beautiful, funny, sad & true

Late last night, one of my friends sent me an e-mail containing a link to a WebSiteLikeTV video of pictures that were taken at my high school reunion, which happened about a month ago.  Naturally, I gave it a miss, because it’s a well-established fact by now that I hated both high school and the town I grew up in. I have no nostalgia for that time of my life at all.  I think if I could have it surgically excised from my head, I’d sign up for that procedure before you could finish saying, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’

Based on the pictures from the event, it looks as if about thirty people attended the reunion, out of a graduating class of around four hundred.  Normally for something like this, I would post a link to the video so that you could experience it too, but believe me when I tell you that in this case I’m doing you a favor by not including it.  I recognized about five people, and only one or maybe two would have been nice to chat with for a while. 

Everyone went bar hopping on both Friday and Saturday night, and then had a picnic in the park on Sunday, which involved all their kids and families, and sounded pretty awful.  Most, it seems, married others from the class and stayed in town.  If that had been my fate, I have no doubt that I would not be alive today.  I feel very fortunate to have escaped Yakima’s event horizon.

[shudder]

Moving on.

In other news, I got a call from my friend Jim, whose studio I’ve been planning to use for both new recording projects starting this month, to tell me that the golf course outside his place is being completely torn up, redesigned, and then rebuilt.  Construction started Monday and will last until spring.  The crews, with their huge earth movers, will be working approximately ten hours per day, six days a week.  This leaves only Sundays for recording purposes.  This is not the end of the world, or the end of either project, but it sure puts a cramp on our collective style.

Work has been extremely stressful this week.  Thank gawd for the play-reading group tonight, a gig with IrishBand tomorrow night, and a gig down in Salem with Breanna ‘n’ Justin on Friday night.   And remember Andrea, who moved to Switzerland right after we finished her CD?  She’s in town this week and next, so I’m going to go see her play a show on Saturday, and hopefully make some time to get some Ethiopian food while she’s here.

Our apartment building is getting a new heating system this week.  The good news is that the people whose apartments are freezing in the winter will no longer have to freeze, the people whose apartments are boiling will no longer have to boil, and the fuel tank which runs out of fuel on the coldest nights of the year will no longer have to be filled.  The bad news is that we’ll each have to pay for our own heat, which we haven’t had to do thus far.  I know; I know.  I shouldn’t complain about that, because we have such a good thing going here.  But it will be a tremendous improvement over the antiquated boiler and heating system.  I’ll miss the central fan, though.  I sure hope they keep that around for the summers.

Hmm.  How to end this entry. . .

Well, here you go. Since we were talking about YouTube (no, I’m not going to include the reunion), here’s a funny video about an Australian oil tanker crash.

Today I could barely focus on work because I had so much recording stuff to think about.  I kept thinking about how two of the bands I’m in are about to start recording new albums, and in both of those projects I’m doing the lion’s share of the production, recording and mixing.

My eyes popped open at 4:30 this morning, and I had a bunch of ideas about what to do with IrishBand’s recording, and how to go about it, and where to do it, and which songs we should do, et cetera.  I also e-mailed Breanna a bunch of times to figure out when we can go in and start on the basic guitar and vocal tracks, and what the process might be like.

I like not knowing what the process is going to be like, truth be told.  I like to sit with a song and let God (or whatever) tell me what to play.  Production is spiritual for me, and it drives me crazy when people sit there and tell me what to play, because I always think, “Shut your piehole. . .I’m trying to listen to GOD here.”

SHORT GEEK-OUT #1:  Last week I bought, with a great deal of help from IrishBand, a Digi 002 recording interface, but it has a slight design flaw with its power supply, which Digidesign is aware of.  If you own one of these units, and you have a problem with it, relax. . .all you have to do is call Digidesign and they’ll send you the replacement part (for free!) along with a little instruction booklet on how to install it correctly.  That’s what I did tonight, and then I spent the next hour opening up old sessions and listening to them.  Good times.

SHORT GEEK-OUT #2:  I use a program called SiteMeter here on BFS&T to tell me where all y’all are coming from, and their site was down this weekend because they were migrating to a newer version of their software.  Well, after all their and our (meaning the collective group of users around the world) hard work, they released a ponderous, worthless program which they must have received an endless stream of complaints about, because later that day they had already changed back to the original version.  God bless ’em.  I can’t imagine Apple doing that.  Thanks, SiteMeter!  I love the original!

Here ends the geek-out.  We now return you to your witty, insightful blog, already in progress.

OneYearAgo

Yesterday, I decided that since I had a day entirely to myself, I would continue some of the photography experiments I had been working on the other day at work, when we had run out of things to do.  I’ve been wanting to redesign the look of this blog, you know, and I have a very specific image in mind for the header.  I went to Mt. Tabor Park and took about a million pictures like this:

I don’t know how long I spent doing that, but I took about a hundred million pictures.  My original idea was to be on the side of the hill that faces the city, and use that as the background, but that’s the windy side of the hill, so I wasn’t having much luck, as you can tell from the middle picture.  If I faced the city, the paper curled back toward me every time.  I think I’m going to have to go in the morning to get the right kind of light for that particular shot.  So I had to give up on that idea for now, so I walked to the forested top of the hill and used that as the majority of the backgrounds.  I walked around everywhere, holding a tiny scrap of paper in front of my camera, checking it against the ever-changing background, and snapping shots as I went.  It was surprisingly fun.  A couple of sneaky snoopers walked over, ostensibly to look at a plaque on the ground, but really it was to take a peek at what I was doing.  They surreptitiously poked their heads over to read my little paper scraps that were clipped to the back of my cell phone to save them from the wind.  It was very funny to watch them do that and not attract my attention.

Now I just need to learn how to edit the header image on WordPress blogs, and to find a new layout that I like as much as this one.  I was immediately drawn to this blue-and-black one because it’s beautiful, but it’s also unusual.  It took a lot of scrounging around to find one that didn’t look generic, you know?  So now I have to find a new one that I’m drawn to in that same way.  Then I have to try and put it all together with one of these images, and hope that the idea even works in the way that I imagine that it will.

Today I’m not going to worry about it, though, because I’m going to buy (with a little help from IrishBand) a newer recording interface and software, which means I can mix songs at home again.  For money.  Yay!  I will also have a portable system that I can take to other locations as well.

These are a few of the things that are very exciting right now.

I feel like I’m wasting my life.

No, I don’t mean that in a melancholy way; I’m not feeling bummed out.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite.  I’ve actually been feeling energized and inspired lately; inspired to change my life again.  I feel that I keep coming up against the same proverbial ceiling that I always come up against eventually, being the ‘side’ person in musical situations.  I need to be either the main writer or one of the main writers in a group.  I need to take more chances.  I need to step up my metaphorical game.  I need to have confidence in the marketability of my skills.  My skills get results, you know?  Someone’s making money off of them, and it ain’t me, and that’s unacceptable.

I need to talk to other people who are out there doing it as freelancers, as professionals, not the nay-sayers, or cautious people who are slaves to security.  Working a dead-end job that sucks up my valuable time is getting really old.  I’m watching my life get frittered away, and I’m the only one who can change that, shake it up, and set things right.  I’ve done it before, and I can do it again.

Luckily, I do have a few friends and acquaintances who are making it work, so I have people I can go to and discuss all of this.  Talking to the right people is crucial right now; talking to the wrong people can be poisonous.

Right now I have some things I need to do, and some business to attend to.  In a good way.

Hello and welcome to the first installment of Todd’s Favorite Songs, or something like that.  I haven’t quite decided on a real name for this open-ended project yet, but I wanted to get started on it. This one is called “Knock Yourself Out”, and it’s by Jon Brion, from the soundtrack to the movie “I Heart Huckabees”, with a little help from his friends (and two of the movie’s stars) Jason Schwartzman and Mark Wahlberg.

I’ve been a fan of Jon’s ever since he was a member of Jellyfish and The Grays, but these days he’s more well-known for his production work with Fiona Apple and Aimee Mann, as well as the movie soundtracks he’s created.

Jon is my personal musical hero, and I learned how to be a producer by studying his work.  I learned how to make a song sound intimate, or lush, or sarcastic, or poppy, or melodramatic, or ‘retro’, or minimalistic.  I learned how to think about ‘space’, and distance, and the three-dimensionality of recording.  I also learned about how to manipulate musical space, meaning when to play a certain instrument and when to leave room for something else to happen.  I learned how let a song breathe.  I learned how to strip it down to its barest elements, if that’s what the song seems to call for.  I learned how to really interact with a vocalist.  I learned how to decipher whatever the most important thing about a song is, and how to highlight and showcase it.

I learned that there are many types of producers out there, and that my particular style is valid, and unusual, and somewhat sought after.  I still have plenty to learn about all of this, but the fact that I’m doing it at all is due in a large part to Jon Brion, and he doesn’t even know it.  Who knows; maybe he’ll stumble upon this entry and see my thank-you letter.

Thanks, Jon.  You’ve been like a virtual older brother to me.  Keep up the amazing work.