Purple, Green, Turquoise: Endless Inventory

In terms of production, I focused more on the vocals and vocal arrangement on Emotional Labour than I have in the past. I achieved this by being quicker to lock in changes and mix decisions on the instruments. I’ve found with my songs that the drums and vocals end up being by far the loudest elements, so I’ve decided more and more not to worry about small differences in sound for melodic instruments. 

Instrument-wise, the drums are from the 808 patch on the Session Drummer 3 VST in Cakewalk. The bass is made out of a sampled and pitched “long” 808 kick from the same kit. So I made the basslines in the DAW by hand, moving waveforms around and using pitch-shifting plugins to make them the notes I wanted. Functionally, the bass and drums are looped throughout, with some small deviations. Occasionally I’d have a “busy” and “less busy” bassline and switch between them in verse and chorus. Other times I’d also have the drums add a second shorter kick sound. But overall, the drum and bass loops are very static. Any auxiliary percussion is recorded from gear I own, or downloaded from Freesound.org .wav files. 

The rest of the instruments were the standard ones I’ve used on several previous albums: the Yamaha trombone and Fender strat electric guitar, both primarily running through Guitar Rig for effects, and my great-grandmother’s early 20th century (Sears catalog) violin. I actually finally gave up on this violin shortly after finishing the instrumental recording for the album in 2019. It had been broken 5 years earlier at a festival in Atlin, BC - the neck, previously repaired, had snapped along with the binding holding the top part of the body together - and the scond repair job that I’d had done was failing. So I bought a new (even older) violin, which I’ve played since and which I’ll use on my next album. It’s a violin made in Scotland in 1886 by Frank DeVoney, who was originally a tailor, was an early proponent of plate tuning systems in violin making, and also made his own prosthetic limb. Anyway, I think it sounds nice. I also added some keyboard sounds like synth and organ bass to a few of the songs, and after the vocals were recorded I overdubbed some theremin parts using my Moog Theremini.

The main challenge on vocals was how and when to use autotune, since this was something I’d identified I wanted to try. I used the Waves Tune Real-Time plugin, and think I found a way to use the effect that wasn’t too heavy-handed, but that fit the genre. I defaulted to double- or triple-tracking most of the main vocals, and wound up turning those doubles down as I went on mixing (in the verses especially). I definitely didn’t use as many “answering” vocals as artists like Future do (he has them follow pretty much every line), but I did it a bit. I also pitched my vocals a bit on certain songs, adding a low octave or just pitching them down a semitone or two to mess with the timbre of them. For “Uncross Your Arms,” I did this with the auto-tuned vocals, singing them a third up, and then pitching them down into key. Overall, I didn’t have a ton of harmonized vocals on these songs, the exception being “Friendzone.” I didn’t really obsess over vocal processing either. I focused on listening at low volume when comping and fixing timing issues, then slapping presets on to see which helped them cut through the mix in a good way, then making sure they didn’t sound too harsh.

I printed the individual instruments to stems once I got a working mix so I could remove the temptation to continue to tinker with things. For vocals, this meant that I reduced the parts to stereo channels for leads, doubles, and harmonies. I mostly didn’t regret cutting myself off from further changes, although I eventually wished I’d separated the snare from the hats and percussion. There were a few vocal parts where I had timing issues that were difficult to resolve to my liking. “Smiles are Free” was one, in the verses. I slowly chipped away at them while finalizing the rest of the mix. 

Similar to my violin, this project saw the last use of my trusty M-Audio FastTrack 8R interface, whose drivers were years and years out of date and which had developed multiple noisy channels. I’ve used that interface on just about all the recordings I’ve done, but since I don’t record live drums anymore (and having seen how well Laura Smith worked with an Apogee Duet) I decided I only need a couple channels that I can trust to sound good. So I got an Apollo Twin USB, which came in time to be used for mastering this album.

As previously, I mixed on my Adam F5 monitors and my Sony MDR-7509HD headphones, which I thought were breaking but turned out just needed their screws tightened. Pretty good for 10+ year old headphones. When testing the mixes and making revisions, I also listened on cheap earbuds and in the car, my only real opportunity to judge the bass. In terms of loudness, I did go fairly loud on these songs since that’s what the comparable tracks I listened to seemed to do. But, looking at the waveforms, they’re not completely smashed. Overall, sound-wise, I worry that the mids are too busy with instrumentation to give proper space and prominence to the vocals. And I hope that the bass levels aren’t too all over the place, given that I didn’t test it with a proper subwoofer and the Sony headphones don’t have a ton of bass. My goal is for it to sound okay enough for people to listen to the songs for the content, so I think I achieved that.

I decided I wanted to do low-effort videos for all of the songs on Emotional Labour, since my ambitions to film and cut together my own footage for the songs on Extinct! fizzled and I didn’t end up doing them all. So I copied my video format from the MB-LP album, tinting archival footage with specific colours and overlaying them with videos of my mouth singing the songs. This time I made three mouths, one large one at the bottom and two smaller ones on top, to form a disturbing “mouth-face.” All of the footage I used is from Archive.org, most from the Prelinger Archive, and all in the public domain. 

One video got me in trouble with YouTube: the “High T” video is footage from a shrill 1960s anti-pornography film called “Perversion for Profit.” The problem, as YouTube content bots/moderators noticed, is that the film contains a lot of (censored) pornography, meant to shock the viewer. I appealed the content ban, saying that “the song decries the cultural propagation of sexism and toxic masculinity. Including the video satirically comments on the view that pornography is to blame, instead of puritanical morality crusaders like the film’s presenter.” A funny argument to make to a censor, but the challenge was withdrawn. 

I really didn’t think too much about the video content, I was just looking for something that was somewhat visually interesting that “felt right” to juxtapose with the song, out of the limited number of videos I watched and downloaded. Although it took a very long time to finish and release, I’m happy with the album as it turned out and feel ready to work on my next collection of songs while I put these ones out. It’s been a long time since I performed, and COVID has made it so that I’m not really excited to start anytime soon, but I hope it will be validating to have others hear and react to Emotional Labour’s challenging, answerless, morally fraught songs.

 

I Still Believe I Hear: Memory and Historical Truth

 So now I had loops to write lyrics to, and I had been developing song ideas over time. Over the past couple albums, I’ve created way more loops than song ideas so that I’ve been able to drop the ones I end up liking less later in the process. This album, I worked harder on the loops earlier in the process. I didn’t plan to have the initial versions be demos that I would later re-record, so the filtering process came earlier. It was a bit more nerve-wracking working this way as I would have less “extra” beats if/when things didn’t come together with the lyrics.

As I mentioned earlier, the song ideas had a loose and shifting theme which started around emotional labour and sexism, but as I thought more about what I could bring to those topics ended up being about masculinity, social media, and the social justice movement. I planned on using auto-tune on some of the vocals, to see how I liked using it as an expressive effect, although I knew I would probably end up talk-singing a fair bit as well. As with the melodic instruments, I found it hard to stick to trap influences vocally and feel okay about it. So I didn’t worry too much about how I’d wind up performing the vocals while writing the words, just getting nice rhythms and interesting rhyme schemes. While, of course, fleshing out the song idea. So what was I trying to do with each song?

Shooters - this song has a very obvious premise with no clear answer, arguing that in focusing on specific people and characteristics of mass shooters we’re missing that the root causes of the violence are a dark manifestation of toxic masculinity: of power, entitlement, stigma against mental health treatment, and the associated lack of investment in proper mental health treatment. Thankfully I think this is much more discussed now than four years ago even; I think I started writing it when the recent example was the Las Vegas shooter, and then Parkland came later along with many others. Unfortunately I’ve had occasion to think about this one several times since. This is an example of where I worry about nuance, since reading Twitter has broken my brain: I list “autism” among other factors used to describe mass shooters because it’s often focused on in the media, not because evidence backs the association up. Of course, including it in the list adds to the association, unless you read that part of the verse satirically, as you’re meant to. Oh well. The second verse references Jordan Peterson's idea of "enforced monogamy" as a way of avoiding atrocities like the Toronto van attack, as well as a NYT op-ed by Isabelle Robinson, who was a peer counselor assigned to the Parkland shooter. I like the violin loop, which was a melody stolen from a synth arp preset and made “stereo” when I split the notes up into two different violin parts that I performed and panned left and right so line bounces back and forth between them.

I’m a Man - really, this is a straight parody of the Steve Winwood song of the same name. I saw Chicago play it at the PNE in Vancouver and I thought it would fit my ‘70s musical sub-theme, which runs through a few of the songs. I guess I think of my 2010s-era apologetic, insecure masculinity versus the original song’s 1970s-era stoic, macho idea, and I want to self-deprecatingly argue that mine is better! But then again, the chorus casts doubt on whether the change is truly that deep.

High T - and this song lays out one potential reason why. To me it’s an illustration of this puritanical/misogynistic mindset, where totally normal things like desire are thought of as transgressions and conflated with awful things like sexual assault. I see this sort of conflation as motivation in the 2021 Georgia spa shootings, for example. I wanted to go more extreme with this song originally, but my partner didn’t like it so I ended up going with this expression of the idea. The final outro chorus uses language from Tara Reade’s assault accusation against Joe Biden; I got into reading about that and her on Twitter for a while. The violin is a looped moment from the Debussy violin sonata in G minor. I found the piece worked really well for creating these songs since it was in a minor key and had a lot of chromatic elements - the piece as a whole has a lot of light, atmospheric moments but I was able to pull the dark, chaotic moments out.

Smiles are Free - this is the only song on the album that’s really focused on emotional labour as it’s defined. It’s a testament to how long I’ve been working on these songs, since it predates me working a job in an environment that I like! I still have to keep the repeated outro in mind, though. The violin part is another chopped-up bit of the Debussy violin sonata that I especially like.

Bloodbath - this song starts by making fun of Hal Niedzviecki/Jonathan Kay, before kinda earnestly exploring the idea of cultural appropriation, my positioning in music, and what I’m trying to do in these songs (given my identity). When you read things on social media about social justice, you can get down on yourself and the cultural space you take up. Even trying to be an “ally” or whatever, if I make music about Indigenous issues or feminist issues I’m potentially taking listeners away from those with lived experience, or misunderstanding/misrepresenting those issues. All the same, I like making music and I care about and want to think through these things. I might be normalizing the act of caring and talking about these issues among people in my demographic, and nuances that I miss may be part of translating these stories for people from a different cultural context. I guess I see this song as reminding myself that if I’m trying to do that, here are some ways that could go wrong, so try to avoid those. The song itself grew out of a rhythm I recorded during a drum soundcheck, and I built the vocal loops before deciding on the topic, let alone the rest of the lyrics.

Clout Chase - this is another song that’s very specific to social media, and is kind of similar to the previous song in that I am fighting my own negative impulses while commenting on some bad behaviour that I do see. And while I’m not saying people doing this are distributed equally across the political spectrum, the behaviour itself is irrespective of ideology (hence the literal both-sides-ism). I think ultimately I’m commenting on the features and culture of platforms like Twitter itself, and how they can incentivize unproductive behaviour, or unproductive thought among people like me who are too scared to post. As mentioned earlier, the music is based on a song by Bill Chase, and the main loop is a single bar from that longer passage. Without sampling the original or even getting the parts right, I’m sure, I’m simulating the sample-based method of song construction.

Who Hurts Worse - I feel like I have exactly one of these songs every album, with a lot of verses and no chorus, and I always worry they’ll be too preachy or not catchy enough. But as I mentioned earlier this one has an interesting 31-bar loop, where the final 32nd bar is also the first bar of the next loop, so the lyrics also reflect this musical run-on sentence. In my notes I can see that I was inspired by the trans women versus radfem/TERF conflict that I witnessed both on Twitter and as a library employee during Megan Murphy’s controversial library room booking. At base, I guess I was shocked at how hurt and angry people were with each other, arguing at cross purposes, while no one was made at me, a representative of the group of people who do the most real-world harm to both groups. Realizing that a lot of the rancor is just hurt, traumatized people who need help and that deciding who deserves help more is a stupid exercise. 

I’m Not Running - this was a scary song to write and release, as vague as it is. I read an Andrea Bauer piece for Medium called “What if We’re Both Drunk?,” it brought up some very uncomfortable points, and this song is my attempt at thinking through them. I feel like I abided by everything I was taught about consent, but the fact is that education wouldn’t go far enough today, and while it’s very good that it’s evolving, it’s painful to think about everything I’ve done and realize that some of it was bad in ways I didn’t intend or have the knowledge or empathy to consider at the time. The chorus, “I’m Not Running,” is half-joke, that running for office seems to be when these allegations often go public, and half-earnest, in that I am not trying to run from my actions or their consequences either.  Obviously, the (mostly male) discomfort that I'm describing pales in comparison and priority to that of people who have been victimized. I think it’s all important though, given that what needs to happen is our culture needs to reflect and (mostly male) behaviour needs to evolve, and that takes everyone. The violin line from an arp preset pattern and recorded at half speed then sped up, which is easy to do live, if I ever need to, with the RC300. It would take me a lot of practice to get it in tune at that tempo otherwise!

Friendzone - I’d had this idea for a song for a long time, before the album concept, but I got a bit of confirmation of the idea while reading the metafilter thread. I liked the irony of a guy thinking he can’t date someone and the reason is that he’s “too good” at being a friend; what are the odds that a lovesick entitled person is actually an amazing friend? And still, as much as the metafilter thread derided this delusion, this song explores the ways it’s the result of societal toxic masculinity denying men opportunities to learn to be good friends, to become good at sharing emotionally. Rhyming "ping pong" with "ding dong" is a reference to Ron Maclean and meant to call back to the earlier line about hockey. Musically, it was built improvisationally and given that the song idea predated the album concept I think it’s fitting that it’s the closest to some of my previous albums. I reworked the vocals on the verses after getting a fair way into recording. This song is the only one where I used autotune as a compositional tool for melody creation, putting demo vocals through it to see how I could turn some natural spoken inflections into melodic moves, then re-recording to sing those.

Pink Dollars - somehow I have no notes from the writing of this song, but it’s about some pretty obvious feminist themes; the gender pay gap, step-based salary structures that are more common in female-dominated industries, undercompensated care work, etc. all anchored by an unsurprising but profound (to me) scientific observation. I listen to genomics podcasts that talk about the profound impacts that even single genes can have on shaping people’s lives and health, so it seems weird to me that the biggest influence on someone’s economic success is reducible to the spectacularly obvious feature of chromosomes, ie. biological sex. And yes, of course gender doesn’t equal biological sex, but my whole musical oevre is based on false binaries (this blog’s URL, for instance). I was unaware until writing this blog post that the "pink dollar" or pink money is a term for purchasing power of the LGBTQ community - I used it because I thought it would be easier to google than "pink collar," which is how I meant it. Music-wise, this is one of a few I made dominated by a vocal loop of nonsense sounds. I used the same approach as the violins in “Shooters” where I took the line and split up the notes between two panned parts to make it sound interestingly disjointed.

Something We Do - I like to think that I’m not a cowardly or unassertive person, but occasionally you’re just blindsided by awful opinions or behaviour so unexpectedly that it’s hard to react appropriately. As much as it’s easy to make fun of the idea of weird misogynists or fight the idea of them online, in person they can be volatile, scary people you wouldn’t want to make mad. I liked how instantly self-defeating this guy’s anger was in that moment. The violin was, I think, inspired by The Streets’ “Turn The Page.” I can’t remember which song by Future the beat was inspired by but I liked how much space there was in it, juxtaposed by the long series of cut-up hi-hats.

Uncross Your Arms - This song is definitely something I’ve noticed myself doing, and make a conscious effort to mentally change my perspective when I notice it happening. Reading something critical about men, white people, whatever, and trying consciously to consider without deflecting, denying, explaining away. I think what crystallized it for me was seeing TERFs talk about the concept of “peak trans,” which to me seems like a good example of where not doing this leads people - into a reactionary mode that can prevent you from truly listening to people. I like the lyrics to this one but the fact that it’s so preachy got it moved to the back of the album. Musically, it’s a vocal loop inspired by Nick Jonas’ “Levels.” Early in the album-creation process I I made the instrumental into my phone’s ringtone, which it remains.

On the Waves: Linking

 Happening in parallel to this thematic work was the process of creating music to go with the ideas. For the last couple albums I have written the music loops first, then written lyrics to my favourites before sequencing them out into full songs. That’s again how I worked on Emotional Labour, although by the time I started on the music I had a decent idea of the album’s subject matter and so that likely interacted with the music creation on some level.

It’s hard for me to believe now, since I took 5 years to make the album, but the idea of adding some “trap” influences into the loops was originally to help me work quickly. I was listening to EPs from the rapper Future because my brother told me to, and I couldn’t believe how loop-based they were. Plus I read interviews that they worked really quickly when recording, doing multiple songs in a day in the studio. So one day when I was working on a violin-based cover of the trumpet bridge from Bill Chase’s “Get it On” and I accidentally turned the loop function on on the third measure, I could suddenly hear the Future-style trap bass and drums under that weird, minor-key violin loop. 

Trying to make this vision come to life made me realize I didn’t know anything about making trap-style beats. I had listened to a lot, and I had occasionally used cut-up hi-hats and pitched 808 “kicks-as-bass,” but I couldn’t tell you what the distinctive features were enough to do anything but copy an existing beat. So I set out to learn, and the way I did so was to take a couple bars of the basic beat of 15 or so trap songs and recreate them, then analyze them to see what the common things to do were. This was just bass and drums, so I looked at the tempo, key, what bass notes were used relative to the key, and when everything happened. To avoid confusion, in the following section, when I say “kick,” I’m referring to the 808 kick drum sound which producers now frequently use as a bass instrument, on its own or in conjunction with other kick drum sounds.

Superimposing the kick sequences was the moment that convinced me that this exercise was worth doing. When looking at two bar loops of those 15 songs, all of them had a bass note/kick on the first beat of the first measure, which is totally normal. But none of them had a kick on the first beat of the second measure, something that is not true for most rock and pop music. The most basic rock drum beat goes Kick-2-3-4-Kick-2-3-4 (maybe Kick-2-3-Kick-Kick-2-3-4 or Kick-2-3-4-Kick-Kick-3-4). Never putting a kick on the first beat of the second measure was a specific underlying feature that gave the trap songs I analyzed a basic groove. Most had fairly busy bass/kick parts, often including a kick on the “and” 4 in the first measure, and the majority included a kick on the second beat of the first measure. So, at least among the songs that I analyzed, the basic groove was Kick-2-3-4-1-Kick-3-4. Once I learned this “rule,” the things I was trying started to make sense.

Other things I noticed in analyzing songs this way: tempo varied within a fairly narrow range, most of the songs were in minor keys, and the bass notes chosen often included flat 2s and flat 5s, chromatic-sounding notes that contributed to the songs’ dark, menacing sound. I haven’t checked these features against more recent songs, and I’m sure that production in the genre has evolved, but I tried to incorporate these characteristics into my songs. The way I make myself feel better about the appropriative nature of this work is by sticking to older songs, as though if a song has been around for a few years, the exclusivity of its patent had worn off and I was just reverse-engineering a generic version without directly copying anything. Also learning to write within a genre feels better and more respectful to me than using samples or adopting sounds without understanding what’s going on musically.

For the instruments on top of the rhythms I was learning to create, I didn’t try to emulate trap songs so much. But after my inaugural experiment with the “Get it On” loop (which became the beat to the song “Clout Chase”) I went back to the ‘70s rock fusion well and made something based on Chicago’s “I’m a Man.” That became an approach I used when building the beats for Emotional Labour: if I tried something that worked, I would try variations on the same approach to see if I could get something else in the same ballpark. I had said last album that I wanted to use my violin more, and I did that on Emotional Labour. I tried a bunch based on bits of Debussy’s Violin Sonata in G Minor (which I was learning at the time), usually further chopped up by the beat slicer in Guitar Rig. I’ve used this method as a compositional tool in the past, for example on my violin break on Sarah’s song “Saint,” but I think the actual cut-up sounds worked especially well for this trap-style stuff.

Another series of beats were built around the preset arpeggios in soft synths, re-performed by me on violin. Others were just build organically through looping and experimentation; I made the “good” version of the instrumental tracks the first time, whereas in the past I’ve usually re-recorded everything later in the process. This forced me to make some engineering decisions ahead of knowing all the elements I would end up including. 

Once I had my basic loops in place, I loaded them into my Boss RC300 as three separate tracks (usually melodic/chordal instruments, then 808 bass, then drums). This way I could make baby steps towards sequencing, practising turning loops off and on while thinking about lyrics and song ideas. That was my process while at home, but I also followed my previous practice of making 5-minute long versions of each loop and getting them on my phone so that I can listen to them while biking around. An interesting accident that I wound up incorporating into the final song happened when I accidentally overlapped my second violin loop idea by a measure when exporting one of these 5-minute long versions. I liked the sound of the overlap and thought it would create interesting lyrical possibilities when transitioning from part to part (which is how “Who Hurts Worse” ended up being a 31 bar loop instead of the more normal 32 bars). 

As It First Looks: Improvisation

This new album of mine progressed slowly in the background of all of the rest of that work. And it got even slower as I did two years of grad school while working, then graduated and continued to work more than full-time. All of my recent solo albums have involved a fair amount of learning and research. My Myers-Briggs album, MB-LP, was a lot of interviews and a lot of reddit subs and dubious personality websites. My previous album, Extinct!, was a lot of nonfiction books, textbooks, and papers. This album, Emotional Labour, started with a forum thread and an unhealthy amount of social media. I was spending a night at the Toronto airport on my way home from a trip whose purpose I don’t remember in 2016, staying up at the terminal to catch an early flight the next day. I stumbled onto the 2015 metafilter thread on emotional labour. I was lucky to have a lot of time because it’s super long. I see now that people have made annotated, shortened versions of it, which are probably less chaotic. 

The original thread is full of people agreeing, adding perspectives, arguing, trolling, getting back on track, seeing things in their lives differently, understanding their own behaviour or why they felt a certain way about things, written over time but experienced all at once in the reading. I thought it was powerful, not because I’d never thought about some of those things before, but because there were things in it that were new to me and because of the infectious enthusiasm of the (mostly female) participants. It seemed cathartic, not hopeless. People were discussing gender roles and expectations openly, honestly, and critically, and some people were connecting dots for the first time. Overall the thread reveals the extent to which gender is a performance and a construct with less harmful possibilities not out of reach. I’ve read subsequently that much of what was discussed in the thread doesn’t fit the dictionary definition of emotional labour, representing the scope creep of emotional labour into regular or unpaid labour with gendered expectations.

 But I still felt that was interesting, and it was a way of getting at the same thing that had interested me on Extinct!, which I would call uncounted or underappreciated value. For the environment, it’s the value of clean water, essential for life and happiness but diffuse in terms of responsibility and difficult to quantify and thus undervalued in dollar terms. In a similar way, emotional labour is the “clean water” that circulates among and between people, essential to make things run smoothly but under-examined, undercompensated, and diffuse but clearly gendered in its structural responsibility. Women do more care work. This was around the time that I stopped working at a landscaping company and started working at the public library, and the two jobs had very different cultures, expectations, and gender breakdowns.

As I started to figure out how to turn this subject matter into songs and themes that could carry an album, it helped to consider my target audience and what I could bring to the conversation with my perspective. My first idea was that the album would be written to reflect and poeticize aspects of feminism, the insights that I had read about in the metafilter thread. I started to keep notes on the song ideas I came up with, and came to realize that what I wanted to do was capture the effect of grappling with these ideas, as they relate to my specific perspective and identity, and that if the songs were “for” anyone, they should be for people (mostly men) like me, just with less time and bandwidth to think about these things. In making this my mission, I think I started to get back to how I used to think about writing songs, before I got so conceptual, where the point of the exercise is mostly to figure out my own thoughts about a topic and come to terms with how doing that made me feel. As opposed to knowing the message in advance and writing a song as an argument for it.

While this conceptual shift in framing was taking place, I continued to add to my list of song ideas on the Notes app of my phone, which were sometimes a sentence and sometimes multiple paragraphs long, whenever I thought of them. I would consolidate them periodically, and put ideas together or pull them apart as I thought about what the songs would deal with. I liked how working on them made me feel nervous, worried about feeling vulnerable or being misunderstood. It was that uncomfortability that made me feel like I was learning or growing in doing so. Of course, with so many of my ideas related to live socio-political and ethical issues, many of the ideas I had would show up in articles and in society in general over the course of me conceptualizing my album and working on the music. The concept of emotional labour itself was picked up more broadly than it had been. It was difficult to know I would be writing about topics and not feel like I had a good answer, or that the issue was settled. What allowed me to still write was the feeling that my job was to capture reflections at a moment in time, from a subjective point of view with an often explicitly named identity. I wanted to do some character work with the narrator and have a range of thoughtfulness and familiarity with the issues dealt with in the songs. Some would be “woke,” others deeply problematic. I thought of the songs as art, not ethics, and didn’t omit impulses and thoughts that felt harmful, with the idea that the listener is savvy enough to determine what they think about the topic. But I still hadn’t written any actual lyrics.

Past Present Future: Slowness

This series of posts were written just prior to the release of my album Emotional Labour. This one recaps my last album (2016’s Extinct!) and what I’ve worked on musically since. I said my last album was about “how to think about environmentalism.” In terms of inspiration, I went pretty academic and read a lot of books. The songs themselves are halfway between the bleakness of “we’re all screwed” that is people’s general attitude towards environmental issues and some sort of considered, pragmatic optimism. In my own life at the time I wasn’t sure what move I should make next, since I couldn’t find a way to make music pay enough. So again I think what’s driving Extinct! is some existential anxiety mixed with the hope that I’ll figure out a way to move forward. 

Of the things I included in those songs, I enjoyed when I was able to work in what I studied about environmental economics, eg. “money’s a substitute there’s no substitute for / it misses more than it counts” from the song “Something Better Happen Soon.” Although Asperger as a term is less and less PC, I was proud of how the first song on the album, “Asperger Messiah,” wound up predicting an environmental leader on the autism spectrum by a couple years at least (Greta Thunberg). And in “Commit!” and “Second Try,” I drew from my renewed relationship with my partner, Sarah Jickling. There’s an interesting mix of things I got from my reading, my personal life, and my imagination. I made a few videos for it and put it up on Bandcamp, streaming services, etc. It’s much less google-able than my previous album MB-LP so it doesn’t have anywhere near as many plays, but I’ve had some nice feedback on it by now.

My new album is five years after Extinct!, which is a long gap. But it’s not like I haven’t done music stuff in between. We toured the Good for Grapes album I mentioned in the previous post but despite some good reviews, it didn’t wind up taking the band to any kind of “next level,” and with no budget or grants to pay for more music, that project stalled.

I stayed in touch with some friends out east who do fringe fest musicals, and I did three more productions for them of two new shows, (Better Than) Dying Alone in 2017 and BFFs in 2018 and 2019. They flew me out to watch one of the 2019 shows in Toronto, which was super fun. My role for those was limited to writing the music and lyrics for the songs that accompany the dialogue and story that the producer and director would specify. So exercising agency was always interesting since the characters were heavily based on the story writers, who needed to approve of whatever choices I made. I also had to work efficiently, since they contacted me to write the BFFs show while I was in the middle of getting a master’s in library studies (and working!). So I wrote that show over the course of a spring break.

Another thing I did was produce most of Sarah’s 2019 album The Family Curse. I was originally just supposed to contribute some of the instruments, as I did for her previous album, but the producer she wanted to work with ended up being too busy and she didn’t have the budget to make anything else work so I wound up doing most of the songs. I got to play on the Harley Small-produced “Saint,” and also got to work on “Villain,” “Better,” and “Cautionary Tale” with Sarah and her friend and amazing musician Laura Smith (ex-Rococode, currently Daggerss).

Working on the songs for The Family Curse was a cool experience. Normally I would have done them entirely at home, but because of construction noise from down the block we did the vocal recordings in the free studio space at the Vancouver Library. For the songs we did with Laura, we were working back and forth between our home studios. It was really helpful having her involved; I don’t have the nicest bedside manner when I’m in charge of recording. I get a bit abrupt and/or demanding which is fine when I do my own stuff, but something I really have to work on when tracking with others. And the content of the songs meant that Sarah was really stressed about releasing them.

Not that the lyrics are that extreme, but there are some very specific details included that are true to her experience and hard for her to talk about. So realizing that she needed to write about them, then be okay with releasing what she wrote, then preparing her family for the release was a whole process. Music-wise, we were going for some specific references that included Lily Allen, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and Billie Eilish, but more indie. We had some plans to play shows supporting the album in 2020 that the pandemic ended up cancelling.

Did I say that? Hope I did.

By the time I was settling on the song ideas I wanted to pursue for lyric writing, I had been living with the thirty-something instrumental loops I'd created for a few months. This album is the slowest I've ever worked, not in terms of how long I'm taking to do the work but in terms of how long I had to wait in between steps. I had other projects eat up good chunks of my time, notably a high budget record that I made with Good for Grapes (the band I play in), working with producer Howard Redekopp. 

It was interesting doing rehearsals and pre-production with him; his advice mostly concerned song structure and consisted of finding ways to play the nicest-sounding parts of the songs more times. Tracking parts was long and frustrating at times. I played the violin and trombone on the record and my parts came fairly late in the overdubs, so there were times when the pitch of the violin especially would never quite sound perfect because it was being pulled in so many directions by the pitches of instruments already recorded. Not to mention that I was discouraged from using vibrato, which made pitch even more crucial. I had a tuner with me, so I was able to check what I was being asked to do against concert pitch when it got particularly tricky. Specific notes had to be played a quarter-tone sharp or flat. It was tough to remember how to detune myself correctly over the course of a long line, but I tried my best!

The experience was interesting though, and listening to the finished product I really noticed how everything we recorded was more or less there, but volume was really used as a means of highlighting the important parts. The violin was mostly single-tracked, which I guess is true to how it sounds live. I'm used to the sound of ensemble strings on my own stuff, but I could see getting into single-tracking them at some point.

I think the time off between the various steps of making this album was helpful, since it allowed me time to come back to ideas and sounds and be more big-pictures and objective about them. The downside is the enthusiasm that comes with pursuing a new and exciting thing has also cooled, which means getting back into the flow of working on the songs takes a bit of doing. When I came back to my loops to start writing songs over them, I had been listening to them for a while and shown them to some people, so I knew which ones I was most excited to work on.

The first thing I tried to do was imagine the sort of imagery and mood I might use for a specific song idea, and then try to pair it with a loop that I thought complimented that in some way. Some pairings came easier than others. I generally started with the ideas I was most excited by and then got a little more stuck by the end. There were quite a few instrumental loops I thought I could write good songs over, maybe 15 or 16. I wanted to end up with about 10 songs in the end, so I figured that would give me plenty to pare the album down to something with a cohesive sound and theme.

I enlisted the help of a few friends to listen to my loops and tell me which they liked. It was helpful in that I felt validated when they liked ones that I did too, but it was hard for them to tell me which ones really went together as a group. They could give me some adjectives to describe the mood of the loops though, and that helped me. I had angles of attack in my head for some but not all of my song ideas at this point. I knew, for instance, that I wanted my song about the dangers of unilateral decision-making on climate change to be a first person narrative story song with an anxious sense of impending doom. I chose to pair that with the idea I'd based on a song I'd recorded live at the Fox Cabaret, thinking that I could contrast the hedonism of a club night with the sober but equally reckless decision-making of some Catch 22-ish government/military types. I knew I wanted the song about the next evolutionary leap forward being someone we'd consider handicapped today to be a triumphant fanfare of themed, disjointed imagery. So I picked a major chord guitar loop with horns and strings, all swagger and strength. These choices were just hunches that I would try and make work, and when some of them didn't end up clicking, I either ditched both parts or tried a different song idea with the same loop. So the ones that worked out were really just lucky.

Before I started trying to write lyrics, I spent a bit more time mixing the loops and seeing if there was anything else I could add. Then I printed five-minute versions of the loops just repeating over and over so that I could put them on my iPod and walk and bike around with them. They weren't sequenced, so it was just everything going at once, like it would be at the song's most intense parts, but it was a good way of getting myself to listen to them with my song ideas in mind. Since they were just the same 5-20 second chunks over and over, my brain would get hypnotized and bored enough while listening to them that ideas of how to tackle the song subjects or just images would pop into my mind. I found this worked especially well when I paired doing it with repetitive physical activity like riding my bike into Vancouver (while I was going to the studio to record with Good for Grapes, in fact!).

I conceived of the rest of the song ideas on the album this way. Instead of having a pre-made idea and finding an instrumental for it, I just listened to the instrumental until an idea for a song formed out of it. So I worked both ways on this album. Music came first, but was then set aside while research that would lead to song ideas took place. Then these two bodies of work that had been growing separately were forced together, and each informed the other. I like the freedom to do instrumental loops before thinking about lyrics at all, but for my next project I'd like to have some more early interaction between lyrics and music. That might mean starting more of my instrumentals with vocal melodies; I only did that once on this album. But it was that one vocal melody that made me want to do the album in the first place.

11 AM, time for TRANESTRETCHING

I should rewind, though, because before I did any research for this album at all, I spent a few weeks to record thirty-something song ideas that would form the basis of all of the tracks on the album. The process was a continuation of the way I worked on Little Gwaii and MB-LP, with the key difference that instead of recording demo versions of the songs initially and rerecord once I knew which I was using, I went straight to recording good versions of the loops. I was able to do this because I finally bought a pair of nearfield monitors, so I wasn't stuck trying to judge the sound of the instruments I was tracking through a pair of headphones. The Adam F5 speakers I bought were great, and I felt more confident that I was capturing good sounds on the way in than I have on past album projects.

This no-demo recording process also meant that I cut the Boss RC-300 looper out of the tracking process. Ordinarily, I would record demos onto the looper, using its three tracks as I would when I play the song live. So drums would usually be on track 3, bass on track 2, and guitar/keys/vocals on track 1, depending on the song. Then I would figure out how I wanted to perform the song by muting and un-muting these tracks to create the song structure. But this time, I was recording good versions of my ideas right onto the computer, as I wrote them. I saved the looper for later, when I was trying to arrange the songs, since having the instruments separated into the three tracks as I would play them live made it obvious what moves and mutes would make sense for live performance.

I generally started the loops with a single instrumental idea or conceptual goal. I make a practice of recording any short ideas onto my phone whenever they come to me, so I mined my phone recordings for ideas I'd had that could form the basis of songs. One thing I also tried on this record was recording snippets of existing songs that were on where I happened to be that gave me a specific feeling. One was a classical piece that was on in Good for Grapes' tour bus when we were recording our album, another was a weird electronic jam I witnessed played by musicians dressed as Luchadors at the Fox Cabaret, and another was a song we played in the Delta Concert Band. Specific places and instruments also played roles in loops I included on the record; riffs I wrote on a terrible old bass at Steve Albini's studio in Chicago started a couple songs, and one I wrote and recorded in GarageBand on an iPad while up the Sunshine Coast made the album as well. I also manipulated found sound: one song started with a chopped up loop of the sound of a Vancouver Skytrain leaving the station, and another began with the chirping sound of crosswalks for the visually impaired.

I went for quantity with the loops, knowing the more I made, the more cohesive I could make the sound of the album since then I'd have enough good ones that I could then choose the ones that fit a similar aesthetic. Since I knew I would make a lot, I didn't have to worry about cohesion while I was actually writing them, which was great since I could just follow ideas through wherever they seemed to be leading me. I generally finished 2-3 every time I sat down to work, and considering I was trying to pre-mix and record nice versions of everything as I went it was a pretty good pace.

This was the first album I finally gave up and used drum machine VST sounds instead of recording real drums. I did it because I've come to terms with the fact that I don't have the gear or the ears or the room to make my drums sound professional, but I also did it because I realized that setting up real drums for my live shows is a bridge too far for me right now anyway, so I might as well record the way I'm going to end up playing live, with a drum pad triggering sounds. I still miked up a drum kit and played real drums while recording though, because I didn't want super quantized drum machine timing, just nicely recorded samples. So I converted the audio I recorded on close mics into MIDI and fed that into my soft synth, Session Drummer 3, editing for timing and velocity afterward.

Bass and guitar I recorded much as I have in the past, with both the DIed signal and miked amp and making decisions about which to use or how to blend them later. One thing I did a lot with the guitar was use my Boss DD-2 delay pedal to sync 8^th note delays to the song tempo, and then just hit chords once every couple bars, letting the delays continue almost as loud as the hit. I found that really filled space, when that's what I needed from the guitar.

One thing I noticed in playing the songs from my previous album MB-LP live was that I really underused violin and especially trombone. So I made sure not to do that this time around, incorporating them more often and more centrally, usually at the expense of the guitar. Violin I recorded very normally, with a cheap overhead pencil condenser, but overdubbed many takes onto every part and panned doubles in interesting ways to make a real ensemble sort of sound. I sent the trombone into Guitar Rig 5's talkbox effect, except not with the plugin “talking” but at a static position. The extreme EQ filter effect gave the trombone a nice place in the mix to sit, and I thought made it sound like an old-timey car horn, in a nice way.

I included some other instruments as well; the keyboard sounds all came from presets on my dad's DX7s, and I sent one through the Boss looper for the slicer effect it has. I made more extensive use of shaker, tambourine, and cowbell than I have in the past. Since I wanted this album to be a dancey, beat-driven album, I thought percussion could help propel the songs forward.

Different things would inspire me to write the loops that I used on Extinct! Sometimes it was an instrumental melody, other times a groove, and other times an interesting length for the loop. There are 3, 7, and 14-bar loops, as well as ones where chord lengths are asymmetrical, as in one 8-bar loop where the first chord goes for 6 bars and the second for the remaining two. Any way I could play with my own expectations for how the loop should go, while also making something genuinely nice-sounding to listen to, that was what I tried for. Harshness crept back in with the vocals, but in writing the instrumentals I really tried to make it a priority that they sound nicer than things I'd done in the past.