décor
About five or six months after my separation from Sabina, I started to face the fact that having a bunch of index cards scattered around in every room with notes about how upset I was just wasn't likely to be attractive to new romantic prospects that find their way into my apartment.
I mean, they weren't merely notes. A few of them were just notes in plain prose. I did that sometimes when I knew what I wanted to say but didn't know how to say it. More often though they were ideas that had been transformed into poetry, intended for use as lyrics, for songs I'd written about a breakup.
Yeah, not great.
But I wasn't about to pack them up yet either. The songs hadn't been made yet, which means I still had to record the vocals, and I think it's important to have the original notes in front of me when I do that. Also, by keeping them out, I'm consistently reminded that I have to finish them. The whole room cries out, "Your work's not done." I guess it wasn't much trouble to pack them up and stick them in a drawer if I had any reasonable expectation of alien invasion. But eventually they'd come out again. I remember thinking once that, if any prospect were to walk through the place and see some of these notes, at least they'd know what they were dealing with. I'm a songwriter. What do you expect?
But aside from mere appearances, I just didn't want to dwell on these new ones for too long. At that point, I was averaging a song a year. This is a misleading analysis, to be sure. From 2011 to 2015 I spent quite a bit of time working on Blasé with James, and I also worked on a (non-mobile-friendly) web component to serve as a counterpart to Idle in the year before its release. Idle was worked on intermittently before, during, and after I worked on those other projects. But still, that's a lot of time. I remember singing the early versions of "Fraud" on my piano in my parents' house as far back as 2007. Now I had six songs for an EP to be called Fall, expressing the prevailing emotions I felt when my marriage was ending. But six months after it all happened, I had written everything I wanted to say about that, and the songs were already starting to feel stale. And I don't care how good your music is: if you're working on songs about your ex-wife five years after your three-and-a-half year marriage ended, that's not winning you any points. I had every reason to get these songs done as soon as possible.
And I did. Production frequency increased from one a year to one a month. I released the songs over the first half of the following year, along with alternate versions, an exclusive instrumental outtake, two music videos, one a live recording in my apartment and one a collection of videos I took whose quality underwent intentional degradation, and a (mobile-friendly) web component (click on the numbers). The main EP was released in August 2018:
Mind you this was before the urgent expression system, so I wasn't cutting any corners. Like all of my songs, they started at the piano, and in that stage, before anything is recorded, they can't really be said to have any physical existence at all. Maybe you could say they took on a transient physical form when I played them, but that's it. This was where Instagram came in handy. I could actually use it to log musical ideas in case I forgot them. A one-minute video is just enough to jog my memory. One video captures a piano performance of the chorus section of the second track from Fall, "Fait Accompli," recorded on June 4, 2017, before any production work had been done—before it existed:
By the summer of 2018, every track had its own Pro Tools project file, with multiple beat tracks ("What's Wrong?" being an exception to this), multiple synths, and carefully selected vocal takes, all edited and mixed together. Another video, recorded January 14, 2018, captures the same section of "Fait Accompli" when it was becoming fully realized as an electronic production:
The songs became full-fledged electronic productions. They went from immaterial ideas to digital reality.
But a few important things had to happen first. First was an understanding that the human body is a sort of machine, a physical system, whose actions are reducible to behavioural terms, and if you're going to do something you don't normally do, something that takes months to do, you're only going to get it done if the requisite productive behaviour is wired into your programming. There are certain things you do automatically every day. You eat and sleep, and usually you work to pay for the food you eat and the room you sleep in. To do that you probably need to do a whole lot of other things, too: get out of bed, bathe, primp, dress, commute, talk to other people, talk on the phone, send emails, etc. The list will vary depending on what you do for a living right now. It's whatever you're doing to function in society. If something's important to you that's not on that list, you have to figure out how you're going to do it on top of all that other stuff. If it's a hefty project where working on it on a given day constitutes a mere fraction of all the work you have to do for it, like opening Pro Tools and fiddling around for several hours on various project files, then you have to make it part of your routine. If it's wired in, eventually you'll get something done.
I had a head start, because I had learned this earlier that year. When I was married, I was usually exhausted by the time I was done working. I was also about forty pounds overweight. Separation might have been the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of my physical health. The initial shock of it was starting to wear off, but I was still depressed, and my appetite wasn't even close to where it used to be. When I'm experiencing extremely high levels of stress, I lose my appetite and stop eating. I wasn't enjoying food. But I had to survive. I had to buy groceries and eat. So when I did, I had no interest in eating anything that tasted good. Only what was going to keep this machine functioning. Plus, my future in terms of finances was uncertain. I didn't know what Sabina was going to do. So I didn't spend a cent I didn't regard as absolutely necessary for survival. (Let's for now ignore that I spent almost $1000 to have my piano disassembled and moved piece by piece into my basement apartment.) I ended up applying total Cartesian skepticism to my beliefs about food and nutrition. Why do I think I need bread? What happens if I go home from the grocery store and don't buy bread and cheese? Turns out nothing. What happens if I don't drink milk and juice? Nothing. What happens if I go home and don't eat meat? I'm still hungry and can't sleep. Okay, I can't cut meat out. Same with vegetables and eggs. Oatmeal and nuts seem to make me feel pretty good, too. But pretty much everything else was unnecessary. My dietary habits had been completely reprogrammed. Before I knew it, I had lost fifty pounds and was down to what I weighed when I was skateboarding fifteen kilometers a day to and from university. I remember looking in the mirror at one point and not even recognizing who I had become. Later that year I had to get a new driver's license photo. When I got it I put the picture next to my old one. You can see the difference in my face:
I also had more energy. I wasn't exhausted at the end of the day. In fact, I wanted to ride my bike after work and sit at my piano for two hours, working on a piece that was well above the level of difficulty I'm trained to play. I was also able to sing for longer periods without running out of breath. My new lifestyle had dramatically improved my physical health. And the new habits were wired in. Maybe my separation had shattered my identity, and cultivating new habits was defining the person I would become and still am today. Whatever the case, the new habits were permanent, and I've never gone back. I still have the same basic diet, and Isaac's going to grow up on it.
So I knew I could wire in new behaviours. The second thing I had to do was identify what exactly I had to get this human machine to do on a daily basis to make the creation of six full electronic productions feasible. Well I had pretty much learned this, too. It's not as if I had never produced a track before. The trick was just working it into my daily routine. I had to do it every day if I was going to get the EP done by the summer of 2018. But this requires energy. Energy in addition to the base amount required for my societal obligations. So physical health had to remain optimal. Avoid eating out. Cook all meals using nutrition-dense ingredients: eggs, vegetables, meat, nuts. Physical activity must remain high. Take the bike everywhere. And keep the musical muscles sharp, too. Keep playing the piano, and work on new, challenging classical pieces. One hour a day. No sedentary activities that are not necessary for work, and when working, stand if possible. Squeeze in an hour or two of fiddling around on a Pro Tools project file, and boom, we have the daily schedule of a fully functioning music-production-making machine.
I wrote it down. I made a checklist with the heading "A Good Day." I started with the basics, i.e. nutrition and exercise:
- ☐ make eggs
- ☐ eat nuts
- ☐ make dinner
- ☐ 1-2 h of cycling
I had two jobs at the time and so was making money in different ways on different days. So I didn't specify what I was doing specifically to make money. I kept it broadly applicable:
- ☐ make some money
I was doing pretty well with my piano habits, so I decided I'd codify that:
- ☐ 1 h of piano practice
Lastly, the most important one:
- ☐ 1-2 h of work on a project file
See, you can't just make the one important thing your goal and expect to do that every day. It's too easy to lose track. You have to make every activity you do an equally valued goal, because all of them together are what make the machine work. It's all about maintaining the programming. The behaviour that's wired in. I call them "process-oriented goals," because they orient a person's behaviour not toward achieving something, but toward becoming what achieves something.
So I had identified the tasks that, if repeated, would in time make my dreams a reality. I remember feeling a tremendous amount of satisfaction a few times I went through a day and did everything on the list, but pretty soon after making it I wasn't even looking at the list anymore. I was just doing it.
The third thing was to observe the machine. What can it do once it takes on these daily tasks? How much are you getting done? Working on a project file an hour a day tends to get songs finished relatively quickly. Setting a goal of finishing one song per month seemed pretty reasonable. I had enough time to make a web component for each track, too (just replace the fiddling around on a project file with fiddling around with Javascript and Tone.js). So for every month from January to June of 2018, I had two things to complete: a track and a mini-site. These I call "product-oriented goals" because they orient a person's behaviour toward the creation of something tangible and wholly separate from the creator.
That's how Fall got done. After the last track was uploaded, I packed up all the index cards on my piano and beside my computer, the ones on the chair next to my bed, the ones on my chess table, and of course the ones on my bulletin boards. Probably put them in a box somwhere. My apartment was clean.
That same summer I finished writing a series of songs that would eventually be broken up into three smaller albums (the Long trilogy): Lost, Circumcision, and the still-to-be-completed Long. These also contain lyrics that are not the kind of thing I'd want lying around, but by then I'd started using notebooks to write down my ideas, and notebooks make them much, much easier to conceal.
This reads as a meditation on human life by an alien who’s learning to be a person. It’s a delight. Love the breakdown of the day.
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