constant noise

I couldn't calm my thoughts today so I decided to go take a walk. I headed up into the hills, where I used to take hikes when I was in high school.

The sun was just starting to come down into the bay, all golden and bursting in the water. It was a little hazy and the skyscrapers in San Francisco rose in silhouettes out of the white glare. And above me it was all clear, long sheets of clouds, blue sky, green hills, Mt. Diablo, The Golden Gate.

I stood up at the top of the hill, where I could look out for miles in every direction, where I was alone above everything, and I listened. First I could hear the whoosh of the freeways, constant as river rapids on all sides of me, then there was a train whistle and then another. I concentrated, and another layer of sound came to the surface - the chirping and idling of bugs, the croaking of frogs, wings scraping together, leaves rustling. I could hear the individual songs of birds, and if I looked out at any time, I could find an airplane somewhere in the sky, and I would try to peel it's humming away from the rest of the cacophony.

I'm so used to tuning it all out, but there is a constant noise that is always around us. I once heard a segment on NPR where a guy figured out the pitch of the notes that all the appliances in his apartment were humming, and he then figured out the chords they were making together. How happy can you be when a minor or diminished chord or something even more atonal is buzzing all around you night and day?

So I Think...

This album is going to take a while to finish (because I need it to be just so)... and with business matters it will then take a while a while to be released (because I want it to be released with some publicity, on a certain day, with some touring around it etc...).

I do have a handful of songs that didn't make the cut, and some songs from other artists that I like to cover that would be fun to record quickly and cheaply.

How do you feel about digital singles?? How do you feel about 7 inch vinyl??

It would be easy to do.

For you, and for me.

getting sick

The final night of this session. I can hear piano parts being spliced together through the door, and I'm leaning back on the couch.

I've been coming down with a cold, a cold that I've been putting off for a while. I was about to get sick before I left for Seattle a few weeks back, but I had a lot of things to do, so I decided it would be better to let it come on after I got home, but somehow it didn't really start to hit in full force until last saturday when I was packing up to come down here. Of course, I couldn't come in to the session sick, so I managed to shake it, until last night.

I get so worked up about these recordings that I can't ever sleep quite right, I can't ever take my mind from them, and the funny thing is, I get so tied up in them that I can't really even tell if they are good or great or not.

Carolann fell right into place it seems, the other song we recorded once, then again... and we'll probably do one more version down the road.

The hardest part is writing the songs. That is done. But you can stress and stress over how they should be executed. It would be easier if I fit into a genre and could just put the songs in a mold, but I'm just trying to do what is best for them, so they sound as genuine and organic as they really are, and I'm trying not to take a year in the studio like last time.

We'll see...

murder

There was a murder five blocks from the studio today, which led to a police shootout, which yielded several on-the-loose suspects, and closed down the neighborhood. News helicopters circled all afternoon, and opening up the front door, I could count four or five of them, their humming coming through the walls of the lounge where I sat listening to bass being tracked, making cup after cup of tea, and pacing, making phone calls, trying not to think too much.

On the lounge TV, perpetually on the news, I saw again and again the faces of Clinton and Obama and McCain, the missile and the satellite exploding, the flames about the US Embassy in Belgrade, and now and again, ariel shots of the surrounding area.

All day, I would walk in the room with these images flashing on the screen, and I had been sitting there while just a few blocks away a man had been shot down.

the environment

again and agian, further and further

I drove across California yesterday and the grasses, usually dry and golden-brown, covered the hills in a lush green and blossoms hung off the rows and rows of branches in the orchards. Up in the mountains, snow clung to the shady spots, and I looked out as cars weaved around me and I weaved around semis and I mined my ipod for something to make me feel like I haven't felt before.

These drives are like commutes now. Six hours alone on the highway and I can recognize all the singular elements along the way. I know instinctively how much time I have left. I don't get stressed out, I don't worry much at all, I don't feel anything one way or the other. I'm just going to work.

I always think that maybe this is the last time, that I'll soon be moving on, but somehow, with a few passing weeks or months, I'm always back on the same highways, running the same circles, seeing the same people. Everyone knows everyone if you dig just a little and there is some comfort in that, but I'm always trying to break through to another plain, somewhere that probably doesn't really exist. No matter how much I want to leave it all behind, its all ingrained in me. As insignificant as I feel a lot of the time, I am an essential element. I think we all are.

At the end all this, past all of the barriers, beyond all the walls, all the burdens, all the glamour and the delusions, all the way to the end of where ambition and hope and desire can lead you, where class is gone and the clothes are off and the things you have don't matter, I think that there is just a couch and some music, a bed and someone kind laying beside you. I think there is just a good conversation, and a warm room, and a set table, and problems that don't weigh you down enough to make you sink. I think that maybe the only thing that there is to discover from life, is that there really isn't anything to discover.

Sunday

now it's getting dark, and I took little advantage of the light.

Some people take vacations to relax.  When I travel, I have to see as many sights as possible in a day.  I crave museums and ruins and jungles and beaches and cafes and restaurants and parliaments and cathedrals all in a single rush, from morning to night in constant motion, taxis and buses and trains and...

Likewise, some people enjoy days when they have no plans, nothing to do.  They do nothing, don't go anywhere, and they are happy.  If I were one of those people, today would have been incredible.  

My next recording engagement begins Sunday and today and tomorrow are I guess what you could call days off.  I woke up late, and felt guilty for no particular reason.  I made coffee.  I practiced my vocals, guitar and piano for the upcoming session.  I checked my email.  I practiced again, with a click track.  I made plans for tonight.  I lost several hours somewhere on the internet, from which I recall very little.  I tried the guitar song on the piano.  I read my own blog.  I drank more coffee.  I checked my email, again.  I had lunch.  I started a woodcut and decided minutes into it that I should wait for more inspiration.  I checked my email, again.  I got lost on the internet, again.  I tried to work on a new song and decided after minutes to wait for more inspiration.  I remembered an email I'd been meaning to write...

It happens, but I'm getting the hell out of here as soon as this is posted, and making some plans for tomorrow.

just another day, but don't worry if it worries you.

In elementary school we would decorate paper bags on Valentine's Day and tape them to the sides of our desks. Everyone in the class would have brought in cheap hallmark cards, one for every classmate, and we would walk around and drop them in each bag, all have thirty cards to hold on to. I remember sitting on the floor the night before with a class roster, filling in the TO: section with each name, and the FROM: section with my own. Nothing else - no discrimination from one person to the next.

In high school, one class organization or another would sell candy-grams each year, purchased for a dollar at a table in the cafeteria and delivered to the recipient in class on Valentines Day. I had my high school crushes, and they were deep and unrelenting, but I was far too shy and far too unsure of myself to act upon them.  So when third period was interrupted by a knock at the door and little bags of candy with pink notes were distributed about the room - the balance of which generally landed on one well-packaged girl’s desk - I never had any expectation to receive one. I can’t say I ever had a real interest in participating in such things, but I’m sure it would have blown my mind to have a girl invest a dollar in me, though I’m certain following up on it would have been a daunting task.

By my senior year, I was finding people outside of school to hang out with, going to shows a few times a week, and playing them with my own band. I started meeting girls that looked and interacted with me without a knowledge or interest in my standing in a social hierarchy from eight to three, and I realized that maybe those things which I had felt denied from all this time were actually meant for me, were meant for everyone. I just had to be patient, to find my place, to find people who could see me for what I was worth.

I’ve always maintained that Valentine's Day is just another day, whether in a relationship or not, it shouldn’t be a reason for stress. You should treat someone you’re with as someone special despite what day it is, you shouldn’t try to force love if you’re not in it, and there is no need to throw your money into the pit of a corporate holiday.

I remember one year, though, when I was nineteen.  I didn’t have a girlfriend, had been striking out pretty consistently for a while and my self-confidence was low. I was digging myself in one of those ruts where you begin striving so hard to break your loneliness that when an opportunity comes, when you meet someone, it becomes overwhelming and you can't think of anything else.  Your desire pushes them away.  

On Valentine's Day, in the afternoon, I got a call from my buddy Ash who always booked me on shows he was putting on. This time he had a friend in San Jose who was promoting a midnight movie that evening, Punch Drunk Love, and the band he had scheduled to play in the adjacent coffee shop beforehand had canceled. I confessed that I was free that night and agreed to play, drove up there from Santa Cruz, where I was going to school.  Not surprisingly the turnout for the show wasn’t great. I got a free coffee, set up a mic there in front of a chair, plugged my guitar into the PA, got my levels, then just waited around for folks to show up. When I was told to start my set, there were only a handful in the room, a group of kids a little younger than me, and a woman that seemed a lot older, though she was probably only in her mid-twenties. I played two songs and broke my A string. A few more people had shown up and I played one more tune with that broken string and was told it was time for the movie to start.

Sitting in the theater, watching Adam Sandler portray a completely relatable character, I really felt the effect of the day coming down on me. It was unavoidable, it is engrained in our culture, and I could write it off, but I couldn’t escape it.   I remember a sort of pleasurable loneliness as I thanked the promoter for the show, got handed a couple bucks for playing, and walked out into the dark along the wide and vacant downtown sidewalks and found my car and took that big empty highway up to Oakland where my parents were gone for the weekend, and I fell asleep in that empty house alone.  

The next day I received this email:

Last night… and only three songs! I feel teased. I'm not generally impressed with guys like you who tote their guitars around to cafes and such places. But man, you were great! Such is that soul of yours. If you're ever in the South Bay again, could you send me an email letting me know when and where? I'd definitely make it out to hear more.

It was the from the lone woman who had watched my set, and she signed it, “Happy Day” which always stuck with me as better than “Sincerely” or “Best” or “Take Care” or whatever. In fact that’s what I plugged into the search box in my inbox to find it (since I cant ever delete anything). I never saw her at a show again, but that email made me feel damn good knowing that I had made what was probably a difficult day better for someone else.

Anyway, be it a good one or a bad one...

Happy Day,

Dave

Just fucking around...

Waste My Life For You. Recorded just now. Been having fun with the song acoustic recently, figured you might want to hear:

Anyone but Bush (and anyone like him)

Walking out of a coffee shop in Seattle last week, I spotted a stack of their free weekly newspaper, The Stranger, beside the door. I managed to pick one up without spilling my coffee and the cover made my day:



When I was in South America last month, we didn’t even have to ask around to find that people are very aware of what’s happening in the United States and care deeply about it, as our choices often times effect them as much as us.

One young man, when prodded by my brother to give us his opinion said to us that electing Obama would prove to him that The United States is actually going to change its ways, and that if another old white man is elected, he’d expect more of the same.

Certainly it is not that simple, but it was in interesting statement to hear.

Man, I hope this time next year we aren't invading Iran and seeing our Supreme Court stacked even higher with people that don't have the people in mind. I've never seen my friends so hyped up about a candidate before. This is something special.

Farewell to The Format

Its insane to me how with the landslide of music available, with the multitude of artists that can now reach an audience, with technology that can put tone deaf in pitch and make your bedroom mimic a 1,000 dollar a day studio, it doesn't seem to me like there are any more good or great bands out there than there were before. It doesn't feel like a renaissance, it feels like a big loud convention with everyone more focused on ways to be seen, ways to be heard through the pandemonium, than the actual art.

I hadn't heard of The Format when our booking agent emailed to say he had secured us the opening spot on their 2006 summer tour, my first ever fronting a full band, and I had no idea that the tour would bring me in front of thousands and thousands of people, opening up for musicians I would really come to respect.

I was excited that they were going in to make a new record, that in a matter of months a really enjoyable new handful of songs would be thrown in my lap and I wouldn't have to sift through the trenches of the internet or old boxes of vinyl. I can't say I'm not bummed and that I wouldn't have loved to tour with that group of guys again sometime, but I'm sure that a lot of great music will come from the splintering of Sam and Nate and Mike and Don and Marko. I'm really excited to hear what they all do next.

Seattle Photos

view from my hotel

the studio

the loft 

life of a song

I’m finally just beginning to record, and I’m listening back to some rough mixes and going through old demos of songs that I am going to be taking into the studio in the next couple months, thinking about the history that they have already developed.

I write songs very slowly. Usually it is a process that takes months and years, because I don’t force anything. Maybe a lyric will come to me as I lay sleepless on some overnight drive, and I’ll start mumbling it over some chords in a backstage room a few thousand miles away. And if I don’t forget it – and memory tends to be my filter – then I’ll form it into a melody as I strum my guitar on a stranger’s floor while waiting to use the shower, and maybe I’ll come up with a melody for a verse too. And then walking along a crowded street in New York, I’ll be way within myself, twisting and turning phrases in my head, pulling them over the chord changes and through the melody, really trying to figure out what I need to say, what I need to get out, and I’ll get frustrated and it will keep me up at night. And then finally I’ll get defeated and decide that I just have to be patient. And somewhere quiet, in a different time zone and different season, sitting at the edge of my bed or waiting for my plane to taxi to the runway, it will all come pouring out over a guitar or a piano or into the middle of a little notebook.

When I clean out old backpacks or look through storage or in drawers in the room I grew up in, I find scraps of paper with lyrics scrawled across them, usually from songs I forgot that I began to write. Usually whatever it was that inspired those words has long escaped me. Usually I cringe.

There have been hundreds and I’ve only really released about a dozen of them. My perspective of myself must be worlds away from your idea of me. That’s not a bad thing, its just reality, and I guess everyone sees and hears everything differently.  I'd hope that you fit yourself into the lines I write, match them to your experiences and concerns and hopes.  As the songwriter, I'm just there to prove that you aren't alone in feeling that way.

These songs I’m getting ready to record now are attached to so many moments, so many states and cities, so many people. There are even parts of a song inspired by tensions that another song had incited. I don’t know if they are any good or not, but I know that I am saying what I want to say, and each track on this record will carry a lot of weight.  I really do wonder what the finished thing will be like.

Proof

Recording In Seattle

I’m missing The Super Bowl. I’ll be on a flight to Seattle, where I’ll be spending next week doing the first bit of tracking for this album which has been all talk for the last six months or so. 

Here is a page in my notebook from my trip up there in December to meet with producers:

Please note the vertical lines, indicating rain. I think this will be a very rainy record, so this is appropriate.

I'll let you know how it goes.