Four-Track Excavations

[ryan]

This past week, I started a new project that will probably be ongoing for awhile. For various reasons, I decided to create a document that catalogues and discusses every song I've written. Mainly, I'm doing it for my own gratification -- but then I figured, since I was undertaking such a massive project, I might as well write it in a fashion that others might find entertaining and informative.

A few things prompted this new project. First of all, I've been unemployed since my last contract ended on April 1. Needless to say, I've had a lot of time on my hands, and a lot of anxiety circling around looking for an outlet.

Secondly, the back room of Ben's house flooded during the hard rains Monday night of last week. Since that's where we keep all our computers and musical equipment, it was quite the emergency. Fortunately, nothing was damaged except for the carpet, but as a result, we had to move all our computer stuff out of the room until Ben fixes the foundation of the house, which might be never.

So, I rearranged my bedroom to make way for my corner computer desk, my mixing board, my bass and guitars. It took awhile to establish some kind of Zen that would make my room feel habitable again, and not overcrowded.

In the process of all of this, it occurred to me to dig-out my Tascam Portastudio 424 MKII four-track recorder, which had been hidden away in the back of my closet, scarcely touched in the 21 months I’ve been living here. I gave it a new permenant home in my computer desk, then decided it would be a good time to revisit some of my old four-track recordings -- many of which I hadn't heard in years.

The first song I dug out was an old tune I recorded in 2000 called "Poseidon's Daughter." It was my stab at recording a Psychedelic Rock Epic. I'd labored over it for many months, recording track after track on one tape, bouncing some tracks to make room for others, and then mixing the entire four-track tape down to another cassette as a stereo-mix, just so I could squeeze-in another couple of tracks. Eventually, I'd decided that the song was complete except for the lead-guitar part. I remember trying a few different leads, not liking any of them, and in the process deciding that the entire song was too busy and overwrought. I abandoned the song as a lost cause. I stashed away the four-track master, and never made a single mixdown of the song. I wrote it off in my mind as my overly-ambitious epic that got derailed.

Listening to the song again, for the first time since August of 2000, was a strange experience. Like a catchy pop song recalled from childhood, only the basic melody and the big changes had stuck with me over the years; I’d forgotten all the quieter nuances. I’d forgotten the big keyboard entrances and exits that I’d worked so hard to perfect. I’d forgotten the fake-chorus, and the robotic-soul section, and the spooky transition that leads into the breakdown. I’d forgotten how well these parts all worked together. How could I have forgotten so much of something I had worked so hard on? How could I have dismissed it as a failure?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. All I know is, this isn’t the first time it’s happened. It happened a couple of years ago when I uncovered a song Paul Karleskint and I had recorded over at my house at 1310 West Edison. It happened again last July when I uncovered two songs Idiot Plot had recorded live in Matt Taylor’s living room. All these songs were complete and satisfying works. The two Idiot Plot tunes were probably the best songs we ever recorded together. And somehow, they had all slipped through the cracks in my memory, along with “Poseidon’s Daughter,” entirely dismissed and forgotten until re-discovered years after the fact.

The day after I excavated “Poseidon’s Daughter” from under my bed, I received an email from my dad, notifying me that local radio station KRMG was looking for a part-time soundboard operator. The help-wanted ad specified that they would like a CD from each applicant. This got me to thinking about my body of work, and I found myself wondering which of my recordings would best represent my audio-production skills? I thought about “Poseidon’s Daughter,” and the accomplishments that it represented, and although I knew I wouldn’t include that on the CD, I suddenly felt a kind of wholeness that I hadn’t felt in years.

I realized that I have been working for a very long time at being the best songwriter and sound-engineer I can be. I haven’t always been successful, and I’ve recorded many stinkers, but I think that I’ve hit the mark more often than I’ve given myself credit for.

Moreover, I’ve just begun to realize what a substantial body of work I’ve developed over the past decade. (Yes, it’s been 10 years since I wrote and recorded my first song – using my parents’ kereoke machine as a two-track recorder – in 1996!) It’s interesting to me, to look back and see what kinds of songs I was writing at different periods in my life, and then to look in my journals and see what else was going on around the same time.

So, with that in mind, I've decided to start an annotated catalogue of my own songs. Kind of a "song journal," listing all my stinkers and worthwhile efforts in chronological order, and recalling a bit about the recording of each song. Truthfully, this is something I've done anyway over the years, but not in any concerted fashion. I expect that this will be an occasional project, designed to occupy rainy weekends when I'm unemployed.

===

What does this have to do with this forum?

Well, I thought it might be fun to share this project with you guys. So, as I catalogue each song, I'll post a mixdown on my MySpace account, and I'll post the bit I've written about the song here. So far, I've only catalogued one song. It's called "Bloom," and I think few of you have ever heard it; perhaps I played it for Justin once. It is currently posted at www.myspace.com/collapsiblefortunes. Here's the bit about it:

[ryan]

Bloom
(currently posted at www.myspace.com/collapsiblefortunes)

I recorded this song in the garage behind the house where I used to live on Haskell Street. It was a cold Spring; I remember I could see my breath dissipating in front of me as I sang, and I had trouble keeping my hands warm enough to play the keyboard and guitar parts smoothly.

The entire song was recorded in flash of inspiration that lasted 5 nights. I recorded my drum-program on 3/25/01, and finished the last of the vocal harmonies on 3/30/01. I made my mixdown on 3/31/01, probably using Paul Karleskint’s 4-track as a mixdown deck.

That’s about all I can say for certain about the original recording of this song. I don’t seem to have left any production notes; I’ve scoured my journals and notebooks from that period, and I’ve found nothing. Not one mention of the song. Not one lyric scribbled in a margin. Nothing. The only reason I know the recording and mixdown dates is because I wrote them on the cassette tapes – and for some reason, I wrote the wrong year on the mixdown tape, which caused me a bit of confusion when trying to piece this timeline together.

While it’s fairly unusual for me not to leave any notes about the recording of a song, in this case I believe it was because I felt a deep inspiration unlike that which I’d felt before, and I wanted to make the most of it while it lasted. I remember how this song first occurred to me, as I was lying awake in bed one night, in my little corner of the attic, which had been renovated into a room which I shared with Matt Mayo.

I believe I was thinking about the “spoken word” section of “The Butterfly Dreamed the Man.” This song concerned a departure from the body, and an entrance into a higher plane of existence. I used to get very depressed back then, and I’d feel fragile and hopeless for days. In my mind’s eye, I conjured up an image of an angel sitting at the bedside of a dying child, and I imagined the angel singing a song of comfort, and the words the angel sang became the first verse of the song “Bloom”:

Hush now, don’t you cry.
There’s no need for tears anymore.
Wipe the sleep from your eyes.
In a moment, we’ll be headed for the door.

The next morning, I woke up with the melody and words still in my head, so I worked out the chords on my acoustic guitar, but only in their most rudimentary form. The arpeggios and riffs came much later. For months, that’s about all I had. I remember feeling kind of haunted by the song, knowing that it had a beautiful melody, but not knowing where to go with it. And, for that matter, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the song’s subject-matter. I mean, what the hell was it about? Was it a song to comfort dying children? Why would anyone want to listen to such a thing? And for that matter, what did it say about me, that I would want to write such a thing?

But the song persisted, and slowly accumulated little details that made it work better. The final bit of inspiration came when I was driving home one afternoon from a Red Shift Issue rehearsal in Muskogee. For whatever reason, the song had been turning itself over and over in my head for a few days, and I’d become obsessed with finding a decent chorus for it. I think I’d recently stumbled across the C / G / F appregio, and had fleshed-out some pre-chorus lyrics, and had become excited about the song’s potential.

On that afternoon drive home, I found myself singing the melody of the pre-chorus:

And all of the pain in your life
Turns into sand when you die
And covers the beaches where you first learned to swim…

And then, something amazing happened. The melody took over, and spun itself out of the 4-bar 6/8 feel of the verse and into a 3-bar 3/4 feel, bouncing along on the last 3 beats of each 3-bar phrase:

And you’ll see
The pieces complete
And you’ll know you’re just going over
Lifted from sleep.

The words didn’t all come to me at once, but the melody snapped into place like a lightning bolt. One moment, there was nothing but a verse with a loose-end. The next moment, there was a solid, crystalline chorus which not only complimented the verse, but also contributed some musical sleight-of-hand with its nifty time-signature shift.

I knew, immediately, that this was it. This was that definitive moment of conception that turned a handful of ideas into a song. I had no recording devices with me, and I was 45 minutes away from home, so I turned off the radio and hummed this single melody over and over again until I got back to the house, where I was able to make a quick recording of the idea on microcassette.

I’m not sure how soon after that I programmed the drums, or how soon after I completed the drum-program that I began recording. The only dates I know for sure are the ones written on the cassettes.

On December 5, 2002, I decided to create a digital mix of this song from my original 4-track master. I gave each of the tape’s tracks its own digital track, and then did some editing to allow for better use of compression and equalization effects. I did not re-record any of the instrumental tracks, but after listening to the original vocal tracks, I decided that my singing was off, and that I could do much better. So, I archived the original vocal tracks, and recorded new ones using Andy Jenson’s ADK A-51 condenser mic. While I’ve certainly tried this on other occasions to questionable effect (“Sold"), it was definitely the right decision for Bloom. The newer, digitally-recorded vocal tracks work much better than the original vocals ever did. The performance is better and more in-tune; and the sonic character of the vocals is more appropriate for the song.

The version currently posted on MySpace is the digitally-remixed one, containing the vocals recorded in 2002.

[Guest Justin]

Ryan,

If memory serves me (and trust me, it often doesn't), you played Bloom for me the morning we left for the Frey Street Festival in Denton. Perhaps it was another day; I'm really not sure. But anyway, the point here is that I've often found myself thinking about it since then. I remember feeling, well, I remember feeling completely surpassed. I don't mean that in any negative way with respect to the rest of your body of work. But I do remember thinking, wow, I can't do that at all. It's like when I'm watching some great basketball player doing something amazing. Now, I'm not at all interested in basketball, but it would take a fool not to recognize that what's being done is beautifully out of the realms of normal human experience. I felt that way when I heard this song. I felt the same way when I heard radiohead's Let Down for the first time. I thought, wow, that's something new and exciting, that I'll never be able to approximate. Anyhoo, I just wanted to reiterate what I felt then but may not have said: "Great tune, Cuz."

[jtmx1]

Holy Cow! That is a great song. So, this one of my two favorite songs that I've heard from you, In Absence being the other. Good stuff, man. And I get the feeling that Justin had, too: Totally beyond me. That rhythm guitar work is amazing! And you have such an ear for vocal harmonies.

Once again, my dream band is you, Justin, and I. What would we call ourselves if we ever did anything?

Jeff

[Thanin]

I have a question for your music types. About how long does it take for you to write and finish a song?

[jtmx1]

I don't want to hijack Ryan's wonderful thread, but here is a response to David:

I don’t know how to answer your question, David. Last Monday I wrote cope/datta in about an hour. This is just the musical musing part, not the recording. The first recording took about 5 or 6 hours. And I’ve probably devoted like 20 to 30 hours to it since. If I really tried to perfect it, I’d need another 20 to 30 hours. So, about 50-60 hours for a 3 minute song. That sounds about right. But keep in mind that I have really been pushing myself to just get things done and not sweat the small stuff. (So my current equation is something like 20hrs/finished musical minute.)

In the old days, I didn’t record at all. I just played and sang merely for pleasure; that was the product. After you play a song 200 or 300 times, it is easy to record a live performance. So when I recorded my first batch of songs on Mr. Hale’s 4-track (what kind was it? I’ve forgotten.) I think I recorded 5 songs in 3 or 4 days. In 1987 I recorded a three song demo with John T. Hull in an evening.

But those days were long ago. Computer recording gives so much freedom that you don’t really have to have any clear idea before you start. That is one of the virtues of 4-tracking (I am working on another post called “romancing the tape” in response to Ryan’s post): You really have to plot a recording of any complexity in advance. And that purifies your thinking considerably. But now, I can just hit record on the computer without even bothering about whether it would be a waste of tape. What is 20MB on a 160GB harddrive? And even if it sucks you can always delete it. Besides, mostly I just record my midi performances and these files are tiny.

But the unstructured nature of computer recording offers perils, too. On Corbenic, my 2003-? project, I drafted the whole thing very, very roughly then went back to the beginning and started redrafting and revising. The first song became clear quickly in maybe two more drafts. But I am still working on the second song, Drowned Nation. Last time I checked I was working on like the 30th draft. Aaarg! I kinda liked the first one, but I’ve got about 2 gigs of files recorded in like 100 folders over the last 3 years on just this one song. I stopped sending them to Justin after the 15th draft or so.

That’s why I am making myself write quickly and wrap things up quickly. As you guys know, I’m still having a problem with the second part.

Jeff

[ryan]

Wow, thanks for the excellent feedback, guys. In response to David, a song can take me anywhere from a couple of hours to years to write. I don't mean to sound maddeningly vague, but one of my personal favorite songs was written in two or three hours, the day before Thanksgiving, to be performed for my family. I've never recorded that one, unless you count the fact that Dad videotaped my live performance. In other cases, songs can circulate around in my head for years, slowly accumulating details that make them worthwhile. I'm pretty sure "Bloom" was at least a year old by the time I finally got a chorus for it.

[jtmx1]

Ryan,

Would you be willing to make some of your recordings available for download on myspace.com? If Bloom had been available for mp3 download, I would have grabbed it and put it in rotation, so to speak.

Thanks!

[ryan]

Sure. I've just enabled downloads for all the tunes on my MySpace account. Yeah, I've been holding off on making downloads available out of some vague concerns, but fuck that. What good is music if people can't hear it?

[jtmx1]

Getting it now! Thanks!

Hmm...It would only let me get Golden Goose Egg and By the Hour. I'll check back later.

[ryan]

Poseidon's Daughter

On Monday, January 31 of 2000, I recorded the first tracks of what would become my most ambitious four-track production. In my bedroom at my parents’ house at 1525 Lakeside Ridge Drive, I connected my DR-202 drum machine to my Tascam four-track, and recorded a stereo take of the drum-program I’d created for a song called “Poseidon’s Daughter.” This song would be my psychedelic glam-rock epic, I thought. It would propel itself for seven minutes with sunshine and motion; it would burst at the seams with sound, revealing new depths with each successive listen; it would spin layers of meaning and emotion around a silly story about a man falling in love with a mermaid. It would sound far-out, foolish, bold, worldly, and human. It would encapsulate my entire songwriting aesthetic, and would project the mental image I’d been cultivating of myself as a kind of funky, stoned balladeer of ambiguous sexuality. These were my intentions.

Over the next seven months, I would add a bassline, rhythm-guitar, fake pipe-organ, synth horns, vocals, and some lead-guitar. I would plan each track in advance, keeping diagrams of mixdown strategies for bouncing tracks. And then, in July of 2000, I lost interest. I wrote the song off as a bloated and embarrassing failure, and couldn’t bring myself to listen to it again for six years.

When I finally did rediscover the song in April of 2006, I was kind of taken aback by it. I was struck by how well it conveyed all of the intentions I had imbued it with. And moreover, I was struck by how well it worked as a piece of music. “How could I have considered this to be a failure?” I thought. I listened to it with a strange mix of emotions, feeling admiration for the composition, but also feeling humbled by it, as if I was listening to a song recorded by someone with talents superior to my own. I thought, "I would not be able to write this song today."

How do these things happen? It’s one of the great mysteries of life. We are doomed, I think, to appreciate our own abilities only in retrospect. Time and experience divide us from our moments of great achievement, and only then can we see those moments whole, and appreciate their value. Perhaps that’s how things should be; perhaps it’s a safety-device to help us keep our egos in check.

And perhaps, by examining those moments through the lens of hindsight, we can learn a lot about ourselves, and even reclaim a bit of what’s been lost.

***

In the winter of 1998, my Mom and Dad sold the house at 4908 Redbud Drive, where I’d grown up. They had commissioned the construction of a new house across town, up on a hill in a new housing-addition. I was excited for them, but not very excited about losing my last tie to the neighborhood where I’d spent my childhood. All my old friends from this street had gotten married and moved away over the years, and I’d lost touch with them. As I’d attended college and returned home for holidays and occasional weekends, I’d watched my brother’s friends get older and fall into wider circles of friends, losing interest in each other. Slowly but surely the days of wandering the woods, making home movies, and spending lazy summer days in each others’ backyards had slipped away from all of us. Life had grown more complicated. Still, I drew some small pleasure from walking the sidewalks I’d walked as a child, and from gazing into the woods, remembering those sticky summer days when my friends and I would scavenge our fathers’ tools to build hidden perches in the branches of trees, and would search for vines strong enough to hold our weight as we swung across the creek.

Those days were long-gone, and now that my parents were selling the house where I’d grown up, I was about to lose all physical connection with the memories.

I was still living with Mom and Dad at the time, and would in fact continue living with them for 15 more months. The previous spring, I had obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond. After graduation, I had taken a vacation with my parents to Cancun, Mexico, and then had returned to Sand Springs to live with them and work at the Sand Springs Leader, the newspaper where I’d worked an unpaid internship the summer before.

I worked hard at the Sand Springs Leader job – not necessarily because I liked it, but because I felt like I’d been handed an enormous responsibility. I was in charge of writing several feature-stories and supplying a number of photographs for each issue. I was also in charge of doing the front page layout. The newspaper was only published twice a week, but that was about all I could handle. I was a perfectionist in all aspects of my work, from my writing to the composition of my photos, to the layouts I designed. Unfortunately, this meant only that I made matters much harder for myself than they needed have been. I would agonize over the right questions to ask during an interview. Then I’d write and re-write stories several times before publication. On deadline night, I’d usually pull an all-nighter, submitting my pages and leaving the paper just after the crack of dawn, often calling-in sick the next day.

It was a vicious cycle, and it wore on me. But my work must have shown a certain quality, because by August, the Tulsa World had a representative from their Community World office call me and arrange a job-interview.

Long story short, I took the job at the Community World. It was better pay, and a bit less responsibility, since I was no longer responsible for doing any layout work. But I wasn’t happy. I wanted out. I wanted less of a career. I wanted the freedom to be irresponsible. I wanted to be in a rock band.

During college, I had discovered a love for writing music. It was something that had grown out of my childhood love of listening to music – Kenny Rogers, Alabama, the Dire Straits, the Beach Boys -- I would memorize the songs my parents listened to, and would sing the words to whoever would listen, usually doing my best to mimic the singer’s vocal qualities. As I got older, my tastes developed, and music began to mean much more to me than it had as a child. My heart contained a firestorm of emotions, and I needed a way to express them, channel them, and make sense of them. Through high school, I did this by writing short-stories. In college, I turned to songwriting. As I spent an increasing amount of time in pursuit of a sound and style I could be proud to call my own, my studies became of secondary importance to me. What I really wanted, foolishly, was to be in a band, and to carve-out a living for myself as a musician.

Of course, I knew my parents wouldn’t go for this, so out of respect for them, I finished college and nabbed that piece of paper which they had funded me to pursue. Unfortunately, this meant that I became the proud recipient of a future I didn’t want.

When I obtained a job at the Tulsa World Community World, it felt like I had worked myself one step deeper into a machine which would destroy me. I found it hard to concentrate. I couldn’t sleep at night. I started finding things to hate about the job. And mostly, I felt like I was living a life which wasn’t mine.

I couldn’t just quit my job. That would draw the ire of my parents, who were proud that I’d graduated college and had obtained a job working in my field of study. I couldn’t fathom of a way to explain to them why I was so unhappy. So, I subconsciously sabotaged myself. Through a combination of procrastination and perfectionism, I managed to turn in fewer stories each week than what the paper required of me. Soon enough, I was fired.

That was in November of 1998, and it was a strange day for me. The managing editor of the Community World took me into the back-office and gave me the news. It came like a sledgehammer to the stomach. But after I cleaned-out my desk and climbed back into the driver’s seat of my car, I thought, “I can go anywhere from here.”

I applied to several retail music outlets that day, then returned home to 4908 Redbud Drive, head hung low, to deliver the news that I’d been fired. My parents weren’t happy about it, but ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.

My parents sold the house on Redbud that December, and we moved into a small rent-house at 820 N. Cleveland Drive to await the completion of the bigger house they were having built. I had obtained a job working part-time in the music department of a Barnes and Noble store by that point, and although the money wasn’t enough to enable me to move out on my own, I was much happier; I was finding my own place in the world.

Quarters were cramped in the house on Cleveland Drive; the four of us – Mom, Dad, and my brother Derek – shared three bedrooms, a small living room, a kitchenette, and one bathroom. The back door out of the house was in my bedroom, so during waking hours there was intermittent foot-traffic through my room. Needless to say, none of us had much privacy, and I didn’t get much recording done while I lived here. However, this is where I first conceived of the chord progression, melody and lyrics that were to become “Poseidon’s Daughter.”

I clearly remember the moment of conception of this song, but I cannot recall the date, or whether or not I was sober. The progression strikes me as the kind of progression I often write when I’m stoned, but I had few opportunities to smoke-out while living at 820 N. Cleveland Drive. What I do remember is this: It was a sunny and warm late afternoon. I sat down on the swiveling office-chair in my room, picked up my Yamaha acoustic guitar, and chopped-out a series of chunky, bright major-chords. They felt big, and confident, and I could hear a melody linking them together. I fiddled with it a bit more, and within a few minutes had written what would become the chorus of “Poseidon’s Daughter.” I quickly found some words to go with the melody and played the progression several times, singing the words in various ways, all because it simply felt good to do so:

Why can’t I swim down there too?
What’s a land-born man to do
But sail away,
Sail away, sail away, sail away.

I can’t tell you precisely where these words came from, which words came first, or how they evolved, but I can tell you that these words spurred the rest of the song. I tended to favor ballads back then, and so I naturally tried to wind a narrative around the chorus I’d developed. The phrase “land-born man” fired off sparks in my imagination, and it quickly became obvious to me that this song was about a guy who’s in love with a mermaid.

Ah, I thought. What a great subject for a psychedelic glam-rock epic. How interesting it would be to write such a song. It seemed like a dangerous act, to tell such a fruity story in a longform rock song, and to do it in earnest. That was part of the thrill that inspired me to invest so much time and attention in this endeavor. I thought, “Here is a song that is utterly unique, and unquestionably mine.”

It seems that I should mention here another fact which undeniably informed the creation of this song, and which became woven throughout its themes as a not-so-hidden subtext: Since junior high and the onset of puberty, I’ve been struggling to come to terms with my own sexuality. I find myself attracted to guys, have never known feelings of sexual desire for women, and have never been comfortable about it. I have admitted to many of my friends and family that I’m gay, but I may never really be able to accept it about myself.

So that, to be very honest, was the major spark which fueled “Poseidon’s Daughter.” I was confronting my feelings about my own sexuality in a way which was encoded enough to allow me to feel comfortable about it. This was a major part of what inspired me to record the song, and what made it seem like such a daring endeavor.

After I’d recorded my drum-program on the four-track, I laid-down a scratch guitar track. Then I borrowed a bass-guitar from my friend Gary Kertis at Drum Central, and set to work recording the bassline. Gary’s bass was a left-handed hollowbody strung as a right-handed bass, which inconveniently put all the controls on the top. It had a tone and volume pots, and a set of three switches, which selected different pickups. Using it, in combination with my ART effects processor, I was able to capture a satisfying, hollow kind of tone. I had never recorded a bassline before – and had actually never attempted to write or play a bassline before – so recording the bassline for “Poseidon’s Daughter” was an exciting process of trial and error. Things clicked, and I was able to complete the bassline in about a week.

That was in February, and in March I moved out of my parents’ house and into a house owned by my friend Jeff Perkins. The attic of Jeff’s house had been renovated into a bedroom of sorts, one end extending above the kitchen, and the other extending over the bathroom, in an L-shape. I took up in the shorter end of the L, and my friend Matt Mayo took up in the longer end.

It was here, in the garage behind Jeff’s house at 3341 E. Haskell Place in Tulsa, where I continued recording “Poseidon’s Daughter,” and where I also recorded “Bloom” a few months after I’d abandoned “Poseidon’s Daughter.”

The garage wasn’t a large space, but it had sheetrock walls, and was fairly soundproof, so it was safe to record into the wee hours of the morning. Unfortunately, the garage also lacked heating and air-conditioning, so it got bitterly cold in the winter, and oppressively hot in the summer.

Living at 3341 E. Haskell Place put me directly in the middle of a circle of musicians. Matt Mayo played bass guitar. Paul Karleskint, who had a downstairs bedroom, played guitar. We three were in a band together, along with a drummer named Jeffrey Jones, who lived in Muskogee with his wife. We had started the project in April of 1999, and had given ourselves the moniker “351 Windsor,” after the renowned engine of the same name.

Living with two bandmates gave me access to lots of equipment I wouldn’t have had at my disposal otherwise. In particular, I used a keyboard of Paul’s, a keyboard of Matt’s, a couple of Matt’s effects-processors, and one of Paul’s amps, to complete the recording of this tune.

And that brings us to July of 2000, when I was finally nearing the completion of “Poseidon’s Daughter.” I’d recorded everything but the lead-guitar, and here I was stuck. I knew that a lead was necessary, at least during the introduction, because it was part of the central idea there – but whether the lead should continue throughout the song, I could not decide. I listened to the song over and over, and I arrived at no answers.

I’d played it for several friends, and for Derek, who immediately proclaimed that it was his favorite of my songs. I’d received good feedback in general – but then, I’d become involved in a band that was making very different music from what this song represented, and I really didn’t know what I’d do with it if I did complete it.

So then, one day I listened to it and decided it was crap. I was disappointed, but felt like it hadn’t all been for naught; I’d gleaned some good recording experience from the endeavor, and had learned a number of things not to do. This was, ironically, one of the factors which soon led me to steer away from longform songs, and to place a higher value on pop-efficiency.

And now, six years later, I listen to “Poseidon’s Daughter,” and I think I was wrong to dismiss it. For all the time and effort I’ve spent in distancing myself from this kind of songwriting, I think perhaps it was all for the wrong reasons. And that’s a pretty startling observation.