Let me start this newsletter by stating the obvious: I’m not a singer and never will be. I’m sure with dedicated practice, like the kind I used to do in high school when I was an aspiring concert pianist and practiced 4-8 hours each day, I could probably become good enough that it would take you a while to realize how limited my range was and how incredibly low my ceiling, but I don’t have the motivation or the desire to be a singer songwriter. The next great mixed-race American writer, sure. But singer songwriter, nah. I’ll always be a writer first and then musician, composer, songwriter, & MC second, even if these genres spill over into each other and interanimate each other in interesting and important ways. And I’m cool with that. But that’s also where this LP project is an outlier for me.
You know, those artistic objects you created a long time that once seemed like they might turn into something big but that never amounted to anything.
It all started with R, one of my close friends and homies from Chicago who, like me, moved to the Golden State a million years ago. He came down to LA to treat me and LB to Sigur Rós tickets. I didn’t need the bribe, but damn that concert was fire. Anyway, after we’d returned home from the Shrine, I ended up playing R a couple old tracks I’d written back in 2008-2009 on GarageBand when I’d started my debut album, Space Age, in Buenos Aires before writing and recording new tracks later in SF, LA, & Chicago. Eventually, I released my LP on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, et al. But the songs I’d played for him were basically my B-list songs for Space Age. You know, those artistic objects you created a long time that once seemed like they might turn into something big but that never amounted to anything.
But what if all that old draft needs are simply the skills, the craft, the perspective, & the technical expertise you didn’t have when you wrote it but that you get ten or twenty years later?
I’m the kind of artist who never gets rid of anything, even the shittiest and most hopeless short story draft or indie music track because of my hope that someday, I might be able to rehab it, rewreite it, & reconstruct it until it becomes correct. Sometimes, you just need to become a better artist first before you know how to revise an old draft that felt irredeemable at the time. Sometimes, an old draft really is irredeemable. But if you destroy all of your shitty drafts, you’ll never know which ones might become something and tbh, my counterfactual brain would never stop spinning. Besides, it’s such a waste of energy to spend so much time creating something only to realize it’s not going anywhere. But what if all that old draft needs are simply the skills, the craft, the perspective, & the technical expertise you didn’t have when you wrote it but that you get ten or twenty years later? What if future-you would know how to save that draft even if past-you didn’t? That’s my thinking anyway. But back to my LP.
I literally recorded these two tracks using the internal mic of my Mac Book Pro set the dining room table of our Palermo Viejo apartment during the madrugada while LB (and the rest of the city) slept, so remastering them has been hella painful. Back then, I didn’t think either song could be fixed and I knew my vocal skills weren’t shit either, which is why I had to autotune the fuck out of my vocal tracks, because I’m not delusional about my skill set. But R, my friend and confidant, really liked both songs a lot (and dude is a hardcore musician and audiophile, so his praise means a lot to me). As we talked, I wondered if I just needed to change the beats, add some effects, remaster the vocal tracks using an updated GarageBand, remove the strings in the chorus, & maybe add a little magic. I wondered, just for a brief second, if these songs might actually be something with the artist I’d become but wasn’t back in the day. There was only one way to find out . . .
So now I’m working on All the Places We Were Broken & All the Places Where the Light Shined Through, my post-rock/folk LP that is truly a labor of love. Emphasis on the labor part. It looks like there’s going to be three vocal tracks in total (which is three too many if you ask me), one of which accidentally became a country song and has really strong Lady Antebellum energy. You know that song: “It’s a quarter after one/I’m all alone/& I need you now.” That song. There are also a few instrumental pieces for piano or piano and strings that have strong Balmorhea energy if you’re into them. I def am. And there are at least two songs that have strong indie songwriter vibes (e.g., old The National & Cigarettes After Sex).
I guess the lesson to take from all of this is that even if I didn’t love something that I’ve created—artistically speaking—sometimes my audience does. And that’s legit exciting to discover that my blind spots can go both ways instead of only applying to my own flaws.
As a perk to paid MIXTAPE subscribers, here is “My Theory of the World & of Every Broken Human is That We Are Just Crates of Kintsugi” or “Theory” for short that I recently remastered after fourteen years! It’s not my fave song on the EP but I do think it has its moments. Listen and tell me know what you think, fam!
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