my family that is warm, safe, and loving. I don’t feel like I could do either of those jobs well if I couldn’t have both of them.
This musician thing, though, is another beast. It’s addictive, it’s enthralling, and it evokes my passions. Writing music, recording it, mixing it, putting an album together—this is the stuff that feeds my soul. And a mama with a rich soul is a good mama indeed.
So I pack my bags, I kiss my children and husband, and I escape into the dark night, heading for the airport. When the sun finally comes up (although hidden behind the clouds this morning), I’m sitting in the airport, guitar by my side, with plenty of time on my hands to write, think, read, and just be.
And in a few hours, after circling Manhattan, I’ll land at the airport and begin another musical adventure. But my family won’t ever be far from my mind.
July 3, 2010
Home Again
If recording was the first challenge, perhaps the second is returning home to ordinary life after five intense days of nothing but music (and very little sleep).
We just rolled in, unpacked the car, and put things away. The house is quiet. The kids are asleep. And my brain is on overload, so of course I’m wide awake. Processing. Thinking. Remembering.
Tonight in the car, during the many long hours it took to get home, we talked about shared narratives. About their importance, particularly for people in faith communities, and about how they affect and change us. It got me thinking about the past several days of my own life.
I now share a story with five other people that centers around this music making we’ve been doing. We have some hilarious (and slightly off-color) jokes from the past few days. We laughed a ton. I cried some too (but only me, since I was the only girl there). And we dug deep into this time.
This is a thing I will carry with me forever. Truly.
This crazy, wonderful, slightly nutty project will take shape into an album that people will listen to, will sing along with, will come to know. But what most people will never truly know is the way it felt to make it, the way I came alive in ways I didn’t expect while putting all this together, and the way this short season has knit itself into my heart and into the narrative of my life.
This is my story. And I’ll treasure it always.
Goodbye album making. It’s been a pleasure.
July 2, 2010
The Final Stretch (at least for now)
It’s Friday morning. That means we’ve come to the end of our little beach adventure, almost. We have four songs left that need vocal and guitar tracks, so we should make it if nothing goes wrong. And I’m dragging. Totally dragging.
One sort of strange thing that I’ve felt this week is a significant disconnect with the thematic material of my music. So many of the details we’re shuffling right now have to do with the music itself: how to stop and start each song, when the harmony parts should come in, how to sing in tune, what feel or vibe to give a particular song. I realized that while I love to write songs because I love music, I am also significantly connected to the actual WORDS I write. I’ll even confess that when I write a song, I spend more time choosing each line of lyric than I do crafting the melody.
But here, unless I’m actually laying down the vocal tracks for each song, the lyrics have taken a backseat.
Tomorrow night we do a “post-recording” show in Seattle. I’m looking forward to the chance for my songs to settle back into themselves again–an important combination of words and music TOGETHER. When I talk about each of my songs, and as people listen, they’ll hear all the fantastic rhythms, melodies and textures that we’ve been working on all week long, but they’ll also hear what each song means, what I’m trying to say.
For now, I’m heading back upstairs to lay down the final tracks.
Thanks, dear readers, for joining me in this adventure. Thanks for hearing my heart and bearing witness to this intense, crazy season. I look forward to sharing the new album with you.
July 1, 2010
What It Takes
A few days ago I posted a comment to my Facebook account about feeling a little tired and overwhelmed here in the studio. By and large, most of the comments were very sweet and encouraging, which was exactly what I was hoping to get. But a few Facebook comments, plus a couple emails sent directly to me, were from people with very good intentions who basically told me to “stop worrying and just have fun.”
Stop worrying? Have fun?
I mean, come on people, don’t get me wrong. I’m in this beautiful beach house with a bunch of musicians living into this time with every ounce of my being. While I know those friends were well-meaning, it dawned on me that they have absolutely no idea what this process is about.
Maybe you don’t either, so I thought I’d share.
Some time before now, I sat down and wrote sixteen songs of varying styles, sentiments, and feels. Sixteen songs. That’s quite a lot. A couple are from years ago, but most of them were created within the past year. I wrote lyrics, made chord charts, and began to think about how to arrange them. I decided which four songs to cut so we’d have a nice album length of 12 songs. Then I sat down and made “scratch tracks” of each of the 12 songs so I could send them to the musicians and to my brother, who is the album producer.
We spent hours and hours on the phone talking about how to arrange each song (my brother lives in New Jersey, so we couldn’t just sit down and talk in person). Then I gathered my musicians together and we came to this beach house and set up our studio (which took most of the day on Sunday to put together).
Monday morning we hit the ground running. All musicians working together on the songs–talking about the arrangements, working out who had what solo parts, and creating a general vibe and feel for each song. Once that happened, we got all the microphones set, then I went in a different room so we could record the drum tracks (with me playing my part into a microphone that was piped into the headphones of the bassist and drummer). We did this for each of the twelve songs.
Next came time for the bassist to lay his parts. Twelve different bass parts recorded as their own tracks.
Tuesday night at about 8pm, we were finally finished recording the bass and drums. Those two musicians headed home to Portland, and the four of us who have remained here were up until 1am working on guitar and vocal parts for the songs.
Wednesday we started recording again at 9am, laying guitar tracks and adding vocals. We did four songs yesterday, plus batted around a bunch of ideas for the other songs. I fell into bed, exhausted, after midnight.
It’s now 8:00 Thursday morning. If all goes as planned, we’ll finish six songs today and two songs on Friday, then pack up all the gear, load the cars, clean the beach house, and drive home to Seattle.
Dear readers, please don’t hear me complaining. There are wonderful, amazing moments in this process. I’m laying down thousands of dollars and a significant chunk of my life because I love writing music, and because I believe these songs are worth sharing with the world. I’m secretly hoping that this album will be good enough to shop around for a label, or land a spot on one of the smaller stages on the Lillith Fair tour. I am.
But this is an emotional time too, a demanding time, and even though my only job right now is to make music (in contrast to the many hats I wear in my normal life), it’s intense and hard and challenging and overwhelming. I’ve already made about five-hundred decisions since Sunday, and I probably have another three-hundred still ahead of me.
Stop worrying and just have fun? Probably not.
Live deeply into this season, holding dear these moments as sweet treasures? That is something I know I will do.
And in the mean time, I still covet your prayers, your encouragement, and your positive thoughts as I finish all that I’ve begun.
I’ll close with a verse from one of the songs going on the new album. The song is entitled “Free.”
There’s this secret girl living deep inside my soul
Planting words that blossom into songs
And I love to watch the way she coaxes them to life
Hidden from the gaze of the world
And I’d give anything to be free, free, free
I’d give anything to be free
June 29, 2010
The First Challenge
It didn’t take long for this wonderful, exciting recording time at the beach to turn real and hard.
I think it was the long hours we put in, the lack of sleep I’ve had the past few nights, plus very little food and about half a beer. Around 6pm tonight, I literally hit the wall. It was definitely my first slump during this weeklong adventure, and man, was it a deep slump.
I felt like the world was caving in. I’m an introvert, and I’ve been around people now for three solid days. Unfortunately, this is our only window to lay down all the bass and drum tracks. The bassist and drummer are HERE to record. I’m paying them. They’ve driven all the way out. So a meltdown wasn’t possible.
So I did what any good, resourceful girl would do—I leaned on the people here I’m closest to for support. After a consult with my brother (also the project’s Artistic Director) and my good friend Jeremy, I made a plan and moved forward. I climbed out of the deep hole in which I found myself. With only a few tears, about an hour of frustration, and some dizziness to boot, I was able to overcome.
I got a second wind and our first day of recording finished strong. Thank goodness.
Recording an album is an emotional thing. It takes almost every last ounce of my energy, and it’s crazy work. But it’s SO worth it. And when I hold that new CD, full of fun music played by all these fantastic musicians who are here with me, I’ll know it’s true.
June 28, 2010
And So It Begins.
We arrived at this beautiful Oregon beach house, set up our recording studio, took a walk on the beach, ate a delicious dinner of grilled shrimp and vegetables, and then settled in for a good night of rest.
Or at least we tried. I tried.
At 7am, my brain turned “ON” and I’ve been enjoying the quiet of the morning while the rest of my musicians sleep in. I just made a pot of coffee. I’m about to go for a run. And it’s going to be a good day, I can tell.
The recording process is an interesting one, and I’m grateful to have done it three times already. It gives me an idea of what to be prepared for, what to expect, and how to anticipate the whole range of emotions I normally experience while recording.
You might think that recording an album would make me feel like a really great musician. Honestly, it’s just the opposite. When I sing into a microphone, every little flaw in my voice and in my musical abilities is amplified. I wish I were a stronger musician. I wish I could play guitar a little better. I wish, I wish, I wish.
I have here with me five amazing musicians, all of them who understand music as least as well as me, and some even more. These are also people whose opinions I respect greatly. There will be some moments in the coming days when I’ll just have to do my best. And I will.
But it won’t be without considerable effort, that’s for sure.
Here we go.
Ready or not.