The (Not So) Final Countdown
And now what?
When Anthony Burgess was told he only had one year to live he went on a writing binge, producing some of his classics in the following years: A Clockwork Orange, The Wanting Seed, Inside Mr. Enderby, and The Doctor Is Sick among them. Only he didn’t die. He wrote for another 30 years. Everything in Burgess’s biography has to be taken with a grain of salt because his own accounts are inconsistent with each other as well as with actual record, so it’s tough to say if this diagnosis actually came down to him or not, but it’s undeniable that the books were written.
In a weird way, when my son was born in 2018, I felt a similar drive to get cracking on my artwork. In our TW roundtable discussion about parenting and art practice, I brought up something someone at a wedding told me: “When you become a parent, it makes you become a more honest version of yourself because you get rid of all the things that you don't really care about and end up narrowing your life down to only the necessities.” When applied to my artwork, this occurred to me as “What are the projects that you would regret not having released if you suddenly died for some reason?”
In a way, it wasn’t even a question, because I already knew: Weird Music and White Zinfandel. I’d started both projects in 2009, and they were the two with the strongest inspiration behind them. I’d also put the most work into both. Weird Music had consumed the most time of any project I’d ever done, and I’d been chipping away at it throughout the ten years leading up to my son’s birth. White Zinfandel, on the other hand, would come out in bursts, one song at a time, worked on intensely for a few weeks or months and then set aside until a new song started to surface.
Evaluating things in 2018, the obvious move seemed to be to push on Weird Music to get it across the finish line, considering the amount of work that had already been expended. It really felt like if I didn’t at least get to the end and create a record of it, it’d feel like a huge failure and waste of my time.
Another factor going into this push was the fact that my band Grandchildren was starting to slow down with playing and traveling, partially due to the fact that I was limited in how long I could be out on tour with a new child in the mix. The bigger reason, though, was that Aleks and Shari were planning to get married in 2019 and take a break to have a kid themselves, so we were also looking at a planned hiatus of at least a year. I didn’t know it then, but that hiatus would turn into a permanent end to the band.
The planned hiatus was actually really exciting to me because I had never had the chance before to focus all of my creative energy on my solo projects. For the previous 20 years, my bands had always been the first priority, and I made my own music on the side. Now with the big hole in my schedule where band practice and touring usually were, maybe I could finally get to the point of playing the entire piece of Weird Music all the way through. By the time it became obvious that we weren’t going to continue as a band anymore, I had become so steeped in my projects and writing music to poetry for Talking Writing that I realized I wouldn’t have wanted to go back to it anyway. Despite having a smaller audience, I was finding much more satisfaction in doing my own music and being a free agent.
The COVID lockdown was another strange piece to the puzzle. For a while I had thought that if I could just have a full year with no traveling and distractions, maybe I could really make a dent in this huge project. Of course, my wish was never for that to be caused by a large-scale pandemic, but being forced to stay home for a year did give me that opportunity to focus on recording. I finished the album during the first year, and then going into the second year, I stalled out while working on the text edit and had to take my own hiatus.
While I was in that down time, I did The Sound of Thinking as a pressure-release. Trying to get rebooted to ramp up for an actual Weird Music release, I happened to listen to an episode of the Super Duty Tough Work podcast titled “Why You Should Never Sit on Good Material.” This episode really lit the fire under my ass to get Weird Music out into the world. The album was done and just sitting there, after all.
Once the album was out and I had gone out to play some shows of the material, I came home and realized, “Okay, now it’s time to get cracking on getting White Zinfandel out to the public.” As I was preparing the material, we found out that my wife was pregnant with our second child, and it felt like a timer had started. Now the goal was: get this fucking album done before this child is here or it’s never going to happen. All of a sudden I’m back in the Anthony Burgess mode of trying to beat the clock before time stops. I barely made it, releasing the album on 11/11/2024, just four days before our daughter Rosalie was born.
Heading into the birth, I was operating more or less optimally. I had started The Artist’s Way and was getting my morning pages in everyday, exercising then working on a creative project during the day, walking then writing a music loop at night, practicing and performing regularly. The first week after the birth, I couldn’t even manage to fit exercise into the equation. Daily exercise is pretty much my minimum for being able to stay sane. Without it I start to get edgy and restless.
The second week I resumed exercising, and soon after started writing a loop on some nights. I got a few morning pages in on some days, but I have not been keeping up with those lately.
Now I’m in a weird spot of wanting to continue working on projects but having very little time and energy (I wonder why?). I’m only just getting back to a sense of normalcy where it even feels feasible to work on anything beyond my day-to-day and necessary work obligations. Also, after six years of being super focused on two big goals, now I have to realign and figure out what’s next. As per usual, I have a bunch of things that I can do, but I need to actually start down one of the paths—which also means that I need to make the time to sit down to it instead of doing any number of other things that I should be doing.
Here’s a partial list of creative projects that I could dive into, with ball park levels of intensity, i.e. immersion and difficulty:
Weird Music movie (very intense) - I still intend to film a full 50-min video of Weird Music in the same style as “Digital Losses.” I have been procrastinating because of the imagined level of stress and insanity that this could cause. As a funny example of what plays in my head when I think of doing this project, I offer a real scene from my life shortly after completing “Digital Losses.” I was on a Zoom call with friends just talking about the project. I was explaining how I was in the middle of recording the audio version of it, and everyone was nodding their heads. And then I started saying that I want to make a full 50-min version of the whole piece in the same style as the video they just watched, and everyone’s nods turned to shakes.
Weird Music book (pretty intense) - This is in rough draft form here on Substack, but I’d like to do some final editing/writing and lay this out, maybe creating a couple copies by hand just to see it.
Rosé (very intense) - The next installment in my box of wine, a follow-up to White Zinfandel written entirely on piano and then overdubbed with horns, electronics, and such. I haven’t even started to work on this yet.
902win Peaks: Episode One (not intense) - I was supposed to play a goth night when I did my last run of out-of-town shows and came up with an alternate set mixing together Twin Peaks and 90210. Unfortunately, the goth night got cancelled, but I did finish putting together the set and recorded a copy so that I could remember it later. I started this idea like 15 years ago, editing together scenes from each show, but the final result at the time was kind of boring and difficult to sit through. The newer version has performed music over it and uses two TVs, sometimes running background/silent footage of one show while the other show plays something with dialogue. Overall I find it really entertaining in its new form. It seems even more appropriate given the recent passing of David Lynch. While I was working on it, I used a scene where Dylan gives Brenda a necklace heart that breaks in half, the same as the one in Twin Peaks. The passings of Luke Perry and Shannon Doherty made that scene especially charged. After working out the set, I decided to go through the entire franchise of Twin Peaks and also read Catching the Big Fish while going down that rabbit hole. Shortly after finishing, I heard about Lynch’s passing. Now, rewatching the rough draft combo 902win Peaks, the whole thing feels charged. My intentions are towards honoring these two pieces.
Perfect Recognition (pretty intense) - This wouldn’t be a get-this-thing-across-the-finish-line type of thing, more of a push on an ongoing project. I’m still collecting interviews for this, but I could definitely use a push towards securing interviewees and posting video clips for several of the interviews that I’ve already collected. My short term goal is to post these clips, update my website with links to them, and create a Substack post with all the clips so far for this project. I also have a stack of books aimed at this subject that I could be reading.
Producer album (mildly intense) - I’ve had an idea for a little while of sending loops to vocalists that I know and seeing if I could put together a classic-style producer album in the vein of Handsome Boy Modeling School. Not that it would sound anything like that; it would just sound like my music with vocalists, similar to the Lavender and Apples stuff that I did with Zack Sternwalker.
Remodel my music space (very intense) - I told myself that I would rework my music space after White Zinfandel was out, but getting started on it has not happened at all. I’m not planning anything too crazy, but a good clean and haul out as well as some shelving for organization is much needed. Along these lines I also want to cannibalize and recombine some of the broken equipment that I have to make a live set up that is easier to manage.
I also have shows starting to pop up as early at 2/22, so I have to start practicing and tweaking my sets again. So, you know, that’s a lot of shit. If I’m super on top of things, then I could do the 902win Peaks EP in February as part of the RPM Challenge, then get to work on the WM movie and then the WM book, but the likelihood that I can move that quickly is pretty low. Right now I’m just taking it as it feels comfortable, waiting to feel a pull from one of these things that becomes too difficult to ignore.