My brothers -

I have been woodshedding these past few weeks during my redneck riviera sojourn and have made serious headway on Jubilee. My macro approach has been more subtractive than additive, and over the past few weeks I’ve done my best to hack the haggard outlines of an album I previously introduced into something more cohesive. I think I’m moving in the right direction. Evidence:

Musical Structure

When we last visited this, I had a tangled mess of 15-some-odd fragments that were possibilities. I have whittled that down into 7 songs that (currently) will form the core the final album – representations of the elements of these pieces are above. I’m currently debating whether or not to include instrumentals (I have three) to serve as musical bridges from set of songs to set of songs. I feel pretty comfortable not making a standard LP (as standard as a 7-song LP is now – it was actually pretty common in the 60’s) but the instrumentals could break up the flow and enhance the over-arcing musical themes.

Lyrical Structure

Similar to the way I’ve been massaging the music, I’ve been slowly hacking apart lyrical fragments I’ve previously written and constituting them into new sets of pieces for each song. I’ve also been reading a lot of beat poetry looking for stylistic cues. Two old favorites that jumped out are William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg. I love the way Williams piles his images on top of each other, as in this excerpt from Spring Strains:

the blinding and red-edged sun-blur—
creeping energy, concentrated
counterforce—welds sky, buds, trees,
rivets them in one puckering hold!

Ginsberg writes frequently in an ecstatic (and in reality, Benzedrine-fueled) voice, as in this excerpt from his poem Song:

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye–

yes, yes,
that’s what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

I’ve got the lyrical outlines for three songs done. When I have the set of seven fully outlined I’ll complete all of them at once. Hoo-ha!

QUESTIONS

– Instrumentals or no instrumentals?
- Ecstatic poets I should be looking towards?
- Feedback on any of the song sketches in the widget?

Over the last few weeks I’ve laid out the skeleton of how Jubilee is going to be structured. I’ve got a starting batch of songs, a bunch of writing, and some overall thematic arcs. The first song on an album is without doubt the most important. It has to illustrate everything a project is about (both lyrically and musically) in a three minute chunk that excites the audience for more. I’m going to start the assemblage from there.

For both the meta-construction of an album and the sculpting of a song, I try to work both additively and subtractively. I iteratively construct something from a central idea (an additive approach) while at the same time subtractively evaluate the influences for each piece, thinking how I can process them through my voice into something that is new. Some songs are more additive, some are more subtractive – but most meet somewhere inbetween.

Subtractive

The influences for the first piece are spread between lyrical and music. Lyrically, I’ve been interested in how timelessness is achieved with biblical and naturalistic imagery. The song New Madrid (about the New Madrid earthquake in the late 1800’s that was so strong it caused the Mississippi River to flow backwards) is a great example – it uses loaded words like ‘fountain’, ‘bury’, and ‘death’.

This piece is also strongly influenced by the more ecstatic writing of Vladimir Nabokov as well, specifically his short story The Word. It’s vivid, feverish storytelling, and I totally dig it.

Musically, I’m seeing the influences spreading over a few areas. The song is going to be entirely accapella, but there are many different things all feeding into this – here are the big four examples:

Strident vocal techniques – William Elliot Whitmore – Cold and Dead

Strong Melody – Neutral Milk Hotel – King of Carrot Flowers Part 1

Harmony – Brian Wilson – Our Prayer

Renaissance choral music

Additive

I’ve been iterating on the story for the lyrics, and this is what I’ve come up with so far:

A beggar is walking in the woods at dusk near his village and stumbles into a group of angels whose job is to paint the darkness onto the daylight every day at dusk, and erase it every morning at dawn. He sees the angels, and approaches them to ask why they aren’t instead handling the problems of his village – the day to day toil, darkness, and death. An angel comes up to him and whispers a single word into his ear – he is suddenly covered with warmth, and changes into an angel. The man swoops over his village and sees it from the perspective of the angel – the simultaneous pathos and joy – the full wonder of humanity courses through his veins and he screams out the word as he flies through his town. He awakes the next morning in his bed, covered in feathers, and can’t remember the word.

It’s heavily based on the Nabokov story in spirit, but takes his brand of magical realism and pushes it out a little further, integrating it into an allegory (hopefully).

The music is, as mentioned, all acapella. I’ve got some melodic sketches, but nothing I’m really ready to share yet. I’ll work on that for next week.

OPTIONAL AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

• How does something become ‘timeless’ – look at 2001 – it holds up better today than sci-fi films made in the 80’s. Why is that?
• Additional ideas for the story. I’m trying to wrap this into a relatively tight allegory – any ideas for further research or edits much appreciated.

A while back on my Echo Bloom blog Scratch, I laid out how I was planning on working on Jubilee. It’s pretty relevant now, so I’m going to republish the original in its entirety before talking about how I’m currently applying the method.

Creative Project Management – Seeing the forest for the trees

You can learn a lot about project organization by examining how different algorithms sort numbers. Take a look at this:

As you can see, there are several different ways for computers to sort numbers. While they all end up getting the correct result, there are faster (i.e. better) implementations. Similarly, there are different ways of organizing and executing projects. A project could be executed like an insertion sort, with each new task addressed only in reference to tasks that have already been finished. The problem with this type of execution is seen at about 2:30 in the video- even after the algorithm has chunked through a substantial amount of the data, you don’t have a very good picture of what the final result will look like. For a project, this is a disaster – you can’t see the forest for the trees.

This is because planning and execution have to exist in concert, informing each other through a series of iterative sweeps. Honestly – how many projects have you completed that were done in the exact order that they were planned? This doesn’t mean planning is irrelevant, it just means it has to be fluid. Look instead at the shell sort – the beauty of this algorithm is that it does a series of passes, allowing the algorithm to operate (execute) on a set of data that is being continuously optimized (planned). As a project management technique, this method allows the execution of tasks to inform the way the overall plan evolves.

Great. What does this mean for a creative project? There’s a certain hierarchy of things to consider when making an album:

I. Concept
II. Themes
III. Characters
IV. Songs
V. Verses
VI. Words

Or – in an album, the main concept is represented by a set of themes which are portrayed by characters in songs composed of verses that are made up of words. Iteratively sweeping through these elements allows you to gradually zero in on the final result while building a sense of internal trust in your work. This trust enables you to focus on your most brilliant ideas, instead of worrying about how each idea works relative to the overall structure. Songs become collages – structures becomes flexible (which suits the abstract lyrical focus of Jubilee). In addition to being a logical way to work, it also is extremely practical (for me). The way my life is structured, I can’t hole up Walden-style and crank out a masterpiece in a few months – and that’s OK. This system allows me to work when I have the time.

[Note: Today's post to shortly follow]

I’m in Montana this week exploring the wilds of Glacier National Park, so I’m hoping this posts automagically appears on Wednesday morning. It’s related to my post from last week about my new full length project, and some of the source material. Last week I showed some really rough audio sketches I’d done for some of the tracks – now I want to share some of the writing that will (hopefully) form the base of the new project. The writing is mostly automatic, and tonally and thematically started to gradually approach what I’m looking for for the next project.

I hacked together a little widget that will allow you to check the stuff out. The widget still has some bugs but should do the job of presenting the information.

Back from the great beyond after our nation’s birthday – until then.

“The most important thing in life is style. That is the style of one’s existence the characteristic mode of one’s actions is basically ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing then style is doubly definitive because style describes the doing. The point is this happiness is a learned condition. And since it is learned and self generating it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation. This throws a very ironic light on content. And underscores the primacy of style. It is content or rather the consciousness of content that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us to move us it is style that makes us care.”
— Tom Robbins (Another Roadside Attraction)

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we (all of us) function solely through stereotypes. Bear with me:

Imagine driving in a car. The vast majority of us don’t have any real idea how a combustion engine works, or the inner mechanisms triggered when you turn the steering wheel. Fortunately, we don’t have to – we press the gas pedal and the car moves forward. It’s (most of the time) a wonderfully functional black box. Like a car, the myriad moving parts of any ‘thing’ (your endocrine system, photosynthesis, Yanni – anything) are complex and co-dependent. We grasp these things by stereotyping them – dumbing them down into a form we can comprehend. It’s a survival mechanism that allows our brains to process the least possible amount of information to get the most relevant output. It’s pretty cool (except, of course, when dickheads use it to discriminate).

Like it or not, this is particularly relevant to artists. Your audience defines, brands, and remembers you based on the strength of your style. The Beach Boys have surf rock – Mark Rothko has color fields – Wes Anderson has his nouveau formalism. Their style is their calling card, and their audience immediately identify their work before their name is attached to it.

I’m a fan of music – all kinds. From Radiohead to Messiaen to Garth Brooks (seriously – I put on ‘Ropin’ The Wind‘ the other day and was mildly horrified that I knew every. damn. word.). My musical output over the past few years has reflected my taste – my last record had folk, metal, reggae, and country. And while I think I’ve developed a good lyrical voice, I clearly haven’t yet settled on a single musical medium to work within. It’s something that I think would improve the cohesion of my longer format work, and make my material easier to market. So, as my next full length is starting to take shape, it’s something I want to address now.

Play to your strengths

I could write an entire metal record. It would be fun – I’d bite the heads off of some doves and pop some fake blood packets. But it would only be a genre study – I would be on the outside, looking in. I’ve got to start with what I’m good at and work from there. So – off of my two previous LPs, here’s a collection of what I think my best, and most musically consistent tracks are – kind of a ‘best of Echo Bloom – the formative years’.

They have a lot in common – all are acoustic, two are arranged in two part harmony with harmonica, and all have a similar lyrical feel (more impressionistic, and painterly). The musical style suits both my voice and my guitar skills. The lyrical style is consistent with something I admire about my favorite songs. They manage to be specific, yet still provide a space for the audience to personalize the experience.

Previously I’ve worked in more of an additive fashion, slowly building songs over a period of several months. One thing I thought might give this project a more consistent feel was to iterate off a centralized corpus – the thinking being that all further iterations will retain an imprint of the initial influence, giving giving the final work a shared cohesion (maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t). I’ve been doing automatic writing and recording exercises off and on for about 6 months – I’ll share with you the top music fragments this week and then next week when I’m off in the wilds of Montana, hopefully my writing fragments will automagically appear Wednesday morning.

SO. Here are the rough demos that have risen to the top (seriously – these are like pre-demo cocktail napkin doodles). These pieces all seem to fit together melodically, and I’m pretty confident they will sit together in a similar harmonic landscape.

Thoughts about the process or the content welcome!