underneath the flood

I woke up with the sun this morning.  I didn't mean to, but after failing for several hours to nod off again, all the while allowing trivial things to gnaw away at me, I accepted that I was awake, got out of bed, and started a load of laundry.

Don't get me wrong, everything is going really well, but sometimes that's when you worry the most. I mean, when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, right? So I'm not generally concerned then, but when it's all going good, I tend to worry about all that goodness that I have to possibly lose.  I guess I worry about how to hold on to it, and I don't sleep and don't even enjoy it.  How lame is that? Worry is such a useless thing.

Yesterday I heard Underneath The Flood on the speakers of the little two room studio that I have been spending my days at.  We did have two twelve hour tracking days on Tuesday and Wednesday at a crazy nice Hollywood studio though, where I saw the sun only on Wednesday and for only fifteen minutes, where Motorhead was tracking next door, and when I made some joke about Sheryl Crow having played the very piano I was sitting at, the studio assistant chimed in and killed it, "Actually she's definitely played that piano." We tracked all the bass and drums for all the remaining songs, but I tracked Underneath live with acoustic and upright bass and vocals, just a few takes. And I was so excited with what I heard yesterday with fresh ears.  It was just as I wanted it, full of flaws, full of pushing and pulling, so imperfect it felt perfect to me because I hit the feeling I intended, and was so proud and relieved.  There is no pro tools plug-in to fix feeling.  

I had been working on that song when I signed to Capitol.  I had the melody and the chords months before, but I wrote the lyrics that week.  I was getting my first taste for what the music industry really is, which is pretty much what we all assume it is, but seeing and feeling it for the first time, it sort of fucked me up.  I mean, any industry is about money, but art for the sake of commerce didn't quite click.  I felt pulled in all these directions by all of these people in my life, and everyone wanted something and I wanted everyone to have something and I had this feeling that Capitol would crumble before they could release my album, but I took the chance regardless and it did crumble, but everyone did get something and I got this song, this song that in my own ears is one of the most beautiful things that I will ever create, and hearing it for the first time, a song that would never fit on the radio or in a commercial or anywhere but on my own album, an album that probably not that many people will ever even hear, I turned to Mark and said, "Screw hit songs, this is it."  And that is it!  I waver sometimes, but I have taken so much time and exhausted so much effort to make this album just for me. Someone posted a comment the other day under one of my posts saying, simply, "you think you're great," and sitting there and listening to that song for the first time, a song that I had been working two years to record in a studio, well, I couldn't have said it better. Whether you let it show or not, despite all the times of doubt, you gotta be your biggest fan. 

I saw Jamie Lidell last night.  It was such a relief from the arms-crossed indie rock shows that I am so used to.  There were so many people dancing, dancing because they couldn't help it, and on stage that guy was doing what seemed to be exactly what he was put on earth to do. I wouldn't be surprised if he was having more fun than anyone else in the room, and that made me so happy.  That is just how it should be.

all good things

(I realize that none of what is happening on this page makes sense to anyone reading this, but this is what is happening inside my head right now. These are all good things, just crossing stuff out when certain parts are finished)

(I have to make a new list now though.  There is still so much left to do)

progress

practice

Working my way through Every Time I Leave (I Leave For Good)

L.A.

 ...is grey today.

i think

Think I may have just cut I've Been Down from that list. Not that anyone has heard it.

...or all of the others.

I think the album will be about half slower songs and half mid and up tempo stuff, mostly too heady for it's own good with a few lighter songs for some breathing room, about a third six/eight, a lot about girls, a little about the country, a lot of life realizations, a lot of trying to explain, a lot of running away and coming home and making mistakes, a little anger, a little happiness, a decent amount of hope, and probably a lot of sadness, only a few big guitars, a lot of mellotron, constant acoustic, and a bunch of stuff tracked live.

I think it will be something like that.

,

but who knows

songs

parking lot show

My friend Ashley recently gave me a video she recorded in April 2007 when I played a short acoustic show in the parking lot of Chain Reaction in Anaheim for a handful of people that missed our set.  I put a couple songs online.  

Georgia, Can You Hear Me?

The Sun

Dead Cliche

MAN that feels like a long time ago. I don't even wear that sweater anymore.

Videos!

While running errands and getting settled yesterday, I finally remembered to buy a cord to connect my video camera with my computer so I can post some videos from the studio (fingers crossed that I have the camera running when anything interesting is happening).

When I got home, I started digging through a couple tapes of old tour footage. There is a lot of moving highway, fields and trains and bridges and buildings drifting by through dirty windows, but I managed to find a few gems. I figure I'll post those over the next few days.

Here is comedian/rapper MC Chris sharing his feelings on STN:
(from our tour with him, and Piebald, March 2007)

this is it

I woke up in the city this morning and walked out through the streets, all still trashed from the night before, from all the people blown in by the heat wave, flooding the sidewalks, yelling and laughing and stumbling, still in their beds as I woke, dangling on the last few threads of sleep before the alarm came slashing through.... 

I passed the meter maids making first rounds and unlocked my car, the sound of metal gates raising around me.  I was on no coffee, little sleep, and every sound, every image, every sensation, had such resolution, such vivid importance.  The sun broke through between the buildings and splashed on my dirty windshield.  Chinatown was bustling and the gears downtown were just beginning to turn.  I rolled the windows down and the morning was still cool, still waiting to burst, and on the bridge, the bay shimmering and the haze rising to each side, I reminded myself that a good moment, no matter where or when, is the best of what life has to offer.

Then, back in the east bay, I slept, and then I packed everything, and made the rounds again and again, looking for anything that I might want to have with me, anything I couldn't live without, but most everything I need never leaves my suitcase, I never fully unpack.  I have my guitars, and my computer, and the few clothes I actually wear.  There isn't much else.  

Looking around, I saw the big piece of poster-board leaning up against a wall, passes stuck to it from the days I worked in the kitchen at The Fillmore, lists of songs from the last five years with notes beside them, a list of record labels that had called about Charmingly Awkward, all besides Capitol crossed out, and notes scrawled long ago in permanent pen with such determination, such need, now making little sense.  All of this seemed so distant, but it reminded me that I am doing what I had set out to do.  The meaning of that gets lost in the routine.  It shouldn't, but it does.

I'm in LA now.  This is it.  I'll be here for the next four or five or six weeks - until the record is finished.  I drove all afternoon and evening, the same old drive, and arrived and unloaded into my sublet, and now as I write this, the resident dog is curled up beside me on the bed.  I had made calls.  There are options.  There are bars, and parties, and laughing voices carrying in through the window, but I'm exhausted.  I'm going to sleep.

the parenthetical year

I have to write one more song for this record.  I have declared several times that I am finished writing it, but the problem with taking a year make an album (for so many reasons I had not expected), is that you change so much in the course of a year.  Everything from my taste to my outlook on life has changed a bit each day, and I want to say it all!  And right now I know that I have one more song to write, and that is a happy song.

When I was a kid, a year was such a long time.  I can hardly express it, but I feel like I lived a lifetime before being enrolled in kindergarten, and I feel like another lifetime passed as I made my way through each school year, doggedly trying to wake up each morning, worrying about the trivial things, the tests and assignments that came and went and came again and went again, and when spring hit, keeping track of the days, and minimum days, and holidays, left in the school year, and graduating and going off to college, and going on tour, and changing schools and quitting school, and recording, and getting flown around the country and then touring for a full year, and then...

...at the beginning of June, last year, it was over.  That stretch.  They say you have your whole life to write your first record, but what they don't tell you is, once you've finished that record, and the cycle on that record, that life is over.  And come last June, when I was spit out of it, the time that had once moved so slow, began to race. 

I was left with only one direction to begin this next stretch.  It was time to make a new record, that's all.  I didn't know where to live, or where to begin, and I had all of these songs that I had written on the road, all of these songs that had been outlets for things I couldn't express in a van with people I had to be civil with, all of these songs that had been little exorcisms of all of these feelings that came from all these elements that were out of my control.  All of these angry little songs.  I didn't think they were angry at the time, but my friends did, and my management did, and none of those people ever offer criticism of my stuff unless they really think I need to hear it.  I listened to my year-old demos a little while back.  Man! I was pissed off.

Now, I think I'm entering that next phase of life, the phase I've heard 'adults' talk about for so long, the phase where you blink and a decade has passed, cause I don't know where the hell this last year went.  And if my existence were a short paragraph, for the last twelve months I've been stuck in parentheses. I've just been getting everything together, cutting the fat, laying a new foundation and setting new goals.  I've done and seen and experienced so much, but I don't yet have anything to show for it.  Sometimes it just takes a while.

That is sort of a drag, but there is so much I enjoy about right now.  I like that things are no longer black and white.  I see that everyone ends up in the same place in the end and no one knows when they'll get there, so it isn't about where you end up, it's about where you are now, and how you feel about where you are.  

A year ago, I felt like a failure, for reasons that were beyond my control.  Now I realize that within any defeat there will be a thousand little victories, and within any victory there are bound to be a million little defeats.

Nothing is ever one thing.

I don't know why it took me so long, but now all that is so clear to me, how everyone is influenced by so so many forces and no one has a real clue why they do anything they do, that they are not so much thinking about what they think of me, but more thinking about what I think of them (just like me!).  We spend so much time trying to be different, but are so concerned if we do or feel something that might be abnormal.  We hardly know ourselves.

AND we make up rules, long for guidelines to govern something so abstract as human life and interaction.

AND you always know when you're fucking up, but sometimes you need to fuck up.

All of this makes me feel pretty good about being anywhere, and doing anything as long as it feels right for me.  I needed to hang out in the parentheses for a little bit, and I think that I am almost out of the woods, but you never know.

Okay. I'm going to go work on this happy song, I have about a week before my final stint in the studio.  It has to be good.

!!!!!

climate change

I found myself at Town Hall one night last week seeing a few authors read - in fact, nearly every day I managed to see a reading or discussion thanks to the PEN World Voices Festival - but my favorite moment had to have been that night, when Ian McEwan read what he called a piece of "pre-fiction," about living in the Arctic as part of the Cape Farewell project.

Its a pretty funny yet pretty reasonable piece on coping with climate change.

You can read it HERE

"We must not be too hard on ourselves. If we were banished to another galaxy tomorrow, we would soon be fatally homesick for our brothers and sisters and all their flaws: somewhat co-operative, somewhat selfish, and very funny. But we will not rescue the earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more, even if we accept that we can never really change our natures."

brooklyn library

Taking advantage of the free wi-fi at the Brooklyn Public Library while I'm waiting for an event to start, I figure I should do a blog post.  

It has been a year since I've been in New York, well almost a year, and it feels like no time has passed.  For a place that is constantly moving and changing, constantly under construction, being torn down and rebuilt, it hasn't strayed too far from where I left it.  A few places are closed, a few places are more gentrified, a few scaffolding structures have moved a little to the left or right, but overall it is the same.

 

My head is flooded though, by memories from my previous moments here.  I keep stumbling upon places I have revisited so often in memory but not in person over the last months...

oh, its starting... the reading I'm at...

I'll finish this thought later.