spilling over the side

Final Metaphors For 2011

2011-12-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

You have to pull all the weeds, clearaway the rubble and the trash that came in on the wind.

To pull a weed, you have to know which ones are weeds. Whenclearing away the decaying piles, you have to know what to keep, whatrusted engine part might come in handy one day. You don’t knowall of these things perfectly. You do know them better withexperience, with study.

Your garden will not grow all at once andnot every sapling survives winter. Not every bud willblossom. You’ll probably want a foundation for your house, and itwould be wise to draw up some plans before you beginconstruction. In reality, you probably can’t build it alone, andyou might have to fire your contractor along the way.

Everyone you know is a fuckingasshole. No one understands you, and you are completelyalone. Also, everyone is kind. They get it, and they are totallythere for you. You have to filter though the advice and opinions. You have to listen for your own voice beneath the static of thechanting pundit or the caring friend. You must own up to who youare, not just accepting the shelves you can’t reach, but acknowledgingyour ability to climb up onto the counter.

You have to find the boundaries of yourtime and energy, play your cards tactfully (“yes” - “no”), knowingnothing is black and white (“yes, but...” - “no, though...”). Youhave to see what kind of fuel is in your tank. Loneliness burnsfast in a crowded bar. Running too long on anger will start afire. And you have to figure out how to be easy on yourself whenyou break down. You will break down. And you will breakdown again and again and again.

You are fortunate. Your whines arethe whines of the sheltered and well-fed, with potable water from afashionable pipe in your kitchen and all of the information recorded bymankind in a device in your pocket. Also you are shattered,suffering, alienated, confused and lost and hopelessly in need. Your “feelings” are physical firings within your body. You areliterally in pain, literally panicking and you usually have no ideawhy. That guilt for your existence is a burden forthe nations, a burden for the gods. You do your part. You have mypermission to feel like shit if shit is how you feel.

You are being manipulated. You arebeing used. The subversive thoughts that crack these massivechains need not be violent. Self-awareness is subversive. Love is subversive when not a fairy-tale or some abstract vibe. Shockis just a great way to make a million dollars. A riot is a great way tokill your neighbor. We have to change within us before we’ll see achanged world. We have to see past the guilt, the denial, thatkeeps us in an abusive relationship. We have to see corruptionbeyond a war on terror, grief beyond a door we’re not certain welocked. These things are in the open now. Let’s keep themthere. Let’s go deeper.

You’re going to have to stop thinkingonly of what is wrong. You’ll have to take that wrong and flipit, figure out its opposite, turn a not-thing into a thing. Andwhen you’ve searched for and decided on the antitheses of that cozyobject of loathing, you must break it apart. You have to map outits components, the individual pieces that are necessary for that goodmachine to run. Which ones are broken now? What is wornout? What is stuck? What is clogged? Where can you findreplacement parts? What can you sharpen or solder yourself? Where do they do repairs?

And when you’ve changed, yoursurroundings will treat you differently. You’ll drive right pastthat old bar on Saturday night and circle aimlessly around a city thatsuddenly holds nothing for you. You’ll spray us with tears as yourelease the hand of that beloved and drowning friend that is only goingto pull you under.

What I mean is, you’ll probably findyourself camping out alone on a vast and snowy plain. You mightbe on your own to lay that foundation. You may have no one tocomment to on the palette of your garden in the vibrations of thatfirst Spring. You’ve made space and space is nothing. It isvery cold and the walls around it are coated with dust. It is ashitty companion. But you’re building something. Somethinghonest, something that will be appreciated. It’s just gonna takemore patience, more hard work.

So in the meantime, Thank you 2011. Thanks for the laughter and pain.

Let’s crack this new one open and seewhat’s inside.

All my love,

Dave

2011-12-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

“Happiness” is out today.

I’ve made a digital booklet of art to go along with the album, check it out here: http://www.davesmallen.com/happiness.html

It is available for pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp: http://davesmallen.bandcamp.com/album/happiness

Or download on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/happiness/id480259479

Thanks so much to everyone who helped with this project along the way, who inspired it, performed on it, financed it, recorded it, sent words of encouragement, or was simply patient over the years. This record is for you.

All my love,
Dave

Vastness/Stillness

2011-10-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

I leave dinner in Hollywood and start to drive home. I don’t want to be home though. I’m restless and I’m listening to mixes for the new record. I get off at my exit, but keep driving past my house, up and over the hill, right back onto the freeway...

I drive until it transitions to a four lane road, then two lanes. I wind upwards from the outskirts of the last suburban neighborhood, past the make-out-spots lined with cars, past where the streetlights cease and the forest takes over.

Twisting into the mountains, around granite faces cast blue beneath the full moon, I pass a mountain biker pedaling with solitary purpose along the late-night highway, his outline black in my review mirror against the orange circuitry of the city below.

The last of the mixes settles with a final cymbal swell and I roll down my dirty windows. Every time I’m confronted with a crossroads I take the path that pushes me higher up into the mountains, until the glow of Los Angeles is blocked by miles of shadow, until I’m slowing down and craning my neck to look over the guardrail, over cliff edges. Then I stop the car.

Everything is warm and still as I step out and climb up onto the rocks at the edge of the turn-out. Looking over the rim, I’m slammed by a sheer drop to the tips of pine trees rising far below. Vertigo hands thrust to my throat, yanking me down and down by my shirt collar. I hold my ground and gaze up into infinity, into the legion of stars - cold currents flashing from my head to my knees. Across the wide valley, mountains beyond mountains fade into the fringes of moonlight. And everything that unfurls below - the spreading wilderness, the jutting cliffs, the rigid wildfire-scorched manzanitas - all of it is illuminated into crystal blue clarity.

My car engine ticks. Something rustles on the hill above. In all the miles of road that I can see, there are no headlights, and I can feel no wind. Trees arch over, dangling frozen fists of silhouetted leaves against the mountain faces. I just stand there, heart hammering in terror. Everything in my body wants me away from that cliff’s edge, back in my car, back into the city, back into safety, while a chorus of 10,000 crickets lifts from the valley depths to my ears.

I know I won’t fall, but I can’t keep my thoughts from pulling me away from this moment. And it hits me: it’s the vastness, the stillness, and in the midst of that, the solitude that I hardly can take. How humbling, below the vivid extremes of space, to look downward and outward and upward at such a distance - especially when that unending breadth is only mirroring the extent of what’s within.

I think about the deceptive tranquility thrown across it all, every creature scurrying across the forrest floor, every rock tumbling down a mountainside. I stare at the sky and imagine exploding suns, meteors colliding, ice and ore spraying into oblivion. I wonder at all that stirs in the shadows of my consciousness, the entire world at work in every cell, vast systems of the mind twisting to the fingertips.

Nature doesn’t judge you. Nature doesn’t punish you in abstract ways, doesn’t care about the shape of your clothes or your beliefs. Nature takes you at your reflex, the weight you can carry, the certainty of your step, your tolerance to the elements. It rewards you for your awareness, for your ability to see - to really see, to really hear. I stare into the face of a mountain until its unique anatomy starts to show in ridges and rockslides and clusters of dark forest. Power is a whole different phenomenon out here.

Finally I allow myself to be dragged away from the edge and back into the car, back onto that long road home. Somewhere down the mountain I pass that biker again, his back to the city, still pedaling deeper into the night. I wonder if there is anywhere he’s headed or anything he’s escaping. And I envy him as I plunge back into the familiar hum of the city sprawl.

Wrought

2011-09-12T13:07:00.000-07:00

rked into shape by artistry or effort

You start a project and you’re in control, making the decisions, directing the piece, doing some uncommitted experimentation - but somewhere there’s a shift and gradually your art begins to control you, to dictate your days, how and where you spend them. At first it is just a vision, a little dream you’re tossing around, but as it expands and inflates and ropes other people in, as it rises and rears its head to block out the sun, you begin to treat it differently. You make your marks tentatively, you don’t want to disrupt some balance, ruin whatever it is that makes it “work.” And when it’s all finally over and collapsed into a finished heap, you look around and see the damage it has done, all of the people it has labored, and all of you that it has used up.

I’m almost done with my new album. I want to say that this record has not been wrought, but fuck it - along with being exciting and fascinating and a joy to make, it has been fucking wrought.

I didn’t expect that I would produce this album myself. In 2011 a self-production is becoming the standard, but back where I come from, you write the songs and bring your voice and your guitar and your band and someone else records, gives you feedback down to the minute details, collaborates on a game-plan, maybe even writes and plays some piano parts, books the studios, makes everyone take a break when it isn’t flowing... I’ve had to do all this for myself - out of interest in the challenge, sure, but largely out of a sort of accidental necessity. It’s been an incredible exercise in learning how to understand when I’ve gone too far, to calm myself under pressure, to make myself slow down, figure out when it’s time to be done, when it’s time to ask for help. These things I’ve been learning by trial and (mostly) error.

I’ve become so close to these songs, these recordings, that I have to trust my close group of musician friends for their reactions - and they’ve come through for me with their saintly guitars and voices, with their outside ears...

I lost August to this album. I didn’t want that to happen, but it did. I had mixing days booked. A sudden deadline. I had to get it all tracked just-so by a certain date. I lost myself, I don’t know where I went, and waking up now that mixing is done, I feel the void, the loss. My roommates say that the culture of the house changed, they joked that I was preparing for some semester-culminating finals week and then kept their distance as I trudged soldierly through my tests like drifts of snow.

When you’re dealing with something so subjective as music, there is no right and no wrong. This can be an excruciating freedom: you can do whatever you want, but when you get down into the heart of it, when you’re looking upwards through the bone and sinew and planks and scaffolding and you’re exhausted and alone, nothing is clear. The recordings changed to the point where the initial vision was long thrown overboard and I just laid there, wondering: “Is this good? What is ‘good’ anyway? Will I be able to pay rent?”

There are two major ways in which I become anxious in this moment, and the combination of both sends me into a tailspin. First, I get concerned with being true to myself, having my own voice, sounding like I really sound. And second, I become a perfectionist, become concerned with having a perfect voice, perfect guitar performances, sounding like things I’ve heard before that “worked.” These two stresses oppose one another.

To me, being yourself, or even more, knowing and being aware of yourself, having a self, being a self, is the most important thing. Otherwise you’re a preprogrammed drone drifting unconsciously through a haze of a life, adorning your malaise with sparkly inanities. But getting down into the pit of yourself and pushing and pulling until you’ve turned inside-out and shown something of it to the world. I think that is fucking virtuous.

I also think it is one of the most frightening things ever.

And that’s where perfectionism swoops in, out of the fear of your true colors - but perfection is death. Perfection is a denial of your existence, of your humanity. Perfection is an assembly-line of clones, of automatons. Perfection is the mall. (Your work is going to come out of the oven fucked up in some way every time, I promise. But it is home-cooked, man!) Perfection is reckless safety. Perfection is birthed in lack of faith in what you are, by ignorance of yourself, by shame. Perfection is blending so well into some standard, some trend or norm, to the point that no one can distinguish you (and thus criticize you...). Perfection is becoming the little insect too small for the naked eye to see... it’s there, though never being swatted, just invisible, outside of our consciousness, making no mark on human life. I flail in the riptide of perfection, gleaming there with all its secrets concealed - the scar under makeup, the murder weapon buried, that island of trash drifting way way out there in the middle of the Pacific.

The shattered part of you brings on this perfectionism. Ghastly sensations of abandonment, of humiliation, annihilation. Every producer must deal with young artists they’re working with collapsing under the weight of all of it, spinning between these two opposing poles, balling up with headaches on the control room couch. And me, I’ve been in my room, collapsing again and again. Sometimes in utter fucking joyous astonishment, as when the first mix for my song “Happiness” came through my headphones after three long years... And other times in an overwhelmed, fatigued, stupor, often culminating in physical blows.

So you shudder with this, with your vision, with your own reactions to your own art as you wander about the twisting halls, the intricate anatomy of this thing you’ve created, that you once played with so casually before it grew so tall, became so fierce, and you got lost in it, started to fear it, to serve it, to give in to its demands... This is all part of the process I allowed to occur, and the process is most important. If I have learned anything in making this album it is that when envisioning a project, you must envision a process too. You must design moments that you can enjoy, that you can thrive in, and of course be challenged by, maybe even suffer within, but fully experience...

Your completed piece is a fly trapped in amber, frozen in a gesture which is only one of infinite possibilities, embalmed in one of a million forms it has taken on throughout its life. The final product will never be what you imagined, and you can’t live inside of your finished work. You cannot avoid though, living inside of the process, inside of that fly while it is still buzzing and darting around the room, trying fruitlessly to glide through that clear and solid window pane.

I live in Los Angeles these days and I hear a lot of conversations about “making it” with your art, but very few conversations about making art. Sure, you can throw your work out on the market, use it to barter for money or fame or whatever you might think you need, but don’t forget about the time you spend creating. Don’t forget to make room to really live that time, because that is your life - your limited limited life! That is real, that is all that is real, all that you get. Do your work, and do it well, but find a way to be alive as you do it.... Find a process in which you may thrive. Find a process in which you may thrive. Find a process in which you may thrive. And find it for yourself.

Black Widows, Mixing

2011-08-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

There are black widows in the courtyard. There is one in particular, that in the darkest part of dusk crawls through the woven mouth of the drainpipe and hangs in threads spun from leg to leg of a dusty plastic patio chair.

I have a certain appreciation for the thing as I watch her from my room right now, suspended there, a black dot, blacker than the shadows behind, rounded and angled in that perfect stylized black widow way. Certain.

Any day I can climb into a combustible metal shell and allow myself to be projected across some distracted Los Angeles freeway, with all the other cars speeding alongside me, and I won’t think to be afraid. Yesterday though, I got close enough to photograph her, and with a sudden lurch of just an inch in my direction, she had me retreating back against the wall. I couldn’t spend ten minutes consciously sitting within inches of a spider like that, the way I can sit comfortably for a day with 35,000 feet between myself and the earth. It makes me wonder if the fears that should arise from technology aren’t yet woven into us through natural selection, and therefore we’re granted this unnatural tolerance...

I’ve been within mauling distance of a grizzly bear, have stood on a rocking canoe within a few feet of an anaconda, and spiders are always there. I feel like these creatures, however aloof, deliver a hush of awe and fear hatched deeper in the blood, cast back into millennia beyond the curtain of humanity, in something more primal, deeper down in the pit of evolution. They command the respect of their lethal potentialities and the uncertainty of their intentions. I mean, who wants to fuck with a woman that once devoured her mate?

In the immunity of daylight I could destroy her little silk cathedral, but somehow I like watching this thing hang in all her arachnid glory as I write, as the opposing window fills with a final hot orange glow. She tells me to stop and breathe, to come back to my actual life, to all that time that’s slowly being used up, diminishing to an uncertain end. She makes me revel in the sunset that comes with each vanishing day. She reminds me that there’s a black widow suspended beside us wherever we go, however we go, and we must honor it.

* * *

Mixing a song is like walking through this courtyard of black widows. The anxieties awoken in the process of setting the malleable into stone are rooted somewhere in survival. I know what it feels like to be eaten by a metaphoric pack of wolves - the spiteful fingers of harsh critics tapping on keyboards. You can’t please everyone, and some will punish you for it - directly, or worse, by neglect. With each shift in the mix, that second guess flutters through the window. Will this kill me? In preparing the track to be submitted to the mixer, I began to hear things that weren’t there, those phantom spider legs marching up between my jeans and my skin. No longer could I tell if the instruments were even playing in time, in the same key. I had to surrender. I had to trust myself that I had recorded what I intended, had kept the takes that I connected to, that what I was turning in was somehow ready enough to be immortalized.

The mix came back and I’m really happy with it. The anxiety is no longer that something is somehow wrong and will lead to my destruction, but that I have to figure out how to do it again with all I’ve just learned. I’m proud, and I’m lining up someone to master it - then I’ll put it on the internet so you can hear it and have it. No publicity push. I don’t want to enter back into that dynamic now. Why beg a hostile wolf pack for their scraps? I loved making this song - some of you are going to find it useful. It will be ours to share.

I’ll be mixing the rest of the album in a few weeks. I’ll keep you posted.

Dreams, Dropping Out, Recovery

2011-07-26T14:04:00.000-07:00

Everything from that time feels distant, distorted, as if I read it all in a book, or saw it flash by in a movie.

I would sit in the garage of that house my sophomore year, everyone else gone to bed, there on the dusty concrete, singing soft with my guitar, writing my songs, in catharsis, beating those melodies out of the angst of the day. Then after laying awake for hours, trying to crack the codes of lyrics, of the indomitable musical hierarchy, to my roommate’s incessant breathing, I’d finally get back up, mind rushing, and walk out onto the deck to look up into the gaps between the clouds, into the stars, bare feet on splintery wood. Lonesome.

I hadn’t wanted to go to college. I hadn’t put in much effort. All my effort went to making music and going to shows and playing shows and handing out fliers outside of shows at Slims or The Fillmore or at The Oakland Arena. I went to school where my brother went, where it was convenient, and because I felt like it was the right thing to do. I never figured out a major. I mostly took classes that seemed like they could help my music career in one way or another. I wanted that time to disappear into something more meaningful. I hardly allowed it to exist.

On weekends I would drive back to Oakland, the cold little Toyata Tercel that my cousin sold me rattling over the twisting mountain pass. I would go to shows and play shows, and hang out with my friends in bands who understood.

My friend talks about the difference between schooling and education. We both quit but continued to try to be educated in any way we could, to find the lesson in an experience, to be open to being taken to new territories of knowledge and perspective by others. Each of us had trouble being schooled though, being molded by an institutional hand.

The personal statement in my college application had begun, “Music saved my life...” - That was true, but I didn’t know that music was eventually going to try to take my life as well. I’m glad I dropped out and found my own way. But in a sense I want to curse the world for telling us to follow our dreams without giving us a disclaimer: If you’re a troubled person, you’ll still be troubled when you’re holding your wildest dreams.

For a while all of those things I’d hoped for began to light up on cue. On paper, we seemed to be executing what we believed we wanted. Attention, travel, status, excitement, sex, drugs, the high of performance, the all night drives, the label and managers and handlers with all their pressures, the bewilderment of getting paid just to play music. I’ll tell all of those stories eventually.

But I was also there beside the backstage door in Philadelphia, holding a trembling fist of snow to the hives on my face. There, pacing around an abandoned lot in Salt Lake City, stressing on the phone with my lawyer over the details of the contracts that replaced my relationships with old friends. There, my hand clenched by a screaming woman, little more than a stranger, in a Chicago emergency room. There, slamming my fists against a hotel wall, against the steering wheel on the highway, against the side of the van, into my own chest and stomach, terrorizing my bandmates. And I was there, listening to my manager’s answering machine again and again as I paced around that empty Brooklyn apartment, ice caked on the windows, angry and afraid and exhausted and alone for a thousand miles. That’s the spot where I couldn’t resuscitate my dreams, where protecting my own self finally took precedent, where I would have been fully shattered if I hadn’t. That’s when I climbed back down and slowly began to dig through the rubble, to understand where those dreams flared up from in the first place. I haven’t really been able to want it bad enough since then. I haven’t quite been able to re-convince myself that anything beyond the song is that important.

All of those things were bound to happen - if not in that context, then in some other. All of that came from within. Your wishes are the ones that should be careful, before you stagger in with all your baggage and track mud across their clean carpets. My early twenties were spent in this frenzy. I think my late twenties are about recovering and making sense of it all so I can be a real person for the rest of my life.

Some mornings I wake up as the sky is beginning to brighten. I might scrawl something in my notebook if the moon is bright enough to write to, then open my door to the yard and make my way down the concrete path, between the side of the house and the retaining wall. Beyond the darkened blooms of the neighbor’s bougainvillea I’ll see those stars fading over silhouettes of hills and the skyscrapers downtown. I guess I’m young still, but so much has happened since I careened frantically through the hopes of a lonely kid in the middle of a Santa Cruz night. A lifetime has passed, and now everything kind of feels like a dream.

The Cemetery

2011-07-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

I’m walking through the cemetery, through gravestone rows, feet sinking into soft turf, into the earth below, toward the bodies returning, having been returned.

I wish these gravestones told me more. The rhetoric of love and heaven hardly makes an argument. I’m curious about the life that lay shrouded behind the name. I want to know more than the dates that bordered each existence. A life is such an ocean of feeling, such a frenzy of events. What were these people passionate about? What was it like to be in a room with them? How were they kind? How did they hurt people?

I could spend an hour a day here then, taking in these histories.

I watch an airplane rise into the sky. I see it tilt and turn southward, shrinking into the distance. I follow carefully as it withers to a tiny glimmer on endless blue, until I can’t hold it any longer, until I suddenly blink and my eyes open to an empty sky.

There are sections here of stones marking where children have been buried - infants - two or three day winks of consciousness. Most of these slight flashes into the universe occurred more than fifty years ago, yet there are flowers set before several graves. I can picture a mother, now very old, still carrying with her that void, that aching space her lost baby left her. I imagine her knelt there in late morning, alone, alone for acres, alone for light-years, for millennia - her long skirt flapping in hot quiet wind.

The sun hammers on blazing car roofs, inching through traffic in the distance. Trucks rattle by, landscaping equipment in tow, metal teeth gnashing. A funeral procession comes with the buzzing of motorcycle cops. I lower my head and lift my gaze from time to time, caught in the eyes of those driving past.

I descend a steep hill, careful, slow, overcome with the reality of this place, with awareness of death, of all the mourning yet to come.

I try to feel the ground as I walk. When you start breaking away your defense mechanisms, you feel the internal weather system all the time. You can’t fight a storm, you can only wait it out, then inspect the damage and from what damage it came.

I think about the emotions that burn. Anger, Anxiety, Anguish, Grief, Fear, Shame, and on and on... Each of these flares up differently, on different latitudes of our bodies. For me, Grief smolders. Grief sends smoke upwards on each side of the spine, it burns quiet like the embers of a campfire on a vast, dark, lonely, plain.

These fires are raging across our planet, spreading from city to city, nation to nation, person to person, moment to moment, era to era. I stand here in the cemetery and this is all I can think about. We are a species ablaze. We are a world engulfed in flames.

Some Thoughts On Writing Songs

2011-07-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

An old friend of mine wrote and asked me about my process and approach to songwriting. I thought I'd share my response here as well:

You have this vast reservoir of artistic intention that you need to somehow express, and it is being held back by a giant dam, allowing just a little water through at any moment. Most of the time this massive block functions to funnel that excess of feeling down into a slow trickle so you can perceive everything as it passes by and choose what you want to work with. Sometimes though, the dam may be constructed with negativity: fear, perfectionism, self-imposed or society-imposed ideals of what a song should be, laziness, self-destruction, self-sabotage... Keep an eye on it. The better you know yourself, the better you will understand the limitations of your creativity.

Most of my songs happen in this slow trickling process. I’ll often spend a year on a song, tossing around lyrical ideas, trying to fill in the gaps. Sometimes I look at the process as an attempt to solve a puzzle - some songs feel as though they have already been written in some mysterious way, and I simply have to go searching for the pieces. Being patient and allowing for the right element to come to you is an approach that works well for me, as does writing drafts and editing.

Sometimes though, there’s a flood. You’ll feel compelled to pick up your guitar and it will suddenly all rush out at once. A lot of times I’ll find that these sorts of moments happen around subject matter that I hadn’t intended to write about -Things that had been waiting in the shadows, needing to be expressed. Other times I just yank a lucky stone from the dam and the whole thing crumbles as one thought leads to the next. Knowing what you’re writing about helps with this, as does finding a theme or a hook that you can follow through the song, though that’s not always necessary.

* * *

When people ask me how I write my songs I tell them that I don't have a singular method, but it usually forms from a seed that grows into the final product. The seed could be a lyric I've been thinking of, a concept or insight I feel like I should express, a story I want to tell, an experience I’ve had, a chord progression or guitar lick that I'd like to build around, a melody that feels good, a beat, a new instrument that I want to try to write with, and on and on... Sometimes I'll have an emotional charge that I want to express - I'll want to yell, so I write a song that tears apart my vocal chords to get to that feeling. In the past I've had songwriting assignments, where I’ve been asked to attempt to write something for movies or commercials, and I like those challenges as they provide a framework and motivation that I wouldn’t have been able to impose on myself - though too much constraint can sometimes suffocate your work. Whatever the seed is that you plant, you have to cultivate your song, pay attention to what it needs and what you need from it.

To build around that initial seed, I usually begin by trying some random chords and singing nonsense over them, which will eventually evolve into a structure of rhythm and melody and rhyme. The attitude and speed of the song will start to show as well. Then I’ll have a constrained space to write lyrics in: a part of the process that, for me, tends to happen on a drive or a walk or in a conversation with a friend as often as it happens while sitting with my guitar. I don’t usually write lyrics down, they come together slow enough that I remember the good ones, and the rest just get filtered away.

You will inevitably end up with a heap of scrap parts: verses with no choruses, choruses with no verses, random scattered lyrics and music... There isn’t a need to force those unique parts into a full song right at this moment. Keep them around, revisit them, and you’ll find places for many to live - their counterparts simply have not been born yet. Often times I’ll realize that I haven't been able to finish a song because I haven’t yet lived through the conclusion, had a realization that led to the core message, or my skill at a certain musical element hadn’t yet been strong enough. It takes some faith in the song to see it through at such a glacial pace. It takes a lot of trial and error.

* * *

You’ll probably begin with writing in a sort of conversation with the whole canon of music that has come before you. It’s great to be influenced and inspired by other artists, but make sure to look for the things that are really “you” and showcase those, develop them with time. Dropping musical references in your songs can get a bit like dropping names - it might open some doors for you, but not from a genuine place, so it might not remain satisfying for long. I’d always advise someone to keep their song from being one more echo of a fleeting trend. Be you, even if it isn’t cool right now.

* * *

Songs are an interesting intersection of so many things, of rhythm, of melody, of poetic rhyme and meter, of performance, of concept, story, arrangement, etc... Musicians are an interesting crowd because, even though everyone has all of these abilities available to them, everyone has refined their skills in different ways and to different degrees. Some musicians are athletes who can play with record breaking speed and precision or sing on perfect pitch, some are mathematicians who can conceive the angles of a symphony on a bar napkin, some are actors who must show you and perform for you the meaning of what they are saying, and of course there are poets, there are comedians, marketers, party promoters, thieves, revolutionaries, prophets... Everyone has a different approach and passion and belief about what's important. That's how so many songs can exist together, uniquely, in the world.

Any of these separate elements can be endlessly refined on their own. There is an infinite amount of searching to do within the assemblage of words, from their meaning to the quality they have on the tongue. There is an infinite amount of work you can do on scales, on timing, and on breaking out of the rules of those techniques that have arbitrarily been built up around us. You must explore these infinities as you grow, but you need not become a master of any domain to write a great song. That whole 10,000 hours of practice thing - that's an interesting observation on what it takes to have opportunities and excel in a competitive landscape at this point in time in our society as far as technical skill goes, but art is not the same as skill and technique. I believe that you can make great art right now while you’re developing your craft.

This leads me to a quick side-note on competition: it’s a trap. You are in a process, you are on your own path and you need not wrestle to move forward. It takes discipline, not violence. Don't compete with yourself, and especially don't compete with others. Our society judges art as a commodity, on economic markets - virtue in art is too often measured in sales, or perceived monetary value, or status through fame or fleeting hype. It seems like we can only fully appreciate something in this culture if we've turned it into a product, if it gets love from professional critics, if enough people click a button that says they "like" it, if it can be judged on a scale, can have power over something else... Stay away from that if you can, even if you're making your living from your songs. It will only be an excuse to hurt yourself and hurt others. Everyone's taste in music is different, and everyone's taste is right. No one wins. Write for you, because you love music, love expressing yourself, love the challenge, love yourself - and be proud as you grow. All of this I’ve learned the hard way.

Art happens inside of you, in your mind and heart and perceptions, and you can refine different tools (technique, skill, craft) to turn all of that abstract feeling and vision into something concrete. I think that one of the most important elements of songwriting is being able to feel for those piercing moments, for when something mysteriously plucks a heart string or gets the blood pumping. There is no recipe for that, that’s the art of it, and over time you’ll know how to encourage those moments to blossom, to explode. You know what gets you, what lyrics, what melodies, what rhythms and textures give you chills. Recognize when you’re delivering those feelings.

* * *

Write all the time, from every approach that you can. Take it slow, let it unravel at its own pace. Have faith in yourself and the song. Don't force it, and try not to be hard on yourself. Enjoy it. If it isn't coming together in one moment, set it aside before you get frustrated and come back to it later. I probably am able to finish one in every couple dozen songs that I begin - not every one of them makes it to the surface. Be patient, allow the seed to sprout and take root before it grows too tall - take the time to examine each individual branch and leaf. Then eventually, share your song and experience it as it is experienced by others.

And that of course would lead us into another discussion...

Worlds

2011-06-27T22:27:00.000-07:00

While we wish to change the world for the better, often neglecting ourselves on some frenzy toward martyrdom or power, I think it's important to remember that there is a world inside of me, inside of you, and these worlds can actually be changed. If there is such thing as a better world, then I imagine it to be the sum of these individual changes. Every day, six billion times over.

Look At How Far You've Come

2011-06-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you don’t realize how dark it got until you turn around and look at the ascent you’ve made to rise out of it.

Every challenge, every destructive pattern that was ripped from its foundations, every stumble that led to knowledge, every sleepless night that culminated in a flash of understanding, every encounter with the painful truth - All of these things are single steps that added up to the climb.

The mountain metaphor has been serving me well in framing my own process of overcoming a couple years of anxiety and doubt and anger, a couple years in the shadows, in the valleys, in the lands lower than I knew. The only problem with the image of the mountain is that it peaks. I realize that there is no summit that we can hope to attain, only more inclines into thinner air.

On the solstice, I stumbled on my roommate and our friend performing a ritual, burning two candles for that transitional day. One candle burned for all they hoped to gain within themselves, and one burned for all they hoped to leave behind. They asked me if I’d like to join them, and I did.

A couple years ago I would have dismissed this invitation and left them to their own devices, but getting that deep into some canyon wilderness opens you up to all kinds of things as you try to locate your trailhead. I can see it simply as an exercise, and I can take from it what I need and filter what doesn’t connect.

We talked a lot about losing fear, or more, actions from fear, actions from loneliness, actions from unhealthy ambitions, greed, dependency, weakness, a need to control. We talked a lot about opening up to courage, to faith in ourselves, to action from love (in all of its complexity and misinterpretation), action of kindness: to ourselves and those around us, actions of knowledge and strength.

After the candles were lit, my friends were elated, they said that they felt like a weight had been lifted. I told them that I felt a burden. They tried to help, they asked me about it and I explained it with the mountain metaphor. I told them that I felt like I just arrived at a false-summit, that I suddenly caught my first glimpse of the next ascent, steeper than before, rising higher into the clouds. “The challenge of love?! the challenge of courage?! The sort of discipline that real kindness demands?! This is going to take everything I’ve got, and then some...”

My roommate told me to turn around. She said, “Take a minute, and look back down at how far you’ve come.”

* * *

Sometimes I feel like a pessimist, but outwardly, people often comment on my optimism. My good friend who passed through town on tour the other day asked how someone who tends to wear all black, has naturally black hair, can exude so much light. Damn, that meant a lot. Maybe I’ve been mourning something. Maybe I was born mourning something, but every moment gives you a choice between wallowing and hope. My whole life I’ve spent wishing, always longing for something, but I always believed I could get it, maybe even if I didn’t understand how. I used to want very material things. I wanted the spotlight, and power over people, despite my drive to understand things, to know people, to know the world, to be open, to talk. We’re conditioned to want all that empty stuff. I think deep down we feel that it will somehow break that vast separation between us, dissolve that universal loneliness, if only we get a little more - but it only pulls us further apart.

Now I just want to be calm. I want to not fly so high and drop so low on my ups and downs. I want to create, and have much less interest in reaping the spoils of my creations on any economic market, or up on some stage. I believe that we can be kind to each other, to understand our world and ourselves. I believe in patience and in process. I believe in the action of love, as complicated and difficult as loving can be - and I’m not talking about some mystical innate romanticized force of hollywood love. I believe that we can be friends, that we can let down our walls, be peaceful, be reasonable, resolve things. I believe we can find value in our passing moments and not in the hollow goals that pull us from them. I value beauty - real beauty - in nature, in art, in all our hearts, in the sunset that comes with each waning day. I believe in hard work towards genuine ends, that we can learn to share, that unjust power will always crumble, that we can never be perfect, but always be “perfecting.”

I don’t know what it says about our times to be called an optimist for spouting this stuff. These aren’t things that were meant to be strived for. These are things that we’re all entitled to. Why does our system shove them away? How far into the darkness are we when it seems like only the hopelessly hopeful, the deluded, the guru, the therapist, the rambling artist, can speak of any of this stuff genuinely and openly and not face a cold shoulder or a dismissive joke?

And then I start to wonder: in which direction are we heading from here?

Some Thoughts On My Approach

2011-06-14T11:29:00.000-07:00

I’m learning to paint. It has been a long time coming, but somehow up until now I’ve spent little time with a brush in my hands. I’ve noticed that I think about a painting in a similar way to how I think about a recording - I approach the balance of colors and textures with a similar mindset. Recording is also feeling a lot like sculpture. This has made me reflect on the way I make music, on the way that I take abstract thoughts and feelings and moments and mold them into something tangible. It has made me think about why my music process differs from my process with visual art.

Learning how to paint is easier than learning other things because I’ve become more skilled now at learning new skills - and I’ve already put a short lifetime behind my approach to creative endeavors. That’s not to say that I can make the brush do everything I want it to do (hardly!). I just finally know how to be patient with myself, I know that with time and the right effort, it will get there. I know that when I start learning something it will seem simple and I’ll have some semi-conscious fantasy that I’ll be a natural, and know all the moves instinctually. I’ll want to do it my own way, but eventually I’ll make mistakes and learn why the masters of that skill share certain techniques in common. I’ll work to learn the rules, and then I’ll encourage myself to break them. I’ll find myself humbled by the infinite ways to approach the medium. And I’ll do whatever it is, a lot, and over the course of years find my place within it.

I’ve been painting as much as I can. I have a better handle on the brush, on the feel of paint, the way it mixes, and I’ve had multiple pieces to show to people further down the path than me, who can offer a few constructive words in response that break the task wide open for me again. The more you do it, the more confident you become. The more you respond to a piece in a way that only you could respond to it, the more that your pieces start to be recognizable as “yours.”

The way that the system supporting music has been set up really stunts the art-making potential of musicians. We aren’t often encouraged to treat ourselves as “artists,” as far as the process is concerned. The album cycle, the idea that you refine and record a dozen songs and then go on an insane journey to market that material greatly inhibits creative growth. Being signed with a major label allowed me to see the priorities of the system from within. It’s a business. They finance a product and use all the channels they have to sell as much of it as possible. Indie labels do this. Independent artists do this as well. It's standard twentieth century American procedure. The scary thing is that when I talk with musician friends, our conversations usually turn to matters of business, as that’s how we’ve come to gauge success. Things are of course changing as this system crumbles away, but I don’t want to expend my limited moments of life worrying about how much my music sells or who I get to open a show for or what some executive says they think.

As far as creating great artistic material is concerned, though, there are relatively few musicians that have been able to produce enough material to have their own voice start to shine through. Your starting point as a young artist is most always going to be the work of others that moves you or entertains you or challenges you, so it makes sense that so much of the new music we get pushed at us is a collage of references to other people’s works and style from the past.

As much of an adventure as I’ve had creating and releasing two full length albums, I feel that I have held myself back in a lot of ways. I’ve probably started more than a thousand songs in the last ten years, but seen only a couple dozen through to a polished, recorded, state. Recently, learning to record myself has been empowering. I now am less dependent on engineers and producers and studios and someone to finance those great costs. I also have a direct connection with the medium, when before, as a performer, I brought the concept and the paint, but someone else with a different skill set was doing the painting. As my own producer and engineer, I have control over the brush, and of so many new colors to mix in. I can paint on so many surfaces now. This has made songwriting and recording fresh and exciting again. There is so much new potential to aspire to, a new medium in which to find my voice, in which to make new shapes, to say the things I need to say.

A few months ago, when Lucinda Williams released a new album and I was blown away by the continued growth in her songwriting, even in her late fifties, I began to ask people why is it that most musicians do their most compelling work so young in life and sputter out instead of grow? Shouldn’t artists like her be the rule, not the exception?

This question obviously gave way to tons of other questions, and I had a lot of great discussions, but one answer that rang true to me is that musicians have the freedom and motivation as amateurs to create provocative work, but in entering their professional career, the call of the day often becomes entertainment and marketing - selling the product. As professional entertainers, the art becomes secondary (it feels pretentious to even be calling it art!), growth is stunted by tour schedules and the details of photo shoots and agents and managers. You are as a young artist, more often than not, critiqued on such abstract grounds as trends and fashion and who you associate with, that it is easy to become more insecure with success, to shoot towards the safe middle instead of finding your edge. If creative work was only a vehicle to enter into the spotlight, then once in the spotlight, different priorities might emerge in order to stay there. That is a totally separate issue.

I don’t want my creative process to suffer, to never develop to its full potential because I’m driving to the ends of the earth to market it. With Street To Nowhere we worked on our one album for three years, and toured on it and marketed it for almost two years. The experience was incredibly interesting, and I wouldn’t change it, but it still shocks me how much time was spent on eleven of my songs. I think of my favorite painters and how much work they produced. I can’t picture any of them going around the world for a couple years to promote their paintings, painting the same image again, night after night. They experimented freely, took risks, and just their finished pieces fill thick reference books. I’m becoming more interested in their approach, in those creative priorities. I’d rather share with you more songs, straight from my head and heart, even if that means they are less polished, even if some experiments yield freaks of nature. I’d like to expend my energy to further find my voice, and refine my skills, even if that means my work reaches less people. I don’t need to be Starbucks. I’m happy being a neighborhood coffee shop.

My Work Space

2011-06-08T09:52:00.001-07:00

Trembling In A Room

2011-06-07T12:54:00.001-07:00

You can't predict when it will happen again.

You step into a room and it grabs hold. Jostling you, one arm around your throat, the other taut around your chest. Your breath is inconsistent and your words tumble like rocks yanked loose from the mountainside. Unexpected, heavy, and conspicuous - crashing below. You want to let the force pull you into the shadows. You want to let it drag you back into your car, its hand guiding yours as you turn the key. You want the engine to rumble, to feel the car reverse down the street, flow silent and surging backwards into the river of headlights. You want to let it shove you back through your front door, slam you down hard on your bed.

It isn’t humility when you find yourself suddenly kneeling unintended at the presence of others. It isn’t the awe of staring upwards into the branches of a massive redwood or of being swept into the stratosphere by a string of music. The feeling is humiliation. It is a sudden thick shadow shooting out from you, saturating the world around you. You handed away your power, let your anxieties seduce you. How did it happen? You don't want this.

You simmer in this silent injustice and fury. In this quiet, uncontrollable, unintended, dehumanization.

Some will take advantage of it and perform their invisible rituals on you, manipulate you, exploit you, experiment with push and pull and gifts and insult. Some will try to save you to save themselves, to lift you, to frantically convince you of the virtue that you have inside - and some, will allow you to just exist as that whisper of a person, casting their gaze to the floor as you drift by.

There are others though, that will stick with you at a healthy distance, allow you to navigate your own ascent into understanding, to ride your own wave of strength and weakness, and expect you to soothe them when they fall. Because this shocked and shaken creature isn’t you. It happens. it’s a symptom of something that is in you, but you’re bigger than it is, and you’re losing it - you’re way too hard on yourself. There is no way you must act with these friends, these companions. The effect of the mixture was predetermined. It is chemistry. There is a way things will go because of the ingredients involved. You may react oddly when another element is thrown in, but some things are just more conducive to one-another than others.

So fuck it. Go out into the world and be the conflation of elements that you are, see how the world around you reacts, hold on when you feel something dragging you away, and look for an opportunity to grow and for those that will grow beside you. Be fascinated as one moment and one feeling slip into the next.

New Apartment Recording

2011-06-02T19:38:00.000-07:00

Today I took a break from the obsessive process of recording my next album, and made a new APARTMENT RECORDING. The song is called "While Another Day Drew Near" - click to listen and download

<a href="http://davesmallen.bandcamp.com/track/while-another-day-drew-near">While Another Day Drew Near by Dave Smallen</a>

Apartment Recordings are quick recordings of songs that I don't want to slip through the cracks. I track them in my bedroom and try to counterbalance my more detail-obsessive projects by doing only a few takes of everything, even if the songs themselves have been refined and edited for weeks or years, and releasing them that same day. I hope to catch the sound of my space and the character of my voice in a particular moment on a given day.

Each volume builds over time so come back in a little while and there will be more to hear.

Love

2011-05-30T02:03:00.000-07:00

I would say that the thing to focus on is love, but that word has been dragged through so many shopping malls and abusive homes that I'm not certain it articulates my point. So instead I'll say, the thing to focus is on is how we treat one another and how we treat ourselves.

Emptied

2011-05-29T02:13:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you share so much that you drain yourself. I feel that way after I sing. After I really sing. When my throat is all chopped up and things are hazy and sort of out of reception. I could just burrow somewhere and hibernate. When I really rear back and sing, when I’m not thinking about what I’m singing, how I’m singing, it’s redemption, it’s a gap in time, a space that couldn’t comprehend anxiety or fear. I could command a sudden army, or break a stable of horses. And after, there is this space where everything feels numb - the house is burned down - there isn’t hardly an everything to feel.

A lot of today was like that. Today I shared my history and walked through the halls of another’s. We saw other people’s lives pasted up on massive walls and deconstructed into flashes of paint, into torn-out images wrenchingly arranged. Days like that are fascinating and cathartic and you can feel your darkest chasms taking on light, but as I drove away my heart wanted to nod off like a little kid on in the back seat on the long ride home. My heart had partied too hard.

A lot of tonight was like that too. I was confronted with a taste of my own history, in the back of a tour van with an old friend in the driveway of a beaten down house with a party swarming around us. And we were playing songs, writing songs, and I was fucking wailing. This was like we used to do. He used to pick me up in his band’s van when we both had some new songs, and we’d idle on some deserted corner, or find a picnic table in an empty park, and with whispered restraint, share the best of what we’d been creating. We’d give each other notes. These were our own little songwriting workshops. I’d get his approval, which I’d learned to trust, and then I’d be ready to sing for the world.

Now I don’t have much restraint. People kept climbing into the van. They were there, and they weren’t. I can sing loud over anything, anywhere, and it no longer phases me. I’m stronger within myself. I have a better idea if something I’ve written is ready - there's no such thing as ready. I don’t need his approval as much, or I should say, I now value my own approval so much more.

You don’t need to turn the stereo on when you head home from a day like that. You’re a shell, or some discarded bones, a light on a distant radio tower flashing on and off against the horizon. All of the longing that goes into a day, all of the need to connect, and to give, and have your isolated existence be recognized and understood in that of another - all of that is washed away. There is nothing to be accomplished. It’s time to rest.

Songs About Songs

2011-05-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

Poets writing poems about writing poetry.

Sometimes the process swallows up everything around it, and then there is only the process. Days drift by unnoticed. Goals arise, are sliced open, hastily performed, forgotten. Somehow the need to get up and go to work, to put something down on the page, becomes more urgent than the job itself. What if you just didn’t show up? Where do you trip the wire of consequence? What is the bottom line to survival? Is there anywhere you have to be?

Everyone needs to tell their story. Sometimes when you start to tell it back, you can only talk about the telling. It might be time to wake up in the woods then, and find your way home.

Birds sing in the middle of the night here and I can see stars from my bed. In the morning, the shade from the wall keeps the concrete cool in the back yard. I have a routine suddenly, where I stand with that first cup of coffee and see if I can find the observatory in the distance. Today I recognized the sensation of a summer morning, a thread of cool air trembling in the heat. People have climbed to the top of the hill across the way. Below it is an empty college campus. Graduation came and went. It’s quiet now - just joggers and kids from the neighborhood. I’m living in a dining room with curtains separating it from the kitchen. I keep the sliding glass door open to the patio all day.

A couple years ago I reached the point where I was writing songs about my life as a musician. That was the case, because being a musician was my entire life. I had a lot of pain to exorcise, a lot of appreciation to express. You’ll hear. Then everything shifted. A part of me got ripped out, and I’ve been filling it in with something else. I didn’t know how to relate it as it went by, or if it was important to do so. It was mostly happening internally. Now I’m not sure I care much about being anything. What I do know is that I’m getting home. Getting to a new home. I can feel it coming - and it is not a song about writing songs.

Pulled Apart

2011-05-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

How our anxieties pull us apart. How I escape from conversations I want to be in. How I talk myself out of talking to those I wish to speak to. How I sell myself short to those I want to impress. How I disappear from the sight of those I’ve connected with. How you apologize to me for being yourself. How we protect one another from the painful truth that we need to hear. How I feel guilty for speaking my mind. How you smile and nod while you’re really spinning in your thoughts. How we talk around and around what we’re really talking about. How I start believing that you want this conversation to be over. How I shift my weight from leg to leg. How I rip the label from beer. How I burn as I walk away.

Photos From The Last Few Months

2011-05-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

Days

2011-05-19T10:05:00.001-07:00

Why does the positive have to add up to the negative - cancel it out, outweigh it?

Why is it that we make judgements on blocks of 24 hours and label them “good” or “bad?”

My day yesterday was so many things. I sat down and started to work, and within an hour was flooded with anger at myself, impatience at the process, helplessness, loneliness. I went to a museum and saw giant abstract paintings, watched a light rain fall in the sunshine on a pond in the sculpture garden, the drops illuminating like sparks as they hit the water. Time stopped. I spent an hour on hold with some corporate bureaucracy. I worked on a painting. I had a medium sized panic attack. I drank a cup of tea and stared, content, up at the hillside and the sky. I made dinner and snuck onto the balcony off of one of my roommate’s rooms to catch the tail end of the sunset. I watched a buddy I toured with almost five years ago perform an open-hearted set of his always poignant songs at a quiet venue and had a flashback to twenty-two. I drank a couple beers. I laid in bed trying to shake the uneasy rage that resurfaced from the morning, frustrated that I understood why it was there, why it was useless, but still couldn’t cut it loose.

That wasn’t nearly all negative. It was mostly interesting. It wasn’t all good. Some moments were painful. Some were contradictory, or overlapping, or oddly complimentary: Beauty and sadness, anger and understanding, fear and loneliness, happiness despite physical discomfort. I guess I could call it good, but why worry whether it was good or bad, if my life is exciting enough, or happy enough, or if I’m appreciating it enough. You’re not present with thoughts like that. You’re not savoring any moment. And what’s the measurement for any of this? Other peoples lives?! Who knows what they’re experiencing! You can’t touch their reality. You can’t get in there and feel it.

All I can say is - good or bad, yesterday happened.

And now it’s today.

My Approach To Recording This Album

2011-05-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

Right now I’m taking a break from comping vocals. For me, in the process of recording this record, this means that I spent a good chunk of the day today singing my song “Something You Could Say” into a microphone in my kitchen, and now I’m going through the takes (there’s about 25 of them), slicing them up, pulling out the best parts, then pasting them together as the performance that you’ll hear. Yesterday I did this with electric guitar, tomorrow maybe I'll sing again if my voice feels up for it.

One of the best things about making art is that it lives in a world that, if you allow it to, functions without ethics. Almost anything can be art if you treat it as art, and I’m always fascinated by the multitude of definitions people scrape up for the word, the action, the state of mind. That fundamental lack of right and wrong, though, makes a task like the one I’m currently getting some space from, a challenge. How can you know if you’re on the right path when there is no trail to follow! Sure, there are some rules, like pitch and meter, but sometimes the best performance is a little out of key, a little off the beat - and that’s okay, that may even be what somehow makes it great, but you have to be strong enough to allow yourself to break those abstract rules (theory, training, genre, the politics of what’s “cool”) that have been hammered into us. Having a producer helps on a project like this, an outside ear, another vote, but I’m at it alone this time.

One of the goals for this recording is to use it to further refine my ability to know what I like and don’t like, to execute on what I'm stoked on and follow through without second guessing myself too much. This includes knowing when to stop, when to take a break, when to give myself a pep talk, when to go take a hike, or meet a friend for a drink, or take a few days off. I’m working on this in all aspects of my life. There really isn’t ever a reason to be hard on yourself, or work harder than you have to. You can never be “perfect,” but you can always be “perfecting,” and a bad attitude won’t do you any good with that - though it will often try to convince you not to shake it. Better to step away for a while and enjoy the world outside, keep the balance.

When I was tracking in Sacramento two weeks ago with a bassist and drummer, we recorded some songs together in the same room, completely live. This means that we didn’t isolate our instruments, that all of the microphones in the room were picking up sound from everyone... You can hear my vocals on the drum microphones, and the drums cut through on the mic that’s pointing at my acoustic guitar, and so on... This is great because you have to live with what everyone played on each take, and there is no worry about “what’s best,” only “what happened.” I always think that the emotion gets across better on recordings like this as well - you’re all there together, feeling it.

This leads me to another of my themes for this project: Documentation. Music is obsessed right now with mining the past for all its resources. So many bands start off by deciding who they will be influenced by, or what genre they will be in, and weighing each decision against the canon of American pop culture from the last eighty years. I’ve done this. I do this. It’s hard not to. But I’m interested this time in just documenting what the process of this album sounds like, instead of trying to force it into some sonic state that's come before. I’ve been pushing myself to simply capture what my friends and I sound like playing in a room, how my voice echos off my kitchen walls... my guitar, the upright piano at my parent's house in Oakland, the strange old Sears, Roebuck & Co organ that an ex-roommate left in the garage here... It will certainly sound like other records that have come before it, but I think it will also have a sound of it’s own, of the houses and studios it was recorded in. And however the final product, I know that I will have grown through the process - every day I'm learning something new, having fun with it, taking it slow, and staying curious as to what will happen next...

There Is No Destination

2011-05-09T14:26:00.000-07:00

When I was sixteen I started jamming with a friend in his parent’s basement, where he had his drums set up. I would bring my Strat and my little Fender amp over, and we’d play the songs I was writing. We’d have a blast. He encouraged me with my songs, and we decided to start a band. We brought a friend of ours in on bass, and a kid in our class started recording us. We started playing out, at community centers, at this odd warehouse venue where The Locals, an Oakland band I was crazy about, threw shows. That may have been the most fun I’ve ever had. It was magic. I suddenly had the confidence to talk to girls, kids at school apologized for having ignored me or put me down before. The world was full of hope and importance. Music was this vehicle for us to be heard, this force that was going to bring us out of the clamped jaws of high school angst, a very real depression for me, and into the arms of acceptance, of happiness.

From there ambition took a hold. We all went off to college, but the real goal was to be professionals, and as time went on, the incredible moments of music and performing began to fall into the shadows of the desired destination. New goals would form before old ones were attained, so I began to appreciate the achievement of them less and less. I dropped out of college. I put in the work, I played the shows, I wrote the songs, I made the record, I signed to Capitol Records, I went on tour, opened for big bands, played shows to thousands of people, and though I feel like I sucked all of those experiences dry and appreciated them as much as I could, I still wanted more. I had so many nervous breakdowns that anxiety became the norm. And through that process I lost all of those old friends, including that drummer and our friend that recorded us. In a way, they were casualties of managers and lawyers and the opinions of other people, but also largely of my own ambition, of their ambition, of the abstract destination, the etherial solution that lay in front of us somewhere. Only recently did I begin to ask what I was looking to solve in the first place.

I made decisions to distance myself from my past. I chose a team of business-people that I knew deep down didn’t care for me as much as status and money and I impressed upon them my old patterns. I was accepted by the world now in so many ways, but I continued to find people who wouldn’t accept me for who I am, and would eventually only let me down.

Capitol had a merger and fell apart before our record got promoted. The band broke up. I made a new album on my own, and I still had the drive, I still had the energy to push and push. When I finished the album and had downtime, I helped run the Oakland office for the Obama campaign, and when the economy had collapsed, when no labels were clearly interested in even listening to my new record, one of my managers had an idea. I should move to New York, where she was based, and get my name out over there. She would be there to work with me, to find me opportunities.

When I made the decision to pack my Honda Accord and drive across the United States through the ice and snow, I knew I was following the advice of a woman who would openly berate me to a state of tears, and I wouldn’t fight back. But I still felt that I had to try. I had to get to that place, that place I’d been longing to get since those days in my buddy’s basement. I got to New York, slept on couches, and sloshed through the snowy gutters in Brooklyn to find a place to live. I stretched duct tape over the broken windows in my vandalized car, and I tried to get a hold of my manager.

She wouldn’t pick up her phone. I’d sometimes get a quick text back, and when I’d try to schedule a time to meet, she would disappear form the conversation. When my first show came, I stared at the door in the back of the room as I played, but the set ended and she had never walked in.

When I’d called the head of the company angrily, when I’d confronted her via email, we finally got coffee. I was shaking. I was afraid to show my anxiety around her because she’d always used it against me. I addressed what was happening in as calm a tone as I could, and she responded indignantly, “You’re not making me any money!”

She was on salary, and the company had seen a really nice chunk of cash from my old band’s record deal...

When they asked to work with me, I was told that it was because they loved my music and believed in me, but at the same time I had a major label bidding war, and of course this was what it was all about. And there I was spending my own savings to live in the ghetto in Brooklyn, risking my life and my mental health (whatever was left of it...) to make these epic drives alone in the middle of winter, often in the middle of the night, and I had no support. These business-people, that I had been trying to believe were invested in me and my music, became so transparent.

I tried to switch to a different manager within the company, and I waited in my apartment, in the cold, depressed, alone, for an answer. I started releasing my album online, song by song, I played a lot of guitar, I wrote a lot, read a lot of books, tried to get out to some museums, but I was in so much pain and so tired of the cold. I didn't want to be there except to further my career. I’d go up to the roof of the building and look out at the city stretching to the horizon on all sides. No one gave a fuck about me. No one would care if I was splattered on the sidewalk below.

After days and weeks I still had no answer. Every few days I’d call again and the receptionist at the office in San Francisco would tell me that the head of the management company was “In a meeting” or “on a conference call” or “just stepped out,” and I’d never hear back. The shows they had helped me book had run out so I put together some gigs for myself, but they usually didn’t pay, and I was playing a lot of the time for just the sound man.

After almost two months of this, I flew back to San Francisco for a couple shows and managed to pin down the head guy for a meeting. I knew what was coming. The company dropped me. I had so much of my life invested in my relationship with them, so much of my self worth came from knowing I was being handled by the same people that handled these famous bands that I looked up to so much, a reality that is difficult to look back at. I left the meeting with hug and a “thank you.” Sometimes, laying awake at night, I wish I had flipped a desk over, smashed some windows, but what difference would it have made? That wouldn’t have changed all the pain I had already been through.

Back in New York, the city was still iced over. I waited another two months for my girlfriend to graduate from college so I wouldn’t have to drive back to California alone. When we finally made the drive, a rainstorm lifted as we passed through Reno. And as we crossed the border into my home state, a flood of sunshine broke through the drenched pines. I felt tears of relief streaming down my face.

That experience broke me. I’ve stuttered again and again in the last two years trying to keep my music career going, but I’ve hardly been treading water. I’m barely afloat financially, and I'm struggling to stay at all interested in the business aspects of it - which are a necessary evil, I guess. But this is largely because I’ve spent a great bulk of my time getting to the bottom of the illusions that led me to believe that pushing to the ends of the earth for some surface ambition was going to get me anywhere I really wanted to be. I’d been so many places, but always brought with me all of the baggage that had always weighed me down. This period in my life has been such a fulfilling endeavor. I’ve spent the time getting to know myself, my history, my family’s history, and the way my body and my mind work, the way our society, our world, works. Now I understand what happened. I’m just glad to be alive.

Last night I picked up my drummer friend from the airport. We’ve reconnected after all these years, and he was flying home from a European tour. After telling me about performing for these massive crowds over there and talking about all of the various projects he has his hands in now that he’s home, we started talking about real life.

He and I had already been incredibly successful at sixteen: we were having fun and expressing ourselves to the best of our ability. And we still do that, which is the best part! Everything else that has happened since then has been about other, more deeply rooted, desires and issues.

We agreed that we are in a similar place, that we’ve seen enough to know that the best of what life has to offer is there for you in any simple moment, that all of the eyes of the world staring at you with admiration would still feel like shit if you have no love for yourself. Ambition is good in moderation. It gets you out of bed, allows you to survive, to do the things you want, but it can be compulsive just like anything else. We agreed that there is no destination anymore, there is only now, and if you can’t appreciate your ‘now’ - you need to figure out why that is.

I’m working on a new record, and a lot of the lyrical content is driven by this experience. I still make music because I love to write songs and sing them, because they help me to put my life and my feelings into some sort of structure and hear them played back. I write because I have something to say, and because the creativity keeps me challenged in a healthy manner. This has always been true, but it was submerged under so much desperation, such an irrational need to be accepted by the world, when the reality was, I was never accepted by my own self.

2011-04-12T12:32:00.001-07:00

When you compliment me by putting yourself down, you insult us both.

Some Thoughts On Arguments And Belief

2011-04-10T14:45:00.000-07:00

I never want to have an argument again. I’m done letting my wires get tripped in the heat of discussion and feeling the sour chemicals of frustration stream out. I never again want to find myself in a feedback loop, shutting someone down, being shut down, shutting someone down, being shut down - walls of memory banks crumbling, old feelings, old behaviors, rolling out into open air.

Beliefs.

Beliefs are heavy, burdensome things. I’ve tried to shake the beliefs of my friends and family, but a belief is something big and rooted. A belief is a house with foundations laid deep. It can have many levels with many rooms and so many things hung in its closets. It can be hard to grasp in the moment, but there’s someone living their life inside of that belief, just as you go to bed each night in yours.

How often is it worth it to bring in a wrecking crew to try to dismantle someone’s convictions, someone’s perspective on the world? For them to watch the shelter they dwelled in be destroyed, to have all of their belongings strewn about? How high should the stakes be for us to make our loved ones rummage through the pieces in embarrassment, to try to construct some sort of roof to raise above themselves while they figure out what’s right? Especially if they’re getting along fine, if they aren’t harming themselves or others, the way we all stumble along with our ever-imperfect situations. Why put someone down? Why tell them they are wrong? If they are, they will probably learn it in a more effective way (the hard way).

Often, I think, we’re trying to be kind. If we see something that we think could be better in this world, we want to make it so - or we at least want to point it out. But conversely, for so many reasons, we also want to control others, want to have our statements and feelings validated - whatever they may be. But what good is validation from someone whose throat you’re holding a knife to?

People need to believe different things at different moments in different places in their lives. We’ll never be all on the same page. Right and wrong as I see it is a spectrum, an art-form. It’s a chess game, and we must address the intricacies of each move with fresh tact. It’s a skill we should always be honing.

But then there’s bigotry, there are cults, there are harmful notions that cut through our culture at all discernible levels. These beliefs can become towering high-rises, and constantly being under attack, their foundations get dug deeper and deeper every time they are defended. They tend to be eclipsing something buried, something someone carries around with shame. We know that an argument is touchy, and that there are slow and effective ways to address these issues, to stand up to them, but they are often more risky and more complicated than blasting our own fiery convictions back into someone’s face. Maybe there is a right time to let the anger flow when it comes to addressing dangerous ideals, but I really think you need a steady hand to cut ties so tightly bound.

Of course, I know I’ll find myself in arguments again. I’ll wake up in a heated debate over something inane and watch it roll right over the edge into battle. But I want to remember in those moments that what is happening is no longer about the content of the discussion, it is about something deeper and unique in each of us. The way someone behaves in a conflict shows their true colors, gives you a glimpse of the actual home they were once helpless in. It seems to me that once we enter into an argument, we begin to work out our issues on one another - our needs for control, our needs to be accepted and validated and praised and loved, our needs to be understood. We start to vent these feelings from the past - the grief, the anger, the sensations of being victimized - all the things we’ve never had a place for and never were able to throw out. We start to hurl rocks at each-other's houses, forgetting why we got so heated in the first place.

I want to always be honing my craft. To get better at taking that deep breath, making the pact to disagree, and disbelieving the part of me that thinks I was being insulted. I want to be able to make a clean move to the next string of moments. I want to be open, and stay strong, to know what needs to be defended, and what needs to be shrugged away.

Inexplicable Shifts

2011-04-04T15:27:00.001-07:00

Sometimes you’re solid. You get it. Whatever life throws your way you take with optimism, with tact and rationality. You’re aware of yourself, certain, excited to take risks for pure enjoyment. You smile at strangers, make small talk. You’re calm and sympathetic. People are drawn to you. There’s nothing you need, and no one can push or pull you out of your element. You’re in control, modest and powerful simply for being you. Life is easy despite any inconvenience, any challenge, and it’s going to stay this way forever.

Then for no clear reason, something shifts within you. You spring a leak and begin to take on all of the doubt, the self-loathing. Every action requires a great effort, if only to take a breath, to keep your spirits above the surface.

Clenched teeth. Stiff Joints. There is this glare to everything, like you’re looking perpetually through some dusty late-afternoon window. Your headache pulses to the beat of everything.

And you’re going to fail, and all you’ve left behind you on that hard road are epic and complete failures. You’re fucked. And your friends don’t understand, and their advice proves that, and they don’t answer their phones anyway cause they probably don’t even like you. But you need their advice. You need someone to tell you how to get through this. The walls are fucking sheer in this pit, someone has got to throw you goddamned rope. There must be answers, but you can't quiet your anxieties long enough to actually think.

Of course, it’s hard to sleep. And when you do sleep, if you get to dream, you dream of conflict. You fight hard and you lose brutally. You’re confined. You’re stranded at great heights. You’re tortured. And any sense of hope is an illusion. If you come up, you’re going to fall, and fall hard, and wake in that sudden flash of sweat.

Has it always been like this? Have you ever felt your neck and back unclenched? Whose fault is this? You play back the long list of wrongs done to you as you stare into the darkness. You’re the victim here. Someone has to pay.

But then, one morning, with no singular shimmering cause, with no clarity you can discern from Freud or your friends, you wake up, and the day feels easy. You’re rested. And you notice that the morning is constructed of all these incredible little details: shapes of sun across the wall, hints of singing birds. You savour them.

And the past rolls off easy, the future dangles before you in pleasant mystery. And every moment, every thought, everything, has the quality of a secret joke, a punch line you couldn’t possibly explain. But why would you need to?

Curious Processes

2011-04-01T17:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about this album for almost three years.

Laying half-asleep one morning in summer 2008, when I was putting the finishing touches on Everything Changes And Nothing Changes, I became aware of a melody in my head. Being only semi-conscious, I stayed helpless in that state while the song built up in a feedback loop, forming around a sort of embarrassing interaction from the previous night. When I finally lifted from sleep, I grabbed my guitar, and sitting in bed began to sing the chorus to “I Know That You Don’t Want To Be My Girl.”

I used to think that I was consciously responsible for the things I create. But the more music and art that I make, the more I’ve found that I am hardly ever in the drivers seat. I used to think that there were artists I looked up to that must have fully conceived their work before hand and executed it from there, but now I’m beginning to recognize that the artistic process (and this feels true for so many processes in life) is more of a meandering conversation. When you are inside of a project, you are constantly reacting to the elements that you have completed, and then reacting again, and again, until your reaction is to stop. That morning I was responding to something my subconscious had stirred up, and I molded it from there, but I was hardly in control of the outcome.

Deciding what the end result will be and sticking militantly to that fantasy is an easy trap to fall into. You often wind up forcing your way through rocky terrain, pass up potentially interesting pathways because they don’t fit your mold, miss out on the spoils of curiosity, all of the happy accidents, and your enjoyment of the present moment. I also think it demeans the individuality of a work, as it is easy to envision a new take on something that has been done before, but I think the really unique moments happen when you just dive in with an open mind and see what’s down there. I had a ton of reference tracks that I’ve been collecting in the last couple years, recordings that for one reason or another had an essence I could envision a song of mine sharing, and these were a nice starting point, but on the first day of recording I left all of those references behind.

I have no idea what this album will sound like when it’s completed. Hell, I have no idea how long it will take to finish and who else may be helping me with it along the way. I am simply getting up each morning and going to work on it, curious to find out where it takes me next.

Recording, so far...

2011-03-26T10:55:00.000-07:00

Famous Blue Raincoat Cover

2011-02-18T21:34:00.000-08:00

A long overdue bedroom recording of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" -

Famous Blue Raincoat (Leonard Cohen Cover) by DaveSmallen

New Cover Song: Smog's "I Break Horses"

2011-02-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

(a home-recorded cover)

I Break Horses (Smog Cover) by DaveSmallen

Coldest Winter

2011-01-27T19:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a little bedroom recording of myself covering

Kanye West's "Coldest Winter" --> Coldest Winter (Kanye West Cover) by DaveSmallen

Everything Changes: Pay-What-You-Want

2011-01-14T15:26:00.000-08:00

My last album, "Everything Changes And Nothing Changes," is now available for 'name-your-own-price' (that means you can enter: $0.00!)

Take it with you on your iPod.

Share it with your friends.

CLICK: http://davesmallen.bandcamp.com/album/everything-changes-and-nothing-changes

Photos From The Last Few Months

2011-01-04T20:26:00.000-08:00

Say Thank You

2010-08-20T14:45:00.000-07:00

<a href="http://davesmallen.bandcamp.com/track/say-thank-you">Say Thank You by Dave Smallen</a>

NEW APT RCRDNG!

New Apartment Recording

2010-08-10T13:35:00.000-07:00

<a href="http://davesmallen.bandcamp.com/track/if-i-knew-what-i-was-looking-for">If I Knew What I Was Looking For by Dave Smallen</a>

New Woodcut

2010-05-30T17:19:00.000-07:00

Did this woodcut earlier this year and just scanned it so ya'll can see - maybe I'll use it for a poster or album cover in the future...

Click on it for a closer view

Things I Saw from LA to Tucson

2010-04-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

(The Border)

2010-04-28T11:46:00.000-07:00

CLICK TO VIEW FACEBOOK EVENT FOR THIS SHOW!!!!

Seattle Session

2010-04-14T14:19:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple tracks from a session I did in Seattle while gearing up to record my latest album:

In February 2008, I spent a couple days in a Seattle studio with Producer John Goodmanson (Nada Surf, Blonde Redhead, Harvey Danger), musicians Nick Harmer and Jason McGerr (of Death Cab For Cutie), and Jacob Hoffman (of The Lashes). I left town with a handful of raw recordings, tracked live, with a few overdubs. Now I'm sharing two of these tracks with you.

<a href="http://davesmallen.bandcamp.com/album/seattle-session">Everything Changes and Nothing Changes* by Dave Smallen</a>

AZ Shows 4/23 / 4/24 !!

2010-04-13T01:04:00.000-07:00

CA and AZ Tour!

2010-04-04T20:18:00.000-07:00

My acoustic guitar and I will be embarking on an extensive tour of Southern California and Arizona from April 18th to 24th! Here are the dates:

4/18 - Los Angeles, CA - Spaceland!

(w/ Brothers At Sea, Parade Of Lights)

4/21 - Riverside, CA - UC Riverside - Afternoon performance

4/21 - Glendale, CA - House Show [RSVP Needed] - See the Facebook Event!

4/22 - San Diego, CA - House Show [RSVP Needed] - See the Facebook Event!

4/23 - Tuscon, AZ - The Real Coachella Mini-Fest @ Dry River

4/24 - Phoenix, AZ - Fractal!

(w/ Your Very Own, Western Medicine, Saddles)

Pics from my In-Store at Amoeba Records

2010-04-01T13:43:00.001-07:00

CLICK HERE TO SEE THEM

Southern California: Host a Show in your Living Room 4/19-4/23

2010-03-29T13:16:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be in Southern California from April 19th - 23rd, between a show at Spaceland (4/18) in LA and another at Fractal in Phoenix AZ (4/24) -- As I've received a lot of requests to play in San Deigo, Orange County, and LA (in an all ages scenario), I'm curious if you or a friend of yours would be willing to host a house/apartment/dorm/living-room/etc... show for me one of the days that week.

I would basically sit in your living room and play a bunch of songs on my acoustic guitar for you and your friends and anyone else who can make it (we'll set up a way for the public to RSVP in order to keep your address off the internet). I'll probably ask for a small optional donation from everyone there in order to pay for gas and help with tour expenses for the day. All you need is a space where I can sing at the top of my lungs and enough room for a handful of people to watch - no microphone necessary. If you have a piano, I might play that for ya'll as well.

If you're interested, please shoot me an email at: davesmallen@gmail.com

(please include some details about the space you have)

[Again, for the time being I'm restricting this to Southern California - especially LA, OC, SD, SB - but if it works well, we can try it elsewhere too]

Thanks!!

2010-03-27T00:03:00.000-07:00

Saying Something

2010-03-21T10:54:00.001-07:00

There is no permanent balance to life, no place that you can stand, emotionally or physically, forever. There have been a few times when I've felt like I was nearly grasping at what the world is all about, but then I travel, I read, I talk to people and suddenly I'm back in some wilderness where nothing quite makes sense again. What I've learned is that if you ever feel like you get it, like there is nothing left for you to understand, then you are in for a humbling wake-up. How fortunate we are, though, to have books and songs and art and film to help us as we find direction.

I just worry sometimes that we're too distracted by our popular culture, especially when it's traveling with us in our pockets, constantly pulsating with the absolute latest, especially when those items bearing some sort of meaning are buried by the minutia of a celebrity-marketing or our now often weird-for-the-sake-of-weird mainstream, capitalizing on the idea that people don't want something meaningful, they want something pretty and dramatic or something they've never seen. I certainly am always looking for something new and novel and interesting, but I get concerned when I find myself trolling the internet, click by click, for something bright and shiny when our world is writhing in need.

I feel that it's the duty of entertainers, of anyone in front of any sort of crowd, to be saying something. It doesn't need to be political or revolutionary or complex or even inspiring. It can be abstract or open-ended. It need not be put into words or images. It just needs to be expressing something. We're so pent up in a culture where we are always so careful of what we show on the surface. We may feel that we need to strike out in anger or flood with tears, but we hold it in. We may feel so elated that we want to start singing and dancing right in the middle of a busy sidewalk, but we suppress a great deal of it. Music and art allow us to relate those underlying feelings to someone else's, to channel our rage or sadness or joy to something constructive without repercussion, to give ourselves an outlet, to put it all in a new perspective so we can better understand ourselves and those around us - or just have a good time.

There is nothing to be ashamed of in your music library - you are really safe within the arts and we are fortunate enough to have the (relative) freedom to express ourselves (I like to say that everyone's taste in music is right). Sure, there is a consequence of sorts to anything you say or do, and it's good to be aware of it, but it's important to explore our interests and try things on and see how they feel, to stand up for yourself and the things you believe in. If anyone tries to shame you, they are probably just ashamed of something in themselves.

I play shows with all sorts of musicians and I'll see high school garage bands genuinely expressing themselves, however cliche, at their sloppy first show, and I'll hear hip brooklyn bands, calculated and dressed exactly to the moment, buried within a frenzy of rehashed and diced up fad-culture, saying nothing. The whole apathetic feel-nothing, say-nothing, care-about-nothing trend (which I had expected to fade by now) is infuriating to me in a time when so much is at stake, when our country is divided and fighting wars, when our planet is running a fever, when the tide of suffering continues to rise with world's population. . . .

Why sing it, why scream it, if you aren't saying anything at all?

"I Think it's Getting Better" featured in the NBC show Community

2010-03-18T02:25:00.000-07:00

Stolen Fender Stratosonic Guitar

2010-03-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

After a wonderful show last night in San Francisco, my Fender Stratosonic guitar was stolen from my van near Church and Market.

For the past six years that guitar has been beside me for hundreds of shows all around this country and it isn't only unique for being a short run model of Fender's Stratocaster with P-90 pickups (which I replaced with Lollar P-90s), but because it was one of the two guitars (the other being the acoustic that I also play at shows) that I own, that I have had with me while writing all of the songs from my last two records and all of the songs that never made the cut.

It has been with me in my darkest times when I had nothing else to hold on to, and despite the little hope that I have for it to return to me, I ask that if you are in or around the bay area that you just keep an eye out for it.

[Of course, I'll offer a reward]

"I Think It's Getting Better" on NBC's Community - Tonight!

2010-03-11T10:41:00.000-08:00

My song, "I Think It's Getting Better" will be appearing at the end of tonight's episode of the NBC show, Community --8/7c -- I believe the episode is guest-starring Katherine McPhee and if I'm not mistaken the song will be played over the final credits. Pretty cool!

Of course you can grab the song (and the rest of the album) on iTunes:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/everything-changes-nothing/id330156557

[Community - Season 1 - Episode 18 - "Basic Genealogy" - song at the end]

AWESOME BAY AREA SHOWS THIS MONTH

2010-03-02T01:11:00.000-08:00

MARCH 13 at BOTTOM OF THE HILL in San Francisco

w/ Audrye Sessions and Poor Bailey

* I'll have a backing band, and everyone will be playing on everyone's set.

It will be awesome, obviously.

Advance Tickets are a really good idea: CLICK HERE

AND

MARCH 28 at AMOEBA RECORDS in Berkeley

Free. Solo/Acoustic. In-store performance. 2pm.

(My record is also available now at AMOEBA'S Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles locations.)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !

Videos of New Songs

2010-02-23T12:28:00.000-08:00

Here are a couple more videos from my session outside The LACMA in Los Angeles last year. These are both newer songs that I've included in my live set for a while now. The videos are by Elliot Glass.

HAPPINESS:

GOOD MAN:

A Few Things I'm Currently Inspired By:

2010-02-22T21:46:00.000-08:00

The poem, Beauty, by B.H. Fairchild

The book, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

Cory Branan's entire catalogue

Essence, by Lucinda Williams

Leonard Cohen (These days it's Live In London)

Albrecht Durer's woodcuts

The paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Moments when no time was taken to consider what others might think

The Avett Brothers (Especially when produced like Petty's Wildflowers)

Wildflowers

Conan O'Brian (hard work, kindness)

T-Bone Burnett

Scientists that take the time to appreciate and understand art

Artists who trouble themselves with some science

Those that do it when it's out of fashion

Springsteen: Darkness At The Edge Of Town

Long drives over mountains and across bridges to get home from the show

The drawings by Kai Althoff on the top floor of SFMOMA

Anxiety and the pot from which it boils over

"With The Sky All Blue" Woodblock Print

2010-02-22T20:49:00.000-08:00

I recently added my "With The Sky All Blue" Woodcut print to my online store. Each is hand printed and signed by yours truly. You can order it in a variety of colors (Green, Red, Gold, Blue) and shipping is free. In fact, shipping is currently free on all of my prints.

I'll also be including a free "You Look Great Today" greeting card from brilliantism.com in every order that includes a T-shirt or a Print:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Street Team

2010-02-08T15:42:00.001-08:00

I just created a STREET TEAM group on Facebook, a place where I'll post tasks that I need your help accomplishing, and you can share any ideas you have for how I can get my music further into folk's hearts and minds.

I'll, of course, find little ways to make it up to you if you're helping out.

It's a bit of an experiment at this point, so join up if you'd like to help, and we'll see where we can take it.

Interview On Alternative Ways of Releasing Music

2010-02-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

I was interviewed by writer, Emily Zemler, when she was putting together an article that came out today on alternative methods of releasing music for Alternative Press music magazine. As I tend to say much more than can fit in print, I figured I'd share all my answers with you here.

What was your motivation for releasing a song each month in 2009?

Everyone was saying that 2009 was going to be a dismal year and I wanted to have a way to get through it, and maybe even enjoy it. I finished recording "Everything Changes and Nothing Changes" in 2008 and decided to release it myself. Without a budget for promotion, I was concerned that if I put the whole thing out at once, the album might get buried by a thousand other releases before my fans could hear about it. I had put out one song, America, as a digital single before the November elections, and I liked how it went, so I figured I could do that for the rest of the record.

How did you release them?

A song at the first of each month from March to December of 2009 with a digital EP of the first five songs released in June and a compilation of all the songs as a physical and digital full-length on December 1st 2009. Each song was accompanied by an individual piece of my own artwork: linoleum and wood block prints. I experimented and released some songs for free, some for a buck, and America was a suggested donation to a few non-profits.

Did you find that to be successful?

It was great for keeping a consistent dialogue with my fans and I loved the feeling of always having a new song waiting in the wings, but looking back, the most successful part was just recording a bunch of songs that I was proud of, regardless of how they got released. I wouldn't encourage anyone to choose their method of releasing material before they first recorded something they were excited to share with the world.

Why compile the songs into an album after releasing them?

I liked the way that the songs sounded together in a certain order, so I didn't want to lose the album idea altogether. I also like it when an artist's work from a certain period of time is grouped together. It makes their catalog much more navigable. Enough fans requested that I put out a physical CD that I did a short run of those with the artwork from the individual songs included in a booklet.

Did you model this after any other artists who have done similar things?

I had a few friends in Northern California that tried releasing music in small amounts on a consistent basis, and I'd had discussions with a lot of musicians and industry folks about doing something different from an album, so I kept everyone else's ideas and experiences in mind when figuring out what would work best for my album.

Do you see this as the future of music?

Whether we're communicating or not, all artists that are trying something different are in collaboration with one another, and at some point it's possible that what we're all doing as individuals evolves into a standard model for everyone, but I kind of I hope that it stays open to interpretation. The freedom to frame the way that your audience receives your art allows for so many additional opportunities to express yourself. I hope people just keep coming up with something that suits them best.

As an artist who has been signed to a major, what are the benefits of self-releasing music? The drawbacks?

Being out there alone is intimidating, but well worth the freedom to do and say whatever you'd like, whenever you'd like, especially on the still semi-wild frontier of the internet. It's easy to get discouraged when navigating through it without a budget or booking agent or publicist, but a musician has to be concerned with making music, and a business has to be concerned with making money. Art and commerce always have tension with one another. So it has been refreshing to set my own expectations for myself around my music, and not worry about living up to the goals of other people involved.

What's your plan for releasing music in 2010?

When adding production in the studio, I try to do what makes the most sense for each individual song and I'll have to adopt the same attitude for how I release my recordings. I have my next handful of songs written now and I hope to record them this summer or fall. Then I'll have to see what feels best.

Lost "America" Video

2010-01-28T15:06:00.000-08:00

My friend Shawn and I spent a few days making this video for my song "America" in August of 2008. Being my own harshest critic, I felt like I could have done a better performance of the song and took it down from youtube only a couple days after quietly putting it up. I was thinking about it the other day, and went back to take another look. I'm proud of this video, and I'm so proud of this song. Fuck it. I'd like to share it with you.

DIRECTED BY SHAWN HARRIS

A Few Thoughts For The New Year

2010-01-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

I like the attitude so far in 2010, even if the news is still littered with images of smoke and wreckage, downtrodden and angry and opposed.

In the first few minutes of the new year, I watch my friends play a set of new and old songs with old friends and new acquaintances gathered around - in the same old setting, in a context we've never known.

I put my hand on a familiar shoulder at the bar and my buddy and his girlfriend turn around, give me big hugs. He tells me that he feels good about this year - there was a solid idea of what 2009 would bring, but he has no clue about 2010 and that's exciting to him. He says that the next ten years will add an enormous weight to the chains of history. I think he's right.

All around the club people are cursing the last year, though they are thankful to be climbing out. Someone is moving to London, someone is kicking coke and heading to art school, someone is unemployed and spending their days working on their dreams. It is clear that there are a lot of good particles in the construct of a rough time.

A year ago today I was driving across the expansive western plains of Texas, taking the southern route to avoid ice and snow on my way to New York. There are other days that are like the ones I've spent between Las Cruces and Austin, where despite the progress you know you've made, the landscape through the windshield looks the same, days where the light seems to fade over the same heavy chrome clouds and the same pale shrubs from which it rose. No matter how much blurs by through the hours and hours, it is difficult to see the tangible accomplishment. There were lots of those days in the last year - and that's okay.

Reaching back through the crumbs of last year, I recall that my goal upon entering was simply to get through it, to keep the tank filled as the miles and miles slid beneath. There was negativity all around - uncertainty, fear. Many were afraid of what was coming and didn't want to pull back that curtain and see, or had taken a look and made the decision not to make changes to face it, just to forge ahead with their heads down to the storm. None of it was right or wrong. I couldn't recall a time when I had to face something that wasn't a repetition of history, where we couldn't be briefed beforehand by our older brothers and sisters.

So much that is happening right now is unprecedented - our culture is being processed at light speed, our personal relationships are being carved out across oceans where there are new continents forming of floating plastic refuse. Maybe we're starting to get used to it though, learning to roll with the punches, to take them as they come, and maybe there is a hint of curiosity about what will happen. It is always just been one big experiment anyway.

Over the last year, I have experienced so much within myself that I have never encountered, and had little capacity to put into words. I have come to understand what people mean when they talk about anger, while simultaneously being humbled by the heavy hand of love. My previous concept of myself has been shattered. I look back from one vantage point and am so proud of all that happened, everything I saw and felt and thought, so much beauty through the experience. I look back from another place and I find myself fighting feelings of hatred and regret.

There was one thing that I knew for certain, though, as I charged across the great dry sea of western Texas, and that was the fact that I would end up back in Oakland as the year came to a close. I had been offered an opportunity on the East Coast that I was taking more out of the habit of ambition than from my own desire. I took it because I was confused with how to navigate the new landscape I was in, I was hurt by the past, and I was overwhelmed by the future's uncertainty. I took it because I needed to get away to be reminded that no matter what you do, you're always from the place you're from. And as I'm writing this now, I'm looking out my apartment window at the rooftops and backyards and the Oakland hills rising in the distance and I am still utterly confused and unsure of what is coming. The difference is, I feel great about the moment and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.

2009-12-10T14:24:00.001-08:00

As the end of the year is an unavoidable time for reflection, I’d like to say Thank You. Whether you found my music through a Street to Nowhere show years ago, or more recently at a bar show or university concert on the east coast or my album release show the other day at home in San Francisco, or if you stumbled on my music via a friend or a blog, I just want to say: Thank You.

This year has been hard for a lot of people, and we’ve been hard on each other. For many people around me it has been a struggle just to keep doing what you are doing, to have faith in yourself to get by with what you’re most passionate about. I sincerely hope that everyone continues to work on their dreams and works to stay in love with them, even when opportunity becomes scarce. Great things are accomplished by those who care most for what they are doing, so the world needs you doing what you love.

2009-12-01T16:25:00.000-08:00

Everything Changes and Nothing Changes

2009-11-30T23:38:00.000-08:00

MY ALBUM "EVERYTHING CHANGES AND NOTHING CHANGES" IS OFFICIALLY OUT RIGHT NOW!

These are three of the best ways to get it:

---> order on CD with a 12 page booklet of art

---> download on iTunes

---> download from me via paypal

It is also available to stream and download on sites such as: Rhapsody, emusic, last.fm, Napster, Spotify, etc... AND of course it will be at all my shows, and I'll probably have one in my bag or something if you see me around town. Seriously.

I hope you enjoy listening to these songs as much as I enjoyed writing and recording them.

AND

For all of you that have been so kindly following my year long release of this album -

the final single is called "Underneath The Flood" -->

Thank You for listening.

Love,

Dave

Backing Band

2009-11-25T13:41:00.001-08:00

My One Time Only Backing Band of Awesome Musicians for this Friday's Album Release Show at Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco will include: Michael Knox from Audrye Sessions, Noah Clark and Evan Evans of Brilliant Red Lights, and Ben Schwier from The Park. So much fun to play with these guys!

Flyers!!

2009-11-15T15:06:00.000-08:00

FOR BAY AREA PEOPLE:

FOR EVERYONE: My Full Album, "Everything Changes and Nothing Changes," will be on iTunes (and everywhere else music is sold and streamed online) on December 1st - My album will also be available on CD with a 12 page booklet that day as well.

(please post these around if you'd like)

New Print For Sale

2009-11-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

This print from "I Think It's Getting Better" is now for sale in my online store.

Everything Changes and Nothing Changes

2009-11-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

Today I released my newest single, "Everything Changes and Nothing Changes" - this is one of my favorites from this series of songs which I'll release as a full album on December 1st (It will also be called "Everything Changes and Nothing Changes).

<a href="http://davesmallen.bandcamp.com/track/everything-changes-and-nothing-changes">Everything Changes and Nothing Changes by Dave Smallen</a>

Also for people in or around San Francisco, I'll be having my Album Release Party/Show at Bottom Of The Hill on Nov 27th. Soft White Sixties will be opening.

You Can View the Facebook Event for the show Here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=155637079471&ref=nf

And purchase Advance Tickets Here: http://www.stubmatic.com/bottomofthehill/event/1885

2009-10-30T15:55:00.000-07:00

2009-10-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

2009-10-22T15:41:00.000-07:00

2009-10-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

2009-10-19T10:15:00.000-07:00

2009-10-19T10:14:00.001-07:00

Just posted a Facebook Invite for my Album Release Party on November 27th at Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco.

2009-10-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

Single For October 1st

2009-09-27T15:44:00.001-07:00

I'm leaving town tomorrow and will be gone for a few weeks, so I'm releasing my single for October 1st this afternoon. It's called Carolann. I hope you enjoy it!

(If you crave updates from me, I have my tumblr queued to post a new photo each day - It's not much, but I hope it'll do for now.)

Advance Tickets

2009-09-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

For My Album Release Party at Bottom Of The Hill (ON NOVEMBER 27th!) are available here:

http://www.stubmatic.com/bottomofthehill/event/1885

Two Birds On A Wire Print

2009-09-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

I recently added the "Two Birds On A Wire" print (from Charmingly Awkward) to my online store.

I hand-print each one from the original hand-carved woodblock, signed or initialed.

Live Photos Sent To Me Recently

2009-09-21T01:22:00.000-07:00

above photos by Samantha Rodriguez

2009-09-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

Last month Elliot Glass and Allen Kelley met me at Chris Burden's "Urban Light" installation at the LACMA in Los Angeles where they filmed me playing a couple of my songs:

Underneath The Flood:

If you prefer youtube go here.

Everything Changes and Nothing Changes:

If you prefer youtube go here.

Here's what Elliot had to say about this:

"Dave was the first out-of-towner I've done that didn't have a suitable place in LA to shoot at, so there was a bit of a giant question mark as to where we'd film this. We thought it'd be cool to do it on the streets somewhere, but that meant finding a place without too much street noise, where the cops wouldn't shut us down, and where there'd be enough available light. And of course, somehow have it be distinctly Los Angeles. Literally the day of, we still hadn't decided on a place.

Dave and my paths have crossed a number of times by one of those strangely coincidental mutual friend things. I first saw him play years ago when I was still in school, as the front-man of Street To Nowhere, which has since disbanded (somewhat along with the Capitol Records / Virgin merge). The Oakland native is now playing under his own name, releasing his latest album one song at a time (as digital downloads with his own artwork attached), and in the process, bouncing around from San Francisco, to New York, and back again. His songs have always had an authenticity to them that's rare in popular music today. It's not just the earnest lyricism, loaded with emblematic autobiographical spells, but it's the way in which they're so delicately woven through the melodies, coercing you into actually listening to the words. Like all the greatest songwriters, Smallen is a storyteller at heart.

Unfortunately, there isn't a better story to how we came about the location. It was just one of those, "of course!" moments when a mental-note in the back of my brain chimed in. I'd driven by the location many times and thought, "hey, that'd be a cool place to do a photo-shoot." And where better than mid-Wilshire in the middle of the night? But seriously, the Chris Burden installation (outside of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) couldn't have been a more beautiful and perfect location. And thankfully, the security guards were chill with letting us shoot there."

Chris Burden's "Urban Light" sculpture is a permanent installation at LACMA. 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90036 - visit LACMA.org -

To see more of video work from these guys Click Here.

"American Character."

2009-09-09T17:29:00.001-07:00

Thank You.

One of my favorite speeches to date.

I may be self-employed and may have been denied coverage due to a pre-existing condition (depression) - but this is a no-brainer regardless: Everyone has the right to see a doctor and be treated. This is as simple as the golden rule.

I loved it when the right side of the room was forced to stand and clap for holding people accountable, though I was only fleetingly satisfied seeing them fume like little kids on time-out when they were shamed toward the end. I wish they would take the offered olive branch. What a country we'd live in if our leaders had genuine discourse.

"The Time for Bickering is Over." -President Barack Obama

Remember The Bright Side

2009-09-08T23:22:00.001-07:00

A little something about the attitude of the music business right now.

Many folks around the music industry are full of negativity these days. While the failing of the major label model may be immediately related to the economy and the internet, the reality of this situation is just proof to me that few companies actually knew how to run a business in the first place - they just inherited an old system, didn't change with the times, and these things forced that issue. There are some major growing pains and I've been in there, through the gauntlet - and it hurts. But it's time to move on.

I hope people can step back and see what a huge opportunity this moment is. Right now we are redefining how people receive music and support the artists that inspire them, that provide the ever-expanding score to their daily lives. This may not involve big infrastructures of marketers and sales reps and vice presidents - and I would guess that it will remain a difficult living (though I think it provides much more room for working class musicians). But what an amazing time to be making music: You can have control over what you create and the process through which you present it. We no longer are subject to the physical constraints of CDs or contracts with big companies for distribution. We can experiment. We should experiment. We can do anything. It's all a collaboration and every blind forward step that someone takes is important progress for everyone. There's room now for every hard working person with patience, good music, and something to say - It doesn't matter if you appear for a day on the front page of myspace - good stuff gets out there in time.

Look at our lives and the fascinating time we're in. It's indian summer, you have 10,000 songs on your iPod and it's finally okay to express yourself however you please.

Fuck yeah.

2009-09-08T00:06:00.000-07:00

NYC

2009-08-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

This is one take in the studio (Vocals, Acoustic, Drums, Upright Bass) on a long day in March 2008 with Electric Guitar and Keys overdubbed later.

Morning came to consciousness as the streetcar slowly creaked

And it froze the beer-glass ashtrays on the balcony railing

And the refuse of the evening was lifted on the breeze

And new day spills into the street

And the duchess is still sleeping when I slip out of bed

And I stand before her a moment, from her apartment I decend

She’s filthy like she’s wealthy, I’m guilty as my debts

I’m a squeezed accordion

If I get back to New York City

Oh Tanya wont you help me

Dissolve all of my longings

If I get back to New York City

If I get back to New York

It better be like it was before

Tanya I’ll be leaving when the sunlight hits the street

I want to sound your name in verses, echo off of the buildings

I want to disappear with you now Tanya in the rising subway steam, I know you don’t know me but trust me please

Oh I tried so hard to kiss you, tell me, did you burn like I burned

In that blue haze of morning when it was just starting to hurt

And me and Joey were still wasted watching the city walk to work, I’ve been screaming all night, someone tell me that you heard.

If I get back to New York City

Oh Tanya wont you let me wrap your limbs around me

If I get back to New York City

If I get back to New York

It better be like it was before

I’ll think of you in California when the gutters start to flood

And I’ll wear you woven in my winter coat, spiked in my blood

I hope you’re as lovely as you were that night when I was drunk

I just wish you’d call me, you know I wont ask for much

If I get back to New York City

Oh Tanya I hope you’re sorry as you watch my star rising

And If I get back to New York City

If I get back to New York

It better be like it was before

Album Release Show Moved

2009-08-31T13:37:00.000-07:00

To November 27th.

That's the day after thanksgiving.

Thanks IAFYAF!

2009-08-28T12:23:00.001-07:00

Heather from I AM FUEL YOU ARE FRIENDS, one my favorite, and one of the most original and thoughtful music blogs out there - posted something very nice about "I Think It's Getting better" this morning.

CLICK HERE to see the article and learn about a bunch of music you'll really dig, if you dig mine.

You no longer need paypal to purchase music

2009-08-25T15:43:00.000-07:00

You no longer need paypal to purchase music from my website.

After entering what you would like to pay and clicking "checkout" - you'll see a screen that asks for your paypal login. If you don't have a paypal account look for this:

Don't have a PayPal account?
No problem, continue checkout.

And you can pay with any major credit card.

Album Release Show

2009-08-19T11:01:00.000-07:00

As we're getting deep into the second half of my song-per-month experiment, I went ahead and booked November 27th at Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco for my Album Release Party.

All of the songs released this year will be compiled into an album called, Everything Changes & Nothing Changes. As there seems to be demand for a physical copy, there will be some sort of limited edition CD available.

I plan to play some of the set that night with a full band. Supporting acts TBA.

-------

PLEASE support bay area nightclubs (Bottom Of The Hill included) that have been under attack by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. The ABC has been citing clubs with ridiculous charges.

Go to: www.stopthewaronfun.com for more info.

This is exceedingly important to keep shows All Ages!

oakland sunset

2009-08-18T09:38:00.000-07:00

Old Friends (a post for some bay area people)

2009-08-17T10:21:00.000-07:00

My old friends, Oakland rock band: The Matches, are having their final show this Sunday at The Fillmore and I'll be playing acoustic in the upstairs room before the show and between bands. My longest set will be before the show, so make sure to time your arrival accordingly.

These guys have constantly had my back throughout the years and their decision to end this segment of their lives should be an exciting one when you hear/see what each of them are working on for their next step(s).

last week in l.a.

2009-08-14T10:33:00.001-07:00

(photos by Elliot Glass)

These are shot in Chris Burden's Urban Light at the LACMA in Los Angeles. I've had recurring moments of inspiration from Burden's art and the physical and emotional scale in which he works. At 18, I wrote his crazy-famous performance piece, Shoot, into my song Dead Cliche.

Video from this location to follow sometime soon.

Party At a Friend of a Friend’s

2009-08-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

I killed the engine but neither of us went for the door

There was no talk to fill the empty footprint of the stereo

No mention of going inside,

No commentary on the clusters of people approaching

And passing and climbing the stairs and knocking

Headlights of passing cars filled the rearview mirror

They projected our silhouettes onto stucco walls

Flickered down window panes where

The confidence of interactions unrestrained,

Of gestures unashamed by strange or sober eyes

Splashed through the cracks,

The missing blades of Venetian blinds

Or the river of light— Widening and contracting,

Widening and contracting—

Cascading down the front porch steps

So we sat there a while

And my head fell to your shoulder

And your head fell to mine

And the calls of our friends

Rang out far into oblivion

Until Next Year

2009-08-13T11:06:00.001-07:00

We're putting everything off until next year. This one is just too fucked, it came out of the gates with a broken leg and if we try to make it a contender, to put some faith in a horse this lame, we'll have losses that we will never be able to accept.

This is all full of good lessons, full of practical and productive reassessments, full of happiness in spite of, regardless of, unrelated to.

And most important, this isn't the end.

So let's not worry about all those things that just wont take flight right now. Let's let them sit on the runway and get trashed at the airport bar, watch the faces go by, and ask some strangers about themselves. And when this all passes, and people come out from their shelters and come to their goddamn senses, we'll be that much more ready to go.

recent

2009-08-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

New Prints in D.Smallen Store

2009-08-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

Just put some new prints up for sale in my online store.

I hand print each of these from wood and linoleum blocks (which I've carved).

EVERY TIME I LEAVE (I LEAVE FOR GOOD):

CHARMINGLY AWKWARD:

2009-08-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

2009-08-09T23:40:00.000-07:00

by samantha vaughan

Greater Bay Area [This Week]

2009-08-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

With The Sky All Blue

2009-08-01T00:06:00.000-07:00

WITH THE SKY ALL BLUE

I wrote this song for a crayola commercial and it was rejected for being "too dark"

2009-07-30T12:20:00.000-07:00