I had a release last Friday, and over the weekend had my first actual day off in a while. I mean the kind where there is absolutely nothing to do on a calendar. Not even errands. Waking up with zero agenda is a kind of freedom I don’t think I will ever take for granted again.
But I finished everything for this reissue of Ghost. I have mentioned it elsewhere, but I am back to doing everything in-house. I started my not-quite-a-record-label, Bear Machine, back in 2011. And like most things, there's a story there ...
Bear Machine initially came about because of my Family Tree concept. I was really excited by the idea of building this semi-fictional family tree into a series of records, and I was at a point when I wanted to do something big and ambitious. But everyone I worked with at the time was not into it. The feedback was basically: “This is too complicated, people won’t be able to follow it, and you are hard enough to get press for as it is.” To be fair, they were not wrong. But I’m pretty selfish when it comes to making music. I’m always addressing my own curiosity first and foremost. I have trouble working on records I’m not excited about, unless I’m hired for a very specific role, like as a mix engineer. So my response to this lack of interest was to do it myself. I asked my manager, Rachel Cragg, if she wanted to join me in self-releasing The Roots, and so we did.
Those six months were really rough. It may seem simple to put out an album, and it has certainly gotten a lot easier over the past 8 years, but so many things you never anticipate show up along the way. Rachel had to find ways to book tours, release records in languages we do not speak, find good printers and figure out general distribution. I was learning how to make music videos with no budget, create and format all the artwork for physical products, how to tour for material I never expected to play out, and so on. I remember falling asleep in my office chair, plenty of times. My bedroom in my apartment was the only place for records and merch, and my bed was surrounded, floor to ceiling, with boxes. By the end of that release, we agreed to never to it that way again. It was too much for so few hands. So we worked with Nettwerk on the remaining albums in the project so we had help with all the logistics.
But I kept Bear Machine even while working with other labels just in case. Something I've learned over the past 13 years of putting out albums is that I'm not a very good fit for a lot of the music industry. Everything from the way I like to work, on down to how I perceive value, is mostly at odds. Nettwerk was terribly friendly and full of sweet people, but even so, I found myself missing doing things more myself. I might just be stubborn that way. So once I had wrapped up everything for The Family Tree, I asked my boyfriend, Josh, and my manager if they wanted to team up and expand Bear Machine into something larger. They said yes, so that's what we've done.
It's not really a record label in the traditional sense. It's mostly just things we are all personally involved in making in some way, as opposed to signing artists and marketing them, and a lot of it is instrumental. I listen to tons of instrumental music myself, so I was excited by the prospect of making it, and to help record things I personally cannot play. I also find myself more and more interested in collaborating as I get older, and this all seemed like a good avenue to get my feet wet.
Some examples of what we've made so far …
We produced an entirely improvised album with pianist Michael Sheppard. The way we made it was, Jeremiah and I spent half a day micing up the piano, then Josh and I called out prompts, or images, to improvise about and Michael went to town. Every piece was done in one take. It was really something to watch. Here are some examples:
And then we've done more traditional recordings, like the Bach Cello Suites with Paul Dwyer:
A Mozart quartet with Diderot String Quartet:
A project called “Photostat” that Josh and I started, where we are taking classical music and making synth versions of them, like this 16th century lute piece called “Tocatta Arpegiatta”:
We have plenty more coming, but it's a start.
So Bear Machine is not just a home for my personal projects anymore, though I am involved in all of the albums. Some of them I am just a mix engineer and design the covers, others I am part of from top to bottom. It's been super fun to help make the kind of music I often have on around the house. I know it's not the most popular stuff in the world, but it's fulfilling, and unlike things with my voice involved, I can listen to it when we're done. Hahaha. And it has been giving me so many ideas for my lyric driven work that I would be involved for that alone.
So this will also be where my personal projects will live. This re-release of Ghost was a way to help figure out our work flow with a more traditional record and lay some ground work for my next full-length. But I couldn't help but look back at everything and take stock of all the changes that have happened since I made that album. It's been an odd couple of weeks.
I was not doing well when I made Ghost. I started making the album not long after my sister passed away. I was 23 at the time, and my change in outlook was so severe that I didn't know what to do with myself. I was wrestling with mortality in a way I never had before, in a way that would never go back. There were fangs in things I used to believe were harmless, and in hindsight, I was completely unequipped to handle my grief. So I turned to art, the way I always have, and started writing. Much of what I wrote found it's way onto Ghost, but at first that writing felt scattered, like it was all just spilling over with no real direction.
I developed a theme for the record after exploring a strange old house in Gainesville, Florida, while it was undergoing renovations. I got the offer to wander through it with a flashlight, and it was such a cool experience. The house was once occupied by a circus troupe, had secret doors that led to hidden stairwells, and in the attic I found a box with some old letters inside detailing some kind of love affair with a woman who used to live there. I still remember it all vividly.
After that trip, I came home with my theme, which can be summed up in a question: what do we leave behind when move on? I got really absorbed in the idea that everywhere we live, we change in some fundamental way – that these buildings we inhabit as anything more than a guest will be haunted by us in some fashion, be it letters in an attic or stories trapped in the walls.
I tracked the album over 9 months in a tool shed behind my family's house, and I just used whatever I had on hand. The instrumentation on that album was partially due to chance. I used banjo on some tracks because one was found in the garbage. Accordion made appearances because there was one in the music room of the high school I went to, and no one knew who it belonged to, so my brother brought it home. The piano came from one of those “get it out of myself and you can have it for free” ads in a local paper, and it sounded like a haunted house. That tool shed is gone now, and I think that's a good thing, but I made a lot of music in that rickety, leaky building. I developed hugely as a musician back there, and though I have very mixed feelings about that part of my life, I think of my time in that shed, tinkering away in the middle of the night, fondly.
But I'm still surprised by this album and the path that it has taken. When I released it in 2007, it didn't go over well. The reviews were not very positive, and by most metrics it was a dud. I didn't make any music videos for the album, and even the one for Welcome Home was done as a favor, built from the remnants of an interview by Justin Mitchell. I was already working on the second Electric President record by then, so I just sort of shrugged and moved on. But then, over 3 years after the fact, I was contacted by Nikon with an offer for a commercial. I was happy to earn any money I could at that point, and I was well beyond my fear of being a sell out, so I was perfectly happy for a paycheck and the exposure. But once it started airing, everything just sort of took off. Suddenly people wanted to book shows, particularly in Europe. I had no plans to tour my solo material, because I was just one guy and some of those songs had tracks counts above a hundred. So I hired two friends to back me up, did whatever arrangements I could for three people, and started playing shows. And people actually came out. Now, 13 years after I started recording some of those songs, people are still listening to them. Crazy. I guess you never really know.
Working on the anniversary recordings for the second vinyl caught me off-guard, though. Music and memory can have such a strong link, and revisiting certain material on the album made me really blue. I was remembering all kinds of things I'd rather not have. I could see the grief in all those songs even clearer than when I wrote them, and over the month I spent tracking and mixing everything, I was in a sort of fog, and had an abnormal amount of nightmares. I guess I just understand myself a lot better these days, for better or for worse. I'm glad to be finished.
But something cool about getting the rights to this album back was that I could finally master it. The original version was just my mixes, because I screwed up. I took my mixes up to NYC to be mastered, but I learned while sitting in on the session that mastering will not fix things that should have been addressed in the mixing stage. Hearing what I had spent so much time on come through those crazy high-end speakers was kind of embarrassing. Because if anything, the mastering was only making the poor mix choices even more obvious. So I had a decision to make: put out a master I don't like, or keep my mouth shut, remix the album as best I can, and put it out that way. Paying for two masters was out of the question. I chose the latter. And I still think I made the right choice. But hearing a new master bring out the details in the better mixes was really fun. I don't know how obvious those details are to people who don't obsess over sound in an unhealthy way like I do, but they're pretty striking to me.
And then as one last little tidbit among all this reminiscing, I thought I’d go ahead and upload this B-Side from those original Ghost recording sessions. This was one of the tracks that just fell through the cracks, because I was never entirely happy with it. But it was a fun one to stumble upon after a friend of mine asked about it for one of his skate videos, and I didn’t see it anywhere on youtube, so I am putting it up myself. So yeah, a little rarity for those who are interested.
Well, that’s enough typing for one day. I hope everyone is well.