Where it lands
Originally published at A schism in your day. Please leave any comments there.
Sometime around April, Erik contacted me from Hong Kong and told me that this summer, he wanted to put together an album of original music. It’s something we haven’t done since the old Morning Star days of the early 90’s.
Those days of four-tracks and cassette tapes and gigging the bars around KW died inexplicably after the last album we cut, a beast called “Night Protector”. I’ve sometimes wondered what exactly happened. I think it boils down to ‘life’. Ben, our lead guitarist, went off to work, and would eventually start a family and virtually disappear. Erik and I both went back to school to get our respective degrees. Erik did that in another city and therefore was pretty distant. He followed that up with a whole bunch of globe trotting in the form of four years worth of teaching overseas. Meanwhile, I started in on my career and life kept chugging on. Music became a periphery and highly occasional thing to do. I guess that we sort of outgrew it.
Well, I dunno. Maybe “outgrew” is the wrong word. Maybe it’s more like “low priority”. As far as I know, it never left any of us. Ben took some additional lessons, and I hear he still plays from time to time. Erik went off and joined another band for a while, and then continued to diddle in other stuff. Not only did he improve with the bass, but also picked up keyboarding skills and guitar, as well as a strange and wonderful aptitude for orchestral arrangements. I started feeding my gadget freak/computer needs by pushing music production into realms that Morning Star never dreamed of. I’d rope Erik in from time to time to show him the latest and greatest, and very slowly, he and I started using fully digital recording capabilities to make some music. Cover tunes were always the fun thing to do… very little came of creating original material after Morning Star stopped doing their thing. I guess I felt pretty creatively lost, and so I didn’t write any new lyrics, and Erik didn’t have anything to build his music around as a result.
But I guess it was building to this, and that’s a good thing. The learning curve on digital music production is steep, and I think I’ve finally got it… for the most part. Erik’s practically bursting with music dying to be made manifest, and I have been stewing in the warm, wonderful waters of absolutely brilliant lyricists for a while now. I totally abandoned the popular music scene because, frankly, I found all the top forty stuff either painfully trite or blatantly offensive (in other news, thank god). I decided to stay a little off the beaten path, and I’ve been listening to either classics or indie folk stuff. Some lyricists bring tears to my eyes. I’ve been hopeful that maybe someday, I’ll be able to write something even half as good as they do. I think that maybe that’s what’s kept me from putting pen to paper lately… fear of mediocrity, or worse, stupidity. But more and more I hear Myagi saying, “If come from inside you, always right one…”
So, around April, I found myself looking at all the tools I needed to create an album like some kind of time traveler who has all the current technical skill, but lacks in practical experience by about 15 years. I started to write, and I’ve found the process to be a little good, a little bad. While I don’t think I’ve written anything particularly good yet, it’s getting easier to write, which can’t be a bad thing. I sent some stuff off to Erik, who jumped on it like cat on a particularly fat mouse.
We set up a studio in the basement of my mom’s house (oddly, maybe appropriately, the locale of the studio sessions for Morning Star’s first and second demo tapes) and got to work.
One thing’s certain: cutting an album in a summer is so not happening. Gone are the days when Morning Star showed up with material and had a full album in two intensive weeks. It took us over a month to complete just one song! Mind you, there was still a little learning where technical elements are concerned, and in the days of four tracks that you needed to ping-pong, I never had Erik saying things to me like, “OK, we need three acoustic guitar tracks, three electric guitar tracks, a bass, two drum tracks, a strings section, a percussion section, vocals, harmonies, and a few miscellaneous noise tracks where we can talk and add some sound effects.” It’s absolutely preposterous to imagine such a request in the early 90’s. And yet the Mac was able to do just that, and barely even cracked a sweat. I’m no less than blown away at just how far music production for the little hobby-dude has come in just 14 years. The point here though is that the more you throw in, the harder it is to orchestrate and mix everything, and the longer it’ll take.
Although we’re still undecided about how much to keep under wraps until the whole thing is done (probably in a year or more, considering the time it took to do this one), we did decide to share this first effort. I’d really love to have some feedback, so if you’re so inclined, hit comment.
The song’s called “Where It Lands”. Inspired in part by a Ben Folds song, but mostly just me and my little environmental quirks. Hell, before the Morning Star days, Erik and I recorded a song called “Time To Clean Up Your Act” which had the same idea, although quite a bit more… rough in production values.
I wrote this one mostly sitting at the café 1842. I initially intended it as a “first attempt” at writing again, not as the first single from our project, but Erik ran with it.
Now that this is done, I’m feeling the bug a little more. I may just sit down and put some stuff together all on my own. My solo stuff tends to be less musically mature, and less produced, but I still like it from time to time. Think I should give it a shot?