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deekydeluxe · 7 years

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Revisions

I’m pretty sure that if someone from outside of my process looked in on me doing my thing, they’d think I was a narcissistic piece of shit. And while they might not necessarily be incorrect in their assumption, they’d be thinking it for the wrong reasons. This is what it looks like.

Basically, when I get in the car to drive to work on Monday morning, I play the songs I’ve been working on all weekend. I play them multiple times going back and forth between hating it and loving it. Once I get to a certain level of objectivity (which is pretty much impossible since it’s your own work) I try to listen specifically for the cracks. As a creative, I want to take the Stephen King approach to things. In his book On Writing, King talks about how he thinks of himself more as an archeologist than a writer. His job is not to imagine some piece of fiction for others to ingest. His job is to find the stories that exist and excavate those stories from his imagination as best as possible without leaving too many broken pieces in the dirt. Essentially, as I song write or compose a piece, I focus less on making the work perfect and more on letting the piece be what it is going to be. It’s really rare for me to change a work drastically from phase to phase. It DOES happen. Coltrane Tenor is actually a really good example of this. That song has changed so many times from a slow dragging piece in 3/4 to a 4/4 piece that’s totally straight (not swung) to a faster up beat song with a guitar solo in place of a random disjointed bridge section. And the only reason I even let that song change as much as I did was because I knew it was an important piece but it wasn’t quite right. Some works come out perfect the first time through. The Runaways or Reinacorn are pretty good examples of nearly perfect quick songs that were more or less right the first time through. But going through the process of editing is something I’m quite unfamiliar with. Since I’ve started to take Mostly Empty Spaces more seriously, I’ve had to evaluate the process of writing and editing and which of those areas I lack in. I feel very comfortable just sitting and listening to my inner voice. Reflecting on a piece and being critical of it is much harder. It’s harder in part because I’m typically so effected by criticism. In the past I’ve taken constructive criticism as reason enough to quit. It might be a good reason to consider leaving the entire process behind but since it continues to call to me, I haven’t spent enough time living with criticism as a means to making my creative works better. I like where I’m at though. I feel good enough about what I have to invite a more critical eye to the process.

At this point I can’t decide whether I want to release a small 6 song EP or a full 12 song EP. I’ll just have to see how many bones this first dinosaur has that need to be excavated.

#mostlyemptyspaces

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deekydeluxe · 7 years

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Coltrane Tenor

I was driving home tonight and I was singing Coltrane Tenor to myself. It’s one of my older songs. I started writing it when I was living at my mom’s house after college. It’s one of the songs that’s more or less from my own perspective. It’s about trying to find your own path and how I struggled to find my own way in the world while also feeling beholden to those around me. I’ve always felt some weird honor bound duty to make sure those around me are as happy or successful or what have you. Coltrane Tenor was a song about deciding to take a truthful look at your situation and choosing to do something solely for yourself. It mirrors my experience as a late adolescent and an early adult.

At the behest of sounding too full of my own self indulgent shit, I faced an interesting breaking point in my early twenties. I grew up knowing I was smart and being told by everyone around me that I was going to do great things. At this point, I think every Millennial was sold this fantasy. Honestly, it was a fantasy that up until that point seemed more than certain. But how could anyone have really predicted the internet and it’s impact on our mushy human tendencies? My point is that I thought I was going to have a great life. I was going to be very wealthy and I was going to be mega successful and I was going to have all the things the world was offering. And no, I wasn’t going to work for those things. They were just going to happen! It wasn’t until I was in my early 20′s going to a community college (barely) that I realized that I had to forge my own path and that if something was going to happen for me, I had to be the one to make it happen.

I want to be clear here. I had a hell of a head start. My parents were together and very loving and capable parents for the first 16 years of my life and even provided fairly well for me through the remaining years of my high school career. But, we were definitely on the lower side of the middle class and literally no one guided me through the college process. I was left to my own devices and those devices were friends, video games, a live-in girlfriend, and lots of beer. Eventually, I pulled my head out of my ass and decided to follow my very stupid dreams. Although again, even here I was able to succeed with a lot of hard word and equal parts help and luck.

The point is only that I was a young man who was floundering in life and, with some external assistance, worked hard to dig myself out. And this song has transformed over the years from a song about being unable to help someone else without first helping one’s self to a song about a character who thought the key to life was hard work but is now stuck in a promethean cycle of torture; caught in a prison of his own making.

The name of the song is also weird. It was a song that didn’t have a title for a long time. It changed everyone other month, with nothing really standing out. Then, one afternoon when I was working in everyone’s favorite Santa Monica Mac store, I was helping a customer who said he had played with John Coltrane. Frankly, it’s quite disappointing that I didn’t write this guy’s story down. Mostly because I don’t remember it any more. I just remember feeling really connected to him; like his story was my story and when I went home that night, the song changed a little and so I just started calling the song Coltrane Tenor. I wish I remembered more about that encounter.

I don’t know that the song will be called Coltrane Tenor on the finished product. But every time I try to give the song a different name, it doesn’t stick. I might be thinking about it too much. I should probably worry less about it. Let it be what ever it’s going to be.

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deekydeluxe · 7 years

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Mostly Empty Spaces

I started this blog a while ago. Well, I suppose that’s not precisely true. I guess I’m starting it now, but I created it a number of months ago and never used it. I’d like to start by cataloguing, what I hope will be, the process of an album I’m going to put out in the coming months. I think there are a few things to note about this whole album thing and I’d like to start with my general perspective on the whole thing.

1. You’re 32...why would you think that coming out with an album would be a good idea?

Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea. Honestly, I feel like it’s a really terrible idea. I have no god damn idea what I’m doing and the fact that I’m in my early 30′s and I’m considering putting out an album to zero fans really sort of goes against the part of me that’s trying to be a responsible adult. I’m definitely an adult. I have been for many years by now. I have an apartment, many bills, at least one mouth I’m responsible to feed (a dumb dog) and one fiancé who’s happiness I’m tasked to maintain. The problem is that I can’t really escape it. I think deep down I’ve always been a bit of a songwriter. From my days in the Vegas garage bands to my time as a disciple in Mother Mary and the Disciples, I’ve always loved telling stories through music. Hell, I like the idea of telling stories in general. It’s why I wrote 100 pages of a manuscript way back when. And it’s only been within the past 4 or 5 months that I’ve realized I can tell different kinds of stories through music. The idea of writing songs about me has seemed so masturbatory. Obviously, writing songs about me and my thoughts is great as an exercise but like, who cares? I barely care, so why would I devote any time to it? It wasn’t until I started to write songs from the perspective of other characters that I started to realize my niche. I’ve always been fascinated by people and what drives them and that’s why this album has been calling me. This album is going to be about a number of different people in my life and songs that they would sing from their perspective, viewed through my lens.

2. Um, okay, you’re writing an album. How?

Honestly, I’ve been writing this album slowly over the last 5-6 years. It’s only been very recently that I’ve coalesced the material enough to be able to make any sense of it. They were lost and lonely pieces of debris floating out among the stars and only recently have they gravitated towards one another, gaining enough mass to be visible from a neighboring celestial body. And there isn’t a set method but as close as you could get it looks something like the following.

Play a series of chord changes that sound right and hum a melody over them.

Sing anything. Literally sing anything over the melody you made up and let the song find you. If you try to write a song about something, it’s gonna suck ass. If you just let your innards do some of the talking without asking too many questions, usually something appears.

Put it down and go do other stuff. Make a sandwich. Go to work. Whatever.

Later think about what those words might mean. If it sounds like it could mean something, flush it out a little and see what there is to discover.

Hopefully by now you have an idea of what this song is so you can finish the first verse. After that add another verse. Add enough sections to get the whole story out.

Make it sound like a song. Arrange that shit and see what comes out. Don’t forget to consider the style of the song. Does it match the character in the song? It’s not required, but it doesn’t hurt.

Go through the official phases.

Sketch

Rough Draft

1st Draft

Final Draft

Listen to each phase about fifty times in your car while you drive through the endless onslaught of LA traffic.

3. Now what?

Well, I’m not sure. I’ve been discussing the idea of an album with a few close friends. I know I need to get proper recordings of each. I’m toying with doing this whole thing in the box by myself. The only problem is that 1 or 2 more albums down the road and I’d probably hate how it all sounded. There’s just a part of me that thinks that’s kind of okay. Like, it can sound like dog shit compared to newer stuff because dog shit is indicative of where I am right now and ain’t no shame in the game.

I like the album title “Mostly Empty Spaces”. The characters seem very full and very real to me but they’re all very isolated from one another. They exist in their own universes and the extent of their interactions with others ranges from colliding galaxies to fleeting observations from far off distances. Life feels a little like it’s a lot of emptiness with the occasional foray into substance. Everything from the orbits of an electron to the shit we post on our Instagram feeds. It’s all gotta go somewhere I guess.

#mostlyemptyspaces

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