It's just like that.

I struggle constantly to find the balance between need for inspiration and willingness to just buckle down and get it done. Not only in the creative process, either. When I'm inspired to clean my bathroom, I really enjoy doing it, the time taken flies by, and it is immensely satisfying. Sadly, I'm only really inspired to do it every couple of years, so I have to kind of do agonizing grumpy touch ups in-between.

I write this because I just had one of those A-HA! moments working on the lyrics for a song. (Not the "Take on Me" A-Ha. I WISH I had those kind of songwriting moments.) I'd been kind of kicking stuff around in my head for several days, as well as kicking myself in the ass for not just sitting down and getting the words written so I can hurry up and sing the demo. But I couldn't bring myself to sit down and do it. Suddenly, a twist on the original idea I had hit me and I couldn't help but get to work on it. In five minutes, I reworked the first verse and wrote the second (I've had the chorus done for ages). The end result is only about a million times better than where I had been heading with it before.

So, I guess what I learned today is to only ever do what I feel like doing.

Just kidding. I know that I might have never gotten to the point where these lyrics worked if I hadn't been rolling the ideas around in my head. I guess what I really learned is that rolling ideas around in your head counts as work.


Interesting, unrelated side note: Every single time I write a blog post, I have to go through and edit out my excessive use of the words "just" and "that." Actually, I've just changed the title so that this paragraph is no longer unrelated.

(See that last sentence? That's how they all are until I edit.)

And now for a random picture of what I look like today.

More boring music stuff

...for the sake of accountability. You all know how much I loooooove accountability. Actually, I do love healthy accountability. But I've seen an awful lot of unhealthy people "holding each other accountable" and even been one of those people.

How do you know if you're being held accountable in a healthy way? Well, the health of an accountability relationship is inversely proportional to the number of times the word "accountability" is used in the context of that relationship. The healthiest accountability partners don't usually even know they are your accountability partners. However, if someone calls you up to schedule an accountability meeting (and refers to it as such), you should decline and offer them the number of your favorite licensed professional counselor.

"Hold you accountable..." hm, I think that phrase needs to go into some lyrics somewhere...

Speaking of songs and lyrics...(and excessive ellipses...)

I just finished recording a VERY wonky scratch vocal for a heart breaking ballad. Nothing like a heart breaking ballad with a wonky vocal. It turns heartbreak hilarious, and I LOVE hilarious things.

So this is only the third song. I know, I know. I said on Sunday that I was going to record three scratch vocals on Monday, which would have made this the fifth song. Well, I only did one on Monday. I guess I have to be held accountable now. Here's a little secret about me: I'm super ambitious before it comes to actually doing something. Then I record one verse of a song and one chorus and then I need to take a little break for 9 hours or so and then there's no more time in the day to record the other two songs I meant to record. So see, it's not my fault. It's because the day is not long enough to contain my doing stuff time and my recuperation time.

So I only did 33.3% of what I set out to do on Monday. But guess how much I had planned to do today. NOTHING. And now I've done something, which is infinite% more than what I had planned to do. So I think that more than balances out.

They let you do it twice a day if you need to.

Well, my first STRAG session went great. I changed a couple of things about my setup to make tomorrow go even smoother. My friend Paul Sell will be elated to know that I've raised the mic so that I will now sing standing up instead of sitting on my couch hunched over my coffee table.

I also started prepping for tomorrow. I've got words for the next two and a half songs, so I hope to get all three sung by tomorrow evening. Finishing off the scratch vocals for the first song made me a little excited about the whole thing. It's true that they just don't feel like songs to me until they have words. I'll never start with the backing tracks again.

One of the songs for tomorrow is kind of a funny song about how Christians have gotten accustomed to using certain pat phrases over and over. Doing a little research, I just read this on someone's blog: "Join a prayer team. It is a treasure trove of Christianese vocabulary. Intercessors are the literati of Christianese. They wield a command of the nuances of the language that most Christians never understand. They can combine ordinary words like “walls, standing, tearing, gathering, anointing, clouds, heavenlies, earth, wind, fire, rain, and eagles” in ways that will give you goosebumps even though you have no idea what just happened."

Does anybody have any favorite "Christianese" clichés? I'm working on lyrics for this song and I am, of course, drawing a blank. Just throw anything out...things like, "traveling mercies" and "hedge of protection"... those things that roll off our tongues so easily and mean nothing to the majority of the world. I promise it's not going to be a mean song. Maybe a little mean. It'll be kind of like telling someone the truth in love. OOH! That's a good one!

Not that mean.

Short term, Realistically Attainable Goal Number One.

Or, STRAG #1, if you like.

To record, at the very least, one scratch lead vocal track for each of the potential songs for the album I'm working on by the end of this week. This means, of course, that all songs will have to have lyrics. It seems like a lot, but I have very low standards for what the vocals need to sound like. They can be pitchy, crackly, noisy, I don't care. They just have to be there.

I just set up a VERY simple vocal recording rig. In order to avoid potential distractions, I am moving myself away from my desk and it's 24" iMac. It's so pretty, sometimes I just stare at it for hours, accomplishing nothing. So I've plopped my trusty laptop onto my coffee table with an audio interface and mic and that's it. I even designed a highly utilitarian template in Logic that does not have any synths at all in it. Just 8 mono audio tracks to record vocals to and one stereo track for the demos I'll be singing along to.



Already I've ruined my own plan, of course. As I finished burning a disc of the demos on the iMac to bring over to the lappy, I remembered that I had decided to change the key of the very first track. Its melody will never accommodate my narrow baritone as it is and needed to be dropped about 3 half steps. For a moment, I thought I'd make a concession and just import the whole project but then I thought, "IRREGARDLESS!" The theme of this week is imperfect presence, as opposed to imagined perfection. So the demo for this song will have a strained uncomfortable vocal track. So what. Nearly nobody is ever going to hear it. It's just for me to play in my car to get more ideas of how to make the whole thing better. I'll just work on it in the wrong key and then transpose everything down before I record the better-possibly-final vocal.

So it's going to be a pretty busy week. I hope my neighbors are cool with hearing my voice all crackly and pitchy and with no effects or background tracks. Actually, I don't care if they are. They play horrible music at all hours of the night. I honestly think they were playing Rusted Root last weekend.

On another subject:

When I was little, I used to get so excited about things like birthday parties and Christmas that I would actually throw up. I thought I had outgrown this. But the other night, I was doing some recreational praying with my bestest bunch of friends ever and I actually got so excited praying that I had to run to the bathroom and throw up.

Just think about that for a minute.

Album 1.0

I'm working on an album.

There, I've said it. Out loud, on the internet. Now people will ask me about it and at some point I will have to finish it.

I've written (loosely) about 10 or 11 songs. They're all kind of rough sketches and several of them flat out suck. Some have potential. Who am I to judge? All I have to do is program some background tracks, sing them, mix them down and we're done. Simple. Not really. I forgot all the neurosis that goes on in between. They don't all quite have words. Some have words that I hate. A couple have basslines and drum tracks. They all have chord changes and melodies.

At the moment, I cannot seem to make myself sit down and work on it at all. I really want to, I think, and I think about it a lot. But there's a disconnection between my intention and the reality of putting my fingers on the buttons. I don't know if it's fear of failure or laziness or both. Probably both and more, but really I should just get over it. I've written songs before that people liked. This album has the potential to be the best thing I've ever done.

Then again, it also has the potential to be really mediocre, even if I work as hard on it as I can work. I think that's what stops me. I don't know if the work I put in will be worth the outcome.

Some people would say I need medication.

It doesn't matter where you go. What matters is who you are and why you go there.

Adventure is short-lived. Any new place is an adventure for a little while and then you settle in to normal life. It's a sad, disconnected person who scoots off to the next adventure every time life starts to seem tedious or difficult.

A lot of Christians are like that in their relationship with God. If they don't have bottle rockets going off every five minutes, they think something's wrong. Much of a sheep's life is spent just eating and pooping. Not a lot of sparkle there, but that's life. We are his sheep.

I've heard people who do a lot of power evangelism say that after a while, gold teeth and tumors falling off and limbs growing back gets kind of boring. It's their personal intimacy with God that sustains them. It's the quiet day-to-day knowing of him that is their reason to go where they go and do what they do.

I'm not writing all of this to anyone in particular...it's just that when someone is struggling with life, a very typical Christian response is a lot of unrealistic encouragement toward some big fantastic explosion that may never happen. A lot of times, much to our dismay, God's plan is for our circumstances to stay exactly like they are while our character is changed instead. And character changing happens very slowly. We don't even really see it for years and years. We may never really see all of it.*

Or if we find ourselves somewhere we don't necessarily want to be, we constantly proclaim that we are only there "for a season" until our REAL [amazing, glorious, glamorous] purpose comes to fruition. Everyone who is anywhere is only there for a season.

Just some early morning ramblings before I've had my second cup of coffee.






*Hopefully, we stop looking for change at some point and learn to simply abide.

Earlier this year, I started up a relationship with a delightful girl that really kind of made spring and summer happen. We did bunches of road trips and rode tons of coasters and it was probably about the best six months I've had in long time and then it was over. Close friends know all the nuances of the overness and I don't want to lay it all out here on the internet, anyway. But let it suffice for me to say that neither of us really wanted it to be over, but I knew that it was. It's been a pretty rich few weeks for me since then, processing all the feelings and trying to understand. It's a process that has brought me a little closer to God and a little closer to some friends. I still have no regrets about anything.

As much as I want to remain friends with her, I completely understand that it probably won't happen, not any time soon anyway. In some ways I miss her and in some ways it seems like it was all kind of a dream. She's on with her life and I'm on with mine. I can't help but think our paths will cross again and I wonder what that will be like.

I can't believe I just talked about "paths" like that. I'm going to go throw up right now.