imagine me holding up my fingers to make those quotation marks.

dear reader, i certainly use the above term for lack of a better one, but i’m not sure i really believe it.

some of you know i’ve been working a bit to prepare for Real Mixing of The Album, and that’s been an interesting use of time lately. first off, i need great big blocks of time to allow for the nearly two-hour round trip to and from the studio and still have enough when i’m there to get something done; the actual work is a bit of a challenge itself, since i’m prepping each song’s file for best and most convenient use by another human being (always something of a crap shoot) and i admittedly hate pro tools; last is the fact that i’m spending hours (HOURS) making changes that the average human is unable to detect through normal listening.
of course, these are all morning hours, since i’m in the busiest fall ever of my day job, and my day job is actually an afternoon and evening job. this all adds up to pretty long days with lots of time in the car to think about what i’ve done.

incidentally, pre-mixing is what i was going to be doing this morning, but it didn’t work out. so you’re all going to suffer from the affliction of this post. i haven’t even gotten to the real subject yet.

and the real subject (the astute postmodern reader ought not to take offense at my careless words) regards some soundtrack work that i, like a crazy person, have of late agreed to do for a friend’s film. the bulk of it needs to be done, of course, in the same short present timeframe as everything else.
what is a beleaguered artist to do in these trying times but go home, sit down at his or her organ, and plug his or her radio and monosynth into a ring modulator; out of the sums and differences a beauty is sure to arise. i did this for some time yesterday, and i’ll admit, it did help. i was able to picture the footage and hear something sweet, albeit on the far-off edges of my imagination.
i don’t as yet have any actual songs, though, and i wonder if this sense of working out something internally is real. am i progressing–”proceeding”–through a series of steps that, though unobservable, will cause in me a song to be written? (this might be one for the origins debate; emergence of life in microcosm, anyone?) is the low-volume electronic mayhem i claim as a “process” really the primordial ooze of an intentionally structured 4 minutes of music?
the rational observer, whom i am not but i play one on tv, answers no. nein. i have no process. i write entire songs while driving and without picking up an instrument. in the eccles days, i wrote exclusively on a typewriter. now, i stare at formulas for gain of an op-amp and frequency cut-off of a filter (in terms of capacitor and resistor values) until i am inspired to write a song about the parity of populism and elitism. follow me? i hope not. i make no sense.

and i’d be willing to bet i’m not the only one who tells this story. the truth is that i have a sleepless creative nature, and i hang around with it until it gives me a song, or part of a song that i clumsily complete in time. all i can really say with certainty is that this happens often enough for me to be in a band.

hopefully, it’s also often enough to complete a soundtrack in three weeks. while i mix.

(thanks for reading.)