Mixtape: Liner Notes

I have a new release coming out on Friday, November 15th. And like the last one, I’d like to give the material some context. I’m thinking of these as old-school liner notes, or concert programs. It’s one of my gripes with all the modern platforms – too many choices and not enough information. 

So the album is called “Mixtape”, because that's the lens I was looking through when compiling it. Unlike an album, where it’s often about larger themes and more cohesive sound pallets, mixtapes are all about variety (or at least they were for me and my group of friends). So I was more concerned with making sure none of the songs sounded too similar. 

I have to say, coming at this from the opposite direction made this project a ton of fun! After so many years of worrying about cohesiveness, it was really interesting thinking of ways to destroy it. Beyond that, I have always worked within lots of genres. I just stopped releasing my less acoustic work, because I didn’t know where to put it. But I don’t think any of that matters so much anymore. One positive thing about all these modern platforms is that, from what I’ve seen, they have expanded a lot of people’s musical tastes. The need for such firm boundaries/genres seems to have passed. I don’t hear a lot of “I only listen to [insert genre]” anymore. So I’m using this mixtape series as a way to collapse all my random side projects, and just release my work under one name now. I will still make traditional albums, too, but this can be a container for all the misfits. 

So here’s a little bit about each song on the album.

Lovesong

This track spawned from testing out a synthesizer. I didn’t set out to make a song with it – I just wanted to document some of the sounds to listen back to later – but it was developing a fun sense of movement as I layered a bunch of different arpeggiators on top of each other. So I built some drum loops, made a rough song structure, and then I forgot about it for about three years. 

I found the recording again earlier this year. I liked the way it sounded, so I added some guitars and lyrics to it. I was feeling sentimental that day, so I thought I would try my hand at a love song. I never write those, at least not directly, but on that particular afternoon it felt right. I had also just finished reading the “Three Body Problem” series by Liu Cixin the week before, which, if you’ve ever read them, really makes you think about life with this enormous sense of scale. It definitely affected the lyrics I came up with. 

So this track was just a chaotic bunch of happenstance and trusting your instincts, which feels in line with the theme of love. At least to me.

Safe and Sound

This song, if you know my earlier projects, was on an album called “The Violent Blue.” But it originally started as a Radical Face song. We just needed something to finish out that album, and it wasn’t fitting in with The Roots, which I was also working on at the time. So I got together with Alex (the other member of Electric President), we recorded it quickly, and the record was done soon after. But if I’m being perfectly honest, I was never very happy with that recording. Something never felt right about the mix, and it’s not the best key for my voice. I used to say I like the song more than the recording, if that makes sense. But like any piece of art, you eventually just have to accept the flaws and move on. 

So how did this new version come about?

I bought a new mic earlier this year. My way of testing a microphone is to record an entire song with it, using it for every source, as it’s the fastest way to see how it behaves and whether I want to keep it. But I typically do this with a song I’ve already written or a cover, so there aren’t many artistic decisions to make and I can focus on the engineering. I just happened to choose “Safe and Sound” for my test, and I was really happy with how it sounded.

I understand that people might still prefer the original, and that’s totally fine. But for me, this one is far closer to how I heard the song in my head, once upon a time. 

See It Through

I have a giant soft spot for early new wave pop songs. The Cars, Gary Numan, Modern English, Echo and the Bunnymen, The B-52s … it’s a long list. It’s often my favorite driving music, and that era struck such a great balance between fun and moody. Melodrama with a beat, and they really trim the fat with the arrangements. While this isn’t a style I play with regularly (or that I’m very confident in) it happens from time to time. So I decided to put this one out. I have a few more floating around that I may eventually put out, too.

Lyrically, this one is pretty straightforward. It’s about sitting with someone through a bad patch of life, and accepting that it's okay to need that very same help sometimes, too. 

Endless Summoner

This was originally part of my (now defunct) side project “Human Mother.” But I made it as a personal snippet of nostalgia. 

I grew up in Jacksonville Beach, Florida –  a crusty little beach town just south of the Georgia line. I grew up around surfing, and while I mostly skated, I developed a real fondness for the ocean that I still carry with me.

But this particular song is a giant nod to my favorite surf film, Endless Summer. We had the VHS when I was a kid, and I watched it a lot. I just liked the feel of it, and still do. Seeing it years later, I realized how much the mood of that film stems from its soundtrack. So I wanted to write an homage to that movie and its score by The Sandals.

Additional note: the vocal samples in this came from a really funny Uber ride when I lived in LA. The driver didn’t speak a lot of English, and I don’t speak a lot of Spanish, but somehow the miscommunications just made us both laugh a lot. I asked him if I could record our ride, and just put the phone up on the dash. He really liked the word “beautiful.” I thought that was a nice word to pick.

Shipwrecks

I wrote this song on a blue day. I was missing someone I haven’t seen in a long time, and may never see again. For some reason, those kinds of feelings lead me to sad songs with major chords. Always has. I guess it’s because it’s a confusing set of emotions. The kind where warmth and loss are so entangled that they’ve made something new, where you smile and mourn at the same time. Happysad. Lostfound. 

I wrote and recorded the entire song in one day. Mixed it the next. Haven’t touched it since. Not sure I’ll play this one out very much, whenever I do some shows again. But we’ll see. Sometimes it scratches a strange sort of itch.

Kids Are Mean

Another one from my “Human Mother” project, this song was inspired by 90s hip-hop producers. Albums like “Entroducing” from DJ Shadow were a huge influence on me, especially when it comes to percussion. I’ve always loved the chopped drums from that era, and the sound quality they had. Heavy and crinkly and mixed really loud. 

All the speaking in this track came from interviews found on freesound.org, but they’re heavily edited. I cut all the words out and moved them around to make new sentences. There’s something really funny about that to me, stitching together a bunch of nonsense. This track also continues my ongoing obsession with wind chimes.

I’m A Good Listener

I wrote this song after being invited out to a number of social events in Los Angeles. I kept noticing that everyone was saying “amazing” a lot, but it didn’t seem like anyone was listening very much. The people were all nice enough on a surface level, but it really didn’t suit me. It still amazes me that standing around and doing very little can be so tiring when it’s the wrong fit. I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was melting.

So I wrote this song in response. I detuned my guitars until the strings were just flopping around and almost unplayable, and sang the words with food in my mouth, then pitch shifted everything afterwards. I’ve always liked creating things solely to make myself laugh. This is just one of those.

Gymnopodie No. 1

This is a cover of a very famous piano piece from Erik Satie. There are so many versions of this that I thought it would be fun to try something in the opposite direction. The original is incredibly mellow and contemplative, so I wanted something hectic and busy, with an almost drum and bass feel. 

I reached out to Griffin Kisner, who plays drums for me on tour, and on the “A Light In The Woods” series (there’s still about 22 more songs coming for that project). I asked if he could record a single drum take that repeats as little as possible. This was in the middle of the pandemic, so we were just working remotely and sharing via email. I was blown away with the performance he sent back to me. It’s the star of the track, for sure.

Teenage Feelings

This little shoegaze number came about because of a script. A friend of mine was working on a pilot for a show, and while I won’t share any of his ideas here (they’re very cool), it takes place in the early 90s indie rock scene and the main character is a singer in a band. My friend asked if I wanted to write something that she, and the band, might play. That period of music is why I’m a musician, so I was very down to give it a try.

I wrote and recorded the song over two days, writing the lyrics from the point of view of the main character. I had a blast doing it, but it was yet another song that would typically just sit on a hard drive. I’m glad I can use this mixtape concept as a home for all these little misfits now. 

Latin For Joy

This is a track that I made in an apartment in downtown Los Angeles. It started by sampling my partner tuning his strings. The apartment was noisy, so the only place quiet enough to record was the bathroom. Normally I’d turn the mics off while he was tuning, but since we had to do takes between the buses going by, I left them on the entire time. 

I liked the way all the string noises sounded while he was getting ready, so I cut them out and started performing them with a midi keyboard. That led to sampling some trash cans and random noises for drums, and the rest just kind of spiraled from there.

The title came from my misunderstanding of what a word meant, and trying to look up its etymology. I saw the phrase “Latin For Joy” in a search and liked the ring of it.

See You On The Other Side

This song was another synth experiment that turned into a track. I was trying to understand how a plug-in demo worked, and couldn’t get it to behave how I wanted it to. But I liked how warped it all was, and I just cut up the results into something more coherent. That led me to butchering my vocals through various vocoders, and then just stitching together a loose idea of a structure.

I’ve also always liked the idea of depressing dance music, so the final section is a snippet of that idea. I still don’t understand why that idea appeals to me – dancing because you’re feeling down – but it does. Maybe I’ll dig into that idea more explicitly in the future.

And that’s it for this release. 

Fun note: this will be my last post with the website looking like it does. I’m working with the team who built the “A Light in the Woods” website to make something new. Since this is where I’ll be spending the bulk of my time communicating, I’d like something more personal than a generic squarespace site. I’d also like to own it. My least favorite thing about the tech world is how much they toy with everything all the time. I’d like to change it myself, because I have a real reason. I’ve grown tired of adapting to whatever these companies are up to. They rarely, if ever, change things for the better. So it’s time I make my own. 

Until then, I hope this finds you well. Remember to go outside, and to spend time with people you really know and care about.

B-Sides and Rarities: Album Notes

I decided to write some notes about each song for today’s release, just to give them a bit more context. I think that’s something really missing in the digital age. I don’t miss the format of CDs so much — they scratched easily and skipped if you moved too much — but I do miss the booklets. One of my favorite moments of buying a new album was flipping through the inserts while I listened for the first time. All the lyrics, recording notes, stories and images gave the record a bit of relatability. So I’m trying to bring a little bit of that sensation back.

Tall Tale No. 5:

This song was partially recorded in a traditional studio, which is rare for me. I was asked to produce an album, back in 2006, and I was paid in studio-time. So I tracked the drums and guitars during that week, and I later added the vocals and other instruments when I got back home. I was already finished with “Ghost” at this point, but hadn’t started writing for “The Roots” yet. So this fell somewhere in between. Lyrically, this one is directly autobiographical, but some of the events are out of order.

Mind Ur Manners:

This song came about while writing for “The Family Tree” series (I wrote most of those songs in a two year window, between 2007 and 2009). The track started as something for piano, but once I started chopping up the drums it took a very different turn. The end result landed somewhere between the Electric President and Radical Face sound pallets of the time, so it sat on a hard drive until I did the “Patients” experiment.

Home:

This song was a B-Side from Ghost. I found it again after I had already released the Anniversary edition, which was unfortunate. So I uploaded it to YouTube instead, after the O’Shea Brothers used it in their “Happy Medium” skate video series. I kept getting emails and notes from people asking me to upload it to streaming services, which is a large part of what inspired this release.

Body Song:

This was originally part of an experimental side project called ‘Mother’s Basement”, where two other local musicians and I did assignment-based songwriting and documented it on a website. How it worked: we each wrote down three different ideas on scraps of paper then drew them out of a hat. This song came from the assignment – record a song without any traditional instruments, only using sounds you can make with your body. So it’s all vocals, claps, hitting stomachs, snapping, etc. Lyrically, the track is about a nightmare I once had (I used to keep a nightmare journal) where I was in a morgue and had to reach inside a stranger’s dead body, and something unknown licked my palm. 

Mathematics:

This was originally going to be an Electric President song, intended for “The Violent Blue”, but there was an issue with the recording. Some of the files were corrupted so I only had an early version of the recording. So I wound up rerecording everything myself for the “Patients” project, turning it back into a solo song. I remember attempting to make something that sounded, and felt, like a mental disorder – something manic and chaotic and twisted.

Strange Organism:

One of my many instrumental experiments. I do these all the time, but I often move on before developing them. But occasionally I’ll go through old harddrives and see what they sound like. Listening to this one many years later, something about the mood stood out to me so I decided to include it as a sort of intermission.

The Voice of Our Age:

This is the earliest song in the collection. The original demo dates back to 2002, and I wound up re-recording it in 2005. This is one of the first songs I wrote when I first circled back to making music in late 2001. I had just lost both of my novels in a harddrive crash, and the idea of writing fiction at the time made me feel ill. So to fill my time, I started writing songs again. It was yet another track that had slipped through the cracks until I decided to do the “Patients” project. 

The Coldest Hands:

This song was written during the “Sleep Well” period with Electric President, but I wound up finishing it on my own. As such, it was another “doesn’t quite fit either project right now” sort of song, so it sat idle for a few years. Lyrically, it’s about watching yourself become the thing you’ve always complained about, and the horror of how easy that can be. 

Elephant:

Originally written during “The Family Tree” songwriting period, I recorded this one in between “The Roots” and “The Branches.” Oftentimes, when I get a new microphone, I will record an entire song with only that mic to get a feel for it. I had just gotten my first fancy one (a used Neumann U87), and this recording was my first test. I must have moved on quickly, because I forgot I’d recorded this at all and only rediscovered it when backing up some harddrives during the pandemic.

The Emperor Has No Bones:

Another track that came from that “Mother’s Basement” project. The assignment for this one was to use the Beethoven 5th Piano Concerto (“Emperor”) as a launching point for a new piece. I riffed on the second movement, but was actually having trouble with a faulty cable at the time. I decided to lean into all the weird noises and see what might come of something harsh and ugly against such a calm melody.

If You Come Back to Haunt Me:

This was another track from around the ‘Ghost” period – just before, to be precise. A lot of that album is about grief, and being haunted by loved ones. This track is no different, only it has the added angle of acceptance, and how we can even get used to people’s absences, and the holes they leave, after enough time has passed. 

Welcome Home (Early Demo):

When I first released “Ghost”, it wasn’t particularly well-received. Welcome Home became some kind of runaway success over 3 years later, after being picked up by Nikon for an ad campaign in the EU. It was a surprise to everyone around me at the time (me especially), and I was asked to quickly put together an EP as a follow-up. So I made a couple instrumental versions of the song that could work for the closing of the EP, and I chose “Welcome Home (Reprise)” from that set. But I recently found this recording, which was based on the very first demo I made of the song. I remember thinking it was too slow at the time, but discovering it again while building this release, I liked it more than I thought I would. So here’s another version.

And that’s it. Not going to ramble on about anything extra today. But I will have another album coming later this year, so I’ll start sharing more info about that pretty soon. Until then, I hope everyone is well.

The Joy of Shrinking

I’ve got quite a few updates I’d like to cover, so I’ll just jump right in. 

Over the past three months, I’ve been in the process of consolidating. This is not a bad thing – it’s something I enjoy quite a bit. Purging all my half-finished ideas, or things I’ve outgrown, always feels nice to me. I love donating clothes I no longer wear or need; I always look forward to selling or gifting studio equipment I no longer use so it can continue being useful somewhere else. I’ve also decided to do this for myself as an artist, and how I release work.

Change Number One:

I’ve gone back to working totally solo. I’m no longer with any kind of management. I’ve been my own record label for a long time now, but it’s really just an umbrella to release my personal work under – not a real label, by any means. But I’ve found I am much happier just following my own instincts, and I’m lucky to have a partner who can help when I get swamped. And I think that’s enough. Everything is so automated these days that it’s really not a very complicated process to get releases out (at least logistically – whether anything is successful is as much a mystery as it’s always been).

Change Number Two:

I’ve redone my workspace from the ground up. I’ve been recording for almost 30 years now, and over that time I have built-up a sizable collection of equipment. But over half of it is not for me. I’ve always had extra mics in case I need to record different singers, for just one example. But I decided to let all of those things go and only keep what I personally use. The list is pretty small. I tend to record everything with the same three mics. I almost always use the same two preamp channels. I like my variety to be in the work itself, not so much in how it’s captured. The result? I am much happier in the studio. Everything feels fast and easy, and I really enjoy the lack of mental clutter (I also realize that this is a late-stage problem – it’s just been strange watching it go from years of not having enough resources to suddenly having too many). 

Change Number Three:

I am letting go of my tendency for side-projects. I’m simply releasing my work under the Radical Face banner now. There are a couple reasons for this. One, I don’t think there’s a need to divide projects based on production styles anymore. People used to be a lot touchier about genre when I first started my projects around the year 2000, so I set out with multiple to address the fact that I personally enjoy writing in, and listening to, different styles. My folkier songs were released under Radical Face and my more electronic and my more electronic/experimental ideas under Electric President (not to mention all my other side-projects). But I think at this point, those divisions are more confusing than helpful. Most people have no idea they exist at all. And they hold me back. I make lots of material that I never release, mostly because I’m not sure what name to put it under. But since I tend to be the sole song-writer on all of them, I think it makes more sense to release them under one name.

What this effectively means is that I’m going to ignore genre/style altogether and just release things when I’m happy with them. Some might be more acoustic, some electronic, some instrumental, or some combination of them all. 

To kickstart this, I’m releasing a B-Sides and Rarities album in a little over a week, on July 23rd. Here’s the cover:

(The artwork is an unused photo from the “Ghost” album, a trip where I got into some pretty big trouble. It’s a long story, but the local police thought I was a serial killer, because of the mask, and sent a helicopter out to find me … I was pulled over by police, who had their guns out, and I was made to lay on the side of the road, hands on my head, while they searched the car … pretty wild day.)

If you’ve followed me for a long time, you might remember a super-limited release I did in 2009 under the name “Patients.” I put that record out as a sort of social experiment. The way it worked was: I made 100 handmade CDs and you could only get one by sending me something in the mail other than money. I just wanted to see what people would do when you removed money from the process, and I documented everything on a now-defunct website. The songs on Patients were all B-Sides and experiments that I never found a home for. I’ve had people emailing me to release them on streaming services for a solid ten years now, so I finally decided to do it. But I also added a few never-before-heard songs to it, and I remastered everything.

I’ve also decided to not do my Human Mother tracks as a side-project, but rather combine them into a new album. I have vocal versions of tracks I only released instrumentally, as well as plenty that no one has ever heard. I’m nearly done with that release as well, and plan to put it out in the fall. I realize that might be a little fast, but I also don’t think that matters too much anymore either. 

Now, if you’re wondering, I have not forgotten about “A Light in the Woods.” I am still working hard on that series, but the reason it isn’t already out is that I really didn’t care for my last release. I won’t go into all the nitty-gritty details, but I will say this – spending 5 years on something, and the end result being, for the most part, a Youtube upload and a bunch of typical music-industry handwringing, was not very fulfilling. If I’m going to put all these thousands of hours of work into something, I’d like it to feel more substantial when it’s time to share the final result. So I’m combining books 2 and 3 into one larger release, the length of a film, and treating the back 3 parts as another film. I’d also like to do some combined performances/screenings at some indie theaters when these sections are done, before uploading everything to the internet. I have lots more ideas here, but I’ll save them for when the release is closer.

But I did want to share some of the artwork for Books 2 and 3 as a bit of a teaser for what’s to come. I’m proud of how much better I’ve gotten at painting. It’s nice to look back at part 1 and see how much further along the artwork already is. Here’s are some examples:

Beyond that, “Missing Film: Volume 2” is under way, for those who enjoy my instrumental work. I love writing score-style music in my spare time, and I’m starting to amass a lot of it again. I’ll find an appropriate release date for it, but the first half of next year is very likely. 

And these are just the ones I’ll mention here. I actually have a lot to get out, now that I’m consolidating things down to one profile. But I love how much simpler all of this feels. I don’t even like maintaining one social media profile, much less multiples. And I’d rather just get my work out to my largest audience, especially in this day and age, where everything feels so cluttered and overwhelming. It’s also nice to just be releasing work again, regardless of how it lands. I’ve been saying a phrase to myself a lot lately: more creativity, less strategy. In a time that’s pretty obsessed with marketing and reducing everything to “content”, I feel like it’s an appropriate form of rebellion. 

Until next time, I hope this finds everyone well.

Investment Strategies

It’s been an odd couple of months. 

At the start of the year I finally tested positive for Covid. I know exactly where I picked it up. I was on the train and a man was folded in half, visibly sweating, coughing his brains out. I turned to my partner and said, “If we get sick soon, this was the moment.” Later that week we tested positive. Our symptoms weren’t too bad – more uncomfortable than worrisome – but mine went on for a long time. I tested positive for a little over three weeks. Two months out from all of that and I’m still not back to normal. It seems I’ve got some long Covid symptoms. They aren’t debilitating, but I have noticeably less energy and it’s slowed me down. I’ve always had a lot of resilience when it comes to work. 10 hours in the studio is pretty normal to me, and I rarely take days off. I can now do about 6. I was painting two images on my art days before this, and now it’s typically one. And I have to rest more in between. 

It’s been an adjustment, but not an entirely negative one. In some ways, I’m appreciating the change. It never feels the best when it isn’t a choice, but I’ve always had trouble slowing down. I’m understanding the root of this as I get older, and I’ve been slowly adopting more free time into my schedule over the past couple years. I guess long Covid is just fastforwarding my progress. But a side effect of my new pace is that I’ve had more time to think, which I definitely needed. I’ve been at a bit of a crossroads lately. 

I’ve been making music for a long time. I started writing songs over 30 years ago, and I’ve been doing it (mostly) full-time for about 20. I still really enjoy what I do, which I’m grateful for. I’m not confused about why I like making things. But there have been a lot of changes to the industry since I first started, and a lot of them just aren’t for me. I’ve had a growing sense of dissonance over the past five years or so. Slowing down has helped me put my finger on the cause.

The simplest way I can put this is: my personal self and my creative self are no longer in line. Allow me to explain.

Like everyone else in the modern world, large parts of my life have become increasingly digital, sometimes against my will. The result is a very mixed bag. Some things have improved, and others have definitely degraded. I constantly wrestle with the balance of these changes, and I try to be mindful about them. But this is the hardest to do where it intersects with my work.

I’ll start with streaming. I did not come up on streaming. I’m in my 40s, so by the time I was buying music of my own it was the early 90s and I had cassette tapes. Then came the CD, then mp3 players, then streaming and cell phones. The last change has affected how I interact with music the most. Since streaming became the norm, I listen to music a lot less. I know my age is a factor here, but streaming has killed a lot of my desire to explore. I still love to hear new music, but I’m basically 100% recommendation based at this point. I never browse platforms like Spotify. In theory, having all of recorded music available at once, for a monthly fee that’s less than what a single album cost 30 years ago, would be a feeling of abundance, of infinite possibilities. But the actual result is just being overwhelmed. Sifting through hundreds of thousands of tracks that aren’t quite doing it for me just sounds exhausting. So I don’t use it very much. I can’t remember the last time I actively searched for new music on it. And passive things like algorithmic suggestions and playlists have not filled the gap.

I also work in music, so I’m always suspicious of how much that colors my opinion. But I feel the same way about film these days. I used to really stay on top of movies and shows. Since the streaming model has taken over, I have that same overwhelmed, agitated feeling I get from the music platforms. Scrolling through all those films and shows, with their auto-playing trailers and automated recommendations, just makes me turn the tv off. So I rely entirely on recommendations here, too, and I have no desire to explore. 

It’s been strange watching former hobbies and sources of joy turn into chores, or even things I actively avoid. I realize that a lot of people will feel the exact opposite here, though. I don’t think this is unanimous by any means. But this is how it has turned out for me, and it has made what I do for a living feel really strange.

Because I no longer enjoy these platforms very much as a user, releasing work has become increasingly dissonant. How do you make things for platforms you don’t personally enjoy? I’ve never had this issue before now. I liked buying albums. I liked going to record stores, where they had curated selections, and hunting for something that I wanted to take home with my very limited funds. So the idea of creating something that would be packaged as an album, that someone else might discover in a shop and decide to take home, was really motivating. It served as a mental model. And while I liked going to shows sometimes, they weren’t what made me want to write songs. I was all about records and the process of finding them. I cherished my tiny little collection, and the idea of being a part of someone else’s was really cool to me. 

Watching a number occasionally go up on an app I personally try to avoid isn’t quite the same. 

So this has left me in an odd spot. The private, creative side of art still resonates. I still love being in the studio, or figuring out a painting, or working on lyrics, and so on. But when it comes time to start packaging and releasing it, my feelings turn negative. And it’s not just streaming. It’s also the current state of the internet. 

I’m not a social media person. It’s yet another tool that I don’t enjoy as a user, but I’m expected to use for my work. I have no desire to figure it out, but the industry I work within has created a fear that everything you make will simply disappear into a void if you don’t post pictures about your personal life, or what food you buy, or whatever. I have personally seen no difference in listeners whether I post or don’t, but that’s the pervasive dialogue. I didn’t mind social media when it was just one aspect of the internet, and it was largely just for that first word, “social.” But it slowly became the everything place, and now it’s bite-sized versions of news, art, ads, politics, obituaries, health advice, crimes against humanity, kittens, low-rent humor, messages from friends, soft-core porn, go fund me campaigns for medical bills – all shuffled up and shot out at random, like the mind of some psychopathic narrator. I see no place for anything I do there. And like the transition from albums to streaming, I enjoyed the former iteration more. Websites are self contained. I go to a news website to read the news. I go to an art website to look at art. It doesn’t feel like chaos to me, and I like that sense of organization.

Which leads me to another issue – stability. I think we all feel how rickety these platforms are. Tech companies are constantly changing the way everything functions, even down to their core purpose. They’re so busy copying each other that they all forget what they were good for in the first place. I’ve always loved visual art, but watching painters and photographers try to come up with video-based gimmicks to stay relevant on platforms like Instagram has made me not bother anymore. Spotify is now constantly pushing audiobooks and podcasts, neither of which I’ve ever searched for on the platform. YouTube is trying to be TikTok, and TikTok is trying to be YouTube. And on it goes. So anyone trying to reach people on these platforms has to become almost entirely reactionary to survive on them. For deeper work that takes time, this doesn’t make sense. The rules will have changed by the time you finish anything you’re actually proud of.

So here I am, writing on my website. And you know what? I still enjoy this. I would actually do it far more were I not also juggling a bunch of other platforms and sources of input, or trying to incorporate things I deep-down don’t care about. Which led me to my current question – then why don’t you? If the idea of creating something for my own space is more inspiring and interesting, then why not go that way? 

So I’ve decided to do just that.

In a practical sense, this changes very little. I only have an instagram and two YouTube accounts (one for Radical Face and one for all my side projects). When I finish songs, I’ll upload them to places where people listen to music. When I have larger projects done, I’ll be sure to share release dates. Instead of a forum, I’m using Discord, so it’s there if anyone wants to hang out online or ask questions. But I’m going to start really leaning into my website again. This will be the place for my deeper thoughts, essays, larger pieces, and all the things that don’t function well on all the current platforms. I’d like to start writing essays on the creative process and what I’ve learned from it. I no longer have an art account on instagram, so instead I’ll just upload visual work over on the art tab of this website. I’m currently finishing a real bio, instead of those industry ones where they just list accolades and try to make you sound way more popular and influential than you’ll ever be. I’m going to stop putting what I think of as the actual results of my effort into platforms that might just disappear or become unrecognizable overnight. Instead I’m going to put them here, with the occasional post to let people know they exist. 

But I want to be clear about something: I don’t believe this will “work”, or that it’s where things are headed. I don’t expect people to flock back to websites. This isn’t marketing, and it’s not even something I’d consider a sensible strategy. I’m just looking for something that motivates me to share again, and to stop dreading my releases. I’m looking for a space that rewards long-form, that has some depth, and that doesn’t make the end result feel so valueless and short-lived. And I’d also rather invest in something I can own, and be proud of, instead of a platform that makes every single user look and feel the same, where I personally see more harm than good, and I can’t even build short term plans around.

So I’m investing here, and I’m going to see how nice of a personal and digital museum I can come up with. Maybe it’ll be seen and maybe it won’t. But it sure as hell sounds like a lot more fun.

I hope this finds you all well. Until next time. Which will be much sooner. 

A Light in the Woods, Book One

So here we are, approaching another year’s end. Don’t worry – I’m not going to ramble on about time again. Instead, I can finally write about what I’ve been up to for the past five years, and what’s to come. That sounds more fun.

So book one of “A Light in the Woods” is out as of last Friday. This is a strange release for me, most notably because I’ve never worked on something for such a long time before sharing it. The Family Tree turned into an eight year project, but I had releases all throughout its lifespan with yearly tours woven in between. It felt pretty constant. This new project, on the other hand, was such a complicated lift that a lot of the work was front-loaded. Now that I’ve got the format sorted and a good system for the overall workflow, it’ll move along much faster, but it took a long time to get my skills up to snuff and wrap my head around it all.

To explain why, let’s go back to the beginning … 

This all started back in 2018 with a pretty simple notion: I want to do a project about the woods, and I want to use my three favorite mediums to do it (music, writing and visual art). I didn’t have a clear idea of how that would shake out. I just liked the concept.

I chose “the woods” as my subject because I’d recently left my hometown of Jacksonville, Florida and moved across the country to Califnornia. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do when I got there – I just knew I wasn’t going back. I’ve always used life events as fuel for art projects. When thinking about what might be a good topic for walking into the unknown, the woods cropped up immediately. And like always, I started by finding some books on the topic.

When researching how the woods are used within storytelling around the world, I found more similarities than differences. The woods are typically a place of transformation, the unknown, and to some degree, danger or magic. There’s a mix of fear and reverence about them, and that felt like a good fit. I was both nervous and excited to move, having spent all my life in the city I was born in up to that point. I also just really enjoy forests on a personal level. I grew up on a road with a healthy patch of woods at the end, dividing my neighborhood and the local hospital, and it’s where the majority of my free time was spent as a kid. I associate the woods with freedom and strangeness and imagination.

But it wasn’t long until my digging led me to the fairytale – or, more precisely, the psychology of fairytales. When talking with a friend of mine about what I was working on, I was given two books on what role fairytales play in a child’s development and why they have persisted for so many generations. My main takeaway was that we use whimsy and storytelling to share life lessons that would otherwise overwhelm. By abstracting concepts that are too intense to approach directly, stories can get the lesson across with a sense of wonder and curiosity and keep the nervous system out of the picture.

I loved this idea. And it led me to my final concept … What if I used the fairytale as a way to dissect and observe my own fears, now, as an adult? What if I used a disarming medium to tackle my most existential questions about life in general?

When an idea sits right with me, it’s a very obvious feeling. Once this thought crossed my mind, I was all in. And I haven’t looked back. But I had no idea what I was signing up for. 

I didn’t realize how long it would take me to learn digital painting, even though I’ve spent a lot of my life doing visual art in some form. I didn’t anticipate the need for animation, but once I started directing the video it was pretty obvious that it needed more motion. I didn’t think I was going to narrate the story myself, but again, it became the clear choice once I started directing. I also didn’t realize what format would work for this. I knew I wanted something slower paced – something with the tone of a bedtime story, or someone reading aloud to you while sitting next to a fireplace – but I wasn’t sure how that would play out. And I’m still not sure what to call it.

But because all of this was so overwhelming at points, it led me to meeting some new people that I’m very grateful for. I already had my two most constant sounding boards – Josh, my partner, and Jeremiah Johnson – and they were as helpful as ever. But another big part of the project’s development came from Stefano Corazza, who I first met in 2019 around the idea of incorporating augmented reality into a live show. We stayed in touch even after the pandemic shut down the show ideas, and our talks about how to shape the visual side of this project really helped steer it towards this final form – and he did all the 3d effects for me, too. Later, when I found myself struggling with how to translate my script into storyboards, Stefano introduced me to his friend Mitra. She’s a storyboard artist for Pixar as well as a director, and she helped me find my system for making thumbnails out of the script. And then a general mentor for the final paintings came from meeting Robert Stacy, better known as “Sinix”. I reached out to him as a shot in the dark, because I was learning a lot from his YouTube channel on art and design. To my surprise, he was curious enough to hear me out, and we became fast friends. He’s been a huge help with design and composition problems, and his critiques really helped tighten everything up.

There’s actually quite a bit more to these stories and just how I arrived at this result, but I’ve decided to turn it into a series on my YouTube channel, where I’m going to break everything down and go into lots of detail. So if this project is interesting to you, be sure to check those videos out in the coming months. I’ll post them here as well.

I have a lot more I want to talk about, but I’m attempting to write a little less per entry and post them more often. We’ll see if it works. If I’m not keeping up well, then I’ll go back to my typical too-many-words type of essays.

Oh! But before I go, I’d like to get across the overall scope of this project. There are going to be six books in the series (I’m calling them “books” because it’s a word I have a very positive association with, and it implies something slower and more contemplative). The series has 28 songs, 50+ pieces of score, and around 1,000 paintings/animations. Each video is between 40 and 50 minutes long, which adds up to about three films in terms of runtime. It’s way bigger than anything I’ve ever done, but I’m learning to accept that I enjoy scale. I keep going back to it, so I must.

If you have seen it, here’s a link to the first book on YouTube:

And if you enjoy watching it and want to learn more about the world, definitely check out the dedicated website. I worked with this brilliant webteam, Rogue Studios, to make something that feels like the project. Social media isn’t much of a place to create a mood. And as a general note: it will evolve as each book is released, so don’t think of it as a static site. I’m super happy with how it’s turned out so far, and it’s a place where I can put all the information that doesn’t work inside the narrative – so additional world-building and lore and whatnot. Here’s the link, if any of this sounds fun to you:

alightinthewoods.net

I think that’s enough for now. Thanks to anyone who has given this new idea of mine a chance, and I look forward to sharing the rest of it with you. But for now, back to work. 

Hope you’re well,

-Ben

Building Sanctuary in the Age of Distraction

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.

In Pursuit of Quality

It’s been a while since I’ve written here. Or anywhere, really. Since moving up here to San Francisco, I’ve found myself with even less interest in the digital side of life. Which I find pretty funny. I moved to the belly of the tech-beast to largely ignore it. Maybe this is my tiny form of protest? Ha. Either way, my phone remains devoid of apps (not quite true, I use one for meditation). I doubt I’ll go back. When I poke my head out it seems noisier than ever, and I don’t see much point in adding my voice to all of that. I’ll post some drawings from my desktop, put up recordings when they’re done, and send out some newsletters if I have anything worthwhile to share. I think that’s plenty.

I turn 40 next month, which for reasons I won’t go into here, I never really thought I would make it to. I like it, though, the idea of officially being middle-aged. It feels like societal permission to do what I’ve been doing for a long time anyway. I just finally look the part. So now, for example, if someone asks whether I’m on Tik-Tok, I can say “I’m forty”, or simply gesture towards my body, and we can go about our merry ways. I say this in jest, but I have talked about it enough that I clearly feel some need to explain my abstinence. I think this is because I used to write to nearly everyone who bothered to write to me, and now I am feeling that difference. But online behavior has deteriorated to the point where I largely avoid it. Inboxes can quickly get filled by people who are upset at what you are, or are not, doing. There are nice notes, too, but the see-saw tipped too much toward the problematic side somewhere along the way. Maybe it will rebalance in time and there will be some shift in digital etiquette, but I only check in very occasionally now. For those who send nice notes, thank you. They’re still very much appreciated. I just might not see them for a while, and I apologize in advance if I don’t write back.

But talking about what you are not doing isn’t very interesting, and all this peace and quiet has been far from idle. So let’s change gears.

I’ve been making tons of headway on my next big project, called “Into The Woods,” but it has been a strange path. Even for me, and I never learn in straight lines. If I were to quickly explain what this album is going to be, I’d say I have finally decided to truly combine all my interests. I’ve been bitten hard by the art bug in three mediums over the course of my life – the first was visual art, the second was prose and the third was music, in that order. I’ve always used elements of them all in my projects, but not to this degree, and nowhere near this interwoven. It’s been a real challenge, the biggest I’ve ever taken on. I’m genuinely enjoying it! I love pushing myself, and feeling like I’m onto something new for me. But I have to stress the second part of that sentence. For me. 

I am not a very original artist. I never have been. But it’s also never quite been my goal. Something struck me recently while listening to a talk on meditation about a month ago. The sentence was: you are what you pay attention to. That was one of those lightning rod sentences that made me sit up straighter. I’ve thought about it a lot since, and it helped frame a lot of my current mindset. 

Back to the initial part of this post, a major part of why I have backed away from spending time online is because it’s not what I want to pay attention to. It doesn't make my life, or my work, any better. But I also thought about how this applies to my approach to my work, and how I’ve never paid very much attention to originality. Not to say that I haven’t done some particular things along the way, or I approach things in a generic fashion. But when I listen to something like “Loveless” from My Bloody Valentine, and how sonically singular it is, I am well aware that I am not that kind of artist. I’ve never made anything that stands so apart. But when I really think about it, my attention has always been directed toward two major elements – quality and mood. That’s really it.

What do I mean by quality? It’s not simple to put into words, so this may be clumsy. But my idea of quality is when I stumble on someone’s work, and it just is. It feels complete. And this has nothing to do with whether I like it, or how much effort went into it. Sometimes I listen to a record, or watch a film, read a book, look at a painting, and I totally accept it as a viewer. It doesn’t feel like it’s almost there. I don’t notice what it could have been. It’s finished, it exists, it’s what it’s supposed to be. My only question is how I feel about it. All my favorite work is like this. And to clarify, it’s not an issue of fidelity. Some lo-fi music can feel totally correct, while some incredibly well-produced work can feel like it just never fully formed. I can look at something loosely painted and feel like it’s perfect as it is, and see something painfully rendered that just “feels a little off”.

The pursuit of this quality is rarely straightforward for me. I can give an example with this recent project. 

Since I’ve decided to paint the entire story myself, I have been seriously working on visual art again. I have been painting digitally for about a year and a half now. I already had some initial sketches and design ideas for this record years ago, but I knew my chops were nowhere near where I’d need them to be. It did not have that elusive sense of quality to me. The best I was getting was “charming”, and I wanted more. My gut was that it would take me about 200 paintings to develop the level and variety of technique I’d need. I’ve made over 180 finished paintings since I started, and I’m finally getting close. So my gut wasn’t far off. But I wasn’t going to find that certain quality just working directly on the project itself. I don’t learn well that way, just hammering one thing over and over. So I branched out into various topics to better teach myself. The three major focuses were portraits, figures and scenery. Within each category, I worked on different levels of rendering, from gestural to realistic. Over time, I realized my primary concern is light, and I’ve honed in on that more and more. The other aspects feel more open-ended and forgiving. 

To return to an earlier point, at no point have I been attempting to be original over the course of these 180 paintings. I will blatantly steal from other artists I like. I bought collections of Sargent and Klimt paintings, as well as artbooks from digital painters that utilize certain qualities I’m after. I mimic them. Some I outright steal from. My personal taste is guiding my hand the entire way, so sometimes the result is more unique than I was expecting, but I see that as a side effect. I’m just chasing after my particular idea of quality, and how the work feels. Every 20 paintings or so, I jump back to my project and try a few more ideas, and see how much closer I am getting to my goal.

This is not very different from how I make music. I’m not out chasing unicorns. I just want to make records that can sit next to my favorites, where I feel like I’ve communicated my intentions well. I want to hang out with the giants in my mind, to not be embarrassed if something I made happens to play after something I love. It’s a tall order, but it’s one that keeps me motivated. And while I may not spend much time on whether it’s truly original, I do spend a lot of time chasing after very particular moods and feelings. I don’t want the result to feel like someone else’s, even if I’m borrowing techniques, and I have clear ideas of how I want the work to come across before I begin. But as for how I go about it? I’ll steal from anyone.

So this new project has me working in all three categories, and moving between them often to see how they are all interacting with each other. It’s a little unwieldy, but totally fascinating. I’m certainly sick of this pandemic life in many ways, but I love how much time I’ve had to explore all of this, to get it all right. I still have a lot of work to do, but since I have no external commitments like touring, it doesn’t feel too daunting. It’s a big challenge, but I have enough time to really meet it. And I’m going to keep chipping away at this sense of quality until I find it.

I’ve updated the art tab on the website with more recent work, if you’d like to see where all this painting has led me. But I will keep the music and writing parts private until it’s ready to be released. Until then, it’s a lot of chasing that idea of quality. Wish me luck.

Art, Robots and The Speed of Life

Over the course of this pandemic I have had a lot of time to think. I don’t know how universal that has been for everyone, but I have come to think of it as a real gift. A gift with some very problematic wrappings, but a gift nonetheless. It has changed my relationships with art, technology and day-to-day life in some irreversible, and very welcome, ways. 

One major change is the amount I’ve reduced the internet’s role in my daily life. It all started with some experiments concerning my phone, which I had strongly come to resent. I know a lot of people enjoy their phones, and this is not meant as a judgement in any outward way. But I started asking myself the question: Is this making me happier? To answer that question, I did an experiment. I removed the apps from my phone, one at a time, each for a week, and noted whether my life was improved or diminished at the end of the seven days. I’ll skip to the end -- none of the apps were reinstalled. My phone has returned to a phone. I use it to text and call people I actually know, and it can take pictures, which I rarely do outside of capturing reference images for paintings. My favorite function is that it works as a remote control for my recording software, so I don’t have to get up every time I screw up a piano take.

I still have access to all of the things I removed, just at my desktop instead of in my pocket. Sitting at a computer is an act with some deliberation. That might sound small, but I don't think it is. That layer of deliberation changed the way I interact with all of these platforms. I find I’d rather do something worthwhile at my desk instead of idly clicking around, and my tolerance for time-wasting is far lower. I’ve also realized, if I’m being brutally honest, that my phone was mostly a digital pacifier -- a compulsive object used to override discomfort, or to simply kill silence. But I like silence. I’m not sure when it turned into a nuisance. Perhaps I had just gotten uncomfortable with my own thoughts. 

These changes in my habits didn’t leave me with some unfillable void, though. New habits quickly took their place. Where I used to flick through my phone while I was waiting for the oven to preheat, I began keeping my book near me. I’ve been going through a book a week ever since, sometimes two, with no particular sense of effort. Where I used to keep tabs on the never-ending drama of news and politics, constantly dealing with outrage and an anxiety that I can take no actions to alleviate, I’ve instead been thinking much more about what I am making, and what ways I can contribute. I have been a lot more productive, and with more fulfilling results. And I find myself no less informed for only checking the news each Sunday. In fact, not one change has been for the worse. It’s been a unilateral improvement. Mystery solved.

There has also been a very noticeable spillover into my work. I feel like I have more free time than normal while simultaneously tackling my largest project ever. This current one (called “Into The Woods”) involves very elaborate world-building, both visual and written. The album is 30 songs long, with some tracks surpassing the ten-minute mark. I’m doing hundreds of paintings for it, as well as writing it out in prose, all of which will come together in a book. I’ve never attempted this scale of work before -- working in three mediums at once is a really full plate! -- but it somehow feels manageable. I attribute it to this newfound sense of brain space. I think about the project all the time, so I constantly have ideas for it. Constant ideas mean there is always something to work on, but again, without this sense of effort that I’m used to. I know it will take thousands of hours to complete everything, but instead of that being daunting, it feels like more time with something I really enjoy, like getting even more time to hang out with a good friend. I’ve been looking at the long road ahead with a sense of real pleasure. 

I don’t think this will be temporary for me. I want to maintain this as long as I can, even as we ease back into some sense of normalcy. 

But nothing is ever quite so simple, is it? 

It’s been interesting watching the world change around me while feeling myself move in the opposite direction. As I step away from the internet more and more, the world is only barreling further into it. People are increasingly living out their lives digitally, and if you would like your work to be seen, you have to as well. But I've been feeling very protective of this newfound pace of life. I’m making some of my favorite work I’ve ever done. I like how days have a slower shape than they used to, and how I can spend time simply looking out the window, or laying in the grass and listening to a record. I feel more connected to things than I used to. So I’ve been strategizing methods to maintain this. I recently hired someone to help me keep my social media active, since it’s not something I enjoy looking at and don’t have many ideas for, even outside of the issue of time. This new person has way more ideas for it than I ever would, and it’s been a relief. Trying to perform in a space where you have no particular instincts or skillset is a surefire way to make you anxious.

But I have also been working out ways to keep up with this new pace of being a musician. 

Now that streaming is the dominant model and tech companies are in control, there have been a lot of changes to how this all works. The current model, as of today, is that you need new material about every four to eight weeks to keep your profile afloat. It’s all a game of appeasing the ever-mysterious algorithm, in hopes that it will favor you for a moment and you see some kind of boost. This is perhaps reasonable for other styles of music. Modern music production, for all of the most popular genres at the moment, is relatively quick. Since it’s based around samples and very little of the instrumentation is actually performed, things can be compiled faster than ever. Entire instrumentals are commonly built in the time it would take to me to simply mic up a drum kit. This is not a knock on those mediums, as all art requires taste and style, but there is simply no comparison in terms of labor. 

I personally think of a lot of modern music as collage art, as opposed to something like painting. A large part of the labor is done for you, by the photographers whose work is being repurposed, so it leans more into taste than craftsmanship. If someone asked me to do a collage a day, I’d say that’s doable. But if I was asked to do an oil painting a day, it just isn’t. But to stretch the metaphor a bit, collages are the style of the day. They are far and away more popular, no comparison. So it’s no real surprise that they are setting the pace of the modern music world. But where I am personally at odds is that I like to paint. I can enjoy collages as a viewer, at times, but I get very little satisfaction out of making them. Or to return this to music, I like playing and recording all the instruments, with as much analog equipment involved as possible. I recently rebuilt my studio back into a predominantly analog setup and I love it, even though it’s a lot more laborious. I can enjoy toying with samples every once in a while, but it’s really for a change of pace. It’s not where my heart is. 

But there’s also another hurdle to overcome, one that is far more troublesome to me. Allow me explain to you the concept of “laneways” real quick. 

Laneways are shorthand for how your music profile is sorted on streaming platforms. Everything you do is tagged, from instrumentation (acoustic or electronic), major or minor keys, common moods, even down to average tempos and song lengths. If you have some success with a couple tracks, the streaming platforms use those song’s tags to define your profile, or what is considered to be on brand for you. A major downside to this is that stepping out of your laneway -- as in, using some elements that are not found in your most popular tracks -- means your new work will likely not be supported. Platforms like Spotify won’t notify your followers or consider you for playlists if they deem your new work to be too different. Since those notifications and playlists are the only ways to earn an income in a world where streams have very little value and direct support is almost non-existent, this means you probably can’t get too adventurous if you want to earn anything. If you are someone who only really enjoys a specific genre, or the key tropes within it, this is probably not a big issue. For someone like myself, who really dislikes genre in general, it’s stifling.

I can personally deal with not making money. The majority of my work doesn’t amount to much financially, and I have a successful song that's gone wildly beyond anything I’ve ever imagined, and it continually pays for me to keep going. So I feel pretty free to experiment, consequences and all. But this stokes a more general worry in me. I take issue with technology so heavily influencing what, and how, art is made. I think the tech should serve the artist, not the other way around. But I also realize that none of this is up to me. How people like to receive art, and how they value it, is a collective issue. Of course I wish people valued and supported art and artists more directly -- the current era of calling artists “content makers” and treating their work in such a disposable and valueless way is nothing I even remotely agree with -- but I can’t expect the world to mirror me or my values. I just have to decide how I wish to interface with it.

To that end, I have been peppering my profiles with content as best I can manage. But for the past three years, in the background of all these smaller, low-commitment releases, I have been building “Into The Woods.” It will likely be another year before I am completely finished (but I will be releasing it in chapters, so it will start coming out before then). I can’t create the type of songs I’m doing for this album under the time crunches and parameters of sample-based music and tech-company algorithms. I work on it every day, and I’m a pretty prolific guy, but it still takes me years to sort a deeper work like this, to give it everything it needs. I also know that I am not within my laneway, so my chances of any kind of notifications or support upon release are slim. But despite all of that, it’s absolutely a worthwhile trade to me. I genuinely love what I am doing right now. It’s gotten me back in touch with why I started making art in the first place, and the days where I get to fully enmesh myself in the work are wonderful. 

And I am going to do everything I can to protect that feeling. It’s a large part of why I will be moving somewhere more affordable this year. It’s why I’m going to keep building a team to keep up with all the new demands. If the modern world keeps adding jobs that I am not any good at, like maintaining social media, I will keep finding help until I can’t afford to. We are increasingly becoming our own marketers, producers, financiers, press agents, copywriters, photographers and video makers. But all I ever really wanted to be, when you get down to it, is someone who makes things. I’m figuring out the rest as I go. Wish me luck. 

Thoughts: January 4th, 2021

So. Here we are. A new year. 

I just had a funny moment, looking back at my first post of 2020. I could ramble about the obvious problems that arose from the pandemic, but my main takeaway was this: You never really know what’s coming. As much as we all like to plan and predict, we are rarely correct. It’s a necessary futility, perhaps. But I’m learning to see plans as a direction to walk instead of some destination to arrive at. They’re just to get you moving, not to get you somewhere in particular.

I’ve spent the past month really rethinking different parts of my current life. I don’t make new year’s resolutions, but I enjoy taking stock of everything at the end of the year and deciding what to bring forward with me, and what it’s time to let go of. This year I took it further by really disconnecting from the internet and spending a lot more time with my thoughts, my work and my priorities.

A big topic that came up, to my surprise, is how I work on music. 

I have made music largely the same way since 2003. I started similar to most people my age, who were teenagers playing music in the 90s, using a cassette 4-track and whatever mic wasn’t broken. I had a lot of fun doing this, but I didn’t take it remotely seriously. The idea that you could record at home and create anything more than a demo that you might show your friends seemed like an impossible bridge to cross. But then some affordable interfaces and music software started showing up on the market. I instantly had real track counts. I could mix and arrange ideas more freely, and I could look up articles and spend time on forums to learn how to improve. I was off to the races. 

I have been collecting gear for almost 20 years now. I didn’t get my first car until I was almost 30 years old, because I would rather ride my bike and have a nicer mic, a better guitar, or upgrade my preamps. But the end result of all this, I realized recently, is no longer very satisfying. I am not a collector, by nature. I have no real sentimentality about my tools, beyond my upright piano and two acoustic guitars. And I don’t enjoy having tons of choices when it comes to recording. I have a dresser that I keep all my mics in, and I noticed that I almost never look in it. I have a few that I really like, and I stick to those unless they absolutely aren’t working. I am the same about preamps, plug ins, and all the other gadgets. I just don’t revel in the variety. 

So I’ve decided to lean in and embrace that. I want to only work with things I enjoy, and get rid of all my rain day, once-in-a-blue-moon-this-is-useful items. I’m getting very Marie Kondo about it all. So I spent my holidays shooting out every piece of gear I own, and only the pieces I specifically had fun using get to stay. I’m selling 80 percent of it. 

The other major change I am making is that I’m pulling away from the computer more. I’ll still use it in then place of a tape machine, more or less, but I am moving to mostly analog equipment again. I have always stayed away from analog due to its cost, it’s more complicated workflow and the space it takes up. But the truth is, I work alone and don’t need much of it. And every time I have had the opportunity to use hardware, it was strikingly more fun. You have to physically turn knobs and commit to ideas, and you don’t just watch a screen the entire time. And I think that is what I am missing above all at this point. My setup is very practical, but it isn’t much fun.

I have been at all of this for a long time, and I record all the time. There was a time when all the new conveniences technology offered were really exciting, not unlike the internet itself. It was rife with possibility, and there was always something just around the corner. These days? I spend much more time trying to reduce its footprint on my day-to-day, as it has become more problems than possibilities at this point. I’m learning that the line between those two is pretty thin. Choices are nice when they are in balance, but they can flip to being a burden pretty quickly. What once paved the way to new ideas is now choking them. I think this has slowly been happening to the process of making music for me. But it happened so slowly that I wasn’t tracking it. I just noticed I was having less fun.

I once read about a concept referred to as “positive regression.” The idea is not that you attempt to return to the past — that’s a fool’s errand. Instead, it’s looking at when you were last in a state of really enjoying yourself, in whatever manner you are observing yourself, then looking at the conditions that made it productive and enjoyable. Once you pinpoint it, return to that mindset as much as possible, then start walking again.

A personal example that came to mind was back when I was recording “The Roots”. I decided to really restrict myself with that album. I had 4 main tools for my sound pallet (acoustic guitar, piano, voices, and a floor tom), and only used 4 microphones (one for vocals, a stereo pair for instruments, and a dynamic mic for loud sources). The limitations had the side-effect of creating brain space -- I didn’t fish through sound sets or fiddle with mics when I was stuck. It made me look at the source material instead of some production trick when I needed to add interest. It made me get creative with the tools I had. I respond well to things like that in general -- just using whatever I have on hand. So I am taking that mindset to heart again, but with what I like and enjoy now that I am twenty years into this and knocking on 40 years old. I’m happy to say that it’s working. I am liking the recording process again, and I am really enjoying this lack of clutter, mentally speaking.

I believe this concept works in many aspects of life. There’s a professor at Harvard who studies happiness, and in and interview I saw with him he said the phrase, “If you want to be happier, remove things in the way. Adding rarely works for long.” That concept is ringing very loudly these days, and I am enjoying my new pursuit of simplicity. I’m curious where it will lead, both artistically and otherwise.

I hope this finds everyone well. And soon I’ll get back to sharing some actual work. But as a reminder, to stay up-to-date, sign up for my “Hidden Hollow Monthly Mailer.” I am much better at updating that one.

Trucking Along ...

So we are approaching the 6 month mark of life in a pandemic. It’s pretty amazing to me how quickly we can adapt to most anything. What was life upending only a little while ago becomes normal fairly fast. At this point, I think even the apocalypse would be mundane within a month. So it goes.

I am now two months into doing this Hidden Hollow monthly mailing list. I’ve really enjoyed it! As someone who doesn’t care for social media very much and uses it pretty begrudgingly, a monthly update full of things I’ve made, and things I’d like to share, is way more my speed (and do we really need to hear from anyone we don’t personally know more than once a month?).

That being said, I know a lot of people haven’t been receiving them. Please know that I am aware, and I’m working on it. I am not the most internet savvy when it comes to anything without a built in GUI that does most of the work for me, so I have been learning a lot of the new mailing list landscape through trial and error. You see, a lot of privacy laws have changed in the past few years, and while that is a good thing that I wholeheartedly support, it means that mailing lists are nowhere near as simple as they used to be. It used to be 1) add email list 2) write email 3) send mail 4) swim through your money vault like Scrooge McDuck. Now there are a lot more requirements and restrictions and tests you have to run. So the vast majority of these are still going to spam, if they are delivered at all. But I got it more correct on issue two than the first one, so I’m hoping to keep improving.

For those who missed it, I have a new Radical Face single in every issue. These are not part of my new album. I want to clarify that. These are things I just make for fun, or one-offs, or experiments. And since I have really gotten back into painting (specifically learning how to paint digitally), I have been coming up with a painting for each single and using the time-lapse of it as the music video.

Here is the first single, titled “The Missing Road.” I put descriptions on all the YouTube videos now, as well as the lyrics, in case you are one of those weirdos who likes to know what things are about, or how they’re made.

And here is the video for what came out on Tuesday, in issue number two.

I will make sure to post these on here as I go, but if you would like to stay up-to-date, I recommend joining the mailing list (http://eepurl.com/hb4lwf), or following me on YouTube or Spotify. Those will be more immediate, and more reliable than social media.

I will be using social media less and less, I think. I never did much of it in the first place, but I decided at the beginning of the year that I would try posting more on things like Instagram. I haven’t liked it all that much. It doesn’t make much sense to me as a musician. They are visual platforms. Why would someone sign on to something that is about sharing images to find out about music? And now with all these metrics that these companies give you, my suspicions have been confirmed. People don’t. The click-through rate from these platforms is very low, almost non-existent. So I see it as due-diligence to put up reminders where people are, but it is increasingly showing itself to be pretty pointless unless you are enjoying tracking how many people click “like” on things. Personally? I will be much happier to just post work where it really lives, like streaming services, and not bother anyone beyond a monthly email that collects everything relevant into one letter. Fingers crossed I can get to where that is enough. I’d be happier, for sure.

But speaking of visuals, I have been drawing and painting so much in my free time these days that I have started posting it. It is not lost on me how much more these platforms make sense when what you do is visual. For example, I started an art Instagram just to dump whatever I’m painting onto. It doesn’t create anywhere near the dissonance, or the “what the hell am I supposed to do on this thing?” constant question that running a music account does. So if you like the visual art I do and want to see me spam around five images week, you can follow that. I will update the artwork section here on my website a couple times a month, too.

Beyond that, I just want to say that I am really happy with the progress and sound of my new record. Having all this time and space and to really get it exactly how I want it to sound and feel has been wonderful. I like to take my time with albums, and because life has generally been a hot mess for me these past 7 years, this change of pace is so welcome I couldn’t possibly overstate it. And I hear it in my results. I do my best work when I can really devote a lot of my mind to a project. And the singles give me a good excuse to just have fun and be more in the moment. It’s a good balance. Let’s see if I can keep it up.

I hope this finds you all healthy and well.

Hidden Hollow

It's been an odd month. On one hand, I have been more productive than I've been in a very long time – more than any time in the last ten years – and I am discovering tons of new and exciting processes along the way. Artistically, I feel incredibly “awake.” On the other hand, I have been having discussions about the future that I never imagined having.

I have always assumed I would live out my life in America. While I have genuinely enjoyed traveling and seeing other cultures, I was always happy to return here. Sure, it's messy and strange and I've long held a laundry list of things I wished were different. But despite its flaws, it has always felt like the place that harbored the most potential and opportunity for me. I'm not so sure I feel that way anymore. I'm processing disappointment at a bone-deep level, and I honestly can't say how I will feel after digesting all of this. Josh and I have been having lengthy conversations about how much of a future we have here. At this point, neither of us can say.

I realize that most people would assume I am speaking politically here, but I'm not. I tend to view things more culturally than politically. Living around people I disagree with is not very difficult, but living in a culture that I find morally bankrupt is a completely different beast. I have had to walk away from things in my life once I saw, and really understood, that there was something fundamentally wrong with them. It has happened in both my work and my personal life at different junctures. But I never thought I might have to walk away from my country for the same reason. While not the heaviest question I've ever asked myself, this is definitely one of the biggest in scope. I guess we will see. The back half of this year, and how we continue to handle our concepts of society, morality, community and humanity, will be very telling. I am watching closely. I am not terribly optimistic.

But we are in an inherently contemplative time, in almost all regards. Nothing makes you contemplate the future more than staring down the barrel an uncertain one. Naturally, I have also been rethinking what my work is going to look like going forward.

The world I have worked in for the past 15 years is pretty unrecognizable right now, and like most everything else, large aspects of it have ground to a halt. For the first time since I began putting out records, I have been totally rethinking how I want to continue. Because if I am honest about it, I have felt limited these past 7 or 8 years. There are a number of reasons for this, but here is a big one: When the music world moved away from personal websites into social media, I had to change the way I communicated. For me personally, it was not for the better.

Websites, by the nature of how they're organized, allow for flexibility. You design a place that people can visit, if they are so inclined, and you can fill it with whatever you choose. When I first started making my music available to strangers, back in 2002, everything I was doing was collected in one place. This included all my music projects (Radical Face, Electric President, Patients, and any side projects), as well as artwork and short stories. And this really suited me. I don't exclusively perceive myself as a musician. I most see myself as a songwriter, if forced to choose, but even that feels narrow if I look at how I spend my time. I rotate between songwriting, visual art and prose all the time, and I used to feel free to share any of it, and show how the three were influencing each other. But once social media became the dominant medium, I really had to pick. Building multiple profiles with multiple purposes is a very tall order, especially for someone like me, who has no particular inclination to share my personal life to keep a steady stream of posts up. And since Radical Face was my most popular project and where the bulk of my income stemmed from, it quickly became the sole focus. At least publicly. I still made the other things – I just stopped sharing them. I have resented this change. I could write an obnoxious rant about all the reasons why, but it's most simply summed up as: social media my least favorite form of communication on the internet, both professionally and as a person. It's too focused on crafting an image instead of content. I have to make myself use it. I get very little joy out of it.

But then a pandemic comes along, the world stops spinning, and I find myself asking a different set of questions. Instead of wondering how to work with something I don't enjoy to make it more bearable, I start wondering if there is another way altogether. Instead of seeing most of my work as a dance between recording and touring cycles until I run out of steam, I start wondering how I really want to spend my time. And I start asking myself what I really believe in at this point in my life, and what I find exciting.

That's how I came up with “Hidden Hollow.”

After a lot of conversations with some people I'm close with, I started noticing that I have one common impulse in everything I do: I like to share. I enjoy sharing my work, whether its music, writing or visual art. I like sharing process, especially when it shows people that they can learn it all too, that’s it’s in reach. But I also love sharing all the art I find, that I am a fan of, that I'm inspired by. Anytime something moves me or makes me think, I pass it along. When I read a book that makes me set it aside and just stare into space while I process some amazing moment in it, I want to give that experience to others. I love recommending food, or films, TV shows and documentaries – anything that makes the world a little bigger, that helps you realize there is more out there to experience.

So I've decided to do just that.

Hidden Hollow is a monthly mailer that I'm going to send out the first Tuesday of every month — a re-branding of my mailing list, with a schedule. Inside it, I am going to include at least one new Radical Face song. But just an isolated song with no larger context. It will not be a part of my next album. This will give me a chance to actually release all the recordings that I usually just leave on hard drives for years, and sometimes never release at all, but also to just have some fun with song-writing again. I will also be sharing my new, more electronic project, Human Mother, and any writing or paintings I feel are relevant, or that I'm just proud of. But I don’t want this to just be some self-promotion vehicle. I want it to go well beyond that. So I'm also including book recommendations, favorite quotes, music playlists based on themes, artists to check out, cool music videos and short films, etc. I want it to be a completely free digital package full of goodies to spend some time on if you have it and you're inclined, both for myself and for all the things that have moved me or provoked some thought.

But since I also love discussing art and getting recommendations in return, and email is not a very good format for that, I have also created a website that will serve as a forum and an archive. I have attempted to run forums in the past, I know, but it was at a time when everyone moving away from them and I was under pressure to use social media. So I let them wither. Well, I think I can safely say that I know how I feel about all of this now, and I much prefer websites and forums to any alternatives. I will still post notices and work on Instagram and the like, but the meat of the content and discussion will (hopefully) live here now.

And from my conversations this past month, I don't think this is just me. Lots of people mentioned they missed discussing things with like-minded people, but specifically without the feeling of constant observation that social media creates. Phrases like “It would be nice to discuss art without my racist uncle feeling some need to chime in” came up multiple times. And I agree. When we are being viewed by basically anyone and everyone, we behave differently. We are timid, or more argumentative, or just don't contribute at all to avoid the headache. Speaking for myself, I much prefer screen names to real names online. I like being in places where the main form of communication isn't emojis and heart buttons that make everything into a bizarre popularity contest. And I like places that feel a little selective when it comes to really sharing thoughts or personal work, with a sense that everyone involved is acting in good faith. So that is why I have kept the Hidden Hollow website password protected. It's not much of a hurdle, I know, but it's enough of one that you need to be just above a passing interest to go further. I don’t xpect this to be terribly popular, but I also don’t much care if it is. Even if it’s just a small handful of people, I will take quality over quantity any day.

So if this sounds interesting to you, and you'd like to sign up for the mailing list, here's a link to the e-mail widget. It will contain the web address and password, in case you are interested in the discussion and sharing forum:

http://eepurl.com/hb4lwf

As for the forum, I spent some time working out a better way to share, since sharing is the main focus. So it is organized based on the action you take instead of the medium. I'd rather you think about whether you are sharing something you've found, or something you've made, rather than trying to categorize the result. If this is something that interests you, then feel free to sign up and share things. I’ll be posting some examples after I post this. The first issue of the mailer won't come out for a few more weeks – August 4th, to be exact – but all the categories and explanations are already in place.

And you know? I honestly have no idea what any of this will do, but I've decided I'm perfectly fine with that. Just compiling this first issue of the mailer has been a blast, and I already have content for the following three. So even if this largely only interests me, I'm getting a lot of joy out of sharing all these things, and writing out all my feelings about them. And I have always believed in the phrase “Follow your excitement.” It tends to lead you to the most interesting places.

I hope this finds you well.

Thoughts: May 28th, 2020

I have spent a lot of my life making things up.

I started pretty young, and it has been a constant ever since. I've been thinking a lot about how fortunate I am to do so, and the infrastructure and resources around me that allow it. I spend parts of every single day absorbing what others have created, and with the internet, almost entirely ignoring the former limitations of space or time. I then get to take all of that input, combine it with my experiences and whatever fixations currently occupy my mind, tinker with it until I am satisfied, and then send it off into the ether like some tiny sail boat whose destinations I will never know. It is my favorite thing in the world – with food, sex, games and good conversation waiting somewhere in the wings. The joy of creating is unmatched for me.

But it is a luxury. That I can have groceries delivered to me while in a pandemic, or even further – completely prepared food; that my environment is temperature controlled with a few button presses; that my clothing can be thrown into a machine that does the work for me in under an hour; that I can turn a lever for clean running water, at whatever temperature I choose, and wash up in minutes – all of this gives me time and space that I can fill with the unnecessary. I get to constantly listen to what I feel and think because so many of my necessities are taken care of. It allows me the freedom of inventing anything I desire, and translating it into sound or graphite or words or ones and zeroes, further decorating life. Something notable I find from reading history is how modern society has given us so much space, comparatively. Hell, even in modern times, reading stories about different parts of our world and all the various walks of life only highlights the abundance in my own. Many people have little in the way of time, even more so with brain space. Art takes a surprising amount of mental real estate. That real estate is a luxury.

If you are thinking that I am merely waxing poetic about gratitude, well, yeah. I am. But it's something that has really struck me since going into quarantine. The pandemic has removed so many of my former spinning wheels that felt so necessary only a couple months ago. All the time that used to go to travel, to shopping, to commuting, to working on projects that didn't matter to me but may, one day, lead to ones that do – poof. Gone. And while I miss some things, most of it I do not. And I find myself returning to a much earlier way of life, artistically speaking. I am interacting with art in a manner that I assumed was firmly caged in nostalgia.

My relationship with art is my oldest and perhaps most intense one. It is what allowed me to travel, both figuratively and literally. As a child, art was a window into the larger world. I grew up on a dirt road in Florida, in a low-income neighborhood near the ocean (a real estate anomaly that has since disappeared). Through film, books, paintings, comics, video games and whatever else I could absorb, the world felt like a never-ending treasure hunt. Despite some of the inherent wrongness of my early environment, I saw other options, other ways of being. It didn't matter to me that most weren't even real. They felt real, and that was enough. And when I connected that I could become a participant, that I could make those things, too? A door opened in my mind that has never closed again. I walk in and out of that door, between reality and potential, constantly.

But art is also what allowed me to see the world. Traveling wasn't something I knew as a child. Things like family vacations or road trips were financially and logistically impossible. My first memory of leaving the city I was born in was around 11 years old, when I went on an end-of-the-year trip for 5th graders. We traveled to Virginia and Washington D.C. by train, which cemented my enduring love for that form of travel (still my favorite). After that, I traveled a bit more, mostly with friend's families who let me tag along, but rarely very far. Until touring began in my early twenties and my world was flung much wider. Seeing lots of other places and cultures really altered my world-view — more than I realized at the time, in hindsight. But coming from where I did, geographically and economically speaking, I doubt that would have ever happened were it not for art. Creating things has always been a bridge to possibility for me, both in my mind and in my life. It is so entrenched at this point that I would not know how to perceive the world otherwise. I would be a very different being without it. Not to sound melodramatic, but I am pretty sure that, if I had not connected with art the way I had, I would no longer be here at all.

But what caught my mind while in the shower a few days ago, and why I am writing this, is because I am interacting with art in a way I, somewhere deep down, didn't think was possible anymore. A side effect of so rarely leaving the house is that my time for creative work has effectively doubled. I am drawing and painting in a way I haven't since high school, and in a way I honestly believed was gone. I first started drawing pretty intensely around 7 years old, and I drew almost daily until I graduated high school. For reasons I won't go into here (that's a story for another time, as they say), I stopped. Sure, I would make visual art if there was a direct purpose, like an album cover or doodling on merch while on tour. And while I was thankful that all those years of studying and practicing gave me the tools to work in other visual mediums, like music videos, I otherwise didn't think of it anymore. And now I find myself drawing every day again. I am watching tutorials, learning digital art, and currently have 6 sketches waiting to be colored. And I love it. It caught me off-guard how much I missed it, and how different from music it is. It's so much more instant, and I really appreciate that contrast right now. It's refreshing, after typically spending many hours in front of microphones, which so much of I never keep or share.

Even with music, this abundance of time has changed things. The last time I felt I had this much breathing room to make a record was when I did “The Roots.” A major difference is how much more I feel like I can just play. I can set up mics with no other goal than exploring. There is a really big learning curve to becoming successful at something that was once a hobby, to dealing with external pressures like production deadlines and tours and meetings. I've spent years just learning to build my own label and all the legal and practical components that go into that. All of those factors take away time from the core act of creating music, and if you are not careful, they will destroy it. And while I have always been a DIY artist and have pursued so much of this in the name of artistic freedom, one change that I didn't quite perceive, because it was such a gradual one, was how the limited time creates a need for efficiency, and in turn how that need for efficiency alters the process. I traded a lot of whim for focus, to make sure I could finish the projects on time. And while some of acquiring that discipline was a good thing, there's a balance to all things. I feel like I am resetting that scale. These days, going into the garage to just see what happens when I start recording, as opposed to going in to specifically finish a particular song, is a total joy. Some days bear no fruit, and others make for a strange meal I probably wouldn't order again, but the freedom of just seeing where it all goes is something I genuinely missed. I am glad I can call upon that focus I've learned when I need it, but right now I'm even happier that I can ignore it.

So I feel grateful. I am spending so much of everyday just making things. Hell, that I have had this current afternoon to sit with a mug of tea and just type these thoughts up is such a luxury. While the existential dread of a roaming virus is definitely there, and living in such a political and economic state of uncertainty demands its toll, my newly vibrant relationship with art shines a lot brighter at the moment. It may only be for a moment, but hey, I'll take it. And I will gladly take a step back and be thankful for the circumstances that allow it to exist at all.

I hope everyone is well.

Home Videos

Okay. So I have been spent the last couple weeks studying how to better produce videos at home. Like most things, once you get into the details, it quickly becomes a rabbit hole. But I like rabbit holes. This has been no different. I've been having fun.

After my last post, I put together a list of songs to make acoustic videos for, based on what people have requested through social media, then I jumped on one immediately – Small Hands. For the recording, I just used a stereo pair of small diaphragm condensers in XY about 3 feet away (for those who like to know the technical), and filmed it with the video mode on my point-and-shoot camera. But when I sat down to edit the footage, the deficiency of the camera really jumped out. It can only shoot in 30p, has trouble holding focus in low-light, and I couldn't tell how blurry the footage was from the LCD on the back. I think I would have done better using my phone, in hindsight. So I intentionally downgraded it further (I often subscribe to that practice – if it doesn't look great, might as well make it look even worse and run with it), shot some b-roll as best I could, and cobbled together an edit. Here's the result:

I was fine with the performance, but I wasn't very happy with the image quality. I don't mind things being lo-fi – my tastes lean that way more than they don't – but I like it to be a choice. Like with recording, I can record things at a more “professional” sounding level than I often do, but I am much more into what's effective for a mood than sounding technically nice. So I decided to take some of my tour income and invest in a better camera. Something that could shoot 4k, handle low-light, and would also work for photos, since I will also be doing my own head shots and press photos for the foreseeable future. And honestly? This is something I have been itching to do for a long time. I make all my music at home, but video is something I have always had to hire out for. Both for the equipment, but also for the knowledge. I usually edit all of my music videos, so I'm comfortable with the software, but the camera itself is something I don't know much about. And my attempts at getting into photography never lasted more than a month, mostly because of time. But these days, I am swimming in time, and I like to be busy. So I am digging in. I've been reading all about lenses, lighting, best practices, color-grading, and all that fun stuff. And since I learn best with applied practice, I am giving myself certain goals with each video. I really want to use this strange time as a time to push myself, and to grow as an artist beyond what I already know. I've been calling it pandemic home school.

So here is the second video, with the new camera, for the song “Doorways.”

I haven't played that song in a really long time. I honestly avoid it. All the long notes at my break in the loud section are a gamble for touring. If I am having an off day vocally, or even just a little phlegm that particular evening, I will butcher it. But I like playing it when I can, and it's a song that I have always been happy with. I remember wanting to write something about when you first realize you aren't a child anymore, but not finding a satisfying delivery at first. Then I finally just jotted down all the things I no longer believed in, and I finished the song 20 minutes later.

But as another challenge to go with this video, I decided to illustrate a lot of the lines. Visual art is what first got me into art at all. I drew all the time as a kid, well into high school, and I wanted to be an illustrator. While I still doodle here and there, especially on tour, this is the first undertaking in a while that had me really drawing. As in, sketching things out first, then redrawing them once I found something I liked. And as a longtime fan of art from Edward Gorey and the comic “Cerebus”, I have always loved meticulous pen work and have stolen a lot from them. I spent a week drawing for this, about 8 hours a day. And it was really nice. There is something lovely about putting on a record and drawing all day. I can't remember the last time I did it with any freequency. I have ordered a bunch of micron pens again, and I am going to do a few more videos with artwork, I think.

Here are photos of all the drawings, if you'd like to see them in better detail:

And if you like this alternate version of the song, I am going to film a tutorial on how to play it this way while it is still fresh. And luckily, that is a lot less work. I can have it up shortly.

Beyond these acoustic videos and tutorials (still very open to suggestions, by the way), I have some other projects in the pipeline. But I would like to start writing blog posts more more frequently, so I will keep these more at one subject at a time.

More soon, and I hope everyone is healthy and well.

Strange Days

We are past our 14 days at home now. All is well. Everything is strange.

The funny thing about stories is that the ones most worth telling are usually shit to live through. Good stories thrive on uncertainty. Finding myself in a spot where I genuinely have no idea what's going on or what will happen has become my biggest tell that I am living one. But what's even more wild is that everyone is living this one, at the exact same time. It's a far darker story for those that are sick, or those that are helping them. I am just at home, a little lost and vaguely anxious. I consider myself lucky.

I've been avoiding most communication since I got home. I've noticed that when things get serious, I am not a person that reaches out very much. I do a quick check to see if anyone directly needs me, then I like to keep to myself and quietly watch. So I have been strictly limiting the news I take in and the amount I interact with anything outside my home. And as always, once I get a better picture of things, I start to thaw and my mindset opens outward again. I'm not sure why I do this. Probably a better question for my therapist.

As I felt settled late last week, I spent a lot of the weekend wondering what to do with myself. A common question for damn near everyone, I know. Work worldwide is changing drastically or drying up completely. Leadership is hard to find in a lot of places. Even basic direction is a tall order, much less solutions. But I am not nearly as affected as most. I have worked for myself for over ten years. Everything I make, I make myself, in my own house. Sure, I don't know what I will do with these things I make, but that's not a new question either. I never really know, even when the world is operating normally. But I found myself poring over a different question this weekend …

Since I have more stability in all of this than lots of people, what can I do to help?

At first, that question really just drew blanks and a feeling of impotence. But as I talked it over more with my partner and manager, ideas started showing up. While I am still not sure how to help people on the front lines of all this (I am getting some ideas for that, too, though), I do have the ability to make things. And the bulk of us are stuck at home and trying to find ways to cope with anxiety. But instead of solely returning to making an album, I want to get back to some things that can give people something to do. Not always so passive as just listening.

So first on that list is filming tutorials. I have done these before, but I want to take the concept a step further. In the past I would just teach the chords and patterns and leave it at that. But now I'd like to assist in the application by making a new mix of the song, muting the part that I'm teaching in the video, so you can play along with the actual recording. So if I show you the guitar part (which will be the most common), I will upload a version of the song that has the guitar muted. Then you can fill it in yourself after you learn how to play it. I could also upload version that remove the vocals, so you could record your own vocal takes, or even improvise new melodies, if that's of any interest.

The second idea is to get back to filming little live, bedroom versions of songs. Kind of like this one:

So if there are any songs you would like to hear a small acoustic version of, or a song you would like a tutorial on how to play, please leave a comment down below. You could also email me, but I am really behind on emails. I honestly stopped looking at them when I got home. I am only just digging into my inbox as of yesterday. Comments will be easier at the moment.

Lastly, if you have any questions about record or mixing, feel free to ask me. I would like to continue that series on how to record at home and go into more detail. The first I made was here:

This will be an ongoing thing. I'll keep trying to think of ways to help, but I am also open to suggestions. I can only work on an album so many hours a day, and I already had a solid week of Animal Crossing and Celeste to get some couch time out of my system. I am all ears here.

I hope everyone is home, healthy and sane. And for those of you working essential jobs during all of this, thank you.

Thoughts On Touring

So we are already in the middle of February somehow. I remember hearing adults talk about how disconcerting the passing of time could be. As a kid that always struck me as odd, but now I find myself noting it with a sense of alarm. And so the wheel turns.

I've been home from tour for a little over a week now. The time off from the road has been nice. I've had so many ideas for this next record that I've spent every day back in the studio. But I have to say, this last tour was really different. I spent a lot of time rethinking what tour is and how to approach it, and it paid off. I was still physically tired, but that's just the reality of sleeping in a different bed every night and spending the majority of each day in the back of a van. But I didn't feel emotionally beat down this time. The fact that I jumped straight into the studio is proof of that. In the past, I wanted nothing to do with music at all for at least a week or two, and I didn't much want to see anyone. I would just insulate myself and do the bare minimum of work until my give-a-shit returned. But this time I was back to working on the new album on day one. Progress.

A major change happened on this most recent round of touring (or in the middle of the Euro tour late last year, to be more precise) – I finally found a way to look at performing that makes sense to me. And that was to stop thinking of it as performing. This might sound obvious, or even childish, but when I changed my outlook and simply thought of a show as “I am going to play some songs for people and have a nice time”, something clicked. That is something I know how to do. Whereas the idea of performing always felt alien to me – something I am not built for.

The word performing implies a lot. It makes me think of spotlights and displays of absolute mastery. But I find spotlights uncomfortable, and I am not a master of anything I do on a stage. I can play guitar and sing well enough, but I regularly interface with people who are far more proficient at both. I think of myself as a songwriter, first and foremost, and I got into music because I wanted to make records. Especially with Radical Face. I never intended to perform the material from this project at all. The songs all have so many layers, the material can be uncomfortably personal and confessional, and I mostly work alone. I have always thought of it as music for headphones, or sitting in a room by yourself. Or if you are like me, putting on a record, laying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. I don't think music always “works” in different settings. I have records that I love to listen to alone, but would feel odd putting on around a group of people. And then there is music that I really enjoy in a group, or in a car, but I rarely put on by myself, or have a desire to hear in headphones. And when I think of what I do under the Radical Face tag, most of it feels solitary to me. Nothing about that mood lends itself to the idea of performing, and I have often felt a disconnect with playing the songs live because of that. But when I stopped thinking of it as performance, and instead pictured a show as sharing stories and conversation with a group of people, it suddenly made sense to me again. And perhaps more importantly, I felt I could just show up as myself, as a narrator and steward instead of a performer, and there was no need to be anything in particular. I'm not clever enough to assume a persona and be something I am not, so this is all a lot of relief.

I realize this is all internal and most people would likely never notice the difference. But expending energy with a sense of purpose changes it completely, and something in me really relaxed into it. It also never ceases to amaze me how we organize ourselves with language. Just changing the words I use, in my own head, made such a noticeable difference. Brains are strange.

So we head out for another three weeks of shows in about 10 days, so if you are on the east coast of the US or Canada, and you'd like hang out and hear some songs, I'd be happy to have you. And in the interim, I will just be tracking away. I'm really thrilled to be making a new record again. I prefer records to EPs and short form work in every way. I was fine doing EPs as a way to keep busy while moving around and trying to figure out what to do with my life, but now that I am settled and can evaluate from a place of stability, there is no comparison. And I am making something new for me, which is always a great feeling. I'm itchy to get into all the details, but I want to wait until my next post for that. But hey, having to force some patience is the clearest sign that you're excited, right?

I also forgot to post about this here, but there is a song that fell out of my recent recording sessions. I knew pretty quickly into the recording that it was not going to fit the album, but rather than shelve it and move on like I normally do, I just went ahead and finished it. I've decided to do that this time around, since I am my own label and can release things anytime I want to. So this is just a one-off single, called “Reveries”, that doesn't sound like the new record. Ha.

I also have a new Human Mother track ready to put up once I finish the video for it, and we have been producing a lot for the label as well. So I will be dropping a lot of work this year! But I think this enough for one sitting. I will write again soon.

Until then, I hope everyone is well.

IN THE YEAR TWENTY-TWENTY

So it’s the first day of 2020!

Something about repeating numerology always summons a science-fiction narrator in my head. I hope the novelty of how futuristic this year sounds doesn’t wear off. And while I’m not much of a new year’s resolutions kind of person, I do enjoy sitting on such an obvious fence in time and looking both backwards and forwards. For today, I will talk about the forward stuff.

First off, I have started a new project. I actually started it a while ago, but I am beginning to release it. It’s called “Human Mother.” I got the name from a friend’s wedding, where the woman leading the service said something along the lines of: “This is not only seen by the heavenly father, but also by our human mothers.” I laughed a little louder than I should have, but putting “human” before otherwise normal words always makes them suspicious!

- “Are you enjoying your human dinner?”

- “I’ll gladly come to your human party.”

- “Let’s shake human hands on it!”

And this continues my tradition of naming projects after things I bump into the wild that make me laugh. Trying to come up with a meaningful and cool name is a drag. Or it is for me. I never enjoy it. So names like “Radical Face” and “Human Mother” it is.

But as for what this project is? Well, I miss making music that focuses on production, uses electronics and samples and whimsy, and is not quite so personal all the time. That used to be the space that “Electric President” filled for me as a songwriter, because Alex and I always hid little jokes inside the songs, or just treating practices as a way to have fun. And I really miss that. Alex and I haven’t played together in over 5 years now, and with us living on opposite coasts and me becoming more of a hermit, I don’t know if that will really happen again. Maybe I’ll get him to throw bass on some of these songs long distance? I’m not sure. But even that is really the point of this project. Something that is more based on whims, weird processes, a sense of humor, and bothering people along the way.

I put up a track for the project recently, and I made a video for it with the O’Shea Brothers, who are responsible for the wonderful skate video series “A Happy Medium.” I met them in 2011 when they invited me to the premiere of “A Happy Medium 2” after giving them a bunch of music to use in it. After I finished this track for Human Mother, I had a nightmare where I cracked my head open skateboarding and fragments of memories starting showing up (I grew up skateboarding, so this isn’t as odd as it might sound). So I decided to film this weird dream. Needing some skaters for this, I reached out to the O’Sheas, and they recruited Aaron “Jaws” Homoki to be the lead for the video. Aaron is both a maniac and genuinely sweet guy (he did this for free! … I think I just gave him a DVD set of Attack On Titan as payment, hahaha), and the whole project was really fun, despite being in Arizona in the summer.

So yeah, Human Mother will be my home for my more electronic and experimental music for the foreseeable future. I have a lot of other tracks already done, and none of them really sound the same, and I’ll be putting them out whenever I have time, or I’m in the mood. Nothing about this will be overly scheduled. I have enough of that in my life already. Cheers for chaos.

Beyond that, this year will have a lot for Radical Face in it. I am about 30 demos deep for “Into The Woods” and starting to make more final versions of tracks. For how I work, that means I am about 30 percent into the album. But I am really getting my finger on the new direction/sound, which is one of the most exciting phases of making a record. So I’ve been pretty happy to spend as much time recording as I can these days. And this will come out this year. Now that I am putting records out myself again, one huge advantage is I don’t have to wait until a record label has an open slot for me to release it. I get to pick for myself this time. Yay!

And to flex that very thing, I already ave a B-Side from this run of songwriting that I’m going to put out really soon. Just a random single, really. But I can do those things this time.

I also have the US tour coming up really soon. This might be the last traditional tour I do for a while, so if you have any interest in seeing a show, this is your window. And from the European run, Jon Bryant was kind enough to send me some photos from the shows, because I never think to shoot pictures when I travel. Thanks, Jon! I’ll post a few below. And thanks again for everyone who came out to the European shows, and for being such an attentive audience. It makes all the difference.

Beyond those two projects, we are also releasing a record for “Photostat” later this year, and then have more releases coming for Bear Machine as well. I’m happy to finally feel settled enough to get back to the pace I used to have, around that 2007 - 2011 period, where I spent the bulk of my time creating things. It’s my favorite way to live, whenever life allows it.

I hope everyone is well … IN THE YEAR TWENTY-TWENTY!

Tour, A Thank You, and Thoughts

So we are fast approaching the end of 2019. I’ve been back from tour for almost three weeks now, and as usual, I got sick almost immediately after I got home. I spent the first week getting over the flu, catching up on sleep and getting used to normal life again. Once I felt human, I went right back to recording. All pretty standard for me.

So first off, I would like to thank everyone who came out to these European shows. I honestly wasn’t sure how all this would go. I’ve been putting out records for some time now — 19 years if we are talking self-released, and 14 years through labels. 12 full-lengths, from different projects, and about 10 EPs. Some part of me is always expecting it all to dry up, and that people will stop coming. This isn’t a reflection on how I feel about my work, but more that I don’t really understand how I got here. I’ve rarely been covered by music press, I barely use social media, and I’m not the most social person in general. I’ve had some people who have really championed me inside the music industry, but it’s a short list. So booking a tour, not around a record release or something that you can advertise with, and having people still show up was a bit surprising. In a really nice way. So thank you. I’m still not exactly sure how I reached you, but somehow I did, and you cared enough to leave your house and come share an evening. Life is strange.

But one thing that always happens on tour is I have a lot of time to think. Too much time, if I’m honest. One of the odd things about driving around and playing shows is that there is so little middle ground. I can’t speak for anyone else on this, but personally I am either bored or I’m stressed out — mostly the former. If it weren’t for the actual shows being fun, there wouldn’t be much to speak of. It was also unfortunate that my two days that had neither travel nor a show were both raining pretty hard. But there is so much time spent in vans, not talking, or sitting alone in foreign rooms, and I can only read and play my switch so much. So inevitably, my mind wanders.

One thing I thought a lot about is how much the world of music has changed since I was first getting involved and seeing some success, and how much the value system has shifted. Writing about all of these shifts would be way too much for one blog post, but there’s one I caught myself coming back to a good bit. And that is …

Content is now entirely free.

Not an epiphany, I know, but I started digging into that more, and what it means to me. Because even if you want to buy music, ways to do so are shrinking. And due to our inevitable conversations about use of resources and the effects on our environment, that trend will continue (I am having more and more trouble justifying printing physical releases these days, both from a cost and wastefulness perspective). So when an album comes out, the only thing we now spend on it is time. Attention is the currency. And the stream is endless. Don’t like what you’re hearing? Well, click on something else. It goes on forever.

Watching those who work in the music world, this has been a source of significant dread for a lot of people. Which I can understand. It takes a lot of effort, time and money to produce things, especially with high expectations and standards, and when the final result is to release it for free, just hoping it gets attention, and that the attention it garners will lead to some sort of income or security, either from ad revenue built into platforms like youtube, or a sponsorship, or the attention of a larger industry with real budgets … well, it all gets a bit abstract. And that abstract feeling often drags anxiety along with it. And anxiety often makes people more conservative and less willing to take risks. I think it’s no small part in why you see so many people just copying what has already worked.

But the more I thought about this, the more I had the opposite reaction. I find it freeing. If no one is expected to pay for the work, then it dramatically reduces the sense of responsibility on my end. It changes music from a product to more of an idea. And since ideas are free, it only makes sense to me to be more free with them — to take more chances and explore even more aggressively, without worry for how they will be received. Because worst case scenario, people just have to hit that “next” button. You no longer have to contend with someone feeling ripped off when they don’t like you’re work, just being disappointed. For me, that difference is night and day. People aren’t losing money on this. And while I have never been terribly concerned with how I’m received, I think this has flicked over the last domino in that chain.

I don’t know why this is just now clicking so clearly with me, but whenever I have set out to make a record, it is still, at least to some small degree, something I perceive as someone having to invest in on the other end — like the listener’s investment is a foregone conclusion. But that’s really just something I’ve carried over from when I first got into music, pre-internet, taking chances on CDs based off a review I read or a recommendation from a friend. A record is now something that someone can choose to invest time in, but with no financial risk on their part. This difference felt particularly sharp to me while touring. Live shows have a real weight of responsibility to them. People are paying money and then physically coming to a space to watch you play music. They have to plan in advance, maybe even get a babysitter, or leave their home when they are much happier being an introvert wrapped in a blanket, and they have to stand there for the duration. I am very concerned that I uphold my side of this bargain to the best of my ability — which may still not be enough, sure, but I will try with all the resources I have on that particular day.

But records are not like that, not anymore. They are absolutely optional. Hell, most people don’t even know they’re there at all. So I don’t have the most sympathy when I see people complaining that they don’t like someone’s new work. I now just imagine someone sitting on their toilet, frowning as they type a comment about how this free media isn’t precisely their taste at this exact moment. To which I internally just laugh. Not that people aren’t entitled to their opinions — of course they are. They just don’t have the same weight or bearing in this current environment.

But I also wonder about how else this lack of investment on our parts as listeners changes the way we listen. I can’t tell you how many tapes, CDs or records I’ve bought that I did not like at first, but grew to love only because I had paid for them. I typically had no other new music to listen to, because I didn’t have the money to try again, so I gave those albums way more of a chance than I probably would have nowadays. And songs I started out hating became my favorites, and vice-versa. I learned that lesson over and over, and I genuinely think it’s why I developed a love for albums, and why I have spent so much time writing concept records. But now, with everything being free and so constant, I have to fight the impulse of impatience. It’s so easy to constantly click “skip” if something doesn’t grab me in the first twenty seconds that I start losing sight of what I even enjoy. Not mention the problem that I only know what I enjoy now, not what I will enjoy. Being impulsive only reduces my chances of being seduced by something new. But the only reason I have that outlook is from investing in albums first. I wonder if that will be an antiquated way of viewing art in time.

But I don’t want to imply I have any answers here. Because I don’t. I think we are in the wild-west right now, and not just with music. TV, film, news, information warfare, the concept of experts, social status, human interaction … the internet is having its way with all of them. Some I like and some I don’t. I also know that my personal feelings about it don’t matter much. Genies almost never go back into their bottles. And whenever the landscape around you is changing, I think it’s pretty common to wonder what you’re place in it will be, or if you will have one at all. But it’s during times like these that I am glad I have spent so much time designing my own little worlds. I’m used to inventing a place to go when I can’t sort where I fit in. And now, with even less concern for the tourist who might see the result, I think I can design with even more abandon. Because the ticket only costs a click and a little bit of free time.

I have more to say, but I always do. Until next time, I hope everyone is well.

Haunted Houses

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.

Tours and "Ghost: Anniversary Edition"

So I’ve gone and booked some tours. Well, not technically true. Some agents booked a tour for me. But either way, I am touring.

You may have noticed that I don’t tour often. If I am honest, it is not my favorite part of being a musician. I think people assume I’m shy (I’m not) or have stage fright (I don’t), but it really has nothing to do with the shows themselves. Playing songs for people is often really fun. It’s just everything that surrounds touring — the lifestyle of it — I am not very built for.

On the physical side, I’ve been plagued by back problems since I was 19 and tried to film a “sponsor me” video for skateboarding. I fell from a 4 foot ledge onto my tailbone and haven’t been the same since. Which is why I have to play seated at shows. I don’t prefer playing that way at all, but I do it as a safety, so if my back is all jacked up from sitting in a van for 8 hours a day I can still perform. I also have insomnia problems on a good day, so put me on the road in a different bed every night and I can have sleep problems pretty quick.

And then there’s my little ol’ voice. I recently went to a voice doctor in Los Angeles and they put a camera down my nasal cavity and into my throat, and I finally learned why I lose my voice so easily. I have a type of paralysis in one of my vocal chords. I only have about 15% mobility on the left side. This is not new. I have likely had this since I was pretty young and wasn’t taken to a doctor for a throat infection and permanent damage was done. As such, I have always been a quiet speaker and have really low projection. Of all the things I do musically, singing is the one I have fought for the most. I had very little natural ability for it, and it is what I have to practice the most. But what I learned from this vocal doctor is that I use a lot of neck muscles to speak and sing, much more than most people, so when I talk too much, push too hard or don’t get enough rest/sleep, I lose my voice because my neck tires out. Weird! But I was really happy to learn all of this. It helps me plan for this next bit of touring in a way I’ve never been able to before, because I didn’t know what was happening.

And lastly, I think I’ve always struggled with the monotony of touring. I’m happiest doing creative work, and touring is all about repetition. It might appear like touring is the more exciting part of music, but when I am home and working on projects, every day is different. I never quite know what I’m going to be doing, and I really love that. On tour, almost every day is the same. You actually have to work really hard to repeat yourself! Hahaha.

So this time around, I’m doing it all different. The dates have all been broken into smaller chunks — each 2 -3 weeks with breaks — so that I can put creative work in between each outing. We spent time working on the routing so getting 7 hours of sleep a night is actually feasible. And we scheduled more days off in between so I can have bursts of quiet time and not lose my voice. I think it’s going to make a big difference. And I’ve also come to realize that a lot of this is in my outlook. I’m looking at these tours as a way to gather stories, write a lot in my notebooks, read all the books I have not been able to find time for lately, and finally play some Switch games.

And I am also reconnecting with why we do this. Go to shows, I mean. I sometimes forget the communal aspect of music. It has mostly been a private affair for me. So much of my relationship with music has been in headphones — listening to mixtapes on a bus as a teenager going to the library, or sitting on the shore in the evenings and listening to albums. And then I make records alone for the most part. So it’s most often just been a place to figure out what the hell is going on with me emotionally. Some kind of internal mirror that I learned about myself with. But music can also be a shared experience, and unite people instead of just comfort them. I never went to that many shows growing up, so I forget this. But I’ve been asking friends and colleagues what they see in shows, and their answers have been a really nice reminder. It’s giving touring a greater sense of purpose beyond “I guess I’m supposed to.”

Wow. That was much more than I thought I had to say! Well, here are the actual dates, for those who are interested in coming out.

EUROPE:

1. 07/11/2019 - Norway, Oslo - Parkteatret

2. 08/11/2019 - Sweden, Stockholm - Södra Teatern

3. 09/11/2019 - Denmark, Copenhagen - Hotel Cecile

4. 11/11/2019 - Germany, Hamburg - Gruenspan

5. 12/11/2019 - Germany, Berlin - Lido

6. 14/11/2019 - Germany, Munich - Ampere

7. 16/11/2019 - Italy, Milan - Santeria Social Club

8. 17/11/2019 - Switzerland, Baden - Royal

9. 19/11/2019 - Germany, Frankfurt - Mousonturm

10. 20/11/2019 - Germany, Cologne - Kulturkirche

11. 22/11/2019 - Netherlands, Amsterdam - Paradiso

12. 23/11/2019 - Belgium, Brussels - AB

13. 24/11/2019 - France, Paris - Cafe de la Danse

14. 26/11/2019 - UK, London - Union Chapel

15. 28/11/2019 - UK, Manchester - Gorilla

16. 29/11/2019 - Ireland, Dublin - Whelans

NORTH AMERICA - WEST:

1. 1/21/2020 - Phoenix, AZ - Crescent Ballroom

2. 1/22/2020 - Tucson, AZ - 191 Toole

3. 1/25/2020 - Denver, CO - Gothic Theatre

4. 1/26/2020 - Salt Lake City, UT - The Depot

5. 1/28/2020 - Vancouver, BC - St. James Hall

6. 1/29/2020 - Seattle, WA - Neptune Theatre

7. 1/30/2020 - Portland OR Wonder Ballroom

8. 2/1/2020 - San Francisco, CA - August Hall

9. 2/2/2020 - Sacramento, CA - Harlow's Restaurant and Nightclub

10. 2/5/2020 - Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour

11. 2/6/2020 - Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour

12. 2/7/2020 - Pomona, CA - The Glass House

NORTH AMERICA - EAST:

1. 2/26/2020 - Minneapolis, MN - Fine Line

2. 2/28/2020 - Chicago, IL - Thalia Hall

3. 2/29/2020 - Detroit, MI - El Club

4. 3/1/2020 - Cleveland, OH - Beachland Ballroom

5. 3/3/2020 - Pittsburgh, PA - Rex Theater

6. 3/4/2020 - Toronto, ON - Mod Club

7. 3/6/2020 - Montreal, QC - L'Astral

8. 3/7/2020 - Boston, MA - The Sinclair

9. 3/8/2020 - Brooklyn, NY - Elsewhere Hall

10. 3/11/2020 - Philadelphia, PA - World Cafe Live: Downstairs

11. 3/12/2020 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club

12. 3/14/2020 - Carrboro, NC - Cat's Cradle

13. 3/15/ 2020 - Atlanta, GA - Terminal West

And if you are coming out, and there’s anything you would specifically like me to play, feel free to comment or send me an email. I build set lists out of what people want to hear. I am not the one buying a ticket — I firmly believe shows are for the audience — so I never add more than two songs I personally want to play into a set. Now, how I play that song is up to me. I don’t try to recreate recordings live and like to rethink them each time. But I very much want to know what to add in the first place.

Beyond touring, another little tidbit I’d like to cover today is the “Ghost: Anniversary Edition.”

I recently got the rights to Ghost back. And what that means is I can now print the album myself, whenever and however I want, and I can release it through my label that I co-own, Bear Machine Records. And since I knew it was returning to me, I wanted to do something special with it. At first I was just gonna add some bonus recordings and artwork, but I wound up going much further.

Where this first started was with the live renditions of some songs. I have been playing some of them, like Winter Is Coming and Wrapped In Piano Strings, for over ten years now, and I like to change songs as I go. Some of them have taken on very different shapes because of this. If you’ve ever seen the live version of “Along The Road”, you’d know it only really shares melodies and chords at this point, and reads more like a shoegaze track. So I decided to record these versions. I got all the members of the live band to come play their parts on Wrapped In Piano Strings, Glory, Along The Road and Winter Is Coming. But once I got that far, I realized I had alternate versions of other songs, like a string version of “Asleep On a Train” and an acoustic version of “Sleepwalking.” So I went ahead and remade the entire album with alternates of various styles.

This edition with be released as a double vinyl. The original album was remastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, and then there’s a second disc of 12 new recordings. And I really shouldn’t say remastered here. The original version of Ghost was never mastered at all. I just did the leveling on my mixes as best I could and put it out that way. A fun thing about mastering is that it brings out details that were formerly a bit buried, so while it’s not a new mix, it can feel larger and more panoramic. And I think that’s what happened here. Greg Calbi did a great job with it.

For an example of one of these new versions, I went ahead and put up the orchestral version of Welcome Home on my youtube channel.

This arrangement was done by my partner, Josh Lee. I played the piano and mixed it, but the rest was all him. Josh has been playing strings most of his life, and it was really cool to hear a version of the song arranged by someone who really knows the instruments. I think he might have a future in arranging.

But yeah, the Anniversary Edition will come out this fall. I’m getting the final word on the vinyl production now. When I have the dates I’ll be sure to post them.

Beyond that, I also recently produced an album for someone, and I have begun tracking my next full length, called “Into The Woods”, among other new projects. So there is a lot more to talk about! But I think I have gone on long enough for one post.

I hope everyone is well.

Thoughts: July 28th, 2019

So I haven’t written in over a year. I’m not surprised, when I stop and look back.

I’ve moved a lot these past 4 years — multiple times within the city I grew up in and then across the country, to California. Moving is inherently chaotic. It forces you to reorganize and not just physically. I’ve had to re-approach the way I think about a lot of aspects of my life. At first, this was overwhelming and I resented it. But now that I have slowed down and found some kind of center again, this re-imagining has become incredibly liberating. Not to imply that moving inherently solves things — it doesn’t, as you drag yourself with you everywhere you go — but all the new context can be a chance to try again. It’s been easier to figure out where I am at, right now, without all the trappings of personal history and misplaced feelings of obligation. I can observe myself, including all of my bullshit, without needing to justify it. It’s a freedom that is entirely new to me. Strange that is has been sitting next to me all along and I just couldn’t perceive it, but that’s another topic in itself.

So why I am writing now? What has changed? The short answer is simple: I missed it. The long answer is, as always, messier.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about this current era of the internet. I have liked the internet increasingly less over the past 6 or 7 years, in a uniformly downward slope. From the early 2000’s until around 2013, I felt largely positive about the internet. I had my issues with it, of course, but they were drowned out by innovations and an ever-growing sense of possibility. I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when the scale tipped in the other direction for me, but along the way the cons started outweighing the pros. The internet was creating more and more anxiety, and instead of something I interacted with on my own terms, it began feeling invasive, like it was interrupting my life and throwing me curve-balls I didn’t ask for. I found myself processing things that, when I took a step back and really observed, meant very little to me. And then when I had a lot of personal upheavals around 2015 and my head got scrambled in ways I didn’t know it could, that sense of anxiety compounded wildly. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I started using the internet in almost self-destructive ways, all under some illusion it would distract me or make me feel better. It’s a very easy trap to fall into.

But notice how I only use the word “internet.” This was an issue. Somehow, when all that upheaval happened, a lot of things lost nuance and became conflated. The internet was suddenly all one thing to me. Emails, social media, even a text message or phone call — every form of contact felt the same. It was some combination of attention and harassment that I couldn’t differentiate between. So I gradually stopped engaging. I only posted things online when someone pointed out I probably should, and I didn’t look a the results. I didn’t want to know.

I’ve been peeling a lot of this apart lately. When all forms of digital communication felt the same, they all became irrelevant, or devoid of any sense of purpose beyond “Look at me!” And when you are in a space of not wanting to be observed, they all become harassment. To remedy this, I did an experiment. I tried each of the various methods, one at a time, and observed how I actually felt about them. And while they all felt different in their ways, the one that stood apart the most — zero contest here — was social media.

If you are here and reading this, then I can assume that you are probably aware of what I do. And you might have noticed that I am not on social media much. When I did my experiment between all the methods of communication (this blog post being the final one), my response to social media was far and away the most negative. To the point where all of the others did not create any anxiety once social media was removed from the equation. It was the sole source, and when it was active, it bled into everything else. But sorting exactly why has taken some time and thought.

Here’s where I am at with it …

There is an inherent dissonance with me and all the social media platforms. I have come to see them as attention-based economies (as opposed to content-based). Posting on social media is inherently asking for attention, and for that to be rated or quantified in some way. I have my feelings about what this means for society at large, but I’m keeping this personal for now. And personally, I really dislike asking for attention when I have nothing to say. If I am talking about work I’ve completed and would like people to know exists, then I don’t mind posting. I put a lot into anything I make, so it always has something to say built into it. So I don’t mind asking for attention in that scenario. But that’s not the nature of social media. Since we are the ones creating the content for the platform, it will always be more about quantity than quality.

As a working musician, I regularly get asked to be more visible, specifically on Instagram or Facebook. And when I have pushed about exactly why, the answer mostly boils down to this: if you don’t stay constantly visible and aggressively in people’s minds, you will be forgotten, or lost in the shuffle (not to mention that social media is increasingly used as a metric for your value and quality as an artist, and not just your popularity). And my rebuttal to that is, if I am so easily forgotten, then perhaps I’m just not a very effective song-writer. Perhaps people just aren’t interested in what I have to say, or the way I say it. If I have to post pictures of my food, spam my purchases, or build some highly-edited version of what my day-to-day life looks like just so people will remember that I write songs, then maybe I didn’t do enough to move them. Maybe I’m just not cutting it.

I realize how a statement like this might come off. I don’t mean it in a defeatist way. I only put out work that I am happy with, and how much that does or doesn’t resonate with others doesn’t change my sense of personal achievement. It’s interesting to see how it’s received, sure, but it’s not how I personally decide how successful a specific work is. I really just feel like I’m finally getting more honest with myself and where, and how, I like to participate. I far prefer making music videos, podcasts, and writing in long form. But social media not a place for depth. Even for myself, on the other side of the coin. The rare times I browse around on something like Instagram, I am far more compulsive than thoughtful. I exercise my thumb way more than my brain. But none of this is in my nature. I like depth. I like walking away with something to think about. I like puzzles. I like searching for connections, and attempting to find the limits of ideas. And I always have. I don’t like feeling compulsive and distracted. I don’t enjoy spending time thumbing through stuff that I have, at most, a passing interest in and walking away an hour later wondering what the point was, wishing I had read a book, or played a video game, or watched a tv show instead.

Or in other words: it’s not for me.

But I like this, right here. I like sitting and typing about things that have been on my mind. And I like that when I am done, it will sit on my personal website. It can be visited, but does not shove itself into anyone’s life. I am not pushing my thoughts into the space of unwitting bystanders, but instead inviting people to my mental rummage sale, should they be interested. And I don’t mind if people comment on it. I encourage it, actually. I have no issues reading and responding to comments under these circumstances, knowing they came here of their own free will and commented because they wanted to. In the same way, I am remembering that I like getting emails from people. I like letters, digital and physical, and how we interact with each other through them. They are clear channels of communication, words being volleyed between two parties like a game of catch between total strangers. I am realizing how much I prefer talking to people on the phone instead of texting, and how much more I like to get coffee with someone over any of these. And above all, I am remembering that they are not all the same, and I can approach them as I actually am, and I don’t have to conform due to some abstract sense of professional survival. And yes, I could very much be hurting myself or limiting my reach, but I am okay with that. Because I would rather fade away, or have to come up with something entirely new, than do things I don’t believe in for some desperate grab at relevance.

But that’s enough for now, I think. I will be writing about my actual work soon, as I have been really busy in the world of recording, mixing, producing, and in developing my own little label/production company. And I am back to working on a full-length record now that I am settled into one place, which is really exciting. It was fun for a change of pace to try some singles and EPs, but it’s not where my heart is. But I also wanted to give myself the space to start writing again. So from here on out, when I just have some ideas that I want to float into the world, for whatever reason, I will label the blog post with a date and the word “Thoughts.” Beyond that, I hope everyone is well.

-Ben