Tag: useful in a war

Dark Road Diary, Part 57: The Moth and I (On Being Useful In a War)

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Sometimes…a lot of times…you can write a song without knowing where its’ centre of gravity is. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make for a strange real-time relationship with the thing, should it be a song you sing  alot. Done repeatedly in front of people, a song can be thrown under a microscope, undergoing a different kind of magnification than that of the writing and recording process. If you are lucky enough to travel around the world singing your songs, it’s highly likely you will be singing in the shadow of some kind of calamity, some kind of collective sorrow or angst, and you can go from knowing who you are when singing a song that you wrote to being lost and unsure. Useful In A War is a song I started writing in 2008 and finished in 2016, recorded three times, and have been singing in every Night of Grief and Mystery for the past few years.

I am awake in Bellingen, Australia, at 5:30 this morning after a fitful no-sleeping-pill night, the first non-drug induced sleep in a while. The bird calls in this country strike my ear like they are laughing at me or calling out like an infant in distress. Slightly disturbing either way. Mist covers the valley the house is perched on, coating the surfaces of the porch that has been my bedroom for three days. Large clouds of moths gather just off the porch—which is very high off the ground— not quite plague level, but enough for me to notice them from my seat in the corner where I’ve sat to hash out my relationship with this song.

I notice two of these creatures, wings plastered flat by the dew on the little round table I’ve placed my water, book, and pen on. Flipped on their backs, they struggle to free themselves from their bad decision to land, but it’s obvious they weren’t going to be able to.

I should let nature takes its’ course. I should. This is the way of things. There’s something that is supposed to be available to me in the Nights I’ve been a part of, I say to myself, that is supposed to let this be ok, a true ability to abide an ending…not the kind of “alrightness” with death that pollutes the internet on the ‘death positive’ crap wagon. There’s nothing ‘alright’ watching these poor bastards struggle.

So I start gingerly peeling them off the tabletop, their wings so thin as to not exist. I’ve a crust of bread, and one of them latches on with legs that are pointing skyward. Moments later, it flies away. Redemption! Number 2 is not so lucky, refuses to latch on to the crust despite my nudging and blowing. Every time the moth rights itself, it flips onto its’ back again. I try over and over, then I stop trying. I’m just making things worse.

Time is running out and there is panic on a micro level, me and the moth on the battlefield of the living, and the birds are singing their weird songs and the other moths are having whatever their full allotment of life is. There is smoke on the mountains from a bush fire burning miles away, an ocean of fog in the valley, life and death playing out on the tabletop. I want the moth to live. I want the moth to die. I want to either put it out of its’ misery or deliver it back to the sun and air with the rest of the swarm. Mostly, I just want it to be over. I want not just to be relegated to witness. I’m always a witness. I want to be useful.

The moth succumbs. 

Useful In A War is a contemplation on allegiance: to whom do I owe what. I aim that loyalty not to Right or Wrong, not to Left or Right, not to Rich or Poor, not to Pro or Anti but to something somewhere else, to the smoke-shielded top of the mountain I can’t see, or the fog-shrouded valley floor. Allegiance to the Unknowable, the Uncomfortable. To submit myself in soldierly fashion—unquestioning—to a chain of command that begins beyond borders and divides that seem to define being human. To an Unclaimed God, one that hasn’t been nailed down or nailed up, posterized, fetishized, memorized, adopted, co-opted, abandoned and adopted again. 

Stephen has called the song “a disarmingly jaunty rumination on the mercenary mind.” Maybe it is.

I’m probably more medic than mercenary, it occurs to me. Maybe we all are. Or should be. Or could be.

Found Footage is Useful In A War

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A few years ago, I got a nice note from a young man who wanted to let me know that, at least for a while, some songs I wrote meant something to him. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist. He concluded the letter with “If you ever wanted to fly in a warbird, I’m a pilot, and I fly vintage warbirds and I’d be happy to take you up.” Outside of Star Trek, I’d never heard the word warbird used, it had dangerous overtones and I’m not great with heights, so I politely declined. Then I thought about it: when is an offer like that going to come around again? I told him I’d reconsidered and, on a slightly stormy day at the end of a summer, I rode out there to a hangar that sure enough housed old combat planes. We went up a couple of times in different planes and I took a few videos, paranoid I’d drop my phone. We did one run with a mate of his, part of a team that flew formation drills—that means another plane sharing the sky with you almost close enough that you could jump from one wing to the other. Completely incomprehensible. I survived and managed to keep my diner breakfast down, and am forever grateful for the adventure.

This vid is made from some of that footage, along with a bunch of other video files that have lingered on various drives of mine for years. I enjoy tinkering with movie images, and I make no claim at being any good at it. What I find intriguing is being able to use these moving artifacts of my life as grist for the mill, and in that way, these little vids I have been making are much like the songs I write.

gh

Vain + Alone v2.0

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Over a year ago, sometime in July, 2016, I set out to make a little record: A quick solo thing, in and out in seven weeks, whereon I was the only performer.  It was to be modest in scope, a sonic sketchbook I would record like I used to when I’d demo songs before bringing them to whatever band I had working with me.  I had a couple ideas what to call it and decided that its self imposed solitary nature resonated with a side project I had going where I took self portraits that tried to buck the selfie trend.  I called that project Vain+Alone and thought this recording would benefit from the name.  I’m not a great marketer so I was probably wrong about that.  I gathered up some bits of poetry, finished songs I’d been working on for about 10 years, and took up temporary residence in the 2nd floor of a dank old factory a couple minutes from where I live.  I christened the space Dead Starling Studio because that is what greeted me on the floor by the door the first time I stepped through it.

Making a record where one plays all the instruments is not news.
Making that recording outside of a traditional studio is very au courant and a good side effect of the advances of affordable recording tech, but it is hardly groundbreaking.
Engineering, mixing, and mastering it is no big thing, either; just a long process trial and error.
Actually, making any kind of recording these days is not in any way news worthy, and that suits me just fine.

As I set out to make my first “real” recording at the age of 27, I sat across a lunch table from Jonathan Goldsmith, the man who would produce the 2 recordings I made for True North Records.  After an initial awkward hello, the first thing said at that table was, and I quote, “Like the world really needs another record.”  That was 27 years ago and the statement seems even more true now.  We both laughed in agreement and pursued the thing anyway, freed from any expectations that it was going to mean anything to anybody but us.  I haven’t made a lot of recordings–only 9 or so since then–but I’ve made every one in that same spirit.

Contemporary popular musicians can be some of the most the whingey, self-absorbed, and entitled little pricks.  Some of them ARE that, and some just come off like that.  Yes, its true that for many peers of my age, the game has changed significantly and those changes can be a challenge to negotiate.  But lets be honest: We never mattered.  Not in the way you thought, and not in any way that guaranteed a paycheque or a place of value in the culture we were born into– one that, by the way, eats its’ young, has a voracious appetite for competence, and the attention span of a horny highway dog.

Making your way through the world trying to create original content has always been tricky.  It seemed to me that something was worth doing if it created an echo and gave you a sense of its life beyond your own intentions for it.   That echo was reason enough to find ways to pursue the endeavor.  No echo meant you either had to dig deeper when you were making the thing (I’m talking the content of the songs here…not the window dressing of the recording) or consider another line of work.  Somewhere along the way the romantic choice to pursue the making of ‘something from nothing’ turns into a full- fledged consequence, the grown up version of the dream you had as a teenager maybe.  It’s a more potent version to be sure and now gives no fucks about the industry, royalty rates, news cycles, delivery methods, publicity, branding, social networking or, for that matter, your hopes for the thing.  You just do what you do and make what you make because what else are you gonna do?

Back to my little record…this note was meant to be a bit of an apology as to why it took so long to cook, though I can’t say who I may have disappointed.

I should have mentioned that making demos hardly qualifies me to engineer, mix, and master, and I learned this by making Vain+Alone.  So  there was a fairly steep learning curve, which was great, because a secret part of doing this record was about learning how to do this record.  Even the most modest of modern recording rigs lets one tweak until the cows come home.  [I used–and this is for the geeks–a Macbook Pro mid 2012 running ProTools 10, an assortment of Royer, Apex, and AKG mics run through Universal Audio 4710-D mic pre’s into a UA Apollo Twin along with a UAD2 Satellite and the occasional Antelope Zen interface and a pair of Yamaha HS 8 monitors. ed]   This is, as you would assume, both a blessing and a curse.  I’ve found that living with the curse eventually brings you to the blessing, a journey of approximately 15 months, apparently.

Vain+Alone became a bigger swipe at a sonic landscape than I had intended and that made it more difficult to wrangle when it came time to mix and master.  When my pursuit of something that felt finished began to feel embarrassing, I’d think of friends like Don Rooke, who’s latest The Henrys record Quiet Industry (2015) I was fortunate enough to play a small part on.  I know that Don dragged his beleaguered self to the basement for at least a year to make that disarming and beautiful record; or Kevin Breit who, working in his usual genius and mercurial fashion to make his new disc Johnny Goldtooth and The Chevy Casanovas, gave himself to the task in a basement with the same geeky tools that I had and a commitment to doing all of the technical heavy lifting himself as a way to justify continuing to make records and the time and foolishness it takes; or Kurt Swinghammer pouring himself into the CD/Blu-ray DVD release of his ode to Tom Thompson Turpentine Wind; or John Southworth and his epic 2-CD release of Niagara; or Ingrid Veninger and her blazing indie films.  These people would stumble across my peripheral vision in various stages of their productions and I would glimpse them creating the best work they could with no apparent expectation of what it owed them.  Ultimately they would finish and move on and any commentary about any hardship in the process was mumbled under the breath or was just letting off steam in a bid to keep going.

So, I’m done tinkering with Vain+Alone.          I think.                  No, I’m done.

Its on to other things.  A recording of the tours with Stephen Jenkinson is coming out called Nights of Grief and Mystery.  It’s hard to describe this CD…it is worthy company and I am honoured to have been a part of it (more on this record another time).  There is a 5-song cycle I’m starting that will have me co-creating some recordings with survivors from the Huronia Regional Institution.  A re-imagining of the songs from Vain+Alone is close to being finished and will be available…Spring 2018?… arranged, produced, and much of it performed by Kevin Breit and featuring a list of internationally acclaimed musical contributors.  There will be some more touring, no doubt, and hopefully some kind of celebration of the 10th anniversary of the recording of Pleasure & Relief: A Live Concert Recording, a night which owes its beauty to the many people who lent their grace and talent to it.  On that night, I was neither vain or alone.

And then, I will make another recording.

Because.