music – Page 2 – The Conscious Pilgrim

output

There are few things as simultaneously satisfying and consuming as making a record, and for those that don’t know… I am perpetually making a record.

I am constantly writing and composing, flushing out ideas, scrapping ideas, ash-canning entire songs, re-writing, changing keys, piecing concepts together, and woodshedding songs. I honestly can’t tell you how long it takes or how many songs I go through… but if I had to guess, I’d say I spend between 12 and 18 months writing 1-2 songs per week in an effort to get 12-15 that I am really happy with.

The best of the best get brought to my band, where the finishing touches are put on them, they’re tightened up, and performed live a handful of times to unsuspecting audiences, and then when there’s enough of them… typically at least a dozen, but as many as 20… we set up microphones and record them.

The recording process; since we have historically done it ourselves, takes another 3-5 hours per song (1-2 evenings per week) before we send it off to get mixed by someone else… a couple months later, we have a final mix. Within a month of that, we have a master, and roughly 3-4 months after that, we have vinyl records and songs you can stream.

I won’t get into the financial part of if, because it doesn’t matter, and we do as much of the tactile work ourselves as we can stomach which saves on costs, but we’ve also done this many times in our various bands before this.

By the time the record we just started tracking is ready for public consumption, some of these songs will be a couple years old. One of these songs is as old as the band… as it just never got recorded because it was never ready. I’ve rewritten the lyrics 3 times over before finally deciding to keep it instrumental, and spent some time building voicings around the original melody.

All that to say this:

Whatever you’re doing is happening in the time it’s supposed to take. The main criteria is that you’re happy with the finished product… and if you’re not, then it’s not done.

Nobody will ever know; or be able to put a monetary value, on your process.

The best art is made because it’s in you to make it.

anywhere else

I got back from a trip to Vancouver recently.

It might be hard to imagine for a person who values music as highly as I do, but I’ve never just gone there for a concert before. Every trip to Vancouver I’ve ever taken since I was 16 years old; with the exception of 1 family Christmas, was to perform… and I’m certain that we were underpaid in almost every instance, but that’s beside the point.

I went to see Drive-by Truckers and Deertick. Both were astounding, but Deertick were particularly surprising. That show made me want to write songs and make rock & roll records and go on tour. I’ve seen a lot of shows… some of them are good and you’re glad you went. Some of them are life affirming and stay with you for a long time. I didn’t have a religious experience, or anything like that… but I did feel the fire in my belly – the fire that was already there – flare up a little bit.

Along with that, Lu and I ran the perimeter of Stanley Park, I bought too many records from too many cool record stores, and we put on around 27,000 steps a day seeing cool shit and eating amazing vegan food and staying in a nice hotel.

As an Albertan, I have to strongly encourage you to get out of Alberta periodically. This place is mega-hard on your soul, particularly if you’re a creative person.

I’m lucky in a lot of ways, not the least of which is that my friends and I can pile into a Ford Explorer, hitch up a trailer full of gear, and roll into towns & cities where people don’t know us personally and we can all commune in a bath of rock & roll guitars and pounding drums, and we can all come away from the experience with our cups filled up. I get to do this in places that don’t know about our day jobs… don’t know our families… they only know what we tell them, and we only know what they tell us. It’s a magical experience where we see people as people… with none of the pretense.

Traveling to Vancouver was a similar experience.
Nobody asked me what I do for a living.
Nobody knew anything about me… I was just a spiritual being having a human experience and I truly enjoyed it.

If you haven’t gotten far enough away from home to feel that for a while… then it’s time.

Today, I am loading up the aforementioned trailer with those friends and driving to Twin Butte, AB to play Soulfest. It’ll be a riot. If you’re going to be there, come say hey!

momentary

After a few years of writing this blog, sometimes it feels like I’m just repeating myself. What I’ve found; though, repetition is the stuff this life is built out of.

I talk about living in the moment because it matters, despite the fact that it feels like it distracts from the dream.
Meditation is important, despite the fact that I’ve gotten out of the habit of sitting in silence and meditating, and find pushing my body to it’s physical limits to be quite meditative. It draws me back to the moment, the painful, shitty moment I’m in after 2 hours of running on pavement with sweat in my eyes, no matter where my mind takes me.

But from one moment to another is a completely different experience. This is why it’s so important. If one moment I’m 13km deep into a hot sunday run and the next I’m giving you a giant sweaty hug, you’ll understand the momentary difference.

As much as I love a plan, and as much as I love to dream – and those things do have an important place – you’ll note that it’s a rare occurrence that someone ever has to remind you to daydream. What I do need are reminders to live in the here & now, which means if I’m unloading the dishwasher, I am present in doing so… and if I am walking on-stage with a guitar in front of hundreds of people, I am present in doing so.

As much as it’s about the individual living in the moment, there’s an element of outward respect as well. Those few hundred people watching me on-stage deserve for me to be present. I’ve seen enough musicians take the stage fucked up, or distracted, or just not ‘feeling it’ that night and it’s frustrating to that entire audience of people that are trying to live in that very exciting moment with that performer.

But it’s not just those big moments that matter. The little ones matter just as much, especially when people are depending on you on the smallest scale. Those everyday things we do like cooking, cleaning, driving… the tasks that make it so easy to zone out are so much more important than some musician giving a sub-par performance.

So… be present.
And don’t phone-it-in on stage.

charming mistakes

I recently had a conversation with a friend & colleague regarding recording processes. He’s a fellow guitar player and; as odd as it feels for both of us to refer to ourselves in this way, we are composers. Rock & roll composers.

His question for me was; essentially, how good is good enough?

As in, when it comes to recording an instrument, and the ‘take’ in question is ‘flawed’ in some way – as they often are when they are performed by humans – where is the line for an acceptable take vs an unacceptable take. The easy answer is ‘well, if I did what I was trying to do, then it’s worth keeping’ and we are both inline with that. For me, the question is: Is it charming?

There are happy accidents and not-so-happy accidents in this business, but we both feel that if we get too ‘nitpicky’ with every passing note, and cut out every mistake and replace them individually, that we risk engineering the soul out of the song.

That’s a difficult decision to make in the era of quantization and auto-tune, where no mistakes are left to chance in most popular music, but it’s easy for us as artists to forget that there’s a rich heritage of raw and archaic practices. Once upon a time in 1955, when a young Elvis Presley, Bill Black, and Scotty Moore gathered around 1 single omnidirectional microphone in a room and performed their best renditions of songs, that the one that had the ‘best feel’ was what was chosen by the producer, regardless of mistakes, botched endings, and off-key flubs.

There’s a spot in The Kingsmen’s hit “Louie Louie” where the drummer apparently hit his thumb with a drumstick in the middle of the song and yells “FUCK!” loud enough to be picked up on the tape. Decades of AM and FM airplay later, it’s still there, never having been edited out.

And these recordings became iconic.

Surely, that was then, and this is now – but there’s something to be remembered there – The soul must stay intact.

In the end, it’s important that we’re proud of what we’ve made. We intentionally record on high quality instruments, into state of the art microphones, into an industry standard recording program. We hire fantastic mixing engineers, and fantastic mastering engineers. We hire great artists and have our records pressed by reputable companies. All the elements for a great recording are there, and our efforts in the studio should match those elements.

Unanimously, they do match those elements, but as I am currently partaking in yet another recording project with The Confusionaires, these thoughts and propensities come back into the foreground.

These things can be much easier to say than do.
Wish me luck.

father to the thought

There’s an old saying; maybe it’s a proverb, “The wish is father to the thought” that crosses my mind sometimes. Particularly around this time of year when people talk about ‘Christmas wishes’ and ‘New Years Resolutions’ – neither of which mean much to me, personally. I’ve written a few times over the years about how September is the beginning of the year for me (and I think most people) but for anyone new to this corner of the internet, I’ll sum it up by saying “I’m a big fan of making changes when they need to be made… rather than waiting for some special day on the calendar” though I’ll concede that some dates are special.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life wishing things were better while doing precisely nothing about it and wondering why things weren’t getting better despite my lack of effort. Then at 37 years old I started putting one foot in front of the other, resulting in losing 166 lbs, starting this blog, and taking my art seriously, and just generally doing a good job – even when doing things I hated. These things all resulted in a better and more fruitful life – but they also resulted in an adjustment of my sights, which made for more wishing… which made for more thoughtful execution.

So, I still wish for things. I just have better follow-through now.

I’ve developed a plan for things that I’m reluctant to talk about at this time, but I’ve taken on a long-term goal-oriented project that I’m creating the time for in my life. I’ll admit that it’s an artistic goal, and that I’ve been laying the groundwork for it for some time now, by way of proliferating artworks and other songs “ahead of a schedule.” When I say “ahead of schedule” I mean that there’s a certain timeline-oriented expectation for creative works with my rock & roll band, and due to our own efficient execution of things, we’re in a position where we can take on this ‘side quest‘ (for lack of a better term).

It’s something we’ve been talking about as a band for some time, and we’re putting it into motion now. It’s exciting, but it probably won’t see the light of day for a couple years.

But… it started with a wish.
And it developed into a pie-in-the-sky dream that we’re determined to see come to fruition.

I genuinely hope you still have wishes, and that you can muster up the gumption to make them happen. Following your dreams, no matter how big or small they might be, is a full-time commitment and a ton of work – and for most of us, it tends to have to happen in the off-hours when you’re burnt out from working too much, when you haven’t slept well, and you’re poorly nourished. it’s a true exercise in fortitude but nobody is going to do it for you.

It’s hard, and anyone who tells you it’s not hard is trying to sell you something.

So, I hope you don’t wait for it to happen – coax it out and help it along, and it will repay you with the energy you need to keep going.

when it’s no longer yours

There’s a strange thing that happens when you create something, and I don’t know that people really talk about it very openly. Maybe they don’t talk about it at all, but there are so many examples I can point to, and many of them can be triggering for creative people. I hope my perspective; however, is not triggering.

When you make something – anything – there’s a certain point at which it stops being yours, and starts being part of the fabric. Which fabric depends on what you’ve created, I suppose. I’m fortunate to have been part of many creations in my life, and over time I’ve learned that although I’ve been integral in the process, these things no longer belong to me.

The biggest and most obvious thing I’ve had a hand in creating is my daughter. She remains my daughter, and I suppose that will never not be the case, but as far as being part of the creation process of another human being goes – she is very much her own person, and is learning to self-govern by the example of the people around her; because, yes, it takes a village.

In a similar yet different way, I create music with my close friends. I write songs. I take a blank page, fill it full of words that rhyme, ideally with some poignant message about love or life, and I set it to music… and at some point after smoothing out the rough edges at loud volumes in a rehearsal space, it becomes what it’s going to be. Eventually it’ll be performed live, and/or in-studio and recorded, and released.

I may have some rights to it as has been carved out by intellectual property lawyers over the past hundred years or so, but if the magic and the timing line up, the song will take on a life of its own. In a perfect world (in which we do not currently live), someone with a higher profile than me will hear it and want to record it and release a version of it, and it will go on to reach more and more people. It will have taken on ‘a life of its own‘ the same way my daughter has a life of her own, and I the time will come when I have no real governance over what it becomes.

At what point does this happen? Probably when the record comes out, (though some pro-lifer may examine the parallels I’ve made so far and argue that it’s when pen meets paper… please understand that this is not a conversation I intend to have). After all, a painting is not a work of art until it’s finished.

And… making an album available for consumption is called “releasing.”

Regardless, my daughter will always be ‘my daughter’, and my songs will always be ‘by me’ if only as a point of reference: Davey’s daughter. Confusionaires’ songs.

The tendency with these artistic works, to further the parallels, is to be precious about it. To protect and conserve this music so nobody steals it and copies it before you get notoriety for it… and but this is where the parallels stop.

It’s important to let go of these things, and let them become what they are to be. Most of them will go nowhere, and become nothing – possibly ever, possibly just for a long time – while some of them might get picked up by the wind and travel the world. To put a finer point on it, if Bruno Mars heard one of my songs and loved it, and wanted to make a hip, modern r&b version of it, I’d be elated and honoured. However, I’d have to get comfortable with the fact that the majority of the world would know it as a Bruno Mars song because his version of it would easily travel further than mine.

A solid example of this if Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt, which was originally written and recorded by Trent Reznor under his project name ‘Nine Inch Nails.’ Though NIN has a far reaching fan base, that song has become a Johnny Cash song to more people than it is a NIN song.

Trent Reznor also knows that he can write more songs.
I can write more songs, too. And I will.

So to be precious about a string of words and notes that were arguably dropped on me and picked up by my antena from some unseen energy that has deemed me a good conduit for these messages seems selfish to me… especially since if I were to not write the words down, and not conjure up the melody and structure, that the song would keep floating, and be picked up by someone else.

new failures

In my artistic life – a life that I wish wasn’t so separate from my daily life – I’m in a pretty crazy world.

By a very real and tangible metric, I’ve successfully put out roughly a dozen albums. Each one has successfully surpassed reach and influence of the previous. I’ve had music on indie charts. I’ve made music videos. My current band has successfully sold out copies of first vinyl release. I’ve successfully toured internationally as a performing and recording artist. I’ve sold out shows in this country and in Mexico. And I’ve successfully learned new lessons from each experience.

By another very real and tangible metric, I’ve never sold enough albums or had enough steams to make myself eligible for a Juno or a Grammy… meaning that every album I’ve released has sold poorly, failing to meet the criteria for those awards. I’ve never had a hit song. The album we sold out of had very low production numbers, so was a low target. Technically, our international touring adventure earlier this year lost money.

Every musical success I’ve had could be called a failure in the same breath.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens with hit songs. If you have a song perform well – say, #15 on a billboard chart, and the next one does even better – let’s say #12 on the billboard chart, things are; by definition, going very well for you. However, if you have a song go to #1, and the next song doesn’t crack the top 10, you get labelled as a has-been pretty quickly.

In a similar way, a restaurant owner I’ve known once said that he wouldn’t want to be the #1 restaurant in town (according to a local publication) because getting bumped from the top spot – which WILL happen – makes for declining value. He was content with consistently being (and his restaurant was) #2 or #3 for years.

Local musicians often suffer from what’s been referred to as hometown prophet syndrome. This is a situation where you have a difficult time drawing a crowd to a performance in your home town because the perception is that people can see you anytime, so what you’re doing isn’t special. But, to perform a few towns over can be a guaranteed barn-burner of a show, mainly due to the fact that a great performer can show up and blow minds and get a reaction like “where did these guys even come from?” which is a stark contrast to the hometown music scene who’s been watching that performer get on stage and just suck, while gradually grinding it out and honing their craft to near perfection without anyone really taking notice.

My band an I are embarking on a new recording adventure. We’re going back to the drawing board with a few things, and revising our approach to recording while working up a new batch of songs for what will no doubt be an album that we will release. In that way, it will be a success. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.

How that album will perform, we sincerely hope, will be better than any of our previous efforts. The challenge will be to go back through every misstep we’ve taken and improve upon every bad idea we’ve ever followed through on, and amplify the good ideas we’ve barely scratched the surface of.

Addressing the shortcomings of the past is hard, but it’s how growth is achieved and it’s as painful as it is necessary.

I can’t wait to learn how to improve this.

After 30 years, I am still improving.