Big Fan of Anyone

I never used to listen to lyrics. I could hear an album a dozen times, so that I knew every instrument's part by heart, but the best I could do was hum the vocal line. It was like a foreign language to me: when music was on, I spoke in notes.

That started to change when I started singing, because humming the whole time was pretty boring. Lyric booklets helped, and if the CD didn't come with one I'd sometimes make one myself. I learned hundreds and hundreds of covers and got a pretty good understanding of some different ways people write songs, not to mention a warehouse-sized lyric memory. Trying to write my own songs just pushed me further into the world of words, to the point that now if I don't have anything else on my mind I'll just be repeating interesting lines to myself, figuring out how they do what they do.

All this to say: I take words seriously. I put a lot of work into mine, and I hope it shows. I use the posts on this blog to set down what I'm thinking about as I make music, so I can see how my ideas progress and my concerns change over time. I'm going to look at one of the songs from Little Gwaii called "Do You Know CPR?" and see what the heck I was thinking about when I wrote the lyrics.

---

I started working on the song with just the title, which is from a story my mom told me once. Her little brother (my uncle) was born with a congenital heart defect that meant that his life expectancy wasn't good. The last time she visited him in the hospital before he died was after he'd had a succession of heart attacks, but they'd managed to stabilize him. She thought he must have known that something was going to happen to him because at one point a propos of nothing he asked her if she knew CPR. Here's the song:

His eyes shift over from the window to the chair 
Holding off death with a get back stare 
He says "Sis, it's all right, 
I won't go gentle into that good night" 

Well no that's not what he said 
No one quotes Dylan Thomas in a hospital bed 
Especially not a kid of 17 
Circles under his eyes, encircled by machines 

This first part is supposed to launch you directly into the song world by going as visual as possible and giving the kind of cinematic direction of camera and dialogue that Elvis Costello uses in the second verse to "Watching the Detectives" (Cut the baby taking off her clothes/Close-up of the sign that says 'we never close'). I'm imagining the scene from fragmentary details, and my writing reflects this, starting with a pair of darting eyes and building my world outwards.

Spoken word is a new style for me, so on this record I sometimes felt more comfortable alluding to specific lyrics I liked from the genre. The first line approximates a line from Soul Coughing's "Moon Sammy" (And automatically your mind moves from the stairwell to the chair), and the third is straight from Serengeti's "Teenager" (I said 'sis it's all right'/'You know you gotta watch your mouth when your parents are in sight')

And then, instead of using another song, the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. I like this because it undercuts my credibility as narrator, something I was feeling acutely as I was writing the song. What do I know about death? Nothing, really, and you can tell since English lit is my reference point. I don't know what it's like, what people say, and I don't want to pretend I do. But I want to try and imagine, and if I get it wrong I'll try again, this time with concrete facts (17) and a visual bit of wordplay (circles/encircled).

Born with a hole in his heart 
Sometimes he needs more just for it to start 
Lately it's been stopping a lot 
Like stopping a watch, like stopping a clock

When you fall down 36 times, 
Rising up 35 is a pretty good record 
A pretty good record but the stakes are too high 
A pretty good record and he's still gonna die 

The first two lines borrow an image from "Blue Eleanor" by the Old Canes (I've got a hole in my heart/And it needs more for it to start/Feeling alive, feeling alive). "Like stopping a watch" I got from Donnie Brasco, the scene where Lefty's son is in the hospital and he tells Donnie "His heart stopped. Like a watch. That's what the doctor said, just like a watch. They had to wind it back up. Who knows, maybe next time...they can't."

So I expand on that idea of multiple heart attacks by reversing a lyric from The Streets' "Going Through Hell" (Fall down five times, rise up six). And I never lose an opportunity to work in a lyric that can be taken out of context as a commentary on my craft, like "a pretty good record [LP] but he's still gonna die". The band Metric does this on most of their radio singles; you can read them literally or you can interpret certain lines as describing their place and concerns in the music industry.

Is that fair? What's fair? 
This is real life 
And no doctor here would dare 
To put him under the knife, so 

Back to the room without poetry 
Big sister at the edge of the bed 
His eyes flicker upwards hopefully 
Then you know he whispers he says 

The thing about the type of heart defect my uncle had was it would be completely fixable at birth today, with better surgical procedures. But at the time, there was nothing they could do for him.

Chorus:
Do you know CPR? 
I can feel it in my heart 
Do you know CPR? 
Could it really be that hard 

I like it when choruses are somewhat open in the interpretation of their lines. Here "I can feel it in my heart" is meant to work as my uncle speaking about his feeling of premonition and also me empathizing. "Could it really be that hard" is my uncle saying CPR can't be that tricky, and also me incredulous at how hard a decision it would be to not continue to resuscitate him when there was no hope of improvement.

I generally time my completed first verse and chorus to give myself an approximate idea of how many verses I'll need for the song's runtime to hit 3-4 minutes, and try to plan content accordingly. In this case my first verse was quite long and a double chorus felt natural, so I knew two verses would be enough.

As virtuous men pass mildly away 
And whisper to their souls to go 
Scared young kids who just wanna live 
Can whisper to their sisters "no" 

'Cause this is not John Donne, don't be the one 
Who watches as his breath expires 
And if doctors and parents all agree there is 
No hope then call them liars 

I like symmetry from verse to verse, sometimes I've used the same rhyming syllables from verse to verse. In this case for the second verse I just pulled out my #2 English lit poem on death, "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne.

I got the idea of doctors and parents as a reason-based unit (as opposed to other kids who have real sympathy) from a line in Ted Leo's "Me and Mia" (Not doctors nor your mom and dad but/Me and Mia, Ann and Ana/Know how hard you try).

Rage cause he got nothing like a fair shot 
But still has the will to fight 
He's not noble or cowardly, just minutely/hourly 
Dreaming he'll live the night 

E.C.G. blinks in the dark 
Beeping to the beating of a heart 
E.C.G. whines on a line 
Supine in a box of pine 

Another thing going on in this song are the ethical questions that the death of someone close can raise. "Why him? Why not me?" I'm trying to argue here that we shouldn't moralize about things beyond our control. It's not more noble to accept the inevitable than to fight it; things happen, or don't happen, and we can only grieve.

I modified a rhyme from "Lock the Locks" by the Streets (No more alarm that barks in the dark/With the beeping like darts to the heart) for the ECG stanza. I also incorporated a sample of one of those machines as part of the beat, I figured even if it was heavy-handed it helped to bring the setting of the song to life.

Not fine, not fine, OK or coming back 
Sister missed another brother heart attack 
Dealing is hard when the deck is stacked 
Holding his chart, feeling so wracked 

How can she ever be happy enough 
She got to dodge all of this stuff 
How can she carry his name around 
And let little things get her down 

I was pretty much out of description at this point so I just kept going with moralizing, imagining things survivors might think. You tend to feel lucky when you learn about terrible circumstances other people are born into; you feel sympathy, but also gratitude that you were spared the same predicament. The problem is when you're grieving it doesn't seem like you can feel enough of either. You think about all the times you've been annoyed, or petty, and realize how minuscule those problems really were, and you realize your priority should just be getting the most you can out of every minute, every hour.

But every moment is not a gift 
That's not a long-term way to live 
She gave her brother's name to her first-born son 
Told him just to try and have fun 

When she needed anaesthesia or took a plane to meet him 
It was plain that she was numb and afraid 
Pain that fades with the years is still rattling ears 
With echo echoes of her brother saying 

Except that feeling of gratitude, that re-evaluation of priorities, never lasts. Eventually you slip back into normal life, your day to day concerns, your plans. It's possible to change your attitude about things to a certain extent, but a different kind of reality always reasserts itself as danger fades.

So you can't carry those feelings around with you forever, but you can pass on the priorities, the outlook that having lost gave you. In the few times I've ever seen my mom feel like she's in danger (before flying or surgery), she tells me to remember if anything happens to her that I should always do whatever makes me happy and try to have fun every day. Which I assume are the same strategies that have helped her get through losing people close to her.

My mom gave me my uncle's name, Scott, as my middle name. Maybe partly so she would never worry about forgetting him. If so, it turned out to be a good plan, though I doubt she ever expected I'd write a song about him.

---

I wrote the words in one sitting, probably 3 or 4 hours. More than three quarters of what I wrote survived to the recorded version, with the last stanza receiving a major rework about a week later. Several other lines were changed slightly before recording as I considered other wordings.

I think the type of writing I was doing changed as this song progressed, as the changing focus of my analysis demonstrates. I started out with a lot of description, borrowing pretty heavily from things I'd heard done, turns of phrase I remembered. But by the end of the second verse I wasn't aware of borrowing anything, and I was interweaving description with moralizing, and carrying metaphors through almost unconsciously.

I was pretty pleased with how the words turned out for this song, which is probably why I didn't mind that it's one of the simplest arrangement on the album. Maybe I'll pick another example and look at arranging next.

Up Down + Sideways

I finished my new record, it's on bandcamp here: http://gregmcleod.bandcamp.com/album/little-gwaii

The recording process went pretty smoothly. I'd done fully-featured demos ahead of time, and I had all of the parts mapped out and maybe three quarters of my arranging done. So the recording process was more about making nice-sounding versions of short samples, and I could work comparatively quickly. I did drums in a day, renting a Gretsch snare and a nice ride cymbal and otherwise making do with a Taiwanese kick and cheap cymbals I had lying around. I decided not to use toms on this record.

  

I didn't rent mics for the recording, instead using three Shure 57/58s and mics from a budget CAD drum mic pack. My intention wasn't to capture pristine drums, since I was trying to replicate the slightly dirty, low quality sound of drum samples, but I occasionally regretted this approach during editing. The cymbal crashes weren't very detailed and sounded harsh at times, and the kick needed some pretty extensive treatment with EQ, but ultimately it was a decent way to record drums for an album (without spending more than $10).

One thing I tried (that I got from seeing Paul Boechler work at Fader Mountain in Vancouver) is the idea of a "crush" mic, incorporating a mic a few feet away from the whole kit and compressing it heavily. Blending this with the rest of the kit results in a kind of parallel compression that can thicken the sound of the kit or give it a bit of an edge. For some of the songs I time-shifted the signal slightly to be better in phase with the close overheads, but sometimes it sounded better without doing so.

The bass I did using my dad's homemade DI with a Jensen transformer. Since I was working with such short bass loops I paid a lot of attention to timing and fretting/fingering noise. This is the first time I've tried specifically tuning to the part of the neck I'm going to be playing on. Not that the intonation on the bass was bad, but I think it's an interesting approach.

After I had bass and drums solid, I still had to record violin, trombone, percussion, guitar, keys, and vocals. I wanted to work with mics I own, so I set up the NT1a and an SM57 next to each other behind a pop shield and used whichever sounded more appropriate to me. Since I wanted things captured really dry, I did everything in a little makeshift vocal booth.

I used the 57 on the trombone and most of the vocals. I found it worked a little better on the percussive, rap-style vocals, but still preferred the NT1a on the sung vocals. Probably I would have liked an SM7b even better. The guitars were all done DI into Guitar Rig, with strategic EQ cuts (at 3.6 and ~4 kHz) to reduce the harshness that I sometimes hear in amp modelling plugins.

The vocals were mostly done in triplicate, with the second and third parts panned left and right and brought in for emphasis, usually on the ends of lines. Once I had the vocal takes, I sent these through the Boss digital delay pedal and played with the delay time knobs. I can do this live as well, and it works stylistically because it's similar to DJ scratching.

I rented Yorkville YSM6 monitors to mix the album, which was amazing. In the past I've worked on small monitors or headphones, and this was a great experience. The biggest differences to me were the upper mid clarity, the stability of the stereo image, and how well my mixes translated to other systems. The bass was the only thing I still had slight problems judging, but comparing on other systems helped. Given the choice, I'll always use monitors like these in the future.

I'm also finding that the level I mix at is a big factor in how well I manage to hear the balance I create. Paradoxically, the quieter I'm listening, the easier I can hear problems with the balance. With a free level meter app, I found I was most comfortable mixing at around 65 dB, going quieter for context on balancing decisions and louder for corrective EQ and fiddling with compressors.

I tried a few new things mixing as well. A major one was high and low passing everything, to make sure nothing extra was clouding my mix. I decided to low pass everything except the vocals starting down around 12 kHz. I wanted the vocals to really breathe life into the tracks (and I wasn't crazy about my cymbal sounds) so I figured I'd give them the upper frequencies almost to themselves.

I also automated levels more extensively than I have in the past, essentially treating different song parts (verse and chorus, for example) as different challenges as opposed to trying to compress and find a fader position for the whole song. I found just using a mouse and looping the relevant section I was able to get what I wanted within three passes. The vocals were pretty heavily compressed in two stages, so I used quick level cuts to reduce the volume of breaths that had gotten out of control.

I only rented the monitors for a week so I'd be motivated to finish the mix quickly, which I did, but that meant that I had to finish the mastering on headphones, comparing with other systems. I used Izotope Ozone 5; the main things I did were bring up the highs a bit overall, reduce the stereo width of the bass, and apply quite a bit of tape saturation (mostly in the highs and upper mids). I made them a bit hotter than I've done tracks in the past, with the maximizer set high enough it would bring levels down on the loudest parts of the verses, and worked pretty continuously on most choruses.

I finished the masters at 5am and uploaded them to bandcamp. Again, they're right here: http://gregmcleod.bandcamp.com/album/little-gwaii

I think the next post will look at my lyric process. I'm starting to write a new record now, so I'm going to look at how I've been writing songs recently.

Depends Who "We" Is

The record I'm working on is called Little Gwaii. I originally planned to record it on location in the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii), where I lived just after I was born but as you'll soon appreciate a lot of things I'd planned for this record changed completely.

The first big difference was the method of composition. After doing two albums in pretty short succession, I wasn't super excited to start another project with a blank page and an acoustic guitar. Instead, I started playing with my friend Chris' Boss RC-2 looper (as I'd done in the live video for 'Rubber and Glue'), getting all of my instruments together and sending them into a mixing board and then out to the looper.

This way I can pick up an instrument, play a phrase, and have the instrument keep playing while I grab another one to play overtop. I can then build a full band groove fairly quickly, something I've seen artists like Owen Pallett and Tune Yards do live. I then ran the looper through a Boss GE-10 EQ and a DD-2 digital delay. So after I had a groove recorded, I could fiddle with the knobs of these effects boxes and screw with the sound as I've seen Holy Fuck or countless DJs do live.



I worked like this in the room, with the sound heading to my recorder as a well as to a couple of monitors. So I improvised grooves, choosing whichever instrument I wanted to start with and adding whatever I thought would work until I thought I'd made something. All without worrying about vocals, just trying to come up with a loop I thought sounded fun and enjoyable. Then once I was happy I'd record it and explore its possibilities a bit by playing with the effects.

Over a few days I recorded maybe twenty of these, of variable quality, and chose the moments I liked best. Then I tried to write words overtop of these loops, at first mumbling and free associating until I had a couple of words I thought sounded good, and then expanding on them. I have a notebook full of scraps of lines that I've thought of at one time or another, and sometimes I'd start with one of those. I didn't explicitly draw from my existing list of song ideas, the ideas were developed from the first germs of lyrics.

The moods of the loops themselves also helped. Unlike having to imagine what the tone of the finished song is going to be while playing an acoustic guitar, as I've done in the past, I had a fairly reliable blueprint of the most fully featured part of the song already. So I could be inspired by the feeling of the instrumentation as I wrote, instead of trying to replicate the mood I'd imagined while writing.

The song structures also had to change, since I had only a short loop to work with in every case. I couldn't make all of the melodic instruments I'd looped change chords for a chorus, for example. So dynamics had to mostly be accomplished by adding or muting certain parts, and interest had to be sustained by the lyrics and effects. This is how producer-heavy bands like TV on the Radio generally operate too, but it's a necessity for a looping musician. More on recording the demo arrangements soon!

Sleep the Sleep

I was after a kinda weird guitar sound, a nylon string with a little crunch that broke up into something brittle but not completely unpleasant when strummed vigorously. I wasn't working from any specific precedent, just a sound I heard in my head, so it took a bit of experimenting to achieve it. I recorded the guitar in an odd way, panning the NT1a behind the bridge with an SM58 at the neck/body juncture. I must have liked the results. After that I had a heck of a time trying to reamp that signal through a Vox AC30, which I had also decided was a good idea.

It turned out it was not, and sounded objectively terrible. So before sending it to the amp I tried EQ matching the nylon with a DI'ed electric guitar (using Ozone 5) and that calmed some of the boomiest and squealiest frequencies down a bit to where it was usable. I tried switching between a few different amps and in the end I wound up preferring a Fender Blues Deluxe on the majority of the songs.

Vocals were pretty straightforward. I used the NT1a and barely processed it, as per usual. At some point, I decided that most of the backing vocals should be female, for variety's sake. So I got my friend Sarah Jickling from The Oh Wells to come by and since she'd never heard the songs before we recorded them in tiny segments of about 3-5 words each. It was painstaking and she did a great job. To test how these songs could actually be performed live we shot one of them, "Rubber and Glue", in my living room with a bunch of christmas lights.

Playing enough instruments to fill out the song required judicious use of the Boss RC-2 loop pedal I have been borrowing from my friend Chris for the past several years. I'm therefore able to lay down a verse/chorus guitar part on the first pass, then play drums over top of that the second time, then solo over both the third time. But the bridge chord progression is different, so that forces me to go back to just guitar and hope the vocal harmony can carry the momentum. It's a tricky way to perform but I think it's worth learning. It's so hard to make money touring that being able to cut down on personnel without losing much enthusiasm is important.

But back to the recording, I had a few ideas for accenting the basic guitar/bass/drums arrangements. I did my usual violin and trombone work, with the trombone being the main focus on the chorus of "Your Turn" and the violin getting a solo on track 3 but otherwise being much more subdued than on the last one. My dad noodled a bit of clarinet on the final track. And when certain parts of songs felt like they needed fattening, I added electric guitar. That was my Mexican strat through the AC30, cranked, a 57 on the cone. 

I wanted kids' voices doing the refrain on the aforementioned "Rubber and Glue", so I spent a morning at my mother's Grade 1 class and taught them the song. They thought it was hilarious, and afterwards we wrote a little song of our own. It was a lot of fun and reminded me of the time I spent teaching music to kindergartners in Montreal, except most of these kids had punjabi accents instead of french ones. They were practicing a song for a class play and I snagged a bit of it to use as a transition from that song to the next on the record. I'd like to do more location and atmospheric recording in the future.

I had a photo I wanted to take in mind for the album cover, but I wound up doing a painting instead. It's a torso with hands wrapped around it, except one of the hands has lost its grip and all that's left is the impression of the fingertips as the blood returns to the capillaries. At the last minute I changed the order of the text so that it wouldn't read "Greg McLeod: The Invisible Girl", since that was not my intention. And I used some GIMP trickery to make the ends of the word "invisible" slightly transparent. For better or for worse, the whole thing wound up looking like a racy Young Adult novel's book jacket.

I tried to limit the time I spent mixing this album, partly because I wanted to see what sorts of results I was able to achieve quickly, and partly because I wanted to finish before I started recording an EP with The Oh Wells at Fader Mountain Sound in Vancouver. In the end I did all the mixing and mastering in three days, while still tinkering with the arrangements. I then did a few revisions while sitting in the control room at Fader Mountain, and put it up on the internet at 5 am, April 5th.

I have still received almost no feedback from anyone but am pretty happy with it. There are timing quirks that bother me, the vocal level is sometimes a bit low, and the whole thing could benefit from a couple passes automating levels. But I think it has a raw and wholesome sound and pretty solid songwriting. And the final chorus of "Giants", that is something I can stand behind. I'm about halfway done writing songs for a new record. More on that later.

A Cookie in the Ear

Alright, so in the end I finished twelve songs, ten of which I decided to record. Just like the last album, I put them on bits of carpet that I rearranged to work out a sequence. I wanted to start working on the sequence earlier in the process so I can prepare for the transitions better. It can always be changed later, but I wanted to have something that I think works early on. It's especially important on this album because the songs are more tightly integrated than anything I've done previously; many of them rely heavily on the same chords and certain sections "call back" previous songs. Being able to allude to previous lyrical themes simply by reusing the music is a new idea for me, and it strikes me as a pretty powerful tool for creating cohesion.

 I wrote them all on nylon string guitar, which I have never really played before. This changed what I wrote in a few ways. Playing without a pick meant that there are a lot more fingerstyle sections, the larger neck meant fewer bar chords and staying closer to the headstock, and the strumming sections were more painful and wound up blistering the side of my thumb repeatedly. I think of these heavy parts as misusing the instrument, beating the hell out of something that's usually graceful and self-possessed. So with that in mind I resolved to bash the crap out of the smallest drumset I could find, a rented Mapex Saturn bop kit with an 18" bass drum.

 I hadn't had any cymbals at all on the last album because I didn't have any I thought were worth recording but this time around I wanted a nice ride cymbal, something complex, dark and washy. I rented a Sabian Artisan Vault 22" ride, and heavily overused it on the drum parts, with almost no hi-hat.

I got the drum parts mostly how I wanted them but don't seem able to produce the kind of tightness that I want on them. Suppose I would have to practice more. Instead, I decided to do the bass recordings and then edit both tracks for tempo abnormalities until I think they sound solid, then proceed with the rest of the recordings.

I used the same 1972 Fender P-Bass running into a 1971 Traynor YBA-1 that I used on the last one, running into the high impedance input on the first channel and blending with the DI.

I built a little bass house for my microphones, the NT1a and a CAD KBM412 that I had lying around. I used this combination on the kick drum as well, with the NT1a back about a foot on the batter side. The CAD mic does a good job on the very low end but I didn't like it much until I tried blending it with the snap of the NT1a on the other side.

I figured the same approach would work for the bass track, but in my rough mixes I just find myself muting one or the other and blending with the DI. I have the bass tracks recorded and am proceeding with the  rhythmic tweaking. Then comes guitar, vocals, and other fun surprises.

Nancy, que pasa?

Welcome to 2013. This year, I will leave my room. I will play shows. I will meet new and wonderful people. I will win at least two contests. I will write 50 songs, and complete mastered recordings of 36 of them. These are my goals.

I sold my tour van to a 72-year old hook-handed Scotsman today. On the other hand, he had two fingers and a thumb. Oh, and two replaced hips, and he can't pick it up until Friday because he's got an appointment at the cancer clinic. He made me promise never to work with asbestos. Fine by me.

I'm also writing my next batch of songs. I started with a list of song ideas, much like I did for the last album, but this time I'm working on them less linearly. I'm getting the song's message down first and writing with that as a guide, trying to stay as true to it as I can. A couple of ways I have found for dealing with a song that has me blocked: playing energetic covers and coming back to the song can psyche me into a more adventurous and productive mood. Also, writing the next idea as nakedly and unpoetically as I can seems to be very helpful. If I can read the idea I can visualize different ways to dress it up, make it fit with the rest of the song.

So I have five new ones that I'm sure I'll use, and another old one that I can re-purpose (like I did with "Wonderful Life" on the last CD). I'm about halfway there. Here's the little paragraph I wrote in my notebook about how these songs are related:

This album addresses fears I have that I can be childish and shallow in personal relationships. It's about not being emotionally mature enough to truly love. It's about intelligence being squandered by poor emotional understanding and control. It's about learning what it is to be fair and good to others without that being at the expense of oneself. Its thesis is that empathy is essential to happiness.

As a consequence of this, the protagonist in a lot of these songs is me indulging some of my more stunted and infantile desires. The best one so far is made almost entirely of playground rhymes. I like it because I think it's enjoyable at many levels of intellectual and thematic involvement, from first-listen background music to tenth-listen lyric-booklet-in-the-lap. For now when this happens it's fairly accidental, but it's something I hope I'll be able to learn to do better with time. Just look at The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living by The Streets. I do envy the words per minute of his genre. Ah well.