I TOLD you I was sneaky

I'd been taking notes, running loads of books out of any library that would have me for weeks. I knew the end result of my research would be songs, but I hadn't done much thinking about what they'd actually be about until now. I knew I wanted them to diverge from my last album, MB-LP, in some important ways, and so I wrote some “album rules” to clarify what I wanted them to be like. I could always break them later! They stated that:

1. The album should be fun/funny (the subject matter shouldn't dictate tone)
2. The songs should deal with the theme (or an aspect of it)
3. The subject of the songs should be relatable enough to stand on its own without the theme
4. The songs should be personal and aim for the heart
5. Flow-wise, the album should keep the beat going and be able to do as well as background, maybe even transition between songs
6. This is a head-nodding to dancing party album. Try to keep it light even when it's heavy lyrically

The rules reflect concerns that writing a set of songs about the biodiversity crisis will result in dry, boring, impersonal songs. Legitimate concerns, I think. Since I was so immersed in the subject matter, I knew that would come through even if I tried to just write personal songs about my life.

In fact I usually decide to pull the trigger on a song idea when those two things intersect in an interesting way. When some pressure or joy or concern that I'm feeling in my life is paralleled by the subject I intend to cover, that's when I feel like I can write about it authentically. I don't have to worry about this not happening; the things I find especially interesting when researching are often things I notice because I can't help looking through the lens of my own life. And I'm always trying to figure out how things relate to other things. So it's a way of working I find natural and more rewarding than just setting out to represent my personal life metaphorically.

The second concern reflected in my album rules is that the songs will be depressing or overly serious. This has to do with the tone I want to take for educational reasons, I guess. I wasn't interested, as some of the environmental education teachers I read had been, or taking my listeners on an emotional ride from despair to hope. I just wanted songs that weren't scary and weren't preachy; I was going for informative and wry, with a hopefully infectious enthusiasm for the subject matter. That's how I wanted to share what I was learning.

So I went back and pored over the dozens of pages of notes I'd made, trying to pull out single ideas or topics that intrigued me enough to think that I could write a whole song about them. Sometimes they were ideas that had come up multiple times in different readings across different disciplines. Other times they were single sources or ideas that I found intriguing enough to explore on their own. This is the list I made, with short explanations:

• Hard to Give Up Comfort:
  • A lot of environmental reading said if only people in the west would sacrifice some comfort, a lot of problems could be solved. But overconsumption is cultural and hard to avoid, even if you're trying to.
• Average Person and Environmental Policy:
  • The idea, from ecological economics, that progress can only go as far as an average person understands, in a democratic system. Much like 'no child left behind', bringing up the average is the most powerful thing so passing on education is most important and no one is hopeless.
• Nuclear Winter:
  • Came from a source that said a medium-scale nuclear war could halt global warming, and scientists had considered it as a scheme to combat climate change. Basically fears about unilateral, secret government action.
• American Exceptionalism:
  • Based on readings about the unique ecological circumstances surrounding Columbian contact and how the culture of America was affected by it. How the American dream is unsustainable and the American financial model shouldn't be copied by other countries under different environmental conditions
• Passenger Pigeon:
  • Drawing parallels between humanity's potential fate and that of the Passenger pigeon. Both are weed species, growing more like automatons as their numbers increase, maybe not autonomous enough to avoid crash.
• Race to the Bottom:
  • I think I scrapped this idea at some point, I don't remember exactly what it was about.
• Disabled Messiah:
  • This was about human evolution, and how increased brain size marked leaps in evolution, combined with the knowledge that autisim is basically unregulated brain growth as a child. The idea that the next leap forward might be strange and unpalatable to us currently, but what is “good” is completely contextual, and in the world of the future there may be advantages we can;t anticipate to things we currently view as disabilities.
• Bracketing:
  • The tension between worrying about environmental crises and living one's life. Its necessity but also the possibility of ignoring important problems because they are distressing.
• Sad Geniuses:
  • About the sacrifice required to make progress happen. Is progress usually the product of obsession and unhappiness, and is that the reason new technology can often be cynically used to make things worse?
• Should be Happier:
  • People in the West are complicit in exploiting the third world whether they like it or not, causing environmental degradation and hardship for those people. But they are statistically less happy. About whether ill-gotten riches can make you truly happy.

Looking back, a lot of these initial ideas were folded together or made into certain sections of songs later in the writing process. They're less about the nuts and bolts of biodiversity than they are about the larger cultural forces that are creating and perpetuating the crisis. Maybe that's because I thought the songs would end up too dry and factual if they were all about Amazonian frogs or something, but I think it was mainly because I realized people already feel like the situation is bad and want to change it. They more needed to be made aware of institutional and systematic reasons things got this way in order to feel like they can change things.

I wanted to include my struggle to process all of this data and come to conclusions about what we ought to do because I think most people have become concerned about environmental problems at some point, so it was relatable, and also because then it could be an example of what people could be doing to try and change things for the better.

That said, I definitely didn't want to come from a place of moral superiority. One of the hardest things I found was realizing that even while trying to be more sustainable in little ways, the mere accident of being born into our society as it is makes us complicit in all of the harm it does. One article I read that I found funny in a book about teaching sustainability was about how a museum had switched the candy bars sold in their vending machines to ones that didn't contain (apparently) over-exploited, environmentally damaging palm oil in their ingredients. The funny part was the self-congratulating tone of the article, as if that was the last unsustainable part of their operation and now they were completely done. Still, it was something. And doing something is better than doing nothing.

There is a tension there, in wanting to be a part of the solution, less complicit in the problems our society causes, and not knowing what the best action is to take. I wanted my songs to express this frustration while also reminding people that any action is good action. Even action that later research proves was ineffective can be a good thing, since it builds frameworks and relationships for subsequent collective action, and makes people feel hopeful and that real change is possible. These are the issues that I wanted to explore as I refined and added to the song ideas I was pulling from my research.

I Return This Respect

Ecological economics is not just a specific branch of the field (or the economics of a specific type of goods), it's a completely new set of priorities, a massive overhaul of the goals and mechanisms of the financial system. It was one of the most in-depth fields of research I pursued for this album. This was partly because I never took a class in economics, so I had to learn something about the traditional models before I could understand how ecological economics changed them.

The most fundamental premise of ecological economics is that we have not correctly valued ecosystem services under the current system. Farmers, for example, know the value of having micro-organisms in the soil break down waste and re-fertilize the ground, but pay nothing for the privilege, and wouldn't be compensated if something kills these organisms. Nestlé can make millions bottling water that they only pay a tiny administration fee for. Ecosystem resources have various barriers to being valued properly in our current monetary system. Some resemble traditional commodities, as the pollination industry does: beekeepers are paid to tour their bees around North American farms to help the plants reproduce. But other resources, like air, are consumed whether we like it or not and people in a region don't have a choice of what quality they get.

Ecological economics classifies and recommends how to incorporate ecosystem products and services into the current system, but there is an even more fundamental problem: economics is currently predicated on growth to drive it forward. This is against biological and physical science that suggests that the Earth can only support so many people. Technology may continue to increase the efficiency with which we use resources, and thus the planet's carrying capacity may continue to grow incrementally, but there are limits on the amount of several key resources on Earth. Metal may continue to be recycled, but there is only so much available on the planet and 100% recycling is physically impossible. So, practically, the world economy will have to shift from one that expects everything to grow perpetually to one that expects things will merely sustain themselves.

Proponents of ecological economics express this like a police investigator might: we can do this the easy way, or the hard way. The hard way involves doing nothing to change until we run straight into the carrying capacity, and entails at the very least extreme hardship and privation for most, and more likely war and cultural regression in the struggle for limited resources. The easy way involves preemptive measures to enact the change to a sustainable economy ahead of time, incentivizing positive change with government money and by adapting existing financial institutions.

This is one of the places I had to do some learning about how "our" (I imagine Canada is similar, but the book focused on the U.S.) current system works. One of the major financial changes ecological economics recommends is giving the government back the power to issue currency. I didn't understand that the current U.S. system gives that power to private financial institutions, who can then sometimes lend ten times the money they create because of the fractional reserve system, where banks are only required to have something like 10% of the cash they lend to their clients on hand at any given time. So, for every dollar created, they can lend it to tend different people at once and collect interest from all of them. Ecological economics advocates changing this system so that governments control the issue of currency, as a means of paying for the transition to a sustainable economy: offering financial incentives to conduct research and change environmental practices.

The problem is a lot of people benefit from the current system, and are wilfully ignorant or cynically selfish about their role in perpetuating an unsustainable growth-based economy. They either don't believe we'll ever need to control growth, or think that when the crash comes the wealth that they've accrued will put them in a better position to survive it comfortably. And the people that will be hit hardest by unsustainability and environmental degradation aren't just determined by wealth, but by geography as well. It's apparently a fact that both 80% of the world's population and its biodiversity are located in the tropics, but global wealth is massively concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, in Europe and North America. In studies that try to estimate the effects of global warming in economies and productivity, most admit that it will either have little impact or a moderately positive effect above the 49^th parallel. The growing waves of immigration into northern countries from those feeling the most detrimental effects seems like the only logical step for those people to take, and considering much of the environmental degradation in the tropics is driven by the need for raw materials and cheap labour from northern countries, immigration quotas and restrictions seem massively unfair.

This is all really big picture stuff I'm not sure I've fully understood, but my readings in ecological economics were very eye opening. Seeing such scary data presented so matter-of-factually, realizing how decentralized power is in our system and how little influence governments have to change things compared to private companies that are benefiting from the status quo; now I began to understand why one of the biologists I had read earlier on blamed environmental degradation on “a lack of democracy in the economic sphere.” The situation seemed dispiriting, but not completely hopeless, since people's individual behaviours and spending habits still have tremendous power to affect everything, including the massive private companies.

I knew I wanted my songs to contain some of the things I'd learned about biodiversity over the course of my research and inspire people to care more about it. But I didn't want to scare people needlessly or recommend specific courses of action since new research often changes what we think the best thing is to do. So I read some books on teaching environmental education as my last field of research before starting to pull some song ideas out. I read some lesson plans and course outlines from teachers, and several took pride in “creating a narrative arc” that would inspire student engagement. It seemed more like emotional manipulation to me. They talked about purposely depressing their students in the beginning of the course, only to inspire them at the end with hopeful reading, trying to create students with an appreciation for the seriousness of environmental problems and the belief that they can personally go out and change things.

It seemed like my instincts matched up more with the educational theorists than with these narrative-creating environmental teachers. The theorists I read emphasized critical discussion which retained student agency, the right to choose what behaviour individual students thought was best. The goal of environmental education, according to them, was to create students that are able to solve environmental problems, that have the capacities to think critically, discuss with others, and act politically and collectively to find an implement solutions.

So environmental education shouldn't be about telling you to recycle, or else. It should be about explaining the problem recycling attempts to solve, the potential consequences of not acting, the ways we've though about solving the problem. As the student, you should understand why recycling is a good thing to do, and then you will choose to do it. But what did this mean for writing songs? Maybe I could write songs that demonstrated the challenges of considering environmental issues, and focus on building a capacity for critical thought in my listeners through example? After such extensive research, I sure was acutely feeling the challenges of thinking about solutions to environmental issues, so I decided to try that.

This World Is Not Real

Like I said in my last post, the paleontologists came to the same conclusion the biologists did: it is essential that we care about biodiversity, and doing so requires a moral discussion on the order of ending slavery, declaring free speech, or striving for gender equality. All things that aren't really in their field! But they are in the field of moral philosophy, which is what I read next.

The moral philosophers I read sounded a lot like the environmentalists, except they hadn't concluded anything yet. They lamented humanity's lost connection to nature, but said the role of philosophy is in getting people to choose how much culture and nature they want, based on what science and economics tell them will happen. The thing is, science tells us environmental degradation, left unchecked, will ruin all of the cultural advancements we've made. Political theory says that in crowded environments where resources must be tightly controlled, democracy is unlikely: submarines, spaceships and the like are all military dictatorships. So we need to take this into account. But it seems like ethicists are more around to help people figure out what they want than to tell them what they should do. Which makes sense, but it's somewhat disappointing; one discomfiting thing about growing from a child to an adult is becoming your own moral authority, then realizing all our rules were just made up by other adults.

Ethical dilemmas in environmentalism are still possible, like when an elk was stuck in a tar pit in a US national park, and calling out for help before it was ripped to pieces by wolves. The consensus seems to be that humans should alleviate as much suffering that they are responsible for as possible, while respecting the wildness of animals. But what if the elk is from a locally threatened population, reduced by hunting, pushed to this dangerous habitat by encroaching settlement? What about the wolf's right to eat? He may be endangered as well. Merely extending human ethics to wild animals belittles or sabotages the harsh Darwinian realities of wild life, but the suffering that humans cause other animals is complicated and requires consensus built through discussion and moral prioritizing.

How do we make these decisions, though? It has to do with how we see ourselves as a species. I read some more philosophy that dealt with humans specifically, asking questions about whether or not we're special and if so, what we should do about it. From a certain perspective, we have escaped the Darwinian trap. Changes in our own behaviour are dictated by cultural, not biological evolution. We have self-reflective capacities we have yet to ascribe to any other species. And we have the power to affect the planet to an extent not shared by any other macro-organism.

Philosophers of human life generally agree that we have the choice not to follow natural selection in the same way that an amoeba does. We can choose to self-impose limits on the effect we have on the planet. If overpopulation would have disastrous socio-political consequences, it's in our best interests to do so. The most optimistic of them said that we are the only species that can prolong the Earth's window for supporting life, beyond what would naturally occur, because our science can help us engineer the climate. So we have the capacity to be the most positive species on the planet!

Offsetting this optimism was a strange and fascinating argument from astrophysicist J. Richard Gott. He attempted to determine whether humans would continue to increase in number and sophistication; whether we were a true exception. Dealing as astrophysicists do in competing theoretical explanations where scientific tests are impossible, all he could conclude was whether or not we should believe that we are exceptions, whether it was likely or not. He found that it was very unlikely, given the current population explosion, that it would continue. He made it clear that he didn't think humans would necessarily go extinct soon, but that they were unlikely to keep increasing.

The way he did this was argue that if the life we are living was picked at random from all of the human lives that have happened and will happen in the future, ours is most likely to be chronologically somewhere in the middle. Assuming we were thrown into one of the lives, it would be unlikely to be one of the first 5% of human lives, or one of the last 5%. And yet humans have existed in relatively modest numbers until the last few hundred years. So Gott argues that we should be sceptical of any potential future that imagines the population will continue to grow or even stay this high for a long period of time, since a significant percentage (10%?) of the human lives ever estimated to have existed are being lived right now.

This is a weird type of argument I was not familiar with, and one that seems likely to be wrong at first glance. After all, you could have made the same argument at any point in human history, and with hindsight you'd always be wrong. But it isn't claiming to predict anything, it's just saying that we shouldn't base our decisions on the theoretically unlikely event that the human population will continue to increase or stay at current levels for a long time. That conclusion actually seems pretty reasonable, despite the fact that humans continue to seem like an exception. We may well be, but we seem to be approaching the carrying capacity of an increasingly fragile Earth. And we are not yet close to colonizing other worlds, so this is a hard limit (technology-dependent) for now.

So far I'd seen environmentalists, biologists, paleontologists, and philosophers weigh on the problem of the loss of biodiversity. One thing they all had in common was they recommend immediate action, and the second thing they had in common was passing the buck of actually enacting the necessary change to the political and economic spheres. So I knew I needed to learn more about that; not only what we need to change, but the ways the current system makes change difficult.

A Summer Reading List

I just turned 26. When I was in high school our environmental education was very good, compared to what has been taught for most of human history. Silent Spring had been out for decades, and most people had seen An Inconvenient Truth. We knew a lot more about the science of the environment, and as students we were painted a bleak future of doom-soon extrapolating graphs. The urgency of the material and environmentalist exhortations of individual action was undercut by our teachers' (sometimes unconcealed) feeling of powerlessness. Scaring people in environmentalism is a double-edged sword; you push some people into action, but for many others it becomes easier to detach emotionally: “we're all screwed, so what do I care?” And the more dire predictions you use, the more like a millenarian cult leader you sound. We're running out of tungsten! No more lightbulbs! Then it turns out LED lights are more energy efficient anyway. People stop listening when you're constantly predicting a rapture that never comes.

And yet this was the tone of much of the environmental and biological literature I read for this project. Even when dispelling myths like the 50,000 species some say are going extinct a year (which is based on a completely made up number), one of their primary concerns is inspiring donations and grants for their research. Not that this is a bad thing; research on current extinctions is very important, and the true number that occur per year is undoubtedly still a scary one. But knowing that the articles in a lot of the books were recommending very specific courses of action made me warier of them. If not the numbers themselves, but the picture they were painting with them. I hate being sold, even on a good cause. I'd much rather come to the same conclusion on my own.

Even so, biologists talking about the current human-led biodiversity loss basically agreed that convincing people of the importance of biodiversity loss is the foremost challenge of the 21^st century. If I'd originally been asked to say why biodiversity is important, I wouldn't have had a ready answer but I could have reasoned my way into a few. Now I had several: biologists, eager to convince readers of the importance of biodiversity, have long lists of reasons why it's important. They all made sense and yet, I kept thinking, the species we have lost in recorded history have mostly been localized, fragile ones. Island species, ones with very specific eating habits or habitats, ones without much competition. It's easy to romanticize the loss of the dodo, but hard to see what the extinction of a strange flightless bird on a single island means for the future of our planet. As did more practical concerns like cures for diseases that have yet to be discovered, compounds for industry that have yet to be extracted from endangered Amazonian beetles. And more abstract ones, like the existence of a tipping point which once passed will cause massive chains of extinction. Mourning the loss of things we don't have yet and theoretical problems we may face; I could see why getting people to care about these things would be a challenge!

Ironically, it took me reading less alarmist paleontological sources to start to get worried. Especially when they came to the same conclusions as the biologists had. The history of mass extinctions is interesting; we know of at least five that meet the threshold we created, but large extinction events have been happening almost continuously since there has been life on Earth. Paleontologists are generally divided on their causes, but I read good summaries of their consensus opinions.


Two things that I learned stuck out to me. One was just how variable the Earth's climate has been over both the short term and long term. The gas composition of the atmosphere, the temperature, the sea level and its chemical composition, all of these things fluctuate massively all the time. The current sea level is almost the lowest it's ever been in the Earth's history, as is the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. It surprised me that even though the short term increase in CO2 that we worry so much about may have dire implications for our planet, in terms of hundreds of millions of years, a lack of CO2 is predicted to be a bigger problem, as trees gradually convert virtually all of it into oxygen. It was also fascinating how much life determines its own conditions. Changes in microorganisms can completely shift chemical conditions in the oceans, for example. Runaway reproductive success for one type of organisms was always a key component in theories of mass extinction.

Paleontology is all about time scale, and the long one is often counter-intuitive. Paleontologists generally agree that a large meteorite only had a hand in one of the mass extinctions, the C-T one that killed the dinosaurs. Except the fossil record seems to show that most dinosaurs were already extinct by then, and only two groups were wiped out. Like when I researched the near-extinction of the bison and found evidence that their numbers had already been falling for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, extinction seems to not usually be that dramatic. More often, it's a gradual fading away of an old species in its sleep rather than a young species in its prime.

That said, cascading chains of extinction can and have taken out otherwise successful species. The second thing I found striking was that in mass extinctions, there was always an accompanying drop in biomass, the amount (not diversity) of life on Earth. Maybe this is obvious, but I didn't see why having lots of types of organisms go extinct would necessarily mean there would be less tons of living stuff, worldwide. If some things were out-competed by others, aren't successful species then more numerous to make up for it? Apparently yes, but not in the long term, because of the extreme variability of the Earth's climate. So if Australia gets a couple degrees cooler, the cane toads, a newly introduced species, might all die because they can't take it, whereas the older established species that they wiped out would have survived (because the very fact that they're old species means they've probably survived a similar cooling period in the past).

This fact, that species exist places because they are best suited to live there in the long term, and that allowing them to be extirpated can create lifeless wastelands in the relatively short term, really convinced me. Life is just something that's managed to make solar energy useful to itself, hung on through severe climactic variations, and even had a hand in dictating its own conditions on Earth: creating an atmosphere, making the planet able to better sustain life. It's totally possible for the efficiency at which life converts solar energy into a variety of living things to fall apart until, like Mars, it's just sunlight hitting bare rock. The less biodiversity we have, the more delicate our balance, the more dependent we are on current climactic conditions staying the same. And they're always changing, that has never happened! We need as many players as possible ready to step up when their time comes, and then fade into the background when others are better suited, slowly changing and branching out to be ready for when they're needed again.

Solid New Intro

If my last album MB-LP was an album as a writing project, trying to think myself into the heads of people who saw the world very differently from me, then my next album Extinct! is an album as a research project. An omnivorous, note-taking binge on the way different academic disciplines deal with environmentalism and the way we think about the impact humans are having.

I started with a question my brother made fun of me for even asking: “why is extinction a bad thing? Why is biodiversity good?” Intuitively, it seems obvious, but I didn't feel like I could explain it to people with evidence, off the top of my head. I felt some urgency to be able to do that, especially because I'd taken a few classes in Environmental History while studying at McGill University, and that wasn't that long ago.

Fun fact: I'm writing this while on tour, on a bus rolling through Penetanguishene, ON. That's where, in 1904, someone saw the very last passenger pigeon in the wild. Passenger pigeons, along with the bison, are a classic example of how the mighty can fall. They were, for a time, the most common bird in the world—ten billion, maybe, in their North American Habitat—and now there are none. A little longer and sleeker than the rock doves that are our common pigeons today, they got together in flocks of staggering numbers. A continuous sky-river of birds a mile wide could take three days and nights to pass over. To exist in such close quarters and large numbers, they basically acted as automatons: throw a rock at the birds flying over, and they would swerve to avoid it, but for the next three days the birds following would mindlessly deviate in the same way.

So is it a bad thing there are no Passenger Pigeons anymore? If you're a passenger pigeon, then unquestionably. If you're a human, it gets more complicated. The birds had been around in modest numbers since the Pleistocene, that is, thousands of years, before exploding into the most numerous birds on earth. Their biggest competition for food and habitat was humans. They fed on the same tree products, seeds, and nuts as the indigenous people of North America did, and flocked together to communicate where this irregularly occurring food could be found. Finding this food required large, unbroken areas of forest which were surprisingly hard to come by in pre-Colombian North America, since native people were constantly burning the forests to create lots of boundaries between ecosystems where a variety of types of food can be found.

The arrival of Europeans changed the balance between humans and pigeons drastically. The diseases that spread across North American trade routes travelled faster than the newcomers themselves, killing a huge number of natives and removing the passenger pigeon's largest competitor for food and habitat. The forests, left unchecked, grew into huge expanses across which larger flocks of passenger pigeons could range. Their numbers exploded, and European settlers regarded them as both a nuisance (the Jesuits in New France got the pope to excommunicate the birds from the Catholic Church because of the damage they caused to crops) and a boon (pigeon meat was a major source of food and the original ingredient in Quebec's national dish, tourtière), but the birds were always recognized as a force to be reckoned with.

The rise of the passenger pigeon is a classic example of what ecologists call a “weed species”, an organism that takes a niche and runs with it in a short period of time. That should sound familiar. Humans are the ultimate weed species, and the speed at which European settlement in North America began to put pressure on the newly abundant passenger pigeon again, after the demographic collapse of the natives gave them a niche, is what doomed the bird to extinction. The passenger pigeon's extreme social/behavioral adaptation was necessary, since they lived in such dense flocks that absolute conformity was the only way to function. But their rigid patterns of behaviour also meant they weren't able to adjust to smaller flock sizes and sections of forest fast enough to save their species from going utterly extinct. Captive flocks kept in pens would quickly stop reproducing, and the re-settlement of North America necessitated the breakup of the massive forests and the control of species that would threaten the settlers' food supplies.

This year, in a museum in Glasgow, Scotland, I saw my first passenger pigeon. It was stuffed. Should I be sad that that's the only way I'll get to see them? There are still other types of pigeon around, and some people even hate those. Was passenger pigeon vs. human a fair fight, weed specie against weed specie, that we happened to win? Humanity's biggest competition for food these days is the carrying capacity of the planet. We're exhausting not just short-term, opportunistic species like the passenger pigeon, but long-established ones too. In isolation, losing the passenger pigeon might be a small thing, but is it symptomatic of a problem we have as a species? Are wee too good of a weed species? Are we just as mindless in throwing the rocks as the birds are in swerving to avoid them?

These are the sorts of questions I had when I started researching this album, as well as more ethical questions. How bad is it to make something extinct? At what point is it an acceptable trade-off? It seems natural to be rooting for humans, but how do you balance long-range concerns about the quality of life of future generations and the health of the planet with the needs of people living right now? Harder still, how do you convince other people to think about these things when they act?

I got a bunch of books out of various libraries and started making notes. I wasn't concerned with song ideas, just gathering information, collecting theses, and remembering the most interesting examples. I knew the project would be multi-disciplinary because I was asking all kinds of questions, coming at extinction and environmentalism with many different sets of concerns. So I decided to focus on specific aspects of extinction in turn. I would first read current biology and environmentalism to see what scientists studying biodiversity right now were saying about its importance. Then I would study paleontology and the history of earth's mass extinctions, to see what had already happened and what longer-term processes were at work. Then I would read philosophy and anthropology. Why do humans drive things to extinction, how bad is it ethically, and do we have the capacity to act differently? I then wanted to incorporate economics, as a way of looking at how we choose to act and value our environment. And throughout, I would be paying attention to the educational aspect; how the different disciplines were presenting their material, whether they were trying to inspire change or action, and how. I figured this would be important if I wanted to present some of what I learned in my songs.

Metal and the Law

Turns out I wasn't done with the album, though, because my friend Martin in Montreal insisted I make physical copies rather than "Beyoncé-ing" another record. And even Beyoncé has copies of her self titled album for sale now, so I had no convincing reply. He'd gotten an EP and a full length album recorded by his band Alexeimartov pressed onto vinyl, and was looking to put other artists out on his fledgling label. So MB-LP became a real LP, Queen Mary Records #003. An ambitious amount of zeros.

Martin bankrolled the whole operation, and had the smallest possible order of records (100) pressed at Trutone Mastering in New York. Luckily my 16 tracks were short enough to fit on an LP, and I sent him unmastered versions of the tracks so they could master them specifically for vinyl. I know there's some curve they use to attenuate the bass when they cut the record that gets reversed at playback, but having never done it before I figured it'd be better to let them do it.

I'd never decorated a record jacket before either though, but for some reason I decided I didn't mind trying that. I'd already made the labels for the records out of some doctored graphs from a psychology textbook, and I made album art to be printed onto jackets: an old photo for the front and a picture of my notes on the back. I could have easily paid a print shop or duplication service to make them for me, but I decided to go with a different design that I could manufacture myself.

I'm not totally sure why. Partly it's because I still have a whole pile of CDs left over from the first time I had jackets made, and thinking about them sitting, cold and identical, in a box in the crawlspace makes me feel hopeless. Another part is that the music is homemade, with no one who knows what they're doing involved from conception to sending the audio in, so I felt like the package should be too. I feel better selling them if they're also one-of-a-kind works of physical art. The third reason is because I'm an idiot.

My new idea for album art wasn't exactly simple. The front and back were each divided into 16 coloured squares and lines, respectively, one for each personality type. The titles, track listing, and acknowledgements were printed on that background. So I bought the right number of spray paints and painstakingly cut paper stencils for all the shapes and text involved. With a dry time of around 10 minutes, and all of the text being double printed black on white, it was a 13-step process. I made a prototype but found that the edges of the text were fuzzy and hard to read.

There was no way to weight down my stencils enough to make even contact with the jacket, especially with the tiny cutouts and compressed paint shooting at it. I decided to make rigid wooden frames for the background painting, and silkscreen the text instead. The wooden frames worked well, as long as I scraped off the built-up layers of paint periodically. One thing I noticed when I started doing batches of jackets was that, even in a garage with the doors open to the winter weather and fans going, the fumes were fierce. I got a respirator the second day and my blinding headaches and dizziness disappeared.

I had to keep most of my paint in the house, since the garage was freezing. But I worked my way through a hundred and nine jackets, only accidentally flipping the colours on five of them. Next I needed to print the text on them, so I built myself silkscreens out of sheer curtain fabric and bits of wood, then figured out how to expose the screens using the photo emulsion method. You spread washable blocking paste onto the whole screen, prepare transparencies of your art and place those on top, and then burn the screen in with a high wattage bulb. I got a couple neat 250W bulbs for this, but they both burnt out within a couple minutes of use so I wound up using a normal 60W bulb.

The light hardens the emulsion except where your art has protected the screen, so you can wash just those parts out and you have a fabric stencil of your art. I built a hinged press to hold the screens in place and started doing test prints. My results were miserable at first; even with professional tools I bet that technique is pretty important in silk-screening, but with my jury-rigged contraption good pressure and delicate shimming was the only difference between perfection and puddles of illegible ink.

A five step process turned into nine steps as I found that I had to break the screens into sections to get them to print reliably. I was able to touch up most mistakes with a tiny paintbrush, but 8 of the jackets were irretrievably ruined. That still left me a hundred good ones, though, and that's all I needed.

They really are all unique, since my style changed over the course of each step in the process. I went from thick application of colour and rigid adherence to the lines to a lighter, airier approach. None of them are perfect, but I remember them all. Perfection is boring anyway. 

Here's an ESSAY

The last thing I always wonder when I finish an album project, and especially one so conceptual as MB-LP, is if it was successful. It's a given that I learned a ton while making it: about integrating research into my writing, writing from different perspectives, composing with loops, mobile recording, and mixing. So in that sense it was successful. The product itself, though, is harder for me to come to grips with. Unlike a lot of songwriters that talk about their songs as being like their babies, once I'm done working on a song I don't feel paternal affection for it, at least not in terms of unconditional love. If I'm in the right headspace, I can appreciate the thing I made, but it doesn't really tell me anything new about how good it is.

I need other people for that, and at this point I haven't had much feedback about the MB-LP material at all. Even people who've heard it aren't automatically forthcoming with specific opinions, which doesn't bode super well. If someone loves something, they'll tell you. But my suspicion is that even if what I've made is somewhat enjoyable, it will become more so the more the listener understands about its construction and its aims. That takes time, and charitable listening, two things that are in pretty short supply outside of people who already know and like you.

I tried to have something immediately appealing or arresting about the songs on MB-LP, but I definitely feel that there are things I could have done to make the songs catchier. Some I've avoided on (probably misguided) moral grounds: lyrical and structural repetition, especially for looping music, is at a minimum, there aren't a lot of cool sounds for the sake of having cool sounds, or decadent processing on the tracks. Others I should have done but didn't, like explore the possibilities of the loops more, write more songs to pare down from, play them live more times before doing demos. I'm sure I'm ignorant of still other ways, but I hope to learn them someday.

I made a decision to have this project be very conceptual, and to put that up front. The album and track titles are four letter codes, for goodness sake. Bot that said, my hope was always that the overarching concept wouldn't prevent the songs from standing up on their own right. I find it difficult to distil my ideas into something simple and communicable, and am not the best judge of when I've done so. I write and evaluate my lyrics on paper, which is not how listeners experience them unless they have a lyric booklet. And since I don't make CDs, uh, good luck with that.

My point is that a lot of the things I spend time and effort on aren't readily apparent, or require very specific knowledge or attunement to discern. And since most people don't have the time or energy to find them, I have to either temper my expectations of being generally appreciated or change what I focus on. Alternatively, I could insert another step in the process, after I have something I'm happy with but before anyone else is, where I find ways to convert test listener complaints into further accessibility. Having to do major revisions to things I already enjoy is a daunting prospect, but if I want people who don't know me to enjoy my music (and I think I do) I'm going to have to suck it up.

All this is premised by the idea that music isn't actually subjective. Or, if it is, then it's possible for a good thing to appeal to a wider range of subjective taste. Coming up with a plan of how to do this requires knowing who you currently appeal to, so you can determine what you can change without alienating those people while bringing new ones in. At my scale, this means talking to the few people who I know like my music, and trying to see what they think could be improved and what they find essential. I've noticed in the past that when I put a collection of songs together, the first five or ten people I ask will all praise different songs, and my personal favourite will never be one of them. So faced with this reaction every time, I've never been enthusiastic about choosing a direction and seeing if I can stick to it. MB-LP is an eclectic project by design, and I was hoping that in writing it I'd be able to pick the types of songs out that I enjoy writing the most. But I do have a sort of restlessness that makes me have to throw an angry song into the cutesy ones, or vice versa. And that goes for writing as well as performing; I hate to be one-note, and I hate to just fulfil expectations. So in trying for homogeneity I think I'm fighting a losing battle.

Definitely I do notice that I enjoy writing happy, uptempo songs more than in the past. I think when a lot of songwriters first start writing, they feel like writing when they're sad or lonely or anxious, and so those songs come the most naturally. For me at least, it took a while to feel authentic and comfortable writing in happier, less introspective modes. But now I am, and enjoying it, so there's some tangible evidence that I'm improving, or at least broadening my range.

So I guess what I've said here is that I think that making MB-LP was a valuable, fascinating experience, and that through it I've become more aware of ways I can write with greater success in the future. And sometime in the future, when I'm feeling self indulgent, I can grab some earbuds and remember what I thought sounded good back then.