• Thinking back on when I first launched Cerebellum Blues, and how different things were. Myspace, Facebook, etc.

Today is August 15, 2011. I started my music project in late 2006. And all I can say is, what a difference a few years makes. Here’s a partial list:

MySpace - (then) The ugliest site on the web for musicians. (now) Even uglier.
Facebook - (then) A spec in MySpace’s rearview mirror. (now) A spec out MySpace’s front windshield.
Twitter - (then) Home of an annoying whale. (now) A big fish.
Bandcamp - (then) Answer to a movie trivia question. (now) The best site for DIY musicians.
iTunes - (then) Aptly named. (now) Unfortunately named.
Tunecore - (then) Digital only. (now) Whatever you got.
CDBaby - (then) Aptly named. (now) Unfortunately named.
3G - (then) You will. (now) You are.
iPhone - (then) You mean iMac, right? (to) iPhone therefor I am.
Apps - (then) You mean, like, Oracle apps? (now) The new crack.
Android - (then) A favorite character of sci-fi flicks. (now) A mobile OS that just plain pisses off Steve Ballmer (what doesn't?). 
Pro Tools - (then) Pony up, pal, you got no other real choice. (now) What’s Logic?
Yahoo! - (then) Yahoo! (now) yahoo?
Google? - (then) Google. (now) Google!
Microsoft - (then) I WILL FUCKING KILL YOU. (now) I DON’T WANNA DIE!
Wordpress - (then) You mean TypePad, right? Or... letterpress? (now) .com or .org?
Free music - (then) Really, I thought Napster got shut down? (now) How dare you take away my god-given right to free music you capitalist swine.
Squarespace - (then) one-man operation (now) 339th fastest-growing private company in the United States.
Cost per gigabyte of hard drive space (then) about $.40. (now) about $.10.
Obama (then) Who? (now) SOCIALIST!
The U.S. - (then) WE KICK ASS, PAL, AND IF YOU DISAGREE WE WILL KICK YOUR ASS. (now) We’re cool, but, you know, if you disagree, well, we should talk.

Me - (then) Brain-damaged, single, unemployed. (now) Brain-damaged, married, two babies, unemployed.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Change is rampant and fast. Equally interesting, though, is what has not changed much.

Fender and Marshall amps (then) Mass-produced and overpriced. (now) Mass-produced and overpriced.
Fender and Gibson guitars (then) Mass-produced and overpriced. (now) Mass-produced and overpriced.
Guitar Center (then) Seller of mass-produced, overpriced gear. (now) Seller of mass- produced, overpriced gear.
Keith Richards (then) Embalmed but still alive. (now) Embalmed but still alive.

• Missing Wyoming. Again.

As I type this, my audio files for my album have just completed uploading to oasiscd.com, where they will join my already uploaded art work files and be pressed into my first ever CD, Cerebellum Blues, Playlists One and Two. In other words, now would be a perfect time to go fishing. But I won’t be joining my Dad up in Wyoming this year to do a little trout hunting. No, ever since my brain injury in 2006, fishing has not been something I can do.

I really miss it. Not only was it a chance to talk with my Dad about politics and investing and computers, it was also a very recent family tradition, something we don’t have many of. Every year, starting back in 1998 or 9, my Mom and Dad and I (my sister was never able to join us) have trekked up to Sunlight Basin, an area of Wyoming so named because when it was discovered, trappers figured that sunlight was the only thing that could get to it regularly. Sunlight Basin sits between Yellowstone and the Beartooth mountains and down its middle runs the Clark’s Fork river, one the few rivers in the U.S. designated as wild and scenic. Mostly my Dad and I fished the Clark’s Fork on our trips, but in the few years before my accident, we had started using horses to venture up into the valley of Crandall Creek, which feeds the Clark’s Fork. Down near the Clark’s Fork, Crandall is beautiful to look at but not much to fish. Mostly, we would follow the jeep road along Crandall for a little ways, then hop out, fish Crandall for an hour or so and then head over to the Clark’s Fork. But upper Crandall, well, it’s the best fishing I’ve ever experienced. Tricky, too many ways to snag your lure, but the fish, well, they were big, strong, fast—and hungry. We always caught our best dinners on upper Crandall.

For lodging, we stayed a few different places the first years, but soon discovered Hunter Peak Ranch and it became our home away from home. Shelley and Louis run the place with love and you will not find a better lodge in Sunlight.

Maybe next year will be the year I finally go again. Maybe. The high altitude would probably still cause me problems, and then there’s the simple fact that my balance is barely good enough for city life, much less clambering down rocks to cold, fast waters. But my hopes are high. And I trust that whatever fishing luck I have left in the universe will accompany my Dad as he and my Mom depart tomorrow for Wyoming.

• Album update: the luxury of waiting.

As of today, there is only one thing holding back my album: the mastering of a single song. I should receive a test version today or tomorrow, and when I do, I’m pretty certain I will approve it, and then I will send it to OasisCD and as soon as I have the pressed CDs in my hands, I will start offering downloads and the like.

Throughout this process, waiting has been a constant: waiting for ideas, waiting for studio time, waiting to hear back from people, waiting for a headache to subside, waiting to find the right singer, waiting just to see if anything pops up that’s worth waiting for. As, yes, the waiting has been hard, at times the hardest part, but it is a luxury I am glad to have. In adland, which was my only creative outlet before my accident, I was always on a tight schedule of some kind and waiting was almost never an option. Mostly, the schedule was dictated by a client desire to be in-market by a certain date, but regardless of the reason, the result was almost always the same: compromise. For radio, I would have to pick the talent that was available, not the talent I wanted. Same with TV. For print, many times The Perfect Photographer was busy, so I went with the less-than-perfect guy. Now, I admit, on occasion, having to go with my second, third or fourth choice turned out to be a great choice, maybe even the best choice, but the years of compromising created in me a deep seated desire to be able to do a project without compromise of any sort. To do things in the very best way I thought I could do them, and to wait until the resources were available if I felt I did not have what I needed. In short, to do right things right.

Waiting is no fun, but in this case, I welcome it because it’s a choice I have so rarely been able to make, at least creatively.

• Album update: Sweet Virginia.

I just realized I don’t think I ever explicitly posted that Catherine, the babies and I have uprooted from San Francisco and moved to Virginia Beach, VA, for the summer. Well, we have. We are living in Catherine’s brother’s condo while our SF place sits empty, happily gobbling up thousands of dollars a month. How can we afford this? We can’t, but we’re doing it just the same and will deal with the consequences down the road (kinda like the US government!). More to the point, why are we doing this? I think the simplest answer is summer. To explain: the whole rest of the world seems to think that California is summer sun year-round. Well, it’s not, especially in San Francisco, where summer means cold, fog and gusty winds. Personally, I don’t mind SF’s Arctic summers that much, but they drive Catherine nuts. So, given that I’m not working and  Catherine’s not working and her brother is on deployment in Afghanistan, we were able come out here to Virginia and to live rent-free and enjoy some true summer weather and time at the beach. So far, the trip has been everything we’d hoped for and I cannot believe it’s already August. I also can’t believe my album is still not out! But, I have good news: the artwork is done and the final, final, final, final mixing is done and so now all that remains is for one song to be mastered and then for me to give oasiscd.com the go-ahead to print 1000 (gulp) discs and that should happen as soon as mastering is completed, most likely next week. Wish me luck.

• Album update: it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

I’m frustrated and mad at myself for being frustrated. What’s bugging me? Well, the date is July 24, 2011, and my album still is not out. It’s done but not Done, even though I wrote not too long ago that it was finished as in Finished (there is one track that needs to be remixed ever so slightly and the album art work is not quite finalized, I thought it was, but I was wrong and why shouldn’t I have been, after all, I am no designer and yet I'm doing everything myself). I could throw out a date when I will be finally, truly, unambiguously finished, but what’s the point? The simple truth is I have no idea. And I’m mad at myself for being bothered by all this. Why can’t I just roll with the punches a bit better? What does it matter that my album is so late? I’m not under contract to make a deadline. There’s no global tour in danger of cancellation. It’s a vanity project, really, for chrissakes. But still...

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I was going to bang this thing out in a few months. Then I remember thinking it would be a year. But by 2008, I was going to release the album and there was going to be a proper launch party. My friend Brian Shown and I used to have a few too many glasses of wine on taco nights (a mostly weekly affair) and talk about putting together an art/rock show, but with no art rock. The first two hours were going to be an art show of Brian’s paintings, a collection called Nation Invaders about the US invasion of Iraq, then we were going to push the paintings to the side and clear the floor for an unobstructed view of the stage where Cerebellum Blues was going to rock for a few hours. We were thinking of holding the party at 111 Minna and tickets were going to be free and drinks were going to be free (up to two) and it was going to be a good time. I was going to ride my ripple of publicity around my having been featured on Lemonade (not sure I made it into the final movie) and an article I’d written about music and traumatic brain injury and published in Neurology Now (read it here) and on brainline.org (read it here and hear an early version of Water Under the Bridge).

But now my miniscule publicity is prehistoric news and the money for such profligate parties is gone. Hell, I barely have enough to press some CDs, which is probably a waste of money, because who buys CDs anymore? Still, I’ve come this far, right? Might as well finish. Someday. Sigh, I’m going to bed.

• When memories vanish. The perils of using Google Docs.

Back in 2005-6, not sure exactly, I started using a program called Writely. It was one of the original online word processors and I loved it right away because it freed me from being dependent on a particular computer. I could work on a doc at the office on one computer, come home and work on it on another and if were traveling, I could simply login from any computer and check my document. I could even read my docs on my Blackberry. Then Google bought humble Writely and... made the interface better. And somewhere along the way I discovered that Writely/Google Docs saved all of my revisions. This was gold. I could open a doc and dig back to find every iteration of it I had ever made, and in the process maybe rediscover some good ideas I had been too quick to kill.

In time, I made Google Docs my go-to program for lyrics. It was perfect because finally I had not only every lyric I was working on in one place rather than on one Word doc on one computer, or a copy of that doc, or a copy of a copy, but also I had every tortured re-write. And mobile access. Man, it was The Best and created a lot of love within me for Google, never mind that it was Writely’s idea. Then one day, not too long ago, a very innocent dialogue box popped up on Google Docs wanting to know if I’d like to see my Google Doc in the new editor. Sure, why not? I clicked “preview”, it looked fine, I updated. Then I figured, to be safe, I should update my other docs. To date, I’ve done a good portion of them and just this very day I realized I had missed something KIND OF FUCKING IMPORTANT. Updating to the new editor meant losing all revisions. Yes, Google had some shitty, ugly little dialogue box telling me this but I missed it. And now, what am I supposed to do? I can’t call Google, no one can, unless you’re BIG, BIG, BIG. I can’t email them. I can’t chat. All I can do is post a puny little question onto one of Google’s online help forums because that’s how Google rolls: you solve your own problems and if you can’t the community will. We’ll see.

And this experience, so devastating because access to all my revisions was a key part of my songwriting process and was going to prove invaluable in my plans to write about how each of the songs on my new album came into being, has made me kind of hate Google. Just like that. Does Google care? Doubtful. In fact, many Googlers probably spend much of their days talking about how fucking stupid all their users are. I mean, you get what you pay for, right? So fuck off you fucktard of a freeloader. Well, I would have paid for Google search, I would paid for Gmail, I would have paid for Google Docs because I want the contract of payment. I want to be able to say, “Look, I paid for this and now it doesn’t work, help me out.” But with Google, no can do.

And so I am waiting, waiting in vain most likely, for someone out their to answer my question in the Google forums and lead me to the promised land of recovering my revisions. Yes, I am a peon, a nobody, I have just about zero influence, but from this day forward, rather than promote Google Docs to fellow songwriters and copywriters as a great tool I will talk about how it let me down and how Google ignored — or probably never even heard — my pleas for help. If this is doing no evil, I’d hate to see what the company considers to be evil.

• Google+, not exactly doubleplusgood.

I like social media. I tried MySpace back in the day, then I got onto Facebook pretty soon after it opened itself up to non-Havahd students. I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. And I have a vested interest in all this social stuff as it is very relevant to my profession (advertising) and to my music. I also think it’s good for democracy and bad for dictatorships. So when Google+ was released, I wanted to try it, and a few days ago, I finally finagled an invite. What a letdown.

If you follow Google at all, you will know that Google+ is the company’s third attempt to create a social network. First there was Buzz and then Wave. Both failed because they did not offer a simple promise. I mean, can anyone actually explain them? They’re like Obamacare. But Google+ is just a straight up copy of Facebook, except it’s not. Here is the key difference: on Facebook, the people you share with are called friends and you get friends by asking people to be your friends. This simple, clear feature is why Facebook put MySpace out of business in short order. On Google+, the people you share with are called, um, well I don’t know and you invite them to share with you by, um, well I don’t know and once they are either in or not in your Google+ crowd, you can assign them to circles (Friends, Acquaintances, etc.). In other words, whereas MySpace sucked for a clear reason (any dimwit could be your friend) and Facebook was cool for a clear reason (“friendships” were two-way), Google+ is a murky thing of muck. What Google needed to do was copy Facebook and offer a clear, simple difference that would be so compelling people would want to switch. Instead, Google created a copy that has differences that are so difficult to explain, you can pretty much forget someone saying, “SCREW FACEBOOK, I’M GOING GOOGLE.”

And this upsets me because I don’t much like Facebook as a company, and I want an alternative. I don’t admire Mark Zuckerberg at all. Sure, he’s accomplished a lot and that is admirable, but unlike Jobs, Bezos or Buffett, the guy just has no likable qualities, at least not that I know of. Further, his creation is not that admirable. I mean, what’s amazing about Facebook? The Internet? Well, Gore, not Zuckerberg, invented the Internet. Now, Google, well, what Google does — let you find the tiniest needles in the largest haystack the world has ever seen — that’s amazing. Google told China to go phuk itself, major props. It was one of the first businesses to realize that storage is cheap, servers don’t have to be pretty, open source can be enterprise class, your customers will help you make your products better if you let them, transparency is good, effective advertising does not require an ad agency, and on and on. I’m rooting for Google, dammit. In fact, about the only thing I don’t admire about them is their hiring practice, which is to pretty much go with IQ first — maybe I’m just sensitive, but I think that only people with high IQs know their IQs because they’re told at some point and no one has ever told me my IQ — and look at another company that put IQ first for years: Microsoft. And I ask, how well are they doing? Sure, tons of money, but reviled and completely lacking in new ideas. Back to Google... so, given that I admire the company and hate Facebook, I wanted Google+ to be great. Or, at least, good enough. It’s not. It will fail, I think, and the world will be a poorer place for it. And that sucks.

• The ghost of Tower Records. In the flesh.

Catherine, the babies and I are all in Virginia Beach, VA, for the summer and the weather here is similar to what you might find inside the containment of a nuclear reactor during a meltdown, sans the radiation, so yesterday, as we were thinking about where to go for a walk, we opted for a mall. Pretty suburban, I know. After surviving a brief exposure to the elements as we walked from the parking garage to the mall, we opened the doors pushed the stroller into a wash of cool air. Our one errand was to go the Gap and make a return, and after that I got a hankering for an ice cream, so we headed upstairs to the food court. On leaving the elevator, I stopped dead in my tracks, for there before me as a music store, complete with CDs, DVDs and more.

I entered reverently, a little timidly, was it real? It was and soon as was doing what I once did so often up until I was about 37 or 38, whenever Virgin finally closed in SF, I walked the aisles aimlessly. I picked up stuff by Judas Priest, Kiss, Moterhead, the Stones, Iggy, Bon Iver and within minutes I was ready to spend about $100. But I am on a STRICT budget these days, so everything went back into the bins. Ah, the bins, stretching on and on and just begging for my fingers to flip through their contents. Browsing in a real, live record store is so much better than browsing online. No, you can’t listen to anything, but you can get ideas, you’re reminded of bands you once loved, songs you intended to buy but never did, who’s hot and who’s not. I confess, I used to have a love hate relationship with record stores, and still kind of do. My beef was that you could not listen to anything and god forbid you might try to return something because IT SUCKED. Regardless, my experience yesterday left me with no doubt that the world is a poorer place without record stores. I also have to admit, it would be a way bigger thrill to enter a store ad see my upcoming CD on display that it will be to see it on iTunes. Just ain’t the same.

• Talking with an old friend about how to look back on work and feel good about it.

Talking with an old friend about how to look back on work and feel good about it.

On June 23, I drove up to Washington D.C. from Virginia Beach to meet Thom Doyle, an old friend from my years in Munich, for dinner. He was visiting the States from Germany with his wife and two kids and the original plan was for us to all meet for dinner, and then I would stay with a friend and drive back the next day. That plan fell through (friend had strep throat, which I could not risk exposing Avalon and Amelia to), so I booked a room (see photo) in the very hotel we planned to meet at for dinner, the Tabard Inn. After dinner, we all trooped up to my room for a few more drinks and a lot more talk (Thom and I had not seen each other in well over a decade, maybe two). After a bit, Thom’s wife, Ines, and his daughter, Josephine, cruised (Josie had a date!) and Thom, his son, Chris, and I hung out and fell right into the kind of long, rambling, but focused, conversation I so remember from my years in Europe.

In time, the topic turned to work, but not in the sense of what do you do, rather we talked about why. Thom is a heavy, the CEO of a large Swiss insurance company, and I had my day as an executive creative director of a good sized (about 150 people) agency, so we both have experience with jobs that demand a lot and may make you lose sight of what really matters in life. In the years before I lost my career (temporarily, I hope!) as a result of my brain injury, and especially after my neurons got rearranged, I questioned my work deeply. My favorite way of summing up why it was so unrewarding to work in advertising is that ads are sent out into the world to die. They are not meant to last, the are meant to be of the moment and then replaced with new ads of the new moment. Sure, there have been some lasting ad campaigns, but anything that survives longer than a few years is rare. Most are good for a few months. And I hated this aspect of advertising so much that I swore once I got better I would never do it again. Worse, save for music, I could not think of anything else I wanted to do. Nothing. “Why is that?”, asked Thom. I blathered on about whatever and finally, realizing I did not have an answer, I asked Thom about his job. “Why does what you do matter to you? What keeps you interested?” He blathered for awhile, albeit more clearly than me, and tried to explain why there is value to him in his work. I wasn’t convinced, but after much more iintrospection we arrived at a conclusion I feel good about: what matters isn’t the work, it’s trying your goddamned hardest to do your work well.

And as I look forward to getting back into advertising (truly, I do, I hope to restart my career) I won’t be asking what advertising can do for me, I’ll be asking what I can do for it. And my process will be simple: to enthusiastically try my hardest to do great work, to never settle, to push, and to look back on every project regardless of the outcome and know that I did my very best (I did this before, but often with gritted teeth). And if I go into another career? Same thing. Because the only thing worse than failing as a result of not trying hard enough, is succeeding even though you coasted. It robs you (or should rob you) of any sense of satisfaction. And what about my album? Well, regardless of whether it sells or sits unheard, I can say with 1000% certainty that I tried my goddamned hardest to make it great. Every song got all the care I could give it, from the way it was written to who performed it to how it was arranged and recorded. I’m happy, no regrets.

Meanwhile, back in my D.C. room, the clock was getting near midnight and Thom and Chris had to go. We agreed to meet at their hotel for breakfast the next day, which we did, and as I drove back down to Virginia, I was the best kind of tired: spent from thinking and talking about life with people I really like, respect and care about. Which reminds me: that’s something else I will do going forward, work with people I like, respect and care about. Who better to celebrate trying your hardest with?

• A free song from my upcoming album.

Everyone reading this blog -- the multitudes, the millions! -- have put up with a LOT. I have lost track of how may times I’ve posted that the album was just around the corner only to turn said corner and get hit by a truck. Surprise delays have been caused by everything from the not-so-cool (money woes, health issues, a lengthy legal battle with my disability insurance company, technical difficulties, my more-than-occasional idiocy, harsh but persuasive criticisms, second thoughts, third thoughts, fourth thoughts, a hangover here and there, inexperience, etc.) and the cool (marriage, twins, more work than I expected). But today, all that is behind me. All that’s left to do is perform some copyright updates, make a few artwork fixes, and get CD manufacturing and uploading rolling. The album itself is done. Done!

In the coming weeks, I’ll start posting about the individual songs on the album, including the one I’m offering today (which I've posted before, but this is the fully finished and mastered version). I’ll do my very best to make the gory details of the writing and recording and recording process interesting by keeping technical stuff to a minimum and focusing on the people and the songs. Can. Not. Wait. To. Get. Started.

Coming Together (By Falling Apart) by Cerebellum Blues

• Happy Father’s Day, finally!

I was late for my birth (two weeks) and I’ve been late for stuff ever since, so it’s no surprise that this Father’s Day post is past due. But I have the best excuse ever: I’m now a father!

I also confess, I’ve been struggling a little with what to write, there’s just so much to say. But a post I did recently for my Mom’s birthday gave me an idea. In the post for my Mom, I wrote about how she influenced my songwriting. Well, my Dad has been an influence, too, and a big one.

First and foremost, my Dad taught me to be honest and I strive to do this in all my lyrics. Even though I mostly ask other people to sing my stuff, I always want to feel that no matter who’s belting out my sound bites, I’m not cringing and thinking, “thank god he (or she) is singing that instead of me, I would never say that.” I also try my very best to be true to myself and only pour my efforts into songs I believe in.

Second, my Dad inspired me to be a bit of a geek, so I have always been interested in and up on (mostly) the latest recording gear. Back in the 70s I had a Fostex 4-track, in the 80s a Tascam reel-to-reel and in the 90s an ADAT, as well as some of the first Digidesign products. This geekiness has been great because rather than shy away from technical change, I’ve embraced it and wanted more, more, more of it.

Last, but by no means least, my Dad made me an atheist and a pretty strident one at that. He never forced my down this path, but by teaching me to be honest with others and myself, and by sparking an interest in science beyond X-Ray Vision Glasses, he made me a critical thinker who values facts and considers the true stuff to be provable -- but also subject to change without notice. In songwriting, this means no “lord, save me” lyrics, which is nice because I feel that religion has become a cliche in songwriting, so I’m better off not having it available to me (unless I want to poke a little fun at it or challenge it in some way!).

All of these lessons from my Dad have been through conversation, many over wine or on walks, some while grilling, a few in foreign countries. In fact, my most valuable lessons have come from these talks and if I have any wisdom at all it is, in large part, thanks to my Dad.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I look forward to many, many more.

• Happy birthday, Mom, my biggest artistic influence.

In my family, my mom has always been the most artistic one. Some of my earliest memories are of her playing piano. Over the years she has also done sewing, knitting, macrame, pottery and most recently quilting. She's also a gifted interior designer, although she would never admit it! But back to quilting. The picture above is one of her designs and to make it, she first had to think through all of the geometric interplay, then she had to pick and cut the fabrics and then she had to sew it all together to create a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts, impressive though those parts may be. And it is this emphasis on craft that has been passed on to me. When I write and record songs, I'm not after a happy accident or some sort of abstract thing that can be interpreted 100 different ways; rather, I want something that clearly expresses my intent, that has a beginning and end and that has an identifiable structure. Oh, and it should also repeat, but not exactly. I think my mom's quilts have these qualities, and no gift I could give her today could possibly match the one she has given me:  a near obsessive interest in making art and craft work together, because I think the best songs, the kind I strive to write, embody both. And now that my mom is probably thoroughly embarrassed, I will stop!

• Cerebellum Blues, Playlist One, is done and mastered. Finally.

At about 2:30 PM eastern time, I sat down to give a very first listen to the mastered version of my very first album. I hit “play” on “Talking” and... a baby started crying.

At about 3:00 PM eastern time, Amelia batted away her bottle, which is her way of saying, “I’m good!." I got her to burp in short order, and soon I was back in front of my computer and wearing my headphones and immersed in sound. John Cuniberti, who mastered my CD, did a killer job, helped in part, I’m sure, by Jaimeson Durr’s peerless engineering skills, and as I listened I just felt better and better. As far as I’m concerned, all the hard work has paid off and this is the best album I could have made, I am sure of that (which is a major accomplishment for a pain-in-the-ass perfectionist such as me).

In the coming days, I’ll complete the art work and manufacturing processes and should be able to announce the CD within two to three weeks. Please stay tuned. I can’t wait to share this music with as many folks as possible.

Happy Father's Day, Dad!

I wanted to write a proper post about my Dad today, but Catherine and I are madly packing for a three month trip to the East Coast. We leave tomorrow and time is of the essence. But if I know my Dad, he'll understand.

Dad, stay tuned for a real post in a week or two from now!

• The album is in the can. Well, not the “can” but, oh, you know what I mean!

All hail Jaimeson Durr. Last night, just as I was putting down Steven Tyler’s new autobiography and getting ready to snooze, I gave my phone one last email check. I’d been waiting for Jaime to send me the final mixes for the two remaining tracks on my album, but the clock was nearing 11:00 PM and I was starting to think he was going to hold off sending me anything until the next day. But there it was. The Email. I turned to Catherine and said, “I have to go listen to some mixes.” And they were good. Very good. Jaime had done a magnificent job of balancing the various instruments and vocals, and I went to bed knowing that after 4 ½ years, I was finally done with my first album. I would love to write more about the experience, but I will have to do it another day. No time right now. Stay tuned!

• Thinking back on vinyl and musing aloud about the wisdom of making a CD.

I’m 47. I grew up buying some serious poundage of vinyl and CDs. But I never bought cassettes. They were the same price as vinyl and I thought they were shitty—shitty in their essence in that they cost the same as vinyl, yet sounded like shit, held up like shit and and had shit for cover art. I made my own cassettes, thank you, and my source was my vinyl, which I stored in special inner sleeves and carefully cleaned before each playing with my Discwasher and spun on my Harman Kardon turntable fitted with a Shure cartridge. I even sought out the best vinyl, working nights once in a loading dock where I drove a forklift and unloaded tractor trailers in order to save enough for a box set of Beatles albums pressed in Japan on virgin vinyl. Or maybe they were by Mobile Fidelity Labs, I don’t remember (can you believe that?). I say all this to show that I a product of my time. And my time has passed.

Nowadays, vinyl, cassettes and CDs are all relics in various stages of decline. Vinyl is all but gone, so out of date it’s coming back into vogue a bit; cassettes have gone the way of the dinosaurs and will stay that way and deservedly so. And CD’s? They are past their prime and will die out forever just like cassettes in probably the next 5 to 10 years. Digital files rule and will continue to do so, on local drives, in mobile devices and in the cloud.

And yet, as I prepare to release my album, vinyl and CDs are very much in my plans. Why the hell would this be so? Why would I knowingly spend money on dead and dying formats? First and foremost, I think it’s because I can. I mean, when I was a kid, I wanted desperately to make a real, honest-to-god vinyl record but there was no way. I would have had to be signed and no record company in their right mind would have signed me. By the mid-80s, CDs were rapidly pushing vinyl out of record stores, but my odds of making a real CD were no better than my odds of making vinyl had been. Now? Any idiot can make a real CD, including me, and now that I can, I will. I have to get it out of my system. When I croak — centuries from now! — making a physical album is something I damn well want to have done.

The other big reason I want to make a CD and possibly press some vinyl is that to this day music and physical media go together for me. When I listen to music and hold the CD case/art in my hands the experience is just more complete. I’m sure that this is not so for today’s youth, nor should it be. Times change. But I’m not today’s youth. Hell, to a teen, I am old, a grandfather’s age to people born of young parents. And besides, I’m making this album mostly for me. Sure, having CDs on hand to give out to friends and family and the occasional stranger will be nice, but mainly I want to be able to put my own music on a shelf the way I did my old music. I want it to be where I can see it, pick it up, show it off, muse over it.

To misquote Pete, “I want to pick up my CD and play.”

• My album, Father’s Day, Bordeaux, Israel vs. Palestine and more.

About a week ago, my parents visited to help celebrate my being finished with my album. My dad brought an exquisite bottle of wine, a 1995 Margeaux, but just before we opened it we were struck by the raw realization that we were ordering sushi and sushi was no food for a fine French red. We opted to drink the bottle another time, and headed off to Safeway to buy a bit of sake.

A few days later, I made the decision to re-record the piano track on Water Under the Bridge and so our on-time celebration turned out to be a bit pre-mature. This weekend, though, was Father’s Day, so my parents were visiting again and this time there would be Bordeaux-appropriate grub and a truly completed* album. And so we finally had the the wine — toasting both my album and Father’s Day — and it was everything I hope my album will be: in another words, it lived up to expectations.

If you’ve ever had an aged Bordeaux, you know what the wine tasted like. Not that all Bordeaux are the same, not by a long shot, but they share traits: food friendliness, earthiness and balanced fruit (not the jamminess so favored by that alcoholic Robert Parker, who, in my opinion, can no longer appreciate subtle reds as his palette needs more, more, more, more, more). Right up there with the wine was the conversation, as my dad and I debated what to do about Israel (I favor a Palestinian state, he does not), Arab oil (I think their drilling costs will rise rapidly as the oil becomes harder to pull from the ground and as a result, the Saud family, a bunch of worthless fucktards, by the way, will fall), Intel’s 3D chip technology and implications for Arm Holdings, Apple’s potential decision to have Intel manufacture its PA Semi-designed chips, the possibility that Twitter is more valuable in the long run than Facebook, the pathetic state of US public schools and much, much more, maybe even a teensy bit of music.

But enough about fine wine and conversation. What are the expectations I have for my album? Well, they have changed over the years. I confess, back in 2007 when I first started work on it, I was going to consider my album a success if it got finished. Then I lucked into being able to work with a killer engineer, bass player and dummer (Jaimeson Durr, Sam Bevan and Andy Korn, respectively) and my ambitions grew. My ambitions grew further when I was introduced to singer Larkin Gayl, who poured silk on Here Comes the Weather. I finally became convinced I was working on a record that would go viral and sell and maybe even earn back a significant chunk of my recording costs when guitarist Tim Young joined the fray. Now, I have no such expectations, hopes maybe, but not expectations. No, these days, I expect about 50 people download it and I’ll be over the moon if 500 people do so and if a 1000 people click Download, well, then my thoughts might once again turn to making a little money. But not from sales. More on that later, but suffice it to say, there will be a free version of the album.

Stay tuned.

* Water Under the Bridge still needs a final tweak. Argh! 

• The view from my songwriting couch.

A view of Alcatraz from Sam Breach on Vimeo.

Since moving into my current apartment in 2007, I have spent an awful lot of time on the living room couch, most of it with my head back against a cushion, a guitar in my hands and my feet propped up on the coffee table. Often, I do my serious songwriting at night, but there have been plenty of days, too, that I whiled away with chords, rhythms, melodies and words. I can’t say I’ve had many songs begin on this couch, but most have been brought to near finish here or at least far enough along to be put into Pro Tools. I’ll write more about this couch in the future, but my time is so tight these days, I have to keep things brief. In the meantime, please watch the above time-lapse video of the view from my couch, which was shot by Sam Breach. You can see more of her incredible photo work here. Enjoy.

• Is writing songs a decent substitute for keeping a journal?

I’m a bit of pack rat and I hate throwing anything away. But in saving so much I sometimes feel as though I have saved nothing at all, as there is no organization to it. I tell myself that someday I will come back to these keepsakes real and false and reflect on them and for the effort make my life richer but I almost never do. And so the piles grow, but shrink in meaning.

A journal, though, now that would be quite a thing, a document of my life, organized, thought out, meaningful. Except I can’t be bothered to keep a journal. I’ve tried, but I never stick with it. And so there is only stuff, lots of stuff, photos, writings, letters, trinkets, matchbooks, plane tickets, some strewn about, some tucked away, some maybe even ever so slightly showing signs of having been organized in some small way. But there is no time to do anything with it. And I won’t make the time, there is always something more important to do. But a few years ago time got made for me.

I was maybe six to seven months out of my brain injury and I had grown tired of reading magazines and books and noodling aimlessly on my guitar. Plus, I was feeling a little better, a little more up for things that involved movement and thought. And I started noticing my hoard of life detritus more often. There it would be, bursting out of a drawer, clogging the corner of a closet, spilling from a tipped over bag. I began to pick through it all here and there and every little thing held something bigger and brought back a mix of memories, some hazy, some sharp. I was tempted to finally start to cull and organize, but just could not get motivated to make a real effort. Then I got to my old cassettes, not the mixtapes, but the cassettes of all the songs and works in progress I recorded from high school through the late ‘90s. There were cassettes from the days I owned a Fostex 4-track and a Drumulator, cassettes of music I recorded on my Tascam 38, even stuff from my ADAT days. All were saturated with memories.

The Fostex-era tapes brought back visions of high school. My moped rode back into my brain, I could vividly picture Rich Erickson’s Marshall half-stack in Chris Churchill’s garage, I thought back painfully on how I could never master the timing of Warriors, by Thin Lizzy. I also remembered all the treacly songs I wrote and made Toby sing. He did his best, he really did, but to this day I’m amazed he did not write me off as a total loser.

When I heard the tapes from college, I could picture my old cedar closet/recording studio in which I kept my Tascam 38, console and bits of outboard gear. I could vividly remember my friends, my classes, my romantic successes and failures. I could remember the ski trips to all the cheap resorts, which had the best snow, the steepest runs and the worst lodges. In the lyrics I could hear my attempts to sound Important and in the music my interest in the Police, REM and Paul Simon, maybe even a touch of The Violent Femmes and certainly The Beatles.

Then there were the tapes from GIT/MI (Musicians Institute). I’ve been posting about the Kenny Loggins seminar (part 0, part 1, part 2 and part 3) but so much more happened. I remembered the night my roommate got arrested because we were playing our guitars too loud (the cops nabbed him while I was out moving my car). I remembered how a former college roommate had moved in with us for a few months and then moved out to go live on the beach and play Jim Morrison. I remembered Jake the Cat from the alley out back, just a kitten when he clawed on our front door and later full grown, older tom cat living the high life at my parents’ house in Portola Valley, CA, where I grew up. The drive from LA back to Northern California and the tule fog that lay over I-5 so thick I followed the white line on the left as I raced along at 50 mph or so (idiot).

The most recent cassettes held music I recorded on my ADAT around 1997-8. By that time I had returned to the States from my four years in Europe and was into my career as an advertising copywriter and my musical productivity had dropped quite a bit. Instead of anguishing over songs about my departure from Europe and the girl left behind and the loneliness mixed with hope I felt every minute of every day, I was torturing myself to come up with clever headlines and concepts. In fact, I remember this one bench near my apartment in Palo Alto, where I went once with a cigar and a small flask of some sort of dark alcohol, and I lay back on the bench, puffed out cigar smoke up through the trees and sort of imagined myself as David Ogilvy. It was all a distraction, but how could I have known that at the time?

But it’s not just the songs on those old cassettes that recreate the past in my mind. All my songs do, every song I’ve ever written. When I listen to them, old images, words and sounds well up from the bottom of my brain and form an amazingly complete and accurate (I think!) memory. Perhaps not quite like a SQUID can produce, but pretty good. And so, in a way, I do keep a journal, just a slightly unorthodox one.

• I was wrong, the album was not quite done. But is now, I think...

Not too long ago, I posted that the final mixing session for my album had concluded. I was wrong. In listening back to one track in particular, I was not happy and Jaime and I decided that the problem was the digital piano, which just refused to sit right in the mix. To remedy the situation, I called Sam Bevan and had him come down to Hyde Street Studio C and replay the track on Jaime's old school Baldwin upright. I confess, I was amazed by how much richer and more harmonically nuanced the actual piano sounded than the digital sample, which was a VERY high quality sample. Yes, we used a killer Telefunken microphone to pick up the ambiance of Studio C's live room and a Nuemnann closer to the strings, but I'm sure that whoever created the digital version also had great equipment. Hell, they probably had a WAY better piano, as the Baldwin is nothing special (although it does have a mystical vibe). Having already played the song several times on earlier recordings, Sam cranked through his takes and we used the extra time to track organ on the extra super secret bonus track I have planned for a vinyl-only release. To get the proper TONES, we deployed a Nord and it delivered. Cool stuff, Nord. Looks borderline home made, but man, the sound, unreal. We finally wrapped around 11, so I am very tired today (not very rock and roll, I know, but Amelia kept me up long after I got home!). Okay, gotta cut this short, but suffice it to say, the album is, um, closer to being done! Here are some photos from the session.