So it’s been a full year since I last wrote here. That’s pretty difficult to wrap my head around.
My relationship with time is only getting stranger, but I suspect that’s normal. I hear people older than me say the same often. But this also highlights that I have an expectation about how time should feel. I’m not sure when, or how, I developed that standard. My running theory is that it all revolves around when we first learn how life generally works (from, say, ages 5 through 20) and we are forever comparing ourselves to that particular window of time – to when all those neurons were initially connected. But that’s just a guess. I have no real idea what I’m talking about here. I make things up for a living, and with that comes the ability to whip up theories with little effort. It makes me suspicious of my own reasoning.
So where did the year go? The details of what happened aren’t very interesting, so I’ll just boil it down to a string of words: doctors, dental surgeries, IRS, accountants, termites, strangers drilling into pipes/flooded recording studio, injuries, computers dying, construction, diet, address mixups, equipment failure, insomnia, bureaucratic mazes. I could keep going, but that’s enough for a general montage. Maybe to some music that’s upbeat and annoying, played on a tack piano.
Individually, none of these things (well, other than two) were a huge deal. Collectively? A mess. But I’m not too surprised. I suspected that the world wasn’t going to slow down, assess what has happened, and gracefully find a new normal. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the pandemic, it’s that I understand people even less than I thought I did. I also realize that some of my last year is just a side-effect of getting older.
But I think there has been a deeper problem that coincides with all of this, and it’s one I have been thinking about a lot lately.
I’ve recently found myself looking for a phrase to encapsulate how modern life feels. I notice I do this when I’m dealing with a lot of things that are out of my control. I think it’s just to build some container for repetitive thoughts, so I can file them away quickly without needing to turn them over so incessantly (I got that one from a therapist, which makes it easier to buy than my own crackpot theories). After some thinking, this is what I landed on:
We are in the age of distraction.
That one resonated because, when I stop and take stock of everything, it really isn’t all bad. There are lots of modern conveniences that I couldn’t have even imagined even ten years ago, and some of them I really appreciate. But it all feels really out of balance. It’s pretty damn difficult to stay on one train of thought for very long, and I’ve gotten accustomed to feeling scattered. Wondering where my day went happens more often than it doesn’t. Information comes in at all times of day, and night, and from anywhere, and in such similar packages that it is difficult to discern what’s important and what isn’t.
In a world increasingly designed around the commodity of attention, even entities that used to be purely transactional are constantly vomiting ad-speak and trying to increase “engagement” (which is just ad-speak for attention). I recently had a payroll company email me to say “Isn’t payroll awesome?!” alongside some quirky illustrations of people partying. No, payroll company, it isn’t. It’s boring deskwork, and I’m only here because it’s mandatory. There is no need for a pep talk, or another email in my inbox with zero content.
Again, as an individual event, a pointless email is not a big deal. But when hundreds of entities are all doing the same thing, and all in the same space? There are phrases like “death by a thousand cuts” for a reason. They stack up. And collectively they form a texture. Life these days feels like reading the first chapter of a hundred different books and wondering why it’s not adding up to a coherent story. It’s still the effort of reading all one hundred, but I can’t remember hardly anything by the end, and I’m just as tired, if not more.
I understand I am speaking personally here. For some people, this might all be exciting and enriching; I’m sure there are people who thrive on the very thing I’m complaining about. But for what I do, and how I work, there is nothing worse. I love to really focus, and for long periods. It’s the only way I ever get something worthwhile, whether that’s art, music, writing, or even just understanding my life. And as I’ve turned all of this stuff over recently, it got me thinking about a shed.
For those of you who have followed me for a while, you may know that I made my first three Electric President records, and first two Radical Face records, in a tool shed (as well as Clone, Patients, and a couple other side projects). It was originally a one-car garage, but sometime in the early 80s the garage door was walled over. It was used as my family’s laundry room, and it was as unglamorous a space as you can imagine. The floorboards were half rotten, so I covered them in rugs to not be walking on dirt. It did little to keep the weather out. It was unbearably hot in the summer, and unusable in the cold months without a lot of blankets and two space heaters. It was lit by found lamps and naked lightbulbs. It leaked when it rained, and I had to set up all the recording equipment around those leaks. It was actually the most uncomfortable space I’ve ever worked in, if I’m honest. But there were some things about that space that I loved, and really miss.
Because the shed was next to a busy road, I could only work in the middle of the night. I started recording around 11pm, and I stopped around 6am. It wasn’t the easiest schedule to keep, and it created a lot of problems for me, but it had one huge advantage – I was left absolutely alone for 7 hours a night. No one was awake. There were no text messages or emails, no phone calls or anyone needing something urgent. I might wake up to a shitshow, sure, but by the time I settled in to work on music? Silence. If I was stuck on a problem, I’d walk through my neighborhood at 3am, or pace up and down the shore, listening to the roar of the ocean, no one around, just dim lights and my thoughts. And that is what I miss most. All that space to really concentrate on what I was doing.
I took it for granted at the time, because it was the only way I’d ever consistently recorded. But for the past ten years, I’ve been working when the world around me is also awake. I feel a lot better physically, with a normal sleeping pattern, but getting the uninterrupted time to really work is infinitely harder. When I add that up with how modern life is basically a blur of people and companies all vying for attention at all hours of the day – and hidden somewhere in that flurry are tidbits of info I actually need to know – it’s not a big surprise that I find myself missing that daily (nightly?) window of dedicated focus.
And it’s not just for my work. I also think my relationship with time is connected to this. This scattered and distracted way of being is not conducive to forming memories. It keeps me on the surface, and it makes everything feel disconnected. A 15-minute conversation, or intermittent texting, doesn’t make anywhere near the impression that a couple hours of talking to a good friend does, or sharing ideas in real-time with a collaborator. Little snippets of recording have never left me with work I’m proud of, or something I even remember making. And that lack of connection and memory eventually chips away at my feelings of purpose, or overall direction in life. It’s the mental equivalent of only eating junk food – might be fun in the moment, but I end up with no meals that I can explicitly recall (and I love my food memories … great food is often what I remember most from any traveling I’ve done). And I want actual memories. Not a buckshot of experiences that I can never pick up and reassemble again.
But I am not writing all of this to simply complain. I’ve accepted that the only way I will be able to work the way I’m most effective, and to better form those memories, is to design it. It isn’t going to magically happen on its own, and life is only moving more into distraction, not less. So I’ve been designing.
Some of the work I needed to do has already been taken care of. I have very few apps on my phone anymore. I call people these days, and leave text messages only to communicate basic information. When I go into the studio, my phone goes into a drawer, and I only check it on breaks. But to take things further, I have a new email system, so I can have others help monitoring things when I’m working. I’ve gotten both my work and daily life all streamlined and into very clear containers. And I’ve also gotten better about accepting help. I can be pretty stubborn about doing things myself, but I’ve had to let a lot of that go. My current project is simply too big for me to juggle all the things that I used to do. My partner and my manager have agreed to help me keep the day-to-day engines running, and be some extra eyes, so I can stay with my project a lot more.
For an update on Into The Woods (though, that title will have to change, for legal reasons), it’s not that I did not make any progress last year. I made a lot. Just not as much as I wanted to. I had to stop and put out fires more times than I can count. But that frustration aside, I am happy with how it’s all going. No. Understatement. This is my favorite thing I’ve ever made. This combination of writing, painting, animating, songwriting and scoring (and an awesome website to house everything) is the most engaged I’ve ever been, with anything I’ve made. It’s wildly difficult to keep it all moving at once, but I love the challenge of it. I think about it obsessively. And I have to – the connective tissue between all the elements is such a complicated lattice work that I don’t think I can accurately put it into words. But with so many mediums influencing the direction, I’m never stuck, and I’m never without ideas. It’s even led me to making new friends, and as such I’m already connecting to San Francisco in ways that never panned out in LA. I really like where I am right now, which is a nice thing to say.
I also decided to teach myself how to properly master audio last year. Because of the way this new project is being built, one of the most fundamental elements is flexibility. It’s primarily about how all the mediums combine (I’m chasing a very specific mood/pace … more like a living book than an animation or a film), so I need them all to be entirely pliable until they lock into a cohesive whole. I’ve learned so much over the course of teaching myself that I’ve come up with entirely different ways of mixing, and how I think of sound production altogether. It’s been a huge education for me, more than anything I’ve done with audio in the past ten years.
So 2022 was not a waste. A lot of my progress was eaten up by messiness and distractions, sure, but not all of it. Now I just need more time to focus, and for longer periods. It’s the only way I’m going to be able to pull this thing off. But I’ve got my new systems in place, and I feel like I’ve built my little sanctuary in this age of distraction. The rest is just the work, which I’m tackling enthusiastically.
As soon as I have enough to show, at the standard I’m aiming for, I’ll be sure to share. Until then, I hope this finds you well, whoever happens to be reading this.