Tag Archives: recording music

There Is No Map

Do you ever get the feeling nobody has a map, that we’re all floundering, grasping at straws?

It feels like time is slipping away from me, that there isn’t enough of it to go around. I know that everything I choose to do now is important, will probably be why I am where I am ten years from now, although I have no idea for sure. I want to prove to 40-year old me that I will at least give my dreams a shot, stop poo-pooing them.

I have all of these ideas about what I should have done, how I should be succeeding, what steps I didn’t take…

But if I am honest, I wouldn’t be here without the there. If I had started recording my songs ten years ago, I would have recorded songs that were not as good as the ones I have now. Not sure if that would have been good or bad, but it is what it is.

I can measure myself using everyone I aspire to be as a yardstick, but the problem with this is that there is no other person who has lived the life I have lived, has the specific voice I have and can do what I need to do (whatever that is).

If I didn’t care, it wouldn’t matter. And I think that is the problem I see with all these new-age “accepting of your lot” ideas. I understand not fighting what you can’t fight, i.e, the whole serenity prayer, grant me the courage to accept what I cannot change, etc. etc, but I think that dissatisfaction is a necessary component for change.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m only now finally awake to the world around me, that I spent most of my life in a cloud, detached.

For example, had I never been dissatisfied with what back pain medication was doing to me, I never would have stopped taking it. I had a free ride, a doctor who approved a hefty dose of opiates. I could have continued living in a numb state of non-caring forever, having prescribed uppers to combat the downers, pills to wake me up, put me to sleep. Years could have slipped by without me even being conscious of it.

But I was dissatisfied with that reality. And so I took the necessary steps to change my lot, even though I thought it was impossible to do so, even though it took a long, long time to get better, to get back on my path.

I remember walking around after I stopped taking any substance whatsoever, when the fog finally started clearing from my brain, and feeling like a bundle of raw nerves. So this is what it’s like to feel, I said to myself. It was exciting and frightening.

What I’d learned was that numbing myself led to not only lack of fear or anxiety, but also lack of joy or progress. I was stuck in a grey unfeeling, non-descript world. It was my version of hell.

***

I don’t now where the line is exactly, the dissatisfaction to acceptance ratio, how much is too much of either, but I know that the world exists in a state of opposition. In all of its disparity and imperfection, it makes perfect sense: can’t have entropy without growth, can’t have happiness without pain, can’t have love without hate.

We seem to live within this binary ideal perspective, either this or that, one or the other, must not have anger, must not have fear, must accept both of them but not encourage them. Maybe anger and fear and pain are all necessary evils balancing out the love and acceptance and joy. If you weren’t angry you grew up without shelter, why would you fight to help others who don’t have shelter? If you weren’t fearful of what would happen if you picked up the bottle again, what would keep you from relapsing into alcoholism?

No person in this world, I don’t think, feels happy non-stop.

I could write a million songs about the loves I’ve lost.

I could write a repeating song about the love I have.

What’s the difference? They all exist. Our lives are here, now, and we can ascribe whatever meaning to them that we want to ascribe. We can focus on the memories we wish to focus on, yet we can’t always stop things from popping in, from affecting us, people from changing us, moments from turning us in different directions.

Am I A Nobody?

Am I a nobody?

Will you vote for Nobody?

The thought keeps me up late at night sometimes, especially when, like now, I’ve been burning through the limited supply of energy my body doles out to me, when all I want to do is crawl into bed and not write anymore, not fight to make money, not try to rise above my circumstances…

I think many people who do creative work feel this way at times. They pour their heart into something, or do it for the sheer enjoyment of the process, and then the doubt starts eating away at them, the “brain rats” as someone so astutely put it a while back.

My guitar. No. My guitar. No, you're no good at guitar, mine!

“Why am I doing this?” the voices say. “What’s the point? I’m not good. I’ll never amount to anything. What if I die and all I did was this thing, and I didn’t even succeed in making it be what I wanted it to be?”

I was talking yesterday about how it’s so hard to manifest what is in our heads in tangible reality. In a recent speech, Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (one of my favorite movies) and Being John Malkovich (not one of my favorite movies), said that for writers, writing is very hard. (The speech is here, I can’t embed it. Check it out, the guy is speaking truth.)

I take what he says for musicians as well. In the studio, I had some malfunctions. Good thing this is all a learning experience and I’m not taking myself too seriously, right? But my guitar wouldn’t stay in tune because, “dur,” I had restrung it mere days earlier due to life getting too busy. And because it kept going out of tune, I stopped being able to hear what in tune sounds like.

I’ve been playing guitar since I was 13 years old. I know how to tune a guitar. But for some reason, when I’m under pressure and I’ve been tuning for a long period of time, I stop hearing the notes. I fall into this tone deaf vortex. It used to happen to me when I was trying to learn to tune pianos. My dad would tune by listening to the warble of the note in the air and I couldn’t hear shit. A piano has three strings for each key. After an octave, I would give up. Give me tuning a guitar over a piano any day.

At one point, the engineer, Jack Douglas, who was teaching the class at the college where my friend gave me studio time, helped me tune my guitar. My friend poked his head in the door, “most expensive tuner you’ll ever get.”

Douglas was super patient. I was frazzled, and yet, he stood there for ten minutes, helping me tweak each note on my Fender, determined that I’d get it right.

Earlier in the day, the drummer who I paid to help out was helping me tune my guitar, too. And the guitar tracks turned out terrible in spite of my friend Jafar also helping me at various points throughout the day.

I’m the girl who can’t tune her guitar. How…cute. (Grimace)

***

Kaufman also said in his recent speech that we have to stop pretending we know everything. We’re afraid to make mistakes, to mess up.

Being afraid to make mistakes kept me from progressing outside the bedroom with my songs. Don’t get me wrong, I still wrote songs, I still practiced, but not with a mission. Of the songs I am working on now, most came about in the last year or two–the ones I really love.

But I still feel I am floundering, often, like I falling down an endless rabbit hole with no bottom, like I don’t know what I am doing.

I’m caught in a wheel, in the grind, I’m spinning my wheels, and I’m working on music regardless, with no particular direction except that I want to finish this EP and have something tangible I can show people when they ask, “Can I hear your music.”

And I’d like to play out. And I’d like to do some touring, small venues is fine. But one thing at a time. First, the EP.

I was looking back through my facebook music page the other day. About a year ago, I posted that I was wanting to record four songs, with bass and drums, and I had no idea how to do that.

It’s a year later. I’ve auditioned for bands, I’ve worked with a number of musicians, and now I’ve settled on working with one friend, who has been helping me learn through this process, and I’m totally grateful. It’s odd, out of all the people I auditioned for music, I ended up working with someone I was friends with when I was going to high school in Walnut Creek. Small world.

***

I’ve come a long way in the past few years. I’ve overcome many obstacles. I have a long way to go to be where I want to be with my music, to have my songs sound like I hear them in my head, and that freaks me out, but I’m trying to remember that this is supposed to be something I love, not something I have a gun to my head to do.

I feel often as if I have a gun to my head, and I need, urgently, to do this now. I hear voices in my head, people I knew from a past life saying, “You’ll never go anywhere with your music.”

I hear myself going, “You’re too old to do anything now, success in music is for the young and the pretty. Soon, you won’t be pretty, and you’re not really even young anymore.”

I’ve got some mean, stupid brain rats in there.

I’m not letting them stop me though, like they did in the past. If there’s one thing I’m doing better than I ever did before, it’s allowing myself to make mistakes so that I can improve. There’s no improving without making mistakes. No musician or writer exists in a vacuum always simply advancing with practice. No, there are back steps and forward steps.

When I had gotten out of reform school in Jamaica, I was climbing Mt. Diablo, behind my parents house. I was around 18 years old. I was at the top of this very steep hill, and I started sliding down, down, down, all the way to the bottom. I had been at the top a few seconds ago, now I was not. I had no idea in that moment how to get back up. Great, I thought. Now I’m stuck out here and nobody knows where I am (I had gotten deep into the foothills, there were no cell phones on my person at that time, we didn’t use them like we do now.)

I noticed that the whole side of the foothill was tiny little rocks that slid when you tried to climb up them. I started climbing, and had to experiment with footing. Eventually, I realized that if I took tiny little steps, one foot, the other foot, one hand, the other hand, I could get up, slowly, without all of the rocks sliding out from under me. There was no firm footing, just these baby steps.

I remember thinking that this was a lot like life. Look at what’s in front of you. One step at a time. Keep climbing, even if you slide back below where you started (which I have done, many, many times). Life is not a linear path.