Archive for November, 2008

Live at Rockwood, Wednesday night

We’re playing at Rockwood again on Wednesday night. Thinking about adding in ‘Burning a Horse’ and ‘Vicodin/St. Marys’ and swapping out ‘Don’t Look Away’ and maybe ‘The Mayo Clinic’. I listened to the first show on my headphones this evening on the train back from DC and took some notes. There were some beautiful moments but overall lots of room for improvement.

I am thinking the setlist will be something like:

1. broken bow

2. st marys

3. the northern bay

4. colorado

5. one more time

6. burning a horse

7. hold my heartache

8. if you see something

9. dirty white coats

10. all my friends

we’ll see how it turns out. try to make it. rockwood music hall, 10:30pm, wednesday, december 3rd. i plan on being there. there will be advance copies of the new record. it should be a fun thing.

I like this picture

Erecting the frame for the record. This is me and the family Brill recording at Paul's.

All art is exploitation

All art is exploitation. It’s all theft. It’s all profit from someone or something else’s reality. That’s just a thought that’s been rattling around in my brain recently. Every time someone writes a song or a poem or paints a picture and, especially, when someone takes a picture, it’s stealing for the sake of individual ego.

I’m okay with that. But I still find it interesting.

What you’re doing when you write something or sing something or paint something is that you’re claiming it for your own. Even if you say you’re not. You’re putting a focus and a context around your intepretation of an idea. You’re presenting people and ideas through a specific individualized lens and the point is that it’s your lens.

I think about that when I think about song lyrics and how they can refer to moments in life or ideas and how no matter what you say you are stealing from that moment or from that idea and claiming it as your own.

Mastering

I like putting lots and lots of stuff out and mastering is a process standing between me and my ability to do that effectively. And between records and projects with lots of different stuff in them, I don’t do it. So I forget how critical it is. But Joe is done mastering the new record and listening to these beautiful songs I remember how important the process is.

It’s like an image. Lots of closely bundled parallel lines. Those lines are all the different voices and tracks and instruments. Before you master, the sound is all bundled together like a tightly wound rope. Smushed, to put it indelicately.

But then what you do with mastering is somehow you create space where it didn’t seem like any was possible. So although Joe doesn’t mess with the overall mix and can’t influence individual tracks, you can hear all the little bits and pieces more precisely and with greater clarity than before. Like there’s a little enging in the middle of the coiled rope that is pushing apart the different pieces so you can get ahold of them.

Or like a trap door below the sound that opens up into a room of more sound where you didn’t think there was any room at all. It’s like that.

I remember thinking the same thing when the first Lipstik record was mastered (also by Joe). It had never sounded so good. Now, truthfully, it sounds a bit dated and I can hear the imperfections in some of the playing. But, in general, it opened up the sound completely on that record and the magician has done it again with this one.

Separately, it’s amazing and scary to think that I finished the first Lipstik record in July of 2006, over two years ago. I need to speed up the pace a little over here and put out some more finished music. I think I’ve got the unfinished thing taken care of. As I’m typing I’m listening to “Stay Where You Are” by Ambulance, in case you’re wondering. And there are flourescent lights on. And emails in the inbox. And it’s cold outside in New York.

Green Arrow

In the last days of university in Charlottesville, I’d often listen to ‘I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One’. The weather was getting warmer. I’d get in the car, often with friends, we’d drive around. All the routes and roads and past the pastures and horse farms on 22. Up to Monticello. Across from the house was Mountaintop Farm. We’d go up there to watch the sun rise and follow the curvature of the Earth. Feel it spin. Stare at the burnt crimson of the sun as it crept around the corner coming for us. Laughing.

There was one day I was driving back to DC and I was on 29 and I’d just graduated and had things packed up in the back of the car. I was listening to ‘Green Arrow’ and listening to the crickets chirping, both in that song and elsewhere, outside. Listening to the slide of the guitar. Feeling things slip away and flow through my fingers and hands.

What I mean to say is this: It’s really quite a lovely piece of music and you should take a listen, preferably in a warm summer night in the South, driving through Madison county, passing the concrete expanses of Sheetz and 7-11 and watching the cows stare at you from around the bend of the road and then coming upon Mountain Run Lake which is in Culpeper and near many car dealerships.

Give it a shot.

Tags: green arrow, i can hear the heart beating as one, yo la tengo