GROWING PAINS

I first started working on my current album project in earnest in 2022. As I’ve mentioned in past entries to this journal, I’d more or less intended to do it since the late 1990s, but “regular life” rightly got slotted in first.

I had a lot of prep to do before fully engaging in the work, though I had no idea how much and how varied that would be. I still don’t know how much more lies ahead. I do know that I’ll likely finish the actual album by autumn of this year, but the spectre of “contemporary marketing” still looms.

As I write this, I’m 66 years old. I told myself last year that I needed to finish the project while I was 65 years old and while it was still 2023 (my birthday is in November: I love dark chocolate, I wear size 10 shoes and I read a lot of history, in case you need gift ideas).

Why did I need to meet these deadlines? Because it would’ve been the 30th anniversary of my last studio release (the aforementioned In Thrall) and somehow, I thought it would be meaningful to release my next album as a 65-year-old person. 65 is one of those “milestone” years, we’re told.

Throughout my life, I have been trained to think that people in their 60’s don’t do things like make new albums of music. They make new albums of photos of their grandchildren.

“WRONG!” you shout: The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr are in their 80’s and still touring. Leonard Cohen was touring in his 80’s. Aretha Franklin was still working in her 70’s and Dolly Parton is currently in her 70’s. Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan and Diana Ross are all in their 80’s and still active. And let’s not forget Willie Nelson who literally just toured his 90th birthday.

Yes, yes, I know.

A comprehensive list would also be much longer than the folks I mentioned. Please feel free to leave me a comment about the myriad senior artists I didn’t mention who long ago qualified for Social Security.

One obvious difference is that the people I cite are household names, whereas I am certainly not, plus they never stopped making music and I did.

So, what was my hurry? Except for the ticking clock that becomes louder at this point in one’s life, there was no hurry. Rush to finish the first music I’ve released in three decades just to beat a random birthday?

No, the goal is to make the best music that I can make at this point in history. Period. Otherwise, I could just upload my voice memos to Bandcamp and be done.

GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNIN’, HEAD ON DOWN THE BIKE LANE

In early 2020 when Covid shrieked into North America, I was somewhat overweight. I’ve spent plenty of my adult life being reasonably fit, but also a generous amount of it being reckless and unfit.

I was working out at a gym regularly and had been eating a plant-based diet for a few years already. One of the staples of my daily nosh was seitan, of which I proudly baked a two-pound loaf each Sunday and ate in sandwiches for lunch throughout the week. No one but me- and I mean no one– liked my seitan, so I had it all to myself.

Each day I ate a huge seitan sandwich with vegan bread and a lot of vegan corn chips. I love corn chips. As an ex-smoker, I think corn chips are the cigarettes of the snack food world.

In effect, I was eating at least a pound of gluten every day. It’s vegan, I told myself, it’s ok.

I went to the gym for an hour and a half about five days a week. I thought I was in decent shape, and maybe I was, but something nagged at me. Maybe my pant size. I was a 36 waist and seemed to be heading north. I’m only 5’7″.

Covid made me wary of breathing hard around other sweaty hard-breathing humans, so I quit the gym. Retrieving my neglected bike from the basement, I found a great work-from-home bike repair guy who tuned it up, and I took off through our neighborhood. I was determined to conquer every hill in the area.

After two agonizing weeks of daily near-coronaries, I was gliding along the suburban streets like a sylph. I must mention that I do not live in a mountainous area, so I’m talking about the piedmont. There are hills, but the average mountain biker will be disgusted by my pride here.

So be it. I rode and rode, and I still ride and ride. It’s where I think, plan, write, and learn French from podcasts. (Bisous à Coffee Break Academy, je’taime !)

About this same time, I decided to con myself into enjoying raw vegetables. This had baggage. Back when Guadalcanal Diary was only playing club tours, we would invariably show up at a venue to discover a sad plastic platter of wilted veggies accompanied by a room temperature cup of ranch dressing in the dressing room. At one point, we actually took one of these tragic veggie trays out to the parking lot and ran over it with our van, videotaping the event.

Embracing raw vegetables and hummus (or Bitchin’ Sauce, when you can find it) seemed extreme to me and so I dug in.

It took. No more gluten lunches.

The result of all this is that by 2022, I had lost something like 60 pounds, which amazed me. People I hadn’t seen in a while asked me ominously if I was “sick”.

Shedding the bulk wasn’t really my intention, but it happened, and I embrace it. In no way is this meant as a directive for anyone to change lifestyles, nor a criticism of anyone who doesn’t. I’m not your life coach and I don’t want to be. I feel good, I’m healthy, and that’s enough for me.

DAW VS DAW

Feeling all trim and fit, I started to seriously turn my attention to recording.

Before I moved back to civilization, I had built a nifty project studio in an old tack barn behind the house. I recorded demos there for my Geffen Records projects, and I recorded the music for some of the films I’ve scored there as well.

I was a big MIDI fan early on. It was like a gift from above for arranging. I still use MIDI all the time, if only to try out ideas.

Back then, I went through all the digital audio software releases (DAWs) as they appeared. Performer/Digital Performer, Vision, Sound Tools/Pro Tools, Cubase, ACID Pro, Cakewalk: I was using some of these when they were on 3.5 floppy disks. I had Photoshop 1.0 on floppies too, by the way.

Although I’ve worked plenty with Windows and Unix, I‘ve always favored Apple products. My first music workstation was a used Mac Plus, then I graduated to a IIsi. Color monitor! Flying toasters!

In 2022, I had paid only peripheral attention to the changes in home studio recording, as the work I do in my boutique web development business doesn’t overlap with that world much.

Apple had bought up Logic Pro years before and had included a nice junior version of it called GarageBand for free with their OS. Very cool move.

I had used GarageBand for fun, and when I started making the Dazzle Dudes podcast in 2019, I used it for all the songs which the series’ eponymous band played.

I figured it was time to ramp up, so I started shopping. I already had Pro Tools and it’s a world class standard which one expects to see in a good studio. For me, though, Pro Tools was like Microsoft Word, which has so many features that I will never ever need to create a document that using it makes me anxious.

Pro Tools always seemed to present a new learning curve with each update, and I really just wanted to write my songs and record them, not open a pro studio.

Logic Pro seemed to be the answer, although I tend to travel a bit and I like to work remotely from wherever I happen to be. For example, I recorded a couple of Dazzle Dudes episodes from Sweden, and some from LA, using GarageBand and Adobe Audition.

Making a record, though, required more… fidelity.

I travel with an iPad for which there was no Logic version until 2023, and an older Macbook which groans under the processing needs of Logic. Getting reliable work done on a plane was tough.

Logic Pro is also not cross-platform at this point in history, and if Apple continues to make non-user-upgradeable computers- which they will- that’s irritating.

All that said, I embraced Logic Pro and still do. It does everything I need, but elegantly and it’s skewed a bit more toward the “creator” rather than the audio professional.

What I did not know was that Logic is routinely sneered at by some pros as being a sort of toy. It isn’t, but that means nothing to people with a point they want to pound into you.

To me, it’s reminiscent of the endless and ancient “PC vs Mac” debate, which inspired the amusing Apple “Get A Mac” ad campaign from the 2000s.

With modern culture as polarized as it has become, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a TikTok video of a Logic Pro user punching a Pro Tools user in a subway or YouTube videos with Pro Tools fans enthusiastically claiming that Logic Pro aficionados eat cats on the full moon.

I use Logic Pro happily. It works well for me, and my esteemed colleague Mark Williams just dutifully takes the audio tracks I send him and plops them into Cubase, his cult-DAW of choice, and off he goes a-mixing.

For now, I’m in the Logic Pro cult. I do not eat cats. Even on a full moon.

NEXT TIME: G.A.S