Working in a Vacuum

I’m working with my friend and producer Nancy Hess on two new songs right now. The mini-single/EP/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is called “Singer/Songwriter”. There are two songs. One is called “Singer” and the other is called “Songwriter”. We’re maybe 2/3 of the way through the first tune.

It’s a 7 minute aggressive dance song. It’s about escapism and fantasy and about romanticizing delinquincy and all these fables we tell ourselves about running away from our problems and how everything will be good if we can just and, of course, as Gus McCrae says in Lonesome Dove, “life in San Francisco is still just life”.

So this is a somewhat new stylistic direction from the last officially recorded and released thing we did which was the debut record produced by Paul Brill and in a genre that I call “landscape pop” which is in the vein of folk-rock. This is pretty much straight-ahead electronic dance music with the points of emphasis and differentiation being my voice and my singing and a little bit of acoustic guitar. But the whole thing is pretty aggressive and dark and messed up.

Part of the experiment is that I am trying to resist the temptation to send the songs around to a bunch of people before it’s done. That’s what I usually do. I start floating rough mixes to people and it’s really just insecurity. It’s me needing/wanting to hear back “Wow this is great!”. For this thing, I don’t want anyone to hear the songs until they’re completely finished. Until they’re ready to start hitting the blogs and getting pushed by Team Clermont (assuming they want to work on the project) and until the thing is completely done. Until then, I don’t want people to hear a lick.

Why? I guess because I’d like to see what happens if me and Nancy just completely trust our own judgement and intuition and proceed apace and continue to work and tinker on it until the two of us feel it’s finally and completely done.

But the flipside of that is that insecurity inside of me begins speaking with a somewhat louder and more persistent voice. The outside voice. It says, “What if this thing is terrible?” and, “What if nobody likes it?” and “What if people just think it’s bad dance music and not anything particularly interesting?” Those are some loud voices. But part of this whole endeavor is to see if I can shut out those voices and just relax and think and use my own judgement and Nancy’s and if we can build something beautiful that we love without needing feedback or reassurance from anyone else.

Again, the drawback is that there is a potential that we could put in so much time into this thing and so much effort and then release it out into the world and hear nothing back or hear negative things back or feel like we failed in some way. And, you know, you can feel the same way about anything, I suppose. But, again, this is slightly and subtly different.

Should be interesting.

Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction

Next week, we’re playing our first gig at Piano’s on the Lower East Side. I’m not sure what the sound will be like but I do know that it’s a great club with a great atmosphere. As part of that gig, I decided to do something different and, rather than just get up there and play a show, incorporate a little theater into the show, and perhaps more broadly, the idea of the show.

To that end, we’re calling this next group of shows “An Autumn Symposium”. At first, that’s all it was going to be. Just a little branding mechanism. Something to link the show that we’re playing next Wednesday and then the subsequent gig that we’re playing at Rockwood on Thursday, December 3rd at 9pm.

But then I was remembering that Bronwen, one of the singers in the band and a teacher during the day, had spent all this time a few months ago putting together a course reader for her students and the beginning of the school year. And then I was remembering the old days when John used to work at The Copy Shop and you’d go there or to the book shop above it to pick up your course reader for class and how you’d have all these photocopied pages in your hand, excerpts from books and articles, how that experience felt cool and home-made and like your teacher or professor had spent some time actually thinking about things and was leading you on this strange photocopied path through some place new.

So, anyway, I decided to make a course reader myself and I decided on two lessons for these two shows and the first lesson is going to be “Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction: Themes from Saul Bellow” and I got in touch with noted cultural historian, Frederick Pettigrew, to write an introductory essay. We had coffee on the Upper West Side by Columbia where he teaches. And I told him I was looking about some of the ideas that I had and that I was looking for some kind of introduction to the whole thing, maybe like Nat Hentoff wrote on the sleeve of some Bob Dylan records I remember. You remember those essays that people would write on records in the 60s and 70s. They’d be all beat prose and poetry. Rambling run-on sentences and you’d imagine some horn-rimmed glasses guy with a fuzzy goatee, smoking cigarettes and drinking and sleeping with his students and he’d be a person that people referred to as a “cat” and he’d frequent the jazz clubs and his apartment would be very messy and there would be books everywhere. He’d have written one great novel and then years later a spartan little book of poems and then he’d be working on some translation of an obscure German writer that you’d never heard about and your heart kind of sank when he told you that was what he was working on because it was the same old story, as they say and as you know. That story being the story of squandered youth and unrealized potential.

Doctor Pettigrew understood what I was saying and he wrote this great little essay that you’ll get to read later. And the point of the whole thing is both silly (me being weird) and somewhat serious. And it really does relate to notions of heroism in fiction and what it means and how maybe we misrepresent things second of all and first of all we tell stories to make ourselves the hero. Because we are working our way through life with this concept of heroism which is also about mortality. It’s about meaning. It’s about, “There must be a narrative here that has me doing something heroic at its climax and ultimate moment and that must be why it’s okay that I’ll die and evaporate or dissolve into the earth one day.” And then some older people reading this will perhaps scoff or laugh. Maybe a small chuckle. They’ll say, “Geez, Sam is really dark and a downer and why’s he got to be so darn melancholy.” Which is maybe true but, of course, missing the point. I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not saying, “It’s so sad that we’re going to die.” I’m saying that people have these concepts of narratives and they give their lives stories and stories have protagonists and the reasons are because the time is finite, not infinite, and we want there to be a story to our lives and a plot.

And in the midst of that are storytellers – singers and songwriters and writers and producers and creative people and also everyone – and we tell big stories and weave in larger narratives and try to make big human truths from these things and the other point of the idea, and specifically pulling from Saul Bellow, is that there are always more sides to a story than the one being presented. And life isn’t neat and doesn’t fit in boxes with brown ribbons up on the shelf in the hall closet. You can say, “Oh, that’s my youth” or something to that effect but that’s now how it works in reality. And when you do say, “Oh that’s my youth” or something to that effect, maybe you shouldn’t be trusted. Because, whether it’s a book or a song or a film or a bunch of people sitting around the metaphorical campfire, you’re still presenting just one side of that story. And it’s not good or bad. We’re all just being human. It just is. And it is and is and is.

So, anyway, that’s what we’ll be presenting in this course reader next Wednesday and there are excerpts from books I’ve been reading. One of them is Becker’s “Denial of Death” that my friend, Mary Ellen, gave me. And then others are from the Bellow books I’ve read this year. And then some stuff from Rilke because that’s always good and, as cliche as it may be, the guy dropped some very beautiful knowledge and reality in his letters. And a few other things. And the first 20 people will get a copy for free and they’ll be strange and weird and you probably won’t read all the way through but you’ll maybe pick up one or two things and then it’s also art and it will have traveled its way into your life somehow.

Enjoy yourselves, mates.

Interview: John Patrick Hastings

Today, we released the Processor Remix of the song, The Mayo Clinic, by John Patrick Hastings. Hastings is an LA-based experimental composer and musician. As part of the remix project, I’m going to do short interviews with the remix artists to give people some background on the song and the music. I didn’t do one for Nancy Hess but I’m going to and then we’ll get to Alex Lauterstein and a bunch of the other artists that are working on these tunes.

Interview with John P Hastings

1. Describe your background and how you came to be working in music?

I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and starting playing music when I was 13 years old. I was initially influenced by punk music and the D.C. scene and eventually started my own band in high school. That band played and toured throughout my college years before breaking up about 8 years ago. I drifted about, playing in other bands and such until realizing that playing rock and pop music, while certainly enjoyable, was no longer what I was really interested in. I went back to school and began studying music again and now I primarily compose longer form music to be performed by various ensembles.

2. Who are your primary influences?

What sparked my initial move into different realms of music and music making was Brian Eno (as he is for many musicians). Just from him you can move to so many different places, his work with Bowie and U2 obviously, but also Krautrock bands such as Neu! and Harmonia, minimalists such as La Monte Young and Steve Reich, and even to modern art and design. So he was a biggie for me. And since going back to school two composers have influenced me in a big way, James Tenney and the previously mentioned La Monte Young. The influence of Young is music as life, literally. He creates tonal environments, these sound spaces that people’s lives move through. With some of his works lasting 4 to 6 hours you really are experiencing your life in a musical fashion. James Tenney, who died in 2006, was someone who created music conceptually wound into the physical properties of nature. His influence has instilled in me a sense of logic and structure that might not have been there before.

3. What ideas were you working with on this remix? What story or stories or images were you evoking or conjuring?

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Pitchfork

Every once in awhile it’s important to point out something that might be obvious. Actually, maybe it’s not but I figured I’d do it anyway.

Ryan Schreiber and the folks at Pitchfork are the Rolling Stone of the Internet generation. They are a defining cultural force and, as flawed as some elements of the site are, the fact is that they have created something very very special and, in some ways, represent all that’s good about the Internet and about modern music.

Think about it.

Pitchfork has created a community and an awareness for music that few had heard before. They laid the groundwork for a vibrant community of music blogs and serve as an organizing principle and constraint against which other sites and voices can push or pull. Every weekday they bring attention and notice to dozens of different artists that might never have a voice before and, because they’re tough and discerning and serious about music, their reputation and their credibility is basically intact many years after the site was originally started.

It’s really something that’s rather incredible and special.

In the era of the major record labels, and even with the few mini-majors focused on independent music, options for an independent band to build a fanbase and a community were very limited. What’s worse, the pressures on those bands were all pushing them towards the middle. The old wolves of the music industry still had power in that era. When distribution channels were limited and moguls controlled what you heard and the whole thing was so depressing. That was a bad time. I don’t care if they were making money. A bunch of douchey A&R guys running around clubs and music festivals, too scared to sign anyone, too scared to do anything but their asses kissed by desperate artists.

But in this day and age, things are very different. And Pitchfork has a lot to do with it. Now, the examples are bands like Animal Collective, Arcade Fire, The Knife, Grizzly Bear. Yes, those bands are still all signed to record labels. Record labels with in-house publicity departments and more push than the independent artist.

But nevertheless, the aspiration these days is not about being more mediocre. The aspiration, at least for me, is not about trying to fit into someone else’s idea about what the music is supposed to sound like. At least someone I don’t care about whose ideas about music are banal and boring and old. Instead, the goal is to be different enough to be recognized. Different enough and honest enough and real enough to get noticed by a site like Pitchfork.

Of course, at this point, I’m kind of bummed that the new record hasn’t gotten reviewed by those guys. And I still feel like I’m on the outside looking in for the major bands out there that all seem to know each other and remix each other’s songs and play in each other’s bands and what not. I still don’t know Zooey Deschanel.

But for my mission to be to continue to try and do something different and innovate and be special and unique. For that to be the goal and have Pitchfork as an organizing principle against which I can help measure things. And know that, if anything, the reason that the record hasn’t gotten reviewed yet isn’t because it’s not mediocre enough, but because it’s not strikingly different enough. Well, if we’re going to have a paradigm, this seems like the much healthier one.

And it’s not just me.

Pitchfork has established independent music, good music, as the dominant force on the Internet. Maybe I live in an echo chamber but from where I sit I see Pitchfork establishing the dialogue and the touchtstone for the majority of music blogs and music websites. Look at the top bands on Hype Machine. They’re all independent. They’re all interesting. They’re all doing something strange or weird. Hype Machine aggregates blogs and music blogs grew up as satellites in orbit around Pitchfork.

And the result is that the conversation about music on the Web is interesting and open and inclusive. Not as inclusive as I would want (really just meaning I want to be other side of Pitchfork’s velvet rope) but inclusive enough nonetheless. There is an ecosystem and it’s built around good music and people that care about music.

From where I sit, music is doing more than fine. It’s doing great. Even if the music industry isn’t doing well and a bunch of old gray-haired dudes are reading Bob Lefsetz and tearing their hair out and trying to think of where the next Eagles are going to come from. Music does not depend on Irving Azoff or Jimmy Iovine or Clive Davis. There is a world upon which they have no influence.

I’ve started buying music and listening to music at places other than Pitchfork but the site is still the dominant influence on what I listen to and, through the community table at which P4K sits at the head, I’ve heard bands like Arcade Fire and Deerhunter and Bon Iver and everything else that I listen to these days.

Even if they’re snobs. Even if the long-form album review seems antiquated. Even if they should allow comments and don’t. Even if the scores are totally arbitrary. Even if there are so many reviews that even if I did get a review, without a Best New Music designation, I doubt much would happen instantly. Even with all that.

They’ve done a good thing. An important thing. Kudos.

Every once in awhile it’s important to point out something that might be obvious. Actually, maybe it’s not but I figured I’d do it anyway.

Think about it.

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Prices and Things Organic

I majored in Econ in undergrad and always appreciate the clarity of economic thinking as a problem solving tool. Not to say I’m an economist. But I believe, generally, in the power of prices and the power of markets to articulate and communicate the value that a society or community places on a specific action or good. All the regular stuff notwithstanding. Meaning, I also believe that there needs to be a rule of law and there needs to be a justice system and that the legislative branch and the executive branch should work to provide a solid framework and underpinning to the markets so that the relevant actors can work together with some level of confidence.

All that being said, at the end of the day, and again with all those other things acknowledged and notwithstanding, prices are important things. They are signals. They are representations. They communicate something.

So, as much as I want to get on board with all my lefty pals and cohorts who bemoan the state of the food industry, and talk with conspiratorial glances about the corn lobby and how evil everyone is and how bad fast food is and how we don’t even know what we’re eating and god isn’t it awful and I don’t want to harm the chickens or the cows, etc. As much as some of that is true. And the food industry is best not inspected too too closely because we’ll be fearful of what comes out.

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Friction

Seth Godin had a post asking whether Craigslist should charge $1 for posted ads and how that might impact the service. We know what Chris Anderson would say. He’d say that “information wants to be free” and that that level of friction might destroy the service. Gladwell would counter that information doesn’t want anything. It’s not a person.

And the bottom line would be, as Fred has pointed out in the past, that there shouldn’t be a philosophical approach to these ideas but a practical one. And if there are businesses that can get away with charging something for content that others give away for free then have at it. We should rigorously experiment with whatever works, dispensing with any kind of dogma about what “information” wants and instead focus on what kinds of businesses we can build and what kinds of value we can deliver to our customer or, er, um, fans.

This appears to be a central question underpinning the Web.

What is the level of friction that we can introduce and how does that level of friction differentiate between people that actually value something and people that don’t?

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