• Kenny Loggins Songwriting Seminar and Critique at MI / GIT in 1986-7: Part Three, Kenny Loggins reviews a tune of mine.

As I wrote in the first post of this series, when I attended a Kenny Loggins songwriting seminar/critique during my year at Musicians Institute (MI) in Hollywood way back in 1986-1987, I did not know whether or not my song had been selected for review. So when Kenny Loggins picked up a cassette and read out the title of my tune, I was elated, surprised and nervous all at once. Then he hit play. Now, I will never understand this, but every single songwriting critique I have ever attended has had a shitty sound system. Cheap, usually wired incorrectly and more often then not utterly unreliable. MI -- a FUCKING MUSIC SCHOOL -- was no different. Every song up to and including mine sounded like garbage and every song after mine sounded like garbage. I guess the idea is if your song can sound good even when it sounds shitty, it must really be good. Whatever.

Before Kenny started his critique section, he issued the caveat that whatever he was about to say was only his opinion and in no way gospel. Fair enough, but I like my reviewers to be a bit less apologetic. I’m after specifics and don’t want a sugar coating. I wish I felt I could post the other tunes as well as my own, not only so you could hear how Kenny critiqued them but also because together they all create a fascinating trip back to the 80s. Sadly, they’re not mine to share. Besides, none became hits that I’m aware of, and the only songwriter Kenny really liked and requested to meet with after the seminar was responsible for perhaps the most derivative, cliché-riddled tune played that day.

16 QA - Intro to critiques by Cerebellum Blues

When my song finally boomed out out of the utterly worthless sound system, I cringed, but I was hopeful. It had a strong groove, decent production (considering I had recorded it myself in my Hollywood apartment, pictured above) and good performances, as my friend Mike Price had helped out with keys and my roommate, Mike Northcutt, had sung all the vocals. But right as the tune got to the chorus, Kenny hit Stop and said, “That’s a mistake!” My balloon burst. He played a bit more of the song and then tried to offer up a few ideas for fixing the problem with the chorus, something he called a jazz trap, but ended his critique with a luke warm wrap-up. Listening back now I actually disagree with his diagnosis. The problem was not a jazz trap, it was that the vocal melody follows the chords and is a lame melody to boot. Sigh.
17 KL critiques The Upside of Down by Cerebellum Blues 

For what it’s worth, here’s a better sounding recording of the song I submitted on that day so long ago, complete with the dropouts, hiss and wow and flutter of the glory days of tape. Kenny stopped my song before the middle 8, which is maybe the best part of the tune, so if you listen, please go a little farther than Kenny did, so you can check out this stellar bit! But seriously, what do I think of the song today? The intro is too long (worse, it doesn’t need to repeat!), the chorus is weak for the aforementioned reason, the lyrics have a lot of cringe-worthy moments and the whole thing feels monotonic. However, I do like the basic idea, some of the chords and the groove, and I might very well see if I can fix it someday, just as an exercise.  Nor for awhile, though. I have an album to release!

The Upside of Down by Cerebellum Blues

• Live on stage it’s... me?

On Friday, June 4, 2011, I drove down to Mountain View from SF to sit in for one song with Three Chord Monty, a bar band that one of my very best friends, Cory Verbin, has started. I was to accompany them on Ain’t Got You, based on the Aerosmith Live Bootled version and so far as knew I was ready. I had the arrangement down, my solo down, my fills prepped. I was gonna rock!

Rain was falling as I departed the city, and the 101 freeway was glossy black under a mist of pulverized rain. There were blurry tailights ahead of me, bright headlights behind, and a glow overhead as the lights of civilization were turned away from any sort of higher calling by a thick later of watery clouds. To get in the mood to play some music, I listened to some freshly mixed tracks from my upcoming album but the flakey Bluetooth connection was driving me to distraction, so I tried a hard wire, which I foolishly rigged up while driving, but it was worse, thanks to a bum jack in my Blackberry. I switched on the radio, instead, found nothing good music-wise and so dialed over to NPR. As I listened to a woman being interviewed about Teach for America I realized one thing very clearly: I was a lot older than I had been the last time I played a bar gig, which was roughly 20 years ago.

As the Teach for America woman droned on vaguely about her accomplishments, I thought to myself: This can’t be, I cannot be driving to a rock gig and using NPR to get pumped up. Back to the radio, nothing, back to NPR, boring, switched everything off and went with silence. I let my mind wander a bit, back home to where Avalon and Amelia and Catherine were camped out with one of Catherine’s good friends, back to the office where I have been freelancing and how our most recent project did not go so well, back to my accident and life before it and before I knew it I was pulling up at Francesca’s, the clean, little dive bar where I would soon be playing my one song.

From the parking lot I could not hear the telltale thump of live music, so I knew the band hadn’t started, which was good, because I wanted to talk with Cory ever so briefly about how we would approach the song (Who would start it? Who would play which solo when? How many hits at the end, etc?). Inside, I ordered a club soda, chatted with Cory quickly and took at a seat, snapping a few photos as I waited while I waited for my cue.

When my Big Moment came, the Spirit of the Tap was with me as a jack promptly failed turning my borrowed Telecaster into just a Tele, incapable of casting much of anything. As the band started, Cory fiddled with the pedal chord and suddenly my riffs roared to life. Or at least I think they did. I’d forgotten how hard it is to hear yourself on stage, so I plucked away madly hoping I was hitting more right notes than wrong. Then I noticed the arrangement was a little different from what I had learned. Then the singer, Tom, turned to me a signaled for me to solo when I thought he was going to solo on the harp. Then he started soloing after all in the middle of my solo, so I dropped into a more rhythmic thing. And then it was all over. I stumbled off stage, looking to the crowd, I am sure, as a drunk, but it was just my brain acting up in all the excitement.

So, there you have it: my big return to the live stage was anything but perfect, but a hell of a lotta fun and I hope to do it again soon. A huge thank you to Cory and all the other guys in Three Chord Monty for letting me get up there and let my hair down, figuratively speaking, of course.

• Kenny Loggins Songwriting Seminar and Critique at MI / GIT in 1986-7: Part Two, live Q&A .

In 1986-87, I studied guitar at G.I.T. (Guitar Institute of Technology, now called MI, short for Musicians Institute, click here to read an older post about my time at G.I.T.), and I got to attend and record a songwriting seminar/screening that Kenny Loggins held at the school. Here's part two. For part part one, click here.

8 QA 1 - recording by Cerebellum Blues

Kenny Loggins talks about his technique for recording ideas. His answer tells you how far we've come — and how nothing's really changed.

9 QA 2 - sadness vs. joy by Cerebellum Blues

Some asks, "Where does the emotion come from that drives your music" and the answer is way more interesting than you might expect and Kenny Loggins talks about writing from joy vs. sadness.

10 QA - do you know which songs will be hits by Cerebellum Blues

Does Kenny Loggins know which of songs will be hits? What do you think?

11 QA - how much do you let other music influence your writing by Cerebellum Blues

Somebody has the gall to ask if Kenny Loggins ever steals ideas from others. The answer is graceful and feels very truthful.

12 QA - arrangment by Cerebellum Blues

Does Kenny have his arrangements worked out before going into the studio or not? And is this a good idea?

13 QA - on going into the studio with a song that's not ready by Cerebellum Blues

Another ballsy question, another great answer.

14 QA - writers block by Cerebellum Blues

Does the mighty Kenny Loggins ever suffer writer's block? Does a bear...

15 QA - what a fool believes by Cerebellum Blues

On writing an iconic song with Michael McDonald. A funny, cool story.

• The final mixing day.

Right now, the clock says 10:13 PM. Earlier today, much earlier, about 1:45 AM I was in one of those irrational, late-night mad panics we all suffer. I had just calmed my oldest daughter by 5 minutes, Amelia, back down and put her back into her crib when a question began bouncing around inside my brain like a super ball fired into a concrete room: does Jaime have Tim’s guitar tracks for tomorrow’s session? Christ, I was going to end up going into Hyde Street studios for my final mixing day and not be able to do the one thing I really needed to do. How could I be so stupid? Why am I so lame? Wasn’t a brain injury enough, do I really need more grief from the universe? I started to perspire, I was angry, if I were Charlie Brown I would have had a black scribble above my head. How was I going to solve this? What to do, what to do, what to do? Lying back in bed and hating myself for being such an idiot, I looked over at the bed side table and watched the red light on my Blackberry blink and I fumed. But wait, I could check my email on the BB and see whether or not Jaime had the tracks because if Tim had sent them, his email would still be in the phone. It was. And when I woke up this morning I helped Catherine with the babies and then drove to Hyde Street around noon, where Jaime had already set up the amps I had requested for re-amping Tim’s tracks and we got right down to it. And by 6:00 PM, when I had to leave, everything was sounding good and Jaime promised to send final files for one last listen as I headed out into the Tenderloin to find my car and drive home. I had intended to buy a fancy bottle of wine to celebrate the day but the babies were waiting and I had to get home so the wine ended up being whatever was in the fridge. Still, it was cold and crisp and clean and good. Hard to believe a nearly four year journey could end so quietly but it has. No wrap party, no debauchery, no letting loose. Just finishing, and, frankly, I’ll take it.

- Here are a few photos from the final studio session for Cerebellum Blues, Playlist One.

• Kenny Loggins Songwriting Seminar and Critique at GIT in 1986-7: Part One, answering pre-submitted questions.

The other day, I posted about how I had dug up an old recording of Kenny Loggins giving a songwriting seminar at MI (Musicians Institute, formerly G.I.T.). Well, here is the first part of his talk, during which he answers questions that were pre-submitted by students. His honestly, insight and eloquence are impressive. I’ll post parts two, three and four as soon as they're ready. 

1 - What made you become a songwriter? by Cerebellum Blues

2 - Did you ever study the pop format? by Cerebellum Blues

3 - What are some of the co-writing techniques you used with Jimmy Messina? by Cerebellum Blues

4 - Do you start with music or words first? by Cerebellum Blues

5 - How important is the hook? by Cerebellum Blues

6 - Do you write better on the road or at home? by Cerebellum Blues

7 - Do you have formal training in music theory? (0:45) by Cerebellum Blues

• Digging in the dirt and finding some nuggets of songwriting wisdom.

One of the few really great things about having suffered a severe traumatic brain injury is that I have been able to reap the benefit of some serious downtime. Life happens so fast, and over the brief moment we are here we amass memories and paraphernalia that we save because we hope to revisit them someday. But we almost never do. Who has the time? But when you are forced to sit inside for days, weeks, even months on end, you run out of the little distractions that keep you from taking the time to go back and reexamine your life and you start rummaging through closets and attics or what have you. I know I did.

For me it was cassettes. I had bags of the things, plus some drawers full and a few cassette carrying cases (remember those?) stuffed end-to-end. Most were old mix tapes and most of these I chucked. But scattered amidst my mixtapes were cassettes (and a few DATs) filled with recordings of songs and song fragments I wrote from late high school all the way up through about 1996. Sadly, my old DAT deck no longer works, but most of the material on DAT was also on cassette, so I hooked up my dusty tape deck to Pro Tools and got to work, transferring all of this old material to a new hard drive and in the process labeling all of the songs, fixing a few rough fades, and editing out the true crap (there was plenty of it). Many of the tapes were cryptically labeled, so I had to re-listen to everything, a torturous process to be sure, as it made clear to me my mediocrity and desperate lack of focus as a songwriter. One cassette, however, was very clearly labeled: "Kenny Loggins at GIT". It was from the year 1986 or 1987, during which time I was studying guitar at G.I.T. (Guitar Institute of Technology, now called MI, short for Musicians Institute, click here to read an older post about my time at G.I.T.), and I knew exactly what was on it: a nearly complete recording of the songwriting seminar/screening that Kenny Loggins held at the school.

Just looking the label brought back so many memories. I thought back on how I was disappointed it was Kenny Loggins because I didn’t think he was cool and I figured he would have nothing to say. I thought back on the tune I submitted, I thought farther back to the process of recording the tune in my apartment in Hollywood, where I lived with my roommate, Mike Northcutt (who also submitted a song). I thought even farther back to when I graduated from college with a diploma and had absolutely no clue what to do with it and the relief of finding out about G.I.T. and being able to attend the school and put off real life for at least a year, possibly much longer if rock stardom worked out.

All students were invited, but tapes for critique would be pre-screened. The tune I submitted was called “The Upside of Down” and while I thought it had some positive attributes, deep down I felt it was fundamentally flawed, a quality I felt all my songs shared, and I just could not put my finger on why. I hoped my song would be selected so I could be told what the problem was.

When the day finally came and we gathered in G.I.T.s largest room, I was stunned to see so few attendees. There were maybe 20 to 30 people; I thought for sure there would be at least 100. I mean, Kenny Loggins was a big deal at the time and I was expecting throngs, along with catered food and some serious glitz. There was none of that. Kenny walked on stage with nothing but an acoustic guitar, sat in a standard G.T.T.-issue, metal folding chair, adjusted his mic and got down to it.

Not knowing whether my song had been selected or not, I had butterflies and the small crowd just made things worse. Should he play my song, there was nowhere to hide and he was going to be able to clearly see me and address me and humiliate me. I gritted my teeth. To add to the suspense, he didn’t start with critiques; instead, he worked through an edited list of questions that had been submitted by G.I.T. students. Listening back to his answers today, I can only kick myself for not having realized the magnitude of the gift he made to the school and our small group that day, although to be fair to myself, I was a bit distracted by my constant wondering if he would play my tune or not.  And, yes, my song got played. And critiqued, politely and honestly. And I was told in no uncertain words what the problem was.

Want to hear what his words of wisdom? You’re in luck! Back in the ‘80s, one of my most useful devices was a Walkman Pro and I had it with me and it was ON. But wait, surely I can’t post this stuff, right? It must be copyrighted. Maybe. Before posting these clips I wrote to G.I.T. to ask about copyright and they had no clear opinion, so I’m just gonna post and beg for forgiveness later. The surviving recording of Kenny’s talk is 90 minutes and rather than make you listen to the whole thing all in one go, I’m breaking it up into four sections: 1) Pre-submitted questions; 2) live Q&A; 3) his critique of my song ( I’ve left out his critiques of all tunes but mine, figuring that the other songs really aren’t mine to share) and 4) his brief, but utterly cool performance.

I’ll post the sections as I finish them, so please stay tuned. I really believe that if you write songs, you’ll find the insights offered to be of real value.

---

P.S. - Kenny Loggins, if you read this, THANK YOU. Your talk that day remains the greatest discussion about songwriting I have ever been a part of.

• The state of the song: What can we do, if anything, to restore pop/rock music back to its former glory? (part III of III)

1) Have all the great songs already been written?
2) Why is today’s most popular music fundamentally less interesting than yesterday’s?
3) What can we do, if anything, to get pop/rock music back to its former quality level?

As I’ve worked on this series of posts, I’ve become more and more concerned about this last one, because I really don’t think I have any good answers. Still, I’ve made it this far, so please step aboard as I plough forward. Here’s what I think could happen to make things better.

• I’d like to see DJs who love music and have the freedom to play anything make a comeback on mainstream radio. They act as filters and filters are good, especially when there is so much music out there. I mean, how the hell do you discover stuff these days unless you are willing to surf YouTube and other sites for hours on end? And Pandora? It’s cool, but artificial intelligence has a ways to go.

• I’d like to see greater patience in artistic development (if development even exists anymore). I’m not sure, but I get the sense that the same kind of market grab that dominated the dot com era now dominates music as artists and labels seek to wring every last dollar out of an idea while it’s hot and not worry too much about the future (why should you, you’ll be rich, right?). I see this especially in Lady Gaga who burst onto the scene with a fresh sound and proceeded to repeat herself ad nauseam (have you heard the new album?). Compare her to Bowie back in the 70s or U2 and Prince in the 80s or even Nirvana in the 90s. All of these acts took Neil Young’s creed to heart: rust never sleeps, you have to keep moving. Man, writing this is making me nostalgic for the days when bands sounded different from album to album, even song to song. Who does that anymore? No one I can think of. Which brings me to...

• CREATIVITY. What happened to it? One of my favorite bands of all time is Def Leppard -- or was -- because they crafted the hell out of their songs (though, I admit, their lyrics could fall a touch short) with hooks and pre-choruses and huge full choruses and tight breakdowns and wicked intros and outros. Zeppelin, too. They were just so creative and varied with the their music, god, it was incredible. And The Beatles (Help > Rubber Soul > Revolver > Sergeant Pepper’s, Magical Mystery Tour, The Beatles, Yellow Submarine > Abbey Road > Let It Be). Or The Clash going from London Calling to Sandinista. The Who releasing not one rock opera but two. Those were the days, my friend.

• Finally, I’d like to see the power of the song reassert itself over technology. So many of the songs I hear today are less songs than they are constructions of tracks. Now, there is nothing wrong with using a computer to pile up tracks, but they need to be in service of something greater. I loved Beck’s Odelay album for this very reason: it’s thoroughly modern in that it’s packed with tracks (loops) but great songs are what you hear. To do what Beck did is hard, you can’t simply rely on a gifted engineer and Pro Tools, you’ve got to have a core instinct for song, so you know when to keep going and when to stop and and when to start over. I love technology, but by by making the process of recording so easy and forgiving, I think it has lulled a lot of artists into being less prepared than they should be when they head into the studio. Sure, back in the day, bands arrived at studios with nothing but beer and drugs, but they had been touring and practicing and playing, playing, playing, not sipping Starbucks coffees and musing of their art-to-be. Before I leave this topic (for now), let me be clear: I am in no way a Luddite -- at least I try not to be -- and going backward is almost never preferable to going forward. More important, change is always hard. My hope is that right now music is in a period of flux, driven by technology, and will emerge better than ever. We can’t just keep making Creedence albums, as great as they are, and that means pushing away from I IV V, writing material that will sound awful and unmusical to my generation, breaking the rules to break through and find the new. It has to be done, and I hope it is being done with fervency somewhere. In fact, I’m sure it is. It’s just not the human way to stay satisfied forever. I think this quote gets it right:

“The reality is that it's going to take time for the marriage of music and technology to work.” - Troy Carter, Lady GaGa’s manager, in an email to Bob Lefsetz

As always, comments are much appreciated on this post (or any other!). Thanks for reading.

• The state of the song: Why is today’s most popular music fundamentally less interesting than yesterday’s? (part II of III)

Welcome to part II of my III-part series on the state of the song:

1) Have all the great songs already been written?
2) Why is today’s most popular music fundamentally less interesting than yesterday’s?
3) What can we do, if anything, to restore pop/rock music to its former glory?

First off, music is subjective and so when I lament over the quality of today’s music I am merely expressing an opinion, not a fact. Plus, I should point out that I’m focusing on hit songs as opposed to music in general, although music in general might also be in decline a bit. So what, in my humble opinion, is behind the fall in quality of hits? I think there are three factors.

FORMULAS WORK

If you’re at all interested in music beyond casual listening you’ve heard and uttered the word formulaic a lot. Personally, I don’t believe there’s a can’t miss formula for hits (if there were, big artists would be a lot more consistent at producing them) but still, we all know formulaic songs when we hear them: the quiet intro, the big chorus, the repetition, the high production values, the familiar chords, words and even melodies. In the case of the worst offenders, there is no reward for a listener as there will be no surprises, no twists, nothing fresh at all. Classic example, “We Built This City”, by Jefferson Starship. In the good cases, we will here little surprises, little touches of greatness, something cool and irresistible. Perfect example, “Simply Irresistible”, by Robert Palmer. And in the best cases, the truly great hit songs, we know we are in the hands of a master who is leading us on a journey at once new and old. Think Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean.

So, formulas are not really the problem, as Michael Jackson, U2, Prince and many others have sown by releasing hits that are undeniably formulaic, yet also great. No, what’s happened, I think, is that the lead formulas have had the life optimized out of them. Over the years, as most radio stations across the country were bought up by Clear Channel and then divided up into genres and then dictated by master playlists, ad revenue went up, because marketers could target better. For songwriters and bands, the brave new world of national radio took away one of the best outlets for new ideas, the DJ willing to take a chance. And so the formulas for hit songs churned out less and less variety, because the artists wanting have hits were all writing to the same checklist. Thankfully, as with all other formulaic approaches, the ones ruling today’s airwaves is breaking down, as the Internet crashes the party.

One last thought on this. Back when I was at GIT in the mid-80s, an old jazzer named Howard Roberts addressed one of my classes and said, “People like what they know.” He was right, but I would add, “True, but they LOVE what they know when there’s a twist added.” Think about it: the biggest, hugest hits are all just a little more fresh than they are familiar.

ROCK IS NO LONGER COUNTER CULTURE

Back in the sixties, if you were a long-haired musician you were an enemy of society. Then, in the seventies, long hair became a little more acceptable, so rock bands had to push things further and further to stay offensive or at least outside the mainstream. Everything reached a zenith with The Sex Pistols, I think, and then, where else was their to go? The 80s saw a weird revival of glam and glitter, coupled with punk’s penchant for short, punchy songs and then punk was sort of reincarnated as grunge and then Curt Cobain killed himself and, well, besides Michael Jackson, there hasn’t been much weirdness (and Michael was weird for all the wrong reasons). The kids who grew up with Dylan, The Beatles (post-Epstein), The Stones, Iggy, Led Zeppelin, Elton, Queen, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Kiss, The Clash, etc., well, they’d seen it all and wanted to see it all again and so these bands and many others kept releasing music and touring and next thing you knew a rock concert wasn’t a bunch of kids high on drugs watching a band high on drugs and everyone feeling a little rebellious but instead a bunch of parents sipping bottled water watching bands sip bottled water. As a result, the notion of writing rock music to challenge society, to tap the fire of a revolutionary, just isn’t there anymore. I mean, who’s going to write The Times They Are A Changin’ today? A rapper, maybe, but not a rocker. And without this zeal, it’s all a bit mushy.

ARTISTS ARE SPREAD TOO THIN

When I read accounts of the Stones working on Exile at Nellcote, or Deep Purple holed up in Switzerland working on Machine Head or especially The Beatles at Abbey Road no one is doing much besides writing music, recording music or rehearsing for a tour. And the intensity is just beyond: the days spent awake, the fights, the mistakes, the lost tracks, the money wasted. It was all or nothing. Now, when I read about bands, they’re talking about their music, their web site, their mailing list, their merch strategy, their synch deals, their apps and phones and laptops and on and on and on and on. No wonder they can’t come up with a fresh hit; they don’t have the time to figure out that little (or big) twist. Instead, they heap on the production because that’s easy today, but just like a cake mix is not made better with more and more and more ingredients, neither is a rock mix. The culprit, of course, is today’s DIY music culture and on this I am conflicted. I love that I and other artists are no longer locked out of the music making factory because we can’t afford to record or distribute music on our own. Hell, we can do EVERYTHING on our own, and that’s the problem. Despite technology's mega advances, there are still only 24 hours in a day and to write great music, you need the majority of them for music.

What to do about all this? Stay tuned.

• The state of the song: Have all the great songs already been written? (part I of III)

Yet another series!

1) Have all the great songs already been written? 2) Why is today’s most popular music fundamentally less interesting than yesterday’s? 3) What can we do, if anything, to restore pop/rock music to its former glory?

In a recent post, I was, among other things, lamenting over the decline of quality in music over the last decade, on which Bret commented:

“The question is why hasn't there been a great symphonic composer for more than 100 years?

I think it's that the few thousand symphonies written basically cover the range of possibilities for symphonic instruments. To be any more varied or adventurous basically made it less listenable. Sure, you could still write a different symphony, but you can't write a better symphony, and it can't be different enough for many people to bother listening to it. The world can only utilize so many symphonies.

I think we're starting to hit the same point with modern music. Amplification, distortion, effects, and synthesis enabled radically different sounds and forms of music. If you're more varied or adventurous than others since the 1960s, most people simply aren't going to like it.”

And Bret’s comment really set me to thinking. Now I know next to nothing about classical music, but Bret also mentions modern music and on this I have something to say.

To start, virtually all Western music relies on two chord changes to create tension and release, the critical elements of music, or at least the kind of music I like. These changes are the IV to the I and the V to the I. For those who don’t know, the Roman numerals refer to chords in the major scale, so if you had a song in G, the IV would be C (G, Am, Bm, C) and D (G, Am, Bm, C, D). They are both major chords, as opposed to minor, which I denote using a lower-case m. And the most common chord progression you’re likely to hear is I, V, IV. To wit:

 
Bad Moon Rising, by Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Ballad of John and Yoko, by the Beatles.
Pride and joy, Stevie Ray Vauhgn.
This Land Is Your Land, Woody Guthrie.
When I Paint My Masterpiece, by Bob Dylan.
Death or Glory, by The Clash?
Love Is a Stranger, by Eurythmics.

I could go on and on and on and on and on and on. Most amazing, you could make a playlist of a bunch of I IV V songs and not get bored. How can this be? How can one progression lead to so many great songs? Simple, it’s not just about the chords. There are lyrics, melodies, bass lines, drum beats, tempos, performers, arrangement and production, but equally important, there’s also context, or what’s going on culturally at the time of a song’s release as well as what’s happening in the listener’s life. Still, this I IV V thing and several other progressions have been mined pretty deep and you have to wonder if maybe we’re scraping bottom. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, Waylon Jennings was musing on this back in the 70s when he wrote “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?”, the lyrics for which begin with the following verse:

“It's the same old tune, fiddle and guitar
Where do we take it from here
Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars
We've been the same way for years
We need to change”

For me, I think the answer to the question Are we reaching the limit of rock/pop the answer is Yes and No. Yes, in that we have surely explored rock/pop to its very edges. I mean, every time I hear a song, I can pretty much figure out how to play it without even picking up a guitar, as I, V, IV makes its appearance yet again (or II, V I or a few others). And I am less and less likely to hear a song that surprises me, which is both a factor of experience and age. Recent tunes that have caught my ear for innovative chord changes/melody include Ray LaMontagne’s “Beg, Steal and Borrow”, which has a KILLER modulation, and Lady Ante Bellum’s “Need You Now”. But this happens less and less. On the other hand, when I heard The Black Keys’ song “Things Ain’t Like They Used To Be” I could not get the song out of my head. The chord change is not I, IV, V, but Dm to C and back and forth and back and forth and that’s it! But the lyrics, the sound, the mood, man, it’s a great track and older than the hills, really, though it was released only a few years ago. More surprising is Jamey Johnson who I first heard about on NPR and whose tunes could not be more traditional and yet work on my brain like nano-tech enhanced earworms, especially “Mowing Down the Roses”.

So what’s going on? How could songs with NOTHING NEW musically be every bit as interesting to me as tunes that are genuinely at least a teensy bit fresh? The truth lies in the near endless variations of those elements I mentioned earlier (lyrics, melodies, bass lines, drum beats, tempos, performers, arrangement, production and context), which leads me conclude that music is suffering today for reasons wholly other than the possibility of a limit being reached. They are:

1) Formulas work
2) Rock/pop is no longer counter culture
3) Artists are spread too thin

In my next post, I’ll elaborate on these points.

• The last waltz for my first album.

Yesterday, I met bassist/keboardist Sam Bevan and engineer Jaimeson Durr at Hyde Street Studio C to record the final tracks for my first album, which will be called Cerebellum Blues, Playlist One.  

Outside the studio the day was sunny, inside it was sunny, too. We all felt good to be wrapping up this album so we can get on to what’s next, and the session went fast and smooth. Our only break was a lunch at nearby Morty’s, and otherwise we were focused. Now, all that remains is a bit of re-amping and final mixing, which will happen in a few weeks, then everything will be sent off for mastering, replication and packaging.

I wish I had time to write more about yesterday, but just as I came home last night to hungry babies, I’m now dashing off this post with a baby monitor and cup of coffee to my left, and I am well into my 45 minute allotment to get this post done, use my Brainport and clean up a bit before the babies awake with a couple of squalls. Oh, and I awoke with a migraine, so I’m nursing an Imitrex hangover.

Ah, the life of a rock god.

(If you're interested, here are more photos from yesterday's session.)

• Something bluesy this way comes (album update).

I started this blog ton February 28, 2007, at around 8:30 in the morning. Here’s the first paragraph of my first post:

“Welcome. I'm starting this blog to chronicle the making of my first record, or CD, or whatever such things are called in today's world of ones and zeros. I hope for all who read this, you will be inspired to comment and critique.”

Looking back at that first paragraph, I’m surprised at how light my tone was. I had just gone on full-time disability and, truth be told, I was bad enough off that the doctors who saw me thought I was done, my recovery was basically over and I was going to be struggling to cope with everyday tasks much less a profession of any sort for the rest of my life. I was still sleeping upwards of 12 hours a night, plus a few during the day. My headaches were so frequent that I was taking enough Excedrin and Imitrex to have my primary neurologist tell me to stop cold turkey for at least a week. My head shook so violently at times that my neck is still a mess as a result (the whiplash didn’t help either).

At the time, I thought the album would be done in three to four months but after a false start with one team and a reboot with another, I was behind schedule and over-budget before I knew it. I still thought I would be done by the end of the year, though.

Now, as 2010 slips farther back in the rear view mirror and 2011 looks to be here to stay, I am pleased and relieved to announce that the final session for the album will be this week on May 18. After that, mastering and replication should take maybe two weeks and then I will be done! Man, I cannot wait, not only to be finished, but also to get on to the next album and the next.

To all who have read this blog over the years, thank you. Your comments and interest have been a huge motivator for me.

• Inspired by Guitar Player’s article on the 40 most influential guitar solos, here are the 10 that have influenced me the most.

Before I get into this list, let me emphasize that, unlike Guitar Player's list, these are not the solos I believe have been the most influential in general, but rather the solos that have been the most influential to me. In other words, they have somehow influenced my playing, and since I cannot shred, you will see no mention of stuff like Sails of Sharon, by the Scorpions. I love that solo and it blew me away the first time I heard it, but just can’t play that fast. Or Walking on a Wire, by Richard Thompson, which is possibly the best solo I’ve ever heard but again, so far beyond my ability as to be useless to me as a player. So, in no particular order, here are the top ten most influential solos for yours truly.

Powderfinger, Neil Young, Rust Never Sleeps version
I was tempted to pick The Stranger, but I can’t play The Stranger, whereas I can get pretty close to this one. I credit this solo with getting me used to soloing in the A cowboy shape and using more major thirds, instead being just a pentatonic peasant. Also, Neil Young’s tone is, um, unique. It’s like his amp is sitting in a vat of hot grease laced with dirt, shards of glass, and ground up car parts.

Honky Tonk Women, The Rolling Stones, Brussels Affair version
Slow, relatively easy bends, wicked-cool two-string stuff, what’s not to love? I’ll tell you what’s not to love, it’s in open G which is damn confusing. How Keith played this high on coke, smack, weed, booze and god-knows-what-else is beyond me.

Fire and Water, Free, studio or live version, both are cool
I think trying to learn  this solo really got me started on using vibrato. 20 years later, I’m still no Paul Kossoff, but I’m better than I was.

Train Kept a Rollin’, Aerosmith, Get Your Wings version
For the most part, Joe Perry plays stuff I could only dream of, but on this tune he lays down riffs I can grok.

Love in Vain, The Rolling Stones, Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out version
To this day, I cannot play this solo, but I will die trying. Gives me the blues.

Oh Carol, The Rolling Stones, Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out version
I learned most of my Chuck Berry licks from this song, which seems dumb, I mean, why not just listen to Chuck? Subjective. I prefer Keef.

Freebird, Lynyrd Skynyrd, One More From the Road version  
I know what your thinking, which solo??? ALL OF ‘EM.

Time, Pink Floyd, studio version
Everyone raves about Gilmore’s work on Comfortably Numb, but for me, it’s all about Time.

Smoke on the Water, Deep Purple, studio version
For a metal solo, this one’s pretty easy, but what makes it so cool is Blackmore’s tone. There is nothing else quite like a Strat through a cranked up Marshall. Of course, you could say that about any guitar, but still.

Communication Breakdown, Led Zeppelin, studio version
For the lick that starts the solo. My friend Rich Erickson taught it to me around 1977 and I have been struggling with it ever since. Still can’t play it nearly as fast as Rich could.

That's it. I have a nagging feeling I forgot something though...

• What’s next for musical artists? Part IV of IV.

(As I prepare to put my album up for sale, or at least make it available, I’m thinking a lot about the “market” I’m entering.)

I - The worth of music
II - Copyright
III -  Filesharing and can anything be done about it
IV - What’s next for music?

The music industry is undergoing creative destruction. The old guard of label>distributor>retail is being attacked on all sides and it will be completely destroyed. The only question is what will replace it. I don’t know for sure, and neither does anyone else, but it will look something like artist>fan. In other words, it will be a disintermediated shadow of what it is today, which is a fancy way of saying that the middle man will be cut out.

I’m cool with this change. I like that I can record and distribute my album all by my lonesome and that music is no longer controlled by a cabal of gatekeepers operating out of tall buildings and hidden behind a phalanx of secretaries. But there is a downside to this new DIY world in that no one has the time or expertise to truly DIY, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I mean, imagine if Mick and Keith had had to do everything themselves for the Stones? When would they have toured? Recorded? Written songs? Counted the money? Filled out the legal paperwork? And that’s the beauty of the old, dying system. If you could get a label to back you, you were much more free to pursue your art than you are in a situation where you’re doing it all yourself. Which might explain why there has been a perceptible decline in the quality of music. I mean, compare the last decade to any before it, back to 1960, and I think you would agree that the music has not been as compelling or varied or as adventurous. And maybe it’s because no one has enough time for it anymore. They’re all too busy maintaining their blog, Facebook page, Twitter acount, inbox, voice mail, Tunecore account, bandcamp page, PayPal account, not to mention learning HTML, Java, Photoshop, InDesign, Pro Tools and more.

So given all this, I’m going to back off a bit on my earlier statement that the business will be completely destroyed; instead, I would say mostly destroyed, because I think labels will survive. True, no one will NEED a label, but you might just WANT one. After all, with a label backing you, you have more time to devote to your art. And given all the competition labels face from the DIY world, I think they will get better. They will treat artists more ethically, they will be more transparent, they will cut deals that aren’t all quid or quo, they will rediscover A&R and invest in it. Personally, I would love to be backed by a label. I have hardly any time for anything anymore, especially writing songs, because my free time is spent tweaking my bandcamp page, making sure my copyrights are in order, paying the people I have contracted to help me out, writing the occasional blog post, managing my email list, etc., blah, blah, blah.

And as I muse about this future, filesharing rears its ugly head. I mean, how will anyone make money if the product (music) is so easily and enthusiastically shared? It won’t be easy. But here are few thoughts:

First, music is not the product of the music business, personalities are, so the decline in music revenue might not mean a decline in overall revenue.

I agree with the idea that people buy people, not songs. And to be successful in the music business, more and more you have to be a personality people want a little piece of, maybe it’s a song, or maybe it’s a book, or a T-Shirt, or a performance. But if you only try to make money off of your music, you are doomed, thanks to filesharing. (Unless your goal is to be a behind the scenes type, either a songwriter or maybe a producer or track writer.)

Second, selling out will become a lot more in.

Truthfully, I’m not sure selling out was ever really all that well defined—or not respectable. What I remember was, if an an artist sold a song for use in an ad, then he got dragged though the dirt by the music press and not much more. Then the Stones let Microsoft use “Start Me Up”, Nike ran “Instant Karma”, Cadillac used Zep’s “Rock and Roll” and now, well, no one cares anymore. I mean, there are genres like deathcore in which selling songs to national advertisers is probably frowned upon, but I’d wager that even these deathcore dudes would happily sell to EA  or Activision. And why shouldn’t they? How else are they gonna make a buck?

Third, the process of obtaining permission from and paying copyright holders will be simplified.

To understand why this process must be simplified, here's an article from Tunecore that covers the current process. It's a mess. In fact, in reading more about it, plus thinking about the comments left on my previous posts around copyright and filesharing, I'm going to write about this more, just not now.

As for me personally, I’m in a pickle. I think I write good songs and I have an interesting personal story that people can relate to, but without touring or even having much time to get the word out through Facebook, email and Twitter, my prospects of selling music and merchandise are dim. I will try, you can be sure of that, but I’m a realist and don’t expect things to go all that far. Instead, I will put most of my efforts into seeking out licensing opportunities, either selling songs to performers or selling my recordings for use in film, TV and whatever else needs a soundtrack. Though my expectations are low, my hopes are high and I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Stay tuned.

• Is filesharing wrong, illegal and screwing up the music business or is it a cultural phenomenon about which we we can do little to nothing? Part III of IV.

(As I prepare to put my album up for sale, or at least make it available, I’m thinking a lot about the “market” I’m entering. Here are the posts I plan to write:

I - The worth of music
II - Copyright
III -  Filesharing and can anything be done about it
IV - What’s next for music?

I’ll cut to the quick: yes, filesharing is wrong, illegal and screwing up the music business. It’s wrong because if you’re sharing copyrighted material, you’re sharing something that’s not yours to share. It’s illegal because the law says so. And it’s screwing up the music business because getting music without paying for it is just so damn easy that everybody’s doing it.

What’s equally obvious (to me, at least) is why people do it. And in my opinion, you can ignore most of the explanations put forth by Kyle Bylin on Music Think Tank, and you can guffaw at Chuck Klosterman of Esquire who theorizes that people are filesharing because they need to conserve cash in order to pay down credit card debt. What drivel. Shot From Guns gets it right: people fileshare “because they can.”

I mean, think about it, why do you fileshare? Wait, you know what, screw it, fileshare is a euphemism. Why do you use the Internet to steal music? Because you can, right? I mean, you can rationalize it a million ways from Sunday, but none of your mental calisthenics would change the undeniable truth that if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t. (Well, you would, but you’d be doing it old school, using cassettes and the like, which takes a ton of time and is a royal pain in the ass, thus limiting how much you are willing to copy.)

The only real question is what to do about all this. The Music Think Tank article confidently concludes: “All it takes is reminding real people in real places why music matters to you.” I can’t even understand what the hell that’s supposed to mean, much less argue for or against it. I know that this will sound Big Brother-ish, but just as technology has always existed that lets us record and track the ownership of physical objects, so should technology be developed for recording and tracking the ownership of digital stuff. It doesn’t have to be as aggressive as DRM was, it just needs to be able to show proof of purchase. That would be a start. Other thoughts:

• I love the idea of Amazon’s locker because if I buy a track and lose it, I can go get another copy. Why has this not become standard operating procedure for online music?
• Music pricing should be freed from the shackles of fixed royalty schedules, thereby allowing older music or less popular music to sell for less than newer music. Right now, I think the fixed pricing model encourages file sharing because people have no say in what a song or album is worth to them. It’s .99 or nothin’, pal.
• We should emphasize copyright to kids so that they grow up understanding not only that it is stealing but also why. (My kids are in for it!)

Damn, in starting to write about what to do about filesharing, I’m realizing I have not thought about it enough. I’ll come back to this someday, I promise.  

Before I close out this chapter, I want to respond to a comment left on my previous post and give a shout-out to an article I just read.

First, that comment. It went like this:

“With all due respect, I think you're writing this from a very, very biased point of view. You're one of the music elites who can both appreciate a wider range of music than the vast majority of people and you also stand to benefit from copyright.”

I responded by saying I might indeed be biased, but on thinking about it more, I don’t believe I am. I’m not pro-copyright because I might benefit from copyright protection someday, I’m pro copyright because I think society as a whole benefits. Which brings me that article I wanted to give a shout-out to. It’s from a blog called Copyhype: Understanding the Copyright Wars and you can read it here. I think it makes a very compelling, well-supported argument for how copyright benefits the public. Hope you give it a read!

Next up: What’s next for music?

• Does copyright still have relevance in today’s music market? Part II of IV.

As I prepare to put my album up for sale, or at least make it available, I’m thinking a lot about the “market” I’m entering. Here are the posts I plan to write:

I - The worth of music
II - Copyright
III -  Filesharing and anything be done about it
IV - What’s next for music?
I think the asnwer is HELL YES but before I get into why let me delve into copyright law and history a bit. (I’ll keep it brief, I’m an English major, for God’s sake.)

From Wikipedia:

Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression. In most jurisdictions copyright arises upon fixation and does not need to be registered. Copyright owners have the exclusive statutory right to exercise control over copying and other exploitation of the works for a specific period of time, after which the work is said to enter the public domain. Uses covered under limitations and exceptions to copyright, such as fair use, do not require permission from the copyright owner. All other uses require permission. Copyright owners can license or permanently transfer or assign their exclusive rights to others.

Initially copyright law applied to only the copying of books. Over time other uses such as translations and derivative works were made subject to copyright. Copyright now covers a wide range of works, including maps, sheet music, dramatic works, paintings, photographs, architectural drawings, sound recordings, motion pictures and computer programs.

The justification of copyright law, also from Wikipedia.

The British Statute of Anne of 1709 was the first act to directly protect the rights of authors.[1] Under US copyright law, the justification appears in Article I, Section 8 Clause 8 of the Constitution, known as the Copyright Clause. It empowers the United States Congress "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."[2] According to the World Intellectual Property Organization the purpose of copyright is twofold: "To encourage a dynamic culture, while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence, and to provide widespread, affordable access to content for the public."[3]

So there you have it: copyright law has been around for a damn long time and its purpose is to grant a set of exclusive rights to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. How could people be against this?

But it’s too hard!

The most common reason I’ve come across for nuking copyright laws is that in today’s world they are unenforceable. Now, one of my favorite sayings is you can’t legislate the weather, and I agree that controlling people’s desire to copy stuff might be a losing battle, as the changes in the way people can copy are coming so fast and furious that no legal body could possibly stay on top of it all. But to just give up and repeal the old laws seems wrong. Besides, most of what I read advocates for the removal of copyright laws around music, but what about other media? Would the world really be a more creative place without laws to protect books and movies and 70’s sitcoms? I doubt it.

The curse of complexity.

Here’s what it all comes down to for me — and Tunecore wrote a great article on this — copyright laws are just too complex these days, having been written in a world where no one ever imagined anything like the Internet and digital production. Over time, before and after the rise of the Internet, copyright laws have been piled upon one another to create a system of rights (not to mention royalty payment schedules) that is all but incomprehensible to anyone but an experienced entertainment attorney. Worse, if a young artist were to actually pony up for an entertainment attorney in order to be sure he was completely covered legally, he would be paying through the nose for something that can’t be enforced. It’s a conundrum, to be sure, but I choose to believe it’s not only solvable but worth solving. Copyright, in my opinion, is critical to motivating people to invest their time, energy and money into art. Take away its protections and I think you could expect the quantity of high quality art and expressions of other kinds of ideas to drop. And that would be more than just a shame, it would be a step backward for human progress.

One more thought on complexity. Clay Shirky wrote a piece called The Collapse of Complex Business Models that is highly applicable to the music business, which is groaning under the weight of too many conflicting and confusing laws, most of which were were written not with an eye toward to the future but to preserve the status quo. Read the Shirky piece and if you don’t see parallels to music I’ll shocked, shocked, I tell you!

Next up: Filesharing.

• Is music worth less today than it was before? Part I of IV.

(As I prepare to put my album up for sale, or at least make it available, I’m thinking a lot about the “market” I’m entering. Here are the posts I plan to write:

I - The worth of music
II - Copyright
III -  Filesharing and can anything be done about it?
IV - What’s next for music?

A lot of smart people are debating whether or not music is worth less today than it was a decade ago or longer. Some say yes, some say no, nearly all engage in tortured prose about price and value and economics and Christ it gives me a headache just thinking about all the drivel that’s been written.

So, to answer the question straight away, here’s what I would say: I don’t know.

I do know, however, that the only way to determine the worth of anything is a market. Here’s Wiki’s take:

Price: In ordinary usage, price is the quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services.

Economic value: is the worth of a good or service as determined by the market.

You see the problem, right? In the music business, worth is completely distorted by the fixed-price nature of the market. Every album sells for about the same price, same with every song. The movie business has the same problem. Books, too. Why should this be? Beats me, but I would imagine a guild or union bought off some politicians awhile back and we’ve been paying for it ever since. Anyway, without a competitive free market (like there is for beer) there can be no real way to determine worth and without worth how do you arrive at a price? Fact is, we’ve all been raised to believe that all albums should cost the same and this has completely messed up how we value music.

Setting all this aside, though, let’s look at total music sales (from CNN):

Total revenue from U.S. music sales and licensing plunged to $6.3 billion in 2009, according to Forrester Research. In 1999, that revenue figure topped $14.6 billion.

So that settles it, right? You can ramble on all you want about economic theory, but a 50% drop in total sales in pretty convincing that music is worth less now than it was in the past. Not so fast, bubba. The problem is not worth, in my opinion, it’s filesharing, which I will write about after I tackle copyright. Stay tuned.

• Listening to Buddy Miller and letting my mind drift back in time.

The year was probably 1991 or 1992 when walked into WOM on Kaufinger Strasse in Munich, Germany, and put on a pair of headphones and started watching a video of the The Band perform “When I Paint Masterpiece” at Bob Dylan's 30th anniversary concert. I was entranced and went back and back and back again to the store to experience that video, sometimes hitting pay dirt, other times arriving when the video was not playing or even close to starting to play. I was teaching English at Berlitz and so I was poor and buying an album was something I really had to think about. As for video, well, forget it, I had no way to play video. In time I broke down and bought the double CD and could finally listen to the song on my own time, which I did, a lot. And every time I listened to it I thought about making my own masterpiece. I never did, of course. Who does? But just this morning, I put on one of the many, many bootlegs I’ve downloaded recently, this one of Buddy Miller, and I noticed on the info.txt file there at the bottom “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. I played it. It’s great, as good as The Band’s performance. And as I was listening to it, I thought about how much is different in my life now. The biggest thing, of course, is parenthood, followed by marriage. But one other big difference is that I have finally at least attempted to paint my masterpiece, which, with luck will be ready in about a month. Stay tuned.

• Should I feel dirty after going on a bootleg download binge?

I subscribe to the Lefsetz Letter (you should, too) and a couple of weeks ago Bob Lefsetz wrote rhapsodically about a particular Bad Company performance, specifically “Simple Man” from 1976 in Albuquerque. I had to hear it. I first checked YouTube, but while there were songs from this concert posted, Simple Man was not among them. So I googled Bad Company 1976 Albuquerque, NM. Talk about opening a Pandora’s Box. Not only did I find the BadCo gig, I found about 100 other gigs by various bands and promptly went on a bootleg binge. I bought a membership to Rapidshare and Megaupload and just Got the Fevah! Here’s the question, though: am I breaking the law and robbing rights holders of payment? Yes and yes. So why does this not bother me? After all, I’m the guy at the party who will corner you and explain why downloading music without paying rights holders is illegal and harmful to the music industry. And I’m right, dammit.

But here’s the thing: every boot I’ve downloaded contains only songs I’ve already paid for multiple times. Not only that, but also they are songs for which I have sought out and purchased every legal performance of, live or in studio. In other words, I’m only downloading music I have already paid for in every legal way I can (many times, more than once) but I still want MORE. So I guess that makes me an outlaw and a scourge of humanity according to the RIAA. Further, a lot of the bands I’m downloading music by would cringe to know that their unscrubbed, less-than-perfect performances are being listened to over and over and over and over (I’ve already listened to the Simple Man performance Lefsetz cited about 100 times). But it’s the flaws the make these recordings perfect.

In the end, I don’t feel guilty. Or very much like an outlaw. I feel like a fan, someone who is willing to go the extra mile to seek out every great performance possible of bands I love. Further, unlike a lot of bootleg collectors, I only want the stuff with great sound quality and great performances. I’m not interested in historic gigs if they sound historically horrible. As a result, I seek out soundboard or FM broadcasts and always try to get lossless files (although, I am fine with high-quality MP3, meaning anything above 128 Kbps). I wish there were a legal option, namely, I wish more bands would do what Dylan has done and release archival stuff, but so far, very few have. And so I am pushed to the fringes, I say!

Wait, there is one legal option I know of. It’s called Wolfgang’s Vault, and it is packed with KILLER performances (both sound and video!) of some of rock’s greatest acts. If you’re not feeling like strapping on some six shooters and riding into dens of boots, just go to Wolfgang’s. But be prepared to listen and listen and watch and listen and search and listen and watch and basically lose your day.

• The Cerebellum Blues Story: Chapter Eight, Back to Work, Then Back to the Beginning.

In preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music. In this chapter:

Returning to my job / Better songs and better ads? / Going on full-time disability / The Album Begins

I think it was some time in 2004. Or maybe it was 2005, I really don’t remember. Anyway, it was before my brain injury, and I was still working full-time as the co-executive creative director of an SF ad agency. We were pitching the Charles Schwab account and my boss was out from New York to help us polish our ideas a lead the presentation. A few nights before our deadline we (me, my boss and my creative partner) headed out to a wine bar. We’d had a few glasses, and I remember the subject of creativity came up and I confessed that I no longer felt creative. This should have been the equivalent of career suicide, but my boss listened and we ended up talking about music. He was working on his first album at the time and he expressed how getting back into music had totally re-energized him. Everything he said really resonated with me, but did I get home and pick up my guitar? No. I was under the misguided belief that I had to focus any creativity I had left in me on my job, otherwise I would spread myself too thin and be even less able to think up cool stuff.

Fast forward to mid-2006. I’d had my brain injury in January of that year and it was now June and I was returning to work. My doctor did not want me to, Catherine did not want me to, my parents did not want me to, but work was all I really knew so back I went. I believed that the sheer effort required to return to semi-full-time work (my doctor would only approve me for 20 hours a week, at first) work help me recover faster by forcing my brain and atrophying body to be more active. In hindsight, I should have listened to my doctor and everyone else save for one peculiar thing: for the remainder of the year, I only worked three/four days a week and yet produced more advertising that I was proud of than I had in the prior year. Plus, I was writing songs. And I learned something: creativity begets creativity. My notion that I could only do one thing at a time and to do more would be disastrous was totally and completely wrong.

As the year of 2006 was drawing to close I still refused to accept that my career in advertising was over for the time being, and even though my disability insurance would allow me to quit and still draw a nearly equivalent income I just could not do it. What finally changed my mind was a chance meeting with the agency’s CFO. We were both in the office over Christmas break — I madly transferring files and prepping for departure should I ultimately either leave freely or be punted, she probably doing real work — but I did not know she was there. Suddenly my phone rang. She asked if she could talk to me for a minute. I headed over to her office not sure what to expect, and as I sat down, she asked, “What are you doing here? Everyone can see you shouldn’t be here, you should be home recovering, why are you doing this, especially since you have disability insurance?” I explained to her my worry about being seen as a quitter, a freeloader, someone who no one should hire. (Never mind that to meet me in person at this time would have convinced you in about a second that I was disabled. Never mind that I still worried about throwing up at inopportune moments and Catherine still carried a plastic bag with her whenever we went anywhere together. Never mind that I was taking so much Excedrin and Imitrex in order to function that my neurologist, once she found out, told me to go cold turkey and deal with full blown migraines for a little while.) She shook her head and told me about her husband. He’d had a terrible set-back years ago, and like me, refused to go on disability for all the same reasons. He finally relented, though, and now thinks it was the best decision he could have made, the only decision really, and has no regrets.

Things happened fast after that fateful day and by January 1, 2007, I was officially disabled and no longer working. I struggled with whether I had done the right thing and resolved to become un-disabled as fast as possible, but, in the meantime, what to do? I rethought my career, my life, everything and my first decision was to longer ignore my desire to write music. I would finally make the album I’d been thinking about making since I was a teenager.

I wish I could remember the day making an album went from dream to to-do, but I can’t. I know I had been thinking about it in the later months of 2006, but Decision Day has slipped into the murk of memory. Regardless, after telling my friend Cory about my idea, my first plan (link goes to photos) was to work with a mutual friend, David Hearst, who had built his own studio. He was a guitarist and one of the early employees of Digidesign and had used some of his good fortune to construct a state-of-the-art home studio. (Oh, and he also designed some custom wood baffling for the studio’s walls, which he was still in the midst of building by hand when I emailed him about recording.) We lined up a drummer and bassist made arrangements to record drums and bass for eight songs in one weekend. Next, between my friend Toby and me, we would layer up all guitars and vocals. Well, after laying down the rhythm tracks one busy weekend in August of 2008, I opted to reboot. The problem was mainly that David’s studio was just too far away (he was in Redwood City, which is a 45 minute drive from SF), so I got online and started looking for studios in SF. My first Google hit was Hyde Street and after reading about it, decided it would be too much money, but emailed anyway. Jaimeson Durr, who runs Hyde Street Studio C emailed me back right away with rates that were super reasonable, and I was off to the races again. At the time, I figured I’d be done with my album in a few months. Ha. In a way, though, I’m glad it’s taken so long. I’ve gotten a chance to begin again, in a way, and I've learned a lot along the way.

Now, on the cusp of releasing my album, I can reflect a bit and here’s what I’ve learned about myself, and  what I will strive to remember going forward.

First and foremost, family and friends should come first for me, not work. I’m now married and have two baby girls and would not have things any other way.

Advertising was a fine career, and might yet still be what I opt to do, but I should never again allow it to be my life.

Creativity begets more creativity, so, I’m gonna go ahead, spread myself thin, just keep those wheels turning.

Creating music is central to my happiness.

(The End)

• The Cerebellum Blues Story: Chapter Seven, Psychotherapy.

In preparation of my album launch, which should happen in May, 2011, I'm recapping how I got back into music. In this chapter:

Depression / Myths about creativity / Psychotherapy / Emotional uprising

In chapter six of this saga, I described how I started writing songs in earnest a few months after my accident and put forth my theory on how my brain had changed the way it processed emotions to let the music flow. About those emotions...

When you suffer any sort of life changing medical condition, depression is a very real and likely possibility and it needs to be aggressively managed. My case was no different. Every doctor I talked to following my hospital stay recommended psychotherapy and a treatment plan that combined talk therapy with drugs. I was cool with the talk therapy part, but wary of going on Prozac and its ilk, so I started talk therapy first. The month was March of 2006.

If you’re not familiar with talk therapy, it works like this: you enter a nice room where the therapist is waiting, you sit on a couch or chair across from the therapist and you talk for about 50 minutes. There is a small clock showing you both the time, so you kind of know when to wrap things up, and that’s about it. There is virtually no small talk, because everything you say gets analyzed. If you say, “Hello, how are you?” one day but not the next, the therapist will ask you why. It’s maddening at first, but there is a method to it, namely to get you to think about the way you think by having you attempt to express it all to someone else. And you keep going deeper. After a few months, I finally understood Peter Gabriel’s song “Digging in the Dirt”.

During those early talk therapy sessions, I remember madly mulling whether over or not I should add drugs to my treatment. The docs were unanimous -- take the drugs -- but psychotropics seemed like such a huge step. Plus, they really do alter your brain chemistry, and hadn’t my brain been altered enough? I started doing some research. At first, I turned to the Internet, but it’s just not very helpful in these matters. You read stories like I went on Prozac and woke up one morning to find I had put my cat in the microwave, along with a hot dog. I mean, the horror stories are so outrageous. Plus, they far outnumber tales of triumph. I mean, as the Internet tells it, no pharmaceutical has ever helped a soul. So I bought some books, two, to be precise: “Against Depression” and “Noonday Demon.” Both books made a strong case for the benefits of drugs, but two factors stood out in convincing me to give anti-depressants a shot.

First, the books convinced me that popular culture’s tendency to hold depression in high regard for its ability to inspire great art is bogus. Take Van Gogh. People love to cite how his personal anguish drove him to create paintings unlike any the world had ever seen. Or consider Hemingway, who supposedly did his best work soaked in beer and tears in some Parisian dive café. Well, here’s the truth. According the books I read, Van Gogh didn’t paint shit when he was in the grip of depression. It was only when he was “up” that he grabbed a brush. As for Hemingway, he was only depressed in the very last years of his life, having lost his prodigious capacity for memorizing things because of multiple concussions (it’s been said that he could recite whole conversations years after the fact), which he believed meant he could no longer write.

The second clinching factor was strong evidence that depression is a pernicious peeler away of brain health and if you don’t do something about it, the damage can severe and irreversible. Having suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, I hardly needed further brain damage. I decided to try the drugs.

The verdict: I’m glad I did it. I used antidepressants for about six months (I did talk therapy until the end of last year). I credit the drugs with staving off severe depression, and I also credit them with making me more receptive to putting into practice some of the things I was learning in talk therapy. Most important, anti-depressants did not stifle my creativity. On the contrary, they seemed to let it flow, by preventing me from slipping into a downward spiral that ends in a dark, locked-up room the only escape from which is a good night’s sleep.

So, again, about those emotions...

I think I had been squelching a lot things for a long time and through talk therapy and antidepressants, I was able to let my emotions rise up and not ruin me. I could sit with them for longer, which was key to letting me turn some of them into songs. In fact, in the end, the songwriting uptick that had started after my brain injury accelerated with therapy and for that I will always be grateful.

I’m nearing the end of this saga, the moment I decided to make an album, but before I could get there I had one last hurdle. Stay tuned.