TSP Media - 04.09.04 - Billy's Journal

...whoa! how is that for a scientific term?...whoa! I am completely stressed out as I am in way over my head...there is a lot of material to learn and re-learn, and today was the first day I dove in serious...that now leaves just 3 days before I have to start recording these songs again, the pressure, the people, the words, $$, all the wonderful things that go into making something happen like, right NOW! with that said to give a happy picture of duress, I would like to put some energy into the "what' as in what the heck I am trying to accomplish...as I said yesterday in my post, I felt that my last go round with this material didn't meet the heights that I had hoped for the songs for a variety of reasons...one was technical, as I didn't feel we nailed the sound, and therefore the emotion of the sound that I was looking for...that is not to say that those sessions were bad...we learned a lot about how we wanted to record the intimacy of just me playing fingerpicking style guitar and a vocal live...(more...)

so, I feel going into these sessions on Monday we know a little more of what we don't want...it's a hard thing to explain verbally, because recording is something that involves a lot in the way of taste...i personally love the country blues recordings of the 1920's and 30's, which to a modern ear sounds very poor and tinny, as the only source recordings left are the 78's themselves...because they are a physical product (needle on quickly spinning vinyl), I feel the recordings have an inherent violence to them, a distortion which adds to the force of playing and the scope of the subjects, which are your classic blues type subjects (murder, love lost, drinkin, love found, etc)...earlier in my recording career, my approach was more imitative i.e. If I got "that" sound I would get that emotion...i have since moved away from the imitative style, believing that you take what you have and you find your own way...there is a way to get that so called violence within a modern context, it has to be sought with a vision and purpose in mind...it can be found in many ways beyond the recording, particularly in the area of performance, which is where the idea of having a live crowd come in for the actual sessions to try to get my blood going enough to find the darkness and consequent light in the songs...i say this with my fingers crossed, because if it doesn't work, the music will be ugly for all the wrong reasons, and those are emotions you can't erase...in order to properly focus for these 2 weeks, I have narrowed the scope of songs I am going to work on to around 15-17 songs, give or take a song if I decide to work on a couple of songs by other people...the chicago songs at this point are 12 songs, with one new one that I am working on...the others are with an eye towards a couple of additional songs I hope to play at my concert on the 19th...today (so far) has been spent practicing the fingerpicking style, which is very physically demanding, and getting my voice back in shape by spending some time at the piano...unfortunately, as I write very quickly these days, the old lyric pages are everywhere, and getting the right lyrics in shape so I can sing the songs has been difficult...because these songs lend themselves to interpretation, there are different arrangements and different lyrics depending on which version you would listen to...the hope is to get familiar in a way that allows for the spontanaiety of the songs to still come thru, rather than just picking up where I left off as if a particular version was sacrosanct...my logic goes something like, "if it was so great before, why are you re-recording it"...so all is up for the revision of a critical eye...hopefully the time spent away from the songs will allow me to see some of the flaws they might possess, and I can address them as I go...for example, I attempted to re-write some of the lyrics today for a song called "columbus"...the song clocks in at around 9 minutes, and the lyrics themselves were written in one stream of conciousness burst...i am not sure that I could even tell you what the song is about...i spent an hour or so today re-learning the song, and questioning some phrases that didn't seem to make sense...i changed a bunch of the words, but found that when I sang the song from the top, I ended up singing most of the original words...ironically, the original words seemed to make more sense in the flow of the story of the song, but taken on their own, line by line, some lines seemed weak to me...my confidence in the song was reassured by the strength of the entire song in context, and the picky part of me felt better about that than micromanaging any one particular line...i have played guitar for 2-3 hours so far today to get my hand strength back, and I am hoping that when I return home tonight after dinner I can put in another 1-2 hours...my voice is something I can fake, but the playing, which requires great dexterity and precision, isn't...my biggest concern right now is being mentally strong enough to deal with the pressure of performing the entire chicago body of work in one straight go in front of about 1,100 people without having had any warm up gigs...but, I am ahead of myself as usual, so one day at a time...one small bit about the 13th and final chicago song, as yet unwritten...the song is called "the ballad of frank and david", and something in my heart wants to speak about my grandfather that I never knew (Herb Corgan), and the relationship, or at least imaginary relationship, between 2 great architects of chicago fame, David adler and Frank Llyod Wright...i just put that out there so someone can beam me the right energy to dial that one in...thanks again bc

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