(Phaysis)

Despite the recent bottom end of the neurochemical roller coaster, today was OK in comparison to last weekend. Brain juices being what they are, if there’s an excess or absence, it will rectify itself in due time. The strategy is to mediate the extremes by whatever methods are prudent. I chose to take a long walk Sunday night, and that helped a bit. Didn’t clear my head, but the exercise gave me something to do. I think the turning point was the odd cocktail drink I made Monday night with vodka, apples, and cinnamon. I took a picture and posted the recipe on FB, and got a ton of good chatter about it. It was the bellwether towards making life seem bearable again (the intoxication didn’t hurt, but I worry about loving the bottle a bit much lately).

Tonight, I set out to work on my song “Communion” whose lyrics I wrote two years ago during the gray area between awake and asleep. The music’s been knocking around in my head since then. I’ve put it off for far too long, and I’ve had enough. The positive chatter I got regarding “Best Laid Plans” was enough to push me over the edge towards committing something to the songwriting effort. I think I’m proficient enough with my music gear to make it happen without too much frustration.

“Communion” is, chromatically, a dense piece of work, and I’m having no end of confusion about which chords I should use, where I should use them, and how I’m to transition between them. There are phrases that stick out, some things are more solid than others, and I have chunks, pieces that should fit together if only they’d want to fit together. The problem is that I’ve got this thick set of notes, like the bass note would be, say, D#, but the vocal note would be F# (a third), but the tough decision is which I should use as the base of the progression. I know the dominant notes are in the key of F#, but each part of the song seems to have its own soul. The choruses have different chords from the verses, the bridge is distant from the interludes.

It’s a mystery, it’s a puzzle. And the more I play with the pieces, the fuzzier it gets. If I could just see the entire picture on the front of the box, I’d know what to do. I’m hoping to look away long enough to have the parts magically assemble themselves when I’m not looking. The subconscious mind is funny that way; it can take puzzles and solve them when you’re not trying.

So, it’s done. It’s finally over. After nine latent years, my Glass Door song “Best Laid Plans” is polished, posted, and ready for the harsh criticism of the faceless Internet.

I wrote it impromptu-style in 2002 during a dark period, and it shows. After languishing raw on my hard drive for years, I had enough of the anxiety and felt that it had to be published. In the past months of reworking and remixing it, I’ve gone back and forth on the sound, never happy with it. Finally, I pushed it into the right direction and decided that I was too tired to keep tweaking it. I had enough, the song had enough, and so there it is.

A song is where the musician got tired of mixing the music.

I’ve been sitting on this song for so long because it was raw and way too personal. I recorded it in one take, but it has taken the better part of a decade (most of that it sat motionless) until I was ready to show it. In public, I make a point of putting forth a manly, strong, guarded front, and the original spoken words for the song were too honest, too unprotected. I just could not, in all bravery, put it out there. So I had to rewrite the words, put some distance between my ego and the words, bring it to some sort of generic applicability to the everyman listening. Even still, there’s some of me in there — there has to be — but it’s a little more bearable.

All things told, I am actually that lonesome at times. If you’ve been reading all along, you’d know that all too well. I do crave the company of other people, but something in the metal-on-metal execution of my life leaves me unable to make that happen without unease. And so there I am, with “these lonesome ways of my soul.”

It is with profound joy that I announce that after so many wasted years of missing the boat, my music site is up, live and functional, and that you can now hear some of my music. About damned time.

“Where is it?” you ask? Well, it’s where you would expect to find that great music from the band Glass Door:  glassdoor.net!

I still have a few loose ends to tie up, but there it is. So far, I have two full songs and one “found sound” posted. I’m even going so far as to make cover images for each song I post — in some respects, I’m more proud of the images than the songs, but I love all of it anyway. Call me Pygmalion.

What do you think, sirs?

So I’ve come to an internal agreement. Actually, it’s more like an admission of defeat. Either that, or it’s a sudden ability to see that the easist path has been plainly in front of me the whole time. Call it what you want, but I ain’t happy about it.

See, for the past eleventy-thousand years, I’ve been trying to build a website to showcase my music. After spending countless hours drooling, shit-for-brains, while staring at my laptop hoping to spontaneously grok everything I needed to do and write all the code to my own fluidly-custom specifications, I’ve given up. I’m stupid. So stupid, I’m gullible. I managed to convince myself that I had enough mental energy left over at the end of my workday to set up to the task of building a website from the ground up. How foolish I am!

So, having gotten half of a notion last summer to give up coding a full Ruby On Rails website, I decided to try some pre-rolled frameworks. I looked at Drupal and WordPress, among a few others. Since I already had some modicum of “experience” with WP, and since Drupal has a steep learning curve, I went with WP. And what did I discover? WP version 3 unleashed a new feature where you could make your own custom post types, so you can create a Song and have it display along with your regular Posts, Pages, and Attachments. “Astounding!” I exclaimed. “Just add my Song code and build a template, and I’m home, sweet mother of god, HOME!”

Herein, we shall call this moment The Second Great Con of the Man On Himself.

The problem, you see, is that WP 3.0 has half-assed support for custom posts. It doesn’t pull posts made from different types into feeds, doesn’t include them into the front page, doesn’t support archives. For that, you need a WP plugin developer’s mind, and the free energy, street smarts, and tenacity to navigate the byzantine WP wiki in the hopes of finding the help you need to make this happen. As it turns out, custom post types just aren’t user-friendly.

Since my job requires me to be task-based and results-oriented all day, every day, I just can’t summon up the smarts or desire it takes to actually make this stupid little dream of mine into a reality. When I’m settling down for my evening coffee, trying to unwind my head and get into my projects for the night, you know what I really want to be doing? Absolutely nothing. Now I understand the attraction to clicking on the TV and turning yourself off. I can’t do this anymore.

I lost my love for the web. Giving up. And now my task is much simpler. There are plugins for WP that allow me to stream media and set up podcasts. They make things on the back end much easier, but they are neither custom nor completely intuitive to use. That’s the tradeoff. And right now, I’m trading in my programmer’s hat for a dunce cap. The internet has won.

Hurp a derp.

So I’ve finally started pushing the Record button.

The hardest part of making music is learning your instruments and your tools. After picking up all this equipment, it’s taken me some time to get familiar with the basics of my synth, sampler, sound module, drum machine, and DAW software. Five months ago, when I knew a lot less than I do now, every time I pressed Record on the DAW software, it was screwup after screwup after screwup. Frustration rose and overpowered joy, and so I let the music project lie fallow for months.

Until March, when I got the synth. It became a joy again. I got to peck and poke, pushing parameters around, finding sounds, figuring out what that damn thing can do. It became fun and novel again. I had to know more. So I picked up the manual and read it, and started reading the manuals to the rest of my gear. Now I’m getting familiar with it, and that, my friends, is a good, good thing.

I sat at my workstation last night and hammered out a nasty bassline. I recorded the midi of it, learned how to clean it up, loop it, record an audio loop of it. Laid down a track with a GM patch called “Nylon Guitar” (mildly reminiscent of the real thing). Worked up a drum track. (Yeah, I know…Creativity, WOW!) It’s mostly a throw-away track; the vibe is totally not Glass Door material, but I’ll keep punching at it. Each hour spent with it is a new learning experience.

There’s plenty more work to do.