LNOYL

The songs are better than before, and even though I know that for the most part they don’t sound like they were done in a professional studio, each new track I record becomes a forward leaning experiment. What if I record, then EQ the vocals this way instead? Does that work? What if I set up the big silver mic on the outer shell in another attempt to unbury the kick drum…and on and on. Each time something works, it is very sweet and self-sustaining. It propels you onto the next problem – the next thing to fix. Over time, I realize these things happen in phases – you find enough individual tweaks that work, then all of a sudden they all work together. It’s an all or none kind of thing in discreet steps. Even though you’ve got a long way to go, you want someone to realize that its starting to work. Once in a while, you want contact – to let someone know that your actually going somewhere.

There are two buildings adjacent to the back alley parking lot where I show up for work. The first building, which is a renovated house, is painted blood red, with black trim on the window frames. Apparently it’s where music lessons are held. I think its supposed to be a homage to the “Red House”, as in Hendrix’s “There’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby stay”. The house instead looks vampire cartoonish and sinister, like a west coast crack shack painted by its tripped out inhabitants. Because of the impossible cost of real estate out here, crack shacks regularly compete with legit houses on the market. No kidding – http://www.crackshackormansion.com/original.html. Can you tell which is which?

The apartment building right beside the red house is one of those standard 70′s concrete constructions, about nine floors high, with black wire balconies lined up facing the parking lot. Because the balconies face the sun for a good portion of the day, and there is no central air, the people who live inside shade themselves by lining the smaller windows with tin foil, and clip up queen size bedsheets over the large sliding glass double doors that lead outside. When you watch the sun rise and set, and see the shadows shroud or light bounce off the balconies, there is something that you begin to notice, that eventually becomes undeniable. It’s not the sparkle of light off the tin foil, the assorted plants, or even the fact that someone has left a plunger in an disassembled American Standard toilet that just sits there exposed on the third floor. One day at work, I look carefully at the balconies, and I blurt out to Jolene, “there are stains all over those bedsheets – that building should be called “sperm towers”. The name sticks.

I occasionally buy guitar strings from the music store next door that owns the red house. There is a guy who works there who I chat with, and I eventually meet his wife as well – they’ve got a new kitty. They are a young couple who married pretty early in life. He plays guitar, she plays piano. We talk about music a lot, and I get the sense that working in the store is not exactly his most favourite job. It’s not anything he says in particular; its just that once the muse bites, any other job becomes hard time. I get motivated when one day they invite me over for dinner; it’ll be great to get some feedback from fellow musicians I think to myself. They have another friend over as well, a girl named Christine. She’s pretty cute and she’s going to school to become a nurse. We all pile in a car afterwards, and we are heading out to see a show in a converted theatre. On the bill is some guy who plays wonders on his acoustic guitar and sings his story. It’s not my favourite genre of music, but I haven’t yet been to see any live music since I’ve arrived on the island. On the way there, I pull out my CD of songs that I’ve done so far. I’m excited to have a small group of people casually listen to them. He takes it, but then hands it back to me almost immediately. “We are going to listen to this before the show he says,” as he pulls out another CD. We listen to down tempo folk on the way there. He tells me that he’s given up on trying to play rock music, and has escaped the attempts to emulate his heroes. I cant argue with that, but the show is kind of unremarkable. Not that the music is bad, but the message within it just doesn’t resonate with where I am at; I need things to provoke and push me. It’s ok if a song can console, but I don’t want the music to tell me that “everything’s going to be alright” just because it always must be so.

I begin sending Dareck the recordings I’ve been working on. Most of the time, he has one of two responses. He can ignore them completely, and I receive absolutely no feedback whatsoever. Alternatively, an mp3 will show up in my inbox, in which he has added on some really good vocals. If he is really into something that I’ve sent, he’ll on occasion reinterpret it and record an acoustic version, with the aid of an old AKG stage mic his friend Aaron gave him (Aaron’s son is holding the chainsaw on the front cover of the album). I often like his versions better than my own. Darecks best feedback is all or none, and anything in the middle is often hard to interpret (any particular recording assessed as great for any reason can also be claimed to be a failure three to six months later). He’s one of the few people I know who shows sustained interest in creating music, and in that sense he pushes me to do better.

One day, Dareck calls me up, and tells me that he has built a robot. His evolution of robot building is quite unorthodox. His first was a gigantic, 9 foot tall suit, that you could wear. It was made of huge sheets of foam, and was very costume like. He actually built two of them, and when they took to the street, he said people were stopping to take pictures. His second set was a pair of miniatures, based upon his larger suits. They were made of felt, paper and erasers. He animated them for a short video he made. The third was actually a real robotic arm he built on set for a film, that functioned via hydraulics and was made of metal. A pretty steep curve in robot building that was. Little did I know that his writing was going to take off in a similar way. Overwinter, and into spring of 2006, Dareck was going to connect a train of old 80′s electronic equipment that would set his song writing off in a new direction altogether…