It’s been a minute since I’ve written here, but it’s because I’ve been busy doing something, as opposed to Biz Markie’s “Busy Doing Nuthin’.” I’ve fully descended into the rabbit hole of recording my next album, and I’d rather be doing that than anything else.
I began White Zinfandel sometime around 2009, and it started with a bang. I’ve mentioned many times that I’ve been informally researching intense aesthetic experiences, and I’ve collected several interviews on the subject. Coming up with the first couple bars of White Zinfandel was one of my experiences that instigated that path of investigation.
At my previous house where I lived with five friends, I was passing by the piano in our dining room when I felt like it was just kind of calling to me. On a total whim, I sat down and started playing. In the first and only instance of automatic composing that I’ve ever experienced, the first several bars just spun out and I took a deep breath that seemed to fill my chest with a huge bubble of relief while the top of my head loosened with what felt like an amazing rush of dopamine. I kept playing for a little bit with the lingering euphoric feeling, and eventually it dissipated to where I was just sitting there wondering what had happened.
Over the course of the next few days, I wrote the rest of the piece on piano, recorded it, and then overdubbed trumpets and keyboard on top. There was a point when I was struggling to get a good take of something (I think piano) and I sat for a few minutes just staring at the 16-track recorder. Frustrated, I thought to myself, “What the hell am I even doing? Is anyone going to like this? Is it worth it to go down this path?”
This music was a serious departure from what I had been doing both in my bands and as a solo artist. While I tried to figure out what I was doing, where this was coming from and where it was going, I started to think that maybe I was channeling both my grandfathers. My maternal grandfather was a trumpet player, and the trumpet that I still play was an heirloom from him. My paternal grandfather was a piano player, his own father having played piano for silent movies.
My rational mind kicked in to say that that was ridiculous, but in the 15 or so years since this incident, I’ve become increasingly confused about where I stand with rationalism.
For about ten years after writing this first song I intermittently wrote and recorded four more songs in this stylistic vein before setting the project aside to focus entirely on getting Weird Music across the finish line. At the end of 2023, having released the WM audio and played shows with the material, I moved onto writing the rest of White Zinfandel. First I dug out the files for the first five songs and relearned them all on solo piano, and then I wrote four more songs to bring the project to a close. After practicing all the songs as a single piece for several months, I decided to set up the recording gear and get it on “tape.”
Each time I recorded an isolated track in the past it was incredibly difficult and exhausting. Trumpet had been my main instrument in high school, but I had only played occasionally since then, and I was super out of shape. I was also just teaching myself to play clarinet by trying to record parts with it, and even the most simple lines took days to get right.
Now my playing and my recording techniques have improved greatly, so I decided to start from scratch, rerecording the original five songs and recording the recent four songs in one go. After getting three songs down the first day I set up the piano to record, I set it up each subsequent free day and got all the piano parts down in three days. The trumpet parts for the first track were so easy that I decided to double them all up with clarinets.
Just for grins, here is the old recording posted to SoundCloud, followed by the new recording, unmixed and unmastered:
I’m currently switching over to live practice because I have shows coming up, but I’m super psyched to be hear this album coming together. I’m about halfway through the horn recording, and my goal is to have it fully recorded by the time I go out at the end of July. While I’ve been falling into this rabbit hole and also booking shows, it seemed necessary to take a break from social media and Substack.
And so there you have it. That’s where I’ve been. What have you been up to?