Laying It All Down

I’ve often heard that the key to success in the arts is to self-produce.  Don’t wait around for someone to discover your talent and back you financially, just get to work and get your stuff out there using whatever means you have.  Then, when opportunity does come knocking, you will be ready for it.  With this in mind, I decided to record some of the songs I’d written.  They were decent songs – I believed in them, but I wasn’t sure their full potential was shining through when I played them on acoustic guitar every Monday night at Playoff’s Sportsbar.  Taking them into the recording studio, where I could record drums, bass, vocals, and multiple guitar parts on separate  tracks (with as many tries to get it right as I needed) would allow people to hear them the way I heard them in my head.  Maybe someone would take notice of my songwriting prowess and… pay me to write more?  I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I would do with the recordings, and lord knows I was asked multiple times throughout the process “You’re spending how much?  And what is it going to get you in return?” (Chronology alert: I started while I was still living in Aiken).  Mainly, I was recording for recordings sake.  Painters paint and songwriters record.  I guess broke songwriters don’t record, and I came very close to becoming one as a result of my project, but that’s neither here nor there.

South Carolina isn’t exactly a recording mecca, but I had a few options as far as professional studios I could use.  Luckily, I knew a guy.  In my early teens, I took guitar lessons from a local guy named Shawn who could play lightning fast, Steve Vai style shred guitar.  He taught out of his house, where he had a makeshift recording studio set up in a spare room.  I never quite attained Steve Vai status, but my music knowledge and guitar technique improved, and I made a lifelong connection with a talented, knowledgeable guy – a real pillar of the local music scene.  Years later, through the magic of social media, I saw that he’d built a new house in a remote subdivision with a basement studio constructed to his specifications.  The space was designed specifically to be a music studio, from the wiring to the floorplan, and no expense was spared on equipment.  Based on the impressive photographs and my past experience with Shawn, I decided it was the ideal place to record some songs, so I called him up and booked some time.

I picked five songs to record, which is a pretty standard length for an EP.  It wasn’t hard to settle on which five to record because my entire catalog at the time only consisted of about seven, and I had clear favorites.  The entire process of recording them took roughly seven months, consisting of five sessions, spaced out by a month or so in-between.  In the first session, I played acoustic guitar over a metronome click track, capturing the basic framework of each song.  Then, Shawn recorded me singing the lead vocal part to each track.  These vocals served as a guide during the next session, when my friend Blake came in to record the drums (I know my limitations).  Once drums were recorded, I did a session for bass, a session for electric guitar, and a session for vocals.  Recording is a bit like building a house.  First, you have to lay down a foundation, which you then build upon floor by floor.  At the end, you put up a nice, clean façade when you mix it and master it.

I learned so much while recording, but man, it was a grueling process.  You pay by the hour for studio time, so there is a real pressure when you’re playing a guitar part or laying down a vocal track to do it right in one or two tries.  I found myself concentrating on a level that I had never attained before.  I also found that I was forced to confront my music in ways I never had before: connected to wires for long periods of time, standing alone in a vocal booth and shouting into silence while a guy in charge gave me directions through headphones.  After playing or singing my parts to the best of my abilities (and sometimes having to settle for something I wasn’t one hundred percent satisfied with), I would sit around for up to an hour while Shawn tweaked the sound waves I had just created.  This usually involved listening to clips of me singing or playing, over and over again.  This is a very naked feeling and it really makes one reckon with the reality of what they sound like, for better or worse.  It’s a bit like the scene in A Clockwork Orange where the guy is strapped to the chair with a mechanism holding his eyes open and is forced to watch things he doesn’t want to.

The main thing I took away from recording was an appreciation for creating something that was entirely up to me.  If I didn’t take the tracks home, scrutinize them, write new parts to add, and then get on the phone to set up a date to add them, no one was going to do it for me.  At the end, the reward was the satisfaction of having seen it through from start to finish.  Of course, I wanted to share it with people.  The next step was to determine how to go about doing that.

Athens

I visited Athens, Georgia exactly four times before deciding to pick up my life and move it there.  Not one of these visits lasted longer than twenty four hours, nor did I know a single person living there.  I first visited when I was eight years old, during the 1996 Olympic Games taking place in nearby Atlanta, Georgia.  My friend Walker invited me to a soccer game between Nigeria and Brazil which, possibly because of Eric Rudolph’s misdeeds, was being held in Athens’s Sanford Stadium, home of the Georgia Bulldogs.  The next visit was over ten years later, when my brother and I came to pick up his girlfriend from college and we spent the night barhopping.  Then, a few years later, during my stint at the publishing company, one of my favorite bands, Neutral Milk Hotel, reunited for a show at the legendary 40 Watt, so a coworker and I drove over.  This was the trip that opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of exciting, culturally relevant stuff was happening two hours down the road from home.  I started thinking about the music scene all the time and wanted to be a part of it.  I figured I should at least find an open mic to go play, just to prove to myself that it was possible.  I drove over one summer evening with my friend Eli to play a couple of songs at Hendershot’s Open Mic and met a cute girl while waiting to go on.  That was all I needed to make up my mind.

The first step was breaking the news of my plan to my parents and they surprisingly took it very well.  Neither really showed their hand, but I felt like my dad was proud that I was taking a bold leap, whereas my mom was sad I was leaving and worried about my well-being.  I don’t feel like I’m very good at explaining to people exactly how and why I made the decision to quit my job and move to Athens, even though it makes perfect sense in my head.  The general “why?” as in “why did I move anywhere, period,” is partly because I wanted to do a sort of hard-reset on my life, rebuilding it on different foundational values.  Creativity and openness as opposed to safety and comfort.  Also, I’d finally found my way into a creative medium that had escaped me for years, and I felt like the life I had was preventing me from fully exploring and experiencing it.  It was like finally finding a key to a beautiful mansion whose windows I’d been peering into for years, and then being called home anytime I went to explore it.  My view at that time was that a full-time job would doom me to a life as a hobbyist, and that to become a true artist, I needed to make sacrifices and free up time for art.  My views on this have shifted slightly, but that is a topic for another time.

So, why Athens, Georgia, as opposed to Nashville, Austin or Atlanta?  If you’re not familiar, Athens is known for a few things.  Primarily, it’s known as a college town, home to the University of Georgia.  “Don’t you hate living around all of those students?” is a question I hear a lot.  “Not really,” I answer.  Students are quite predictable and therefore easy to avoid.  Not to mention, of all the different “types” of people one could live among, “young energetic people seeking an education,” is far from the worst.  Though Athens mainly owes its existence, size and continued prosperity to the University to Georgia, it being a college town had very little to do with my decision.  The town part did, however.  With just over 100 thousand people, it’s right in my own personal Goldilocks Zone of city size.  All the amenities you could possibly need, but not so many people to make you feel like an insignificant speck of sand on a vast beach.  When I want to feel that way, I just drive to Atlanta which is a convenient hour drive down the road.

The other thing Athens is known for had far more to do with my decision to move here.  When I was a kid, I would ride around with my dad and hear songs by bands called R.E.M. and the B-52s come through the speakers of his Bronco II, sandwiched between songs by Led Zepplin and The Dire Straits.  Learning that the fertile ground which produced this groundbreaking art rock was basically a stone’s throw away in rural Georgia was mindblowing – something I still have trouble wrapping my brain around.  In the years that followed, I came to love Widespread Panic, Vic Chesnutt, Drive By Truckers, The Whigs, and Neutral Milk Hotel – several decades worth of music that spoke directly to my soul.  When I finally cracked the code and joined the hallowed club of songwriters and musicians, nowhere did it make more sense to pursue it further than Athens, Georgia.  I found some rommates on Craigslist, gave notice at work, packed up a uHaul trailer, and took off down I-20 on a new adventure.

Next Time:  Recording my first EP!

Backstory, Part 2

I started working at the publishing company in 2011, shortly after returning from a nine month stint in Southern California where I did an internship with Stampede Management – a company that mainly exists to manage Snoop Dogg’s career.  This that taught me I had no interest in music management, and that, yes, Snoop really does smoke that much weed.  Apart from the internship, the California period was essentially an extended exile from my life back east.  I lived with my parents (temporarily there for my dad’s job) and had no money, which equated to no social life.  I began exercising, seriously cut back on my collegiate drinking levels, and did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do with my life.  Around that time, I began to see Facebook posts from my best friend.  Now living back in our hometown on a hiatus from college, he had put together a band of what looked to be cool guys playing my kind of music: Neil Youngish Americana rock.  I will admit, I was more than a little jealous.  I have, at times in my life, been guilty of a rather defeatist attitude.  “There’s no one cool to play music with around here.  This place sucks.  Why even try?”  Now here was Dan, giving the lie to my preconceived notions, and making some pretty good music in the process.  “That’s it,” I decided, “I’m going to be in a band when I get back to South Carolina.  No more excuses.”

Dan flew out to California that fall and then the two of us drove my Chevy Blazer, loaded down with my belongings, across eight states, back to the old hometown.  By then, his band was dissolving, so the two of us began playing music together several nights a week, learning folk rock covers and Dan’s originals with me on banjo and him on guitar.  I learned how to sing vocal harmonies, we found a bass player and drummer through craigslist, and just like that, we were a band.  There was a bar and grill connected to Dan’s apartment where we started playing biweekly, packing it out on warm summer evenings, singing Bob Dylan tunes while the sun went down.  Seeing how our friends reacted to hearing Dan sing his own original songs was all the motivation I needed to finally finish one of my own and play it live.  It was an idyllic time, which of course meant it was doomed to end too soon.  Dan decided to visit Nashville one weekend, fell in love with it, and was living there within two months.

The band ended, but I was just getting started as a songwriter.  To me, music is what makes life worth living, and songwriters are akin to priests, helping us connect to the truly pure and divine.  I wanted to be one more than anything, and for years, the fact that I wasn’t caused me a great deal of personal stress.  Having a song under my belt gave me a feeling of purpose and fulfillment that I knew I would chase for the rest of my life.  I kept working at it through the beginning and end of another band and managed to increase my repertoire until I had a handful of originals.  Once again without a band, I began to play solo at local open mic nights, increasing my confidence and building a network of local musician friends.  Before long, I was offered a job hosting a weekly open mic at a bar in Aiken.  I gladly accepted, knowing the value a regular gig can have for a musician looking to build chops.  Through it all, I began to see that I had developed a skill which could sustain me wherever I might go.  I figured I could move to a city where I didn’t know a soul, find a place to play my songs, and instantly find folks who I had a deep commonality with.  When I finally made up my mind to leave my hometown, the next step was clear…

Backstory, Part 1

Follow your dreams, they say.  Do what you love, and the money will follow.  Decide what to be, and go be it.  You hear these things when you’re out there, living a life.  You overhear your dad’s lawyer friend offer some variation thereof to a newly graduated neighbor at a barbeque.  You hear these sentiments echoing through popular culture, reinforced by a never ending tidal wave of happy endings in indie comedies and soaring hooks in the summer’s hottest radio singles.  After a while, they sink in.  “This is it,” you say to yourself.  “This is my one crack at life.  I’ve got no excuse not to make it extraordinary.”  Let’s set aside the fact that, by definition, not everyone can have an extraordinary life, nor should they.  Ordinary is good and reliable – it makes the world go ‘round.  Let’s temporarily ignore the fact that unrealistic expectations and their tenacious little friend, disappointment, are what keep the purveyors of Marlboro, FritoLay and AstraZeneca flying first class.  Say you feel confident you’ve got a good shot at extraordinary.  Well, it’s easy, right?  Just pick your target, work hard, and boom, dream attained.  Spend a little time on social media, and you will probably start to believe it’s this easy.  It’s not.  The problem comes when you realize how vague your dreams truly are.

From the time I was a fresh faced high school student, the future I pictured in my head has included the following careers: record company A&R man, advertising copywriter, songwriter’s songwriter, stand-up comedian, comedy writer, novelist, magazine editor, screenwriter, movie director, adventurous reporter – I’m probably leaving a few out.  Sure, there are commonalities here.  I clearly want a job involving arts and culture where I am paid for my creative output.  The problem is, each of these have seemed equally appealing at various times, and so I committed to exactly zero of them.  As a result, I found myself at age twenty five, living in the town where I was born, with a middling job at a publishing company.  “Publishing,” you’re probably thinking, “that sounds perfect for someone like you.  Reading book submissions, working with authors, copy editing their work, etc.”  Well this wasn’t that.  There were no authors to work with because our books consisted, not of sentences and paragraphs, but of lists.  Lists of, get ready for it…lawyers.  Want some light entertainment to read at the beach?  Sorry, we can’t help you.  Need to find a good DUI lawyer in St. Paul?  We’ve got you covered.

I was occasionally called on to utilize my English degree, my writing and editing skills,  and the little Spanish I had absorbed from a minor and a study abroad.   Mostly though, I entered data and listened to podcasts.  It was an office where, not only could you get away with wearing headphones all day and chatting with coworkers via instant message, it was the expectation.  Upward mobility seemed limited, if not impossible.  Perhaps if I had buckled down and made my way into more of a sales role, I could have slowly risen to the next rank, but then where would I be?  Still in the small South Carolina town where ambitious twenty-somethings are far outnumbered by geriatrics and jockeys.  Don’t get me wrong, I was comfortable there.  I made ample money, enough to for a vacation to Costa Rica, and lived in a pretty killer pad overlooking a golf course.  I lived a mile from my parents and ate a home cooked meal at their place at least once a week.  The comfort was precisely the reason I needed to get the hell out.

When I played out the tape in my mind, I could clearly see a scenario in which I turned thirty while working the same job, living in the same apartment, having barely scratched the surface of a career in the arts.  How would I feel about missing the boat simply because I fell into a situation that was comfortable?  In the hours of podcasts I listened to, where successful comedians, writers, actors and musicians told their stories, a common theme was abundantly clear.  No one ever found their way into a great creative career without making a leap, putting themselves out there, and risking abject failure.  It was time for me to give up the comfort and venture into the great unknown.  The question was, how?