Dear Music

This weekend, I picked up a few albums I’ve been meaning to dig into for some time.  The latest Sufjan Stevens, the latest Dream Theater and a few in between.  As I walked through Carroll Gardens yesterday in the pleasant temporal nightmare that is Daylight Savings Time, I listened mostly (embarrassingly) to Dream Theater.  You know, I say embarrassingly but A dramatic Turn of Events is fucking out of this world.  Anyway, last night as I was going to bed, Sufjan.  This morning on the way to work, Panda Bear.  Now that I’m at work I've got the Chick Corea record that won a Grammy oozing out of my desk speakers.  The soundtrack of my life is varied and incredible and most importantly, always playing.

Picture a basic American Colonial house.  Got the shape?  Now paint it brown and scale it down to the size of a Happy Meal container.  Handle for a roof, six buttons on the second floor and a little plastic window right in the middle... what you’re picturing is my Cassette Player from the 1980s.  The most effective tool in my defense against the enemies of childhood: boredom, monsters and having to listen to my siblings.  Basically, if you took this image:

and photo shopped my Tape Player over the Teddy Bear, you’d get my nightly sleeping experience.

Like most parents, my folks would ground me now and then.  But it wasn’t about candy or phone-time or TV.  No, if they really wanted to punish me, my parents would take away my tape player for the night.  I’m not sure if they knew it was my Aragorn to the Boogeyman’s Voice of Sauron but they definitely knew I loved the thing.  And it had magical powers; a soul, even!  One night, while listening to the instrumental part of the Ghost Busters soundtrack, the curtains in my room blew open just a little during the creepiest section of the score.  I very nearly shat myself.  I don’t know if my tape player thought I’d enjoy the experience or if it was actually a sadistic anti-hero; a deranged defender sociopath who loved and hated me.  Whoa.

The first tape I owned was Pearl Jam’s Versus.  My older sister gave it to me and the first time I played it, I was terrified of the rock-awesomeness that exploded out of the single speaker.  I didn’t get it.  I didn’t like it.  I couldn’t stop listening to it.  Every night, I’d play it again and eventually realized I was in love with the album.  It took me fifteen years to fully embrace the lesson that sometimes you end up loving things you can’t stand on the first go around.

Eventually, I moved on to a “My First Sony”.  I couldn’t tell you what I listened to at night but Scott and Todd on 95.5 woke me up every morning.  The alarm could be set to one of four different sounds (including a coked-out woodpecker) or the radio.  Although I’m not a huge fan of morning radio DJs, WPLJ played a couple songs that always kick-started my morning (Jon Secada’s “Just Another Day”, All-4-One’s, “I Swear”, or Genesis’, “I Can’t Dance”).

Next up, a Sony Boom box, tons of CDs and leaving Top 40 radio for classic rock and jazz: Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin.  Then Phish, Miles' Kind of Blue & Coltrane's Blue Train... it’s amazing that the laser in the CD tray didn’t burn a hole through the discs I spun day in and day out.

Fast forward through CD players, iPods, a shower radio (really awesome) and I now have an iMac full of music, a Technics turntable and two boxes of LPs, a bunch of MFSL recordings, three pairs of headphones (Klipsch, Grado’s, and a pair of in-ear monitors) and an itching desire to snag a sweet pair of cabinet speakers for the living room.

I want to thank someone.  My sister Cate for that Pearl Jam album.  My sister Jen who taught me not to “kill a record” by overplaying it.  My dad for the time we listened to “Gimme Shelter” in the garage even though we were already home.  My mom for encouraging me to sing along to Tina Turner in the car.  Kyle & Congdon for writing music, Drew & Greg for playing music, the wind-up, Skidmore.  So many people gave me so much music that really, I want to thank Music itself.  Victor Wooten says Music is a woman and she's all about communication.  If that’s the case, she’s most incredible woman who’s ever walked the earth.  I want to thank her for letting me play and work and create and listen.

Meanwhile, back to work for me.  But not before queuing up LCD Soundsystem and turning the dial on my desk speakers a little further to the right.

Shhhhhh! Quiet Please.

Although he doesn't know it and would never admit it, my father hears the truth.  He doesn't hear what he wants to, he hears precisely what is there.  Cold, exact, brilliant, powerful; he would be great in a recording studio.

On Saturday, I recorded drum tracks for six songs at KMA studios on 49th street and Broadway in Manhattan.  The equipment was somewhere in the Nasa-quality range, and the studio itself would have James Bond's approval for the combination of elegance and functionality.  A friend knew the owner which meant that since they had no one scheduled for the afternoon, we were allowed an eight hour session, typically priced at a modest $1,500, for free.

When you have seventeen microphones recording a small drumset, there are no unnoticed mistakes.  No smoothing things over.  No lying.  If you play the entire song ahead of the beat but then drop behind it for two measures, you'll hear it clear as crystal.  For the non-music inclined we're talking about milliseconds of temporal shift.  Sounds intimidating but this is a musician's dream: to spend the entire day hearing your mistakes and learning from them and correcting them.  To realize that your bordem during a song will drastically shift your energy and when you don't make conscious decisions about which notes to play, it's as obvious as an orator who's mixed up their index cards!  I was blown away at how clear and objective it all was.

But my playing was not the only 'naked' thing in the room.  The kid at the helm was a nice guy and a hard worker, but as I said already, milliseconds stick out.  Maybe it was the way he set up one of the microphones.  Or his voice over the intercom.  Maybe it was his answer to the question, "Where are you from? Where'd you go to College?"  For whatever reason, in the room without any distractions, I knew exactly who he was, how old he was, how competant he was at his job.  What if your brain operated like a recording studio?  Would you be able to read people without bias and give them honest answers in return?

And how about all those buttons!  10,000 settings and thirty microphones can't disguise a poorly written song.  I was amazed at how much time we spent moving a small microphone around the bass drum.  Was the same amount of time spent working out the chorus?  Some of the most amazing songs in history were recorded with four microphones and almost no effects.  The effects should be used to sell the song.  Make sure your product matches your salesmanship.

Being in the studio felt right.  I've already said it was quiet.  It forced me to look at my playing and the songs we worked on through an untainted lense.  It made me think of my father and how he knows when someone is bullshitting (and let's them know).  Most importantly, it made me listen.