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I learned a lot about music from the Simon and Garfunkel
albums: in junior high and high school, I wore out my parent’s copy of Wednesday Morning, 3 AM, learning to
sing through matching my voice to those on the recording. As a choir and
acapella geek in college in the late 1990s, Paul Simon was our ever-standby
party music: we wore diamonds on the soles of our shoes every weekend and on
most weeknights too.
Getting beyond the bouncy greatest hits of Paul Simon’s solo
career, I first heard the album Hearts
and Bones in its entirety during the year following graduation. I was
sharing a house with friends (not far from “living in London with the girl from
the summer before”), and learning piano chords. I wanted to understand how
Simon considered songs like “Cars Are Cars” and “Allergies” (true clunkers, in
terms of musical composition and structure) as worthy of being place aside some
of his most endearing ballads. The album still doesn’t make sense to me, except
when taken as a conglomeration of songs detailing or alluding to personal and
professional stress: as a creative duo, he and Garfunkel split during the
initial Hearts and Bones recording
sessions, following a poorly-received world tour; the encroaching digital age
was changing the music business, and was about to affect everyday life; the
idealism and hope Simon witnessed during the social and cultural revolution of
the 1960s had apparently disintegrated, under the weight of disco, Reaganomics,
and the death of John Lennon. Hearts and
Bones remains an obscure and unique statement about a historic period: it
was the first time in the history of civilization that cars had become cars
ubiquitous (“all over the world”), that numbers had become “serious,” and that
even the world’s greatest brain trust cannot “unscramble” or understand love.
Songwriting and production for the Hearts and Bones album followed Paul Simon’s modestly-successful
movie and accompanying album, One-Trick
Pony. After the wildly successful appearance and release of a live
performance recording of Simon and Garfunkel’s “reunion” concert in Central
Park in 1981, the duo attempted to collaborate once again in the studio. Not
soon after beginning the project, Garfunkel quit, in a dispute over creative
control. Allegedly, Simon demanded all traces of Garfunkel’s contributions be
erased from the master tapes. Hearts and
Bones—in all its postmodern glory—was Simon’s alone. The set of eleven
recordings would come to include nine keyboardists, five guitarists besides
Simon himself, three bassists, a small string ensemble, as well as flutes, saxophones,
marimbas, and digital drum programming. Unlike One-Trick Pony, Hearts and
Bones afforded Simon an opportunity to experiment with a vast array of
musical equipment, as well as to collaborate (or, more likely conduct) other musicians. Hearts and Bones was produced during the
advent of electronic music and digital recording, a time when even
professionals like Simon were challenged to utilize all of the studio trickery
available, without creating an unwieldy final product. (Footnote: in a
spectacular half-hour television special produced for Cinemax and aired in
January 1984, Simon and his band lip-synch their way through almost the entire
album, excitedly pretending to play along—including the string quartet that
ends “The Late Great Johnny Ace”).
Simon wanted to call
the album “Think Too Much,” but then-Warner Brothers president Mo Ostin
convinced the songwriter of a more accessible title. The original album
contains two separate compositions bearing the original title—representing the
act of thinking too much on two separate occasions on the original album. There
was (and still is) much to think about: privacy and identity security, technology,
formulaic pop songs, immigration, Wall Street hegemony, transportation. In many
ways, we are living in a more fully realized version of 1983, in terms of the
emergence of technology, and the effect of virtual communication networks on
society and politics. The “economic downturns” of the twenty-first century have
brought about financial hardship and stress for many, and Simon’s lyrics
forecast a financial system that values ownership over all else: as two famous
painters are brought to tears by the sight of mannequins in a store window,
elsewhere Simon laments, “I once had a
car/that was more like a home/I lived in it/loved in it/polished its chrome.” Following
the twentieth century’s postmodern threads, Simon’s Hearts and Bones represents the culmination of a social clarity:
the existence and tastes of the white, middle-class, suburban American was not
fixed, but fluid. Love for material possessions and wealth complicates visions
of romance—right in the opening song (and right before the album’s title
track), Simon brutally announces his inability to act on his love “I’m
allergic to the women I love/and it’s changing the shape of my face.” Simon’s
lyrics revel in surrealism, bordering on absurdity: The Penguins, The
Moonglows, the Orioles, cars, a photograph from Texas, all collated into a heap
of accompanied, broken images, set to the progression of many minor chords.
Like Simon’s other compositions, the songs on Hearts and Bones are deceptively
complex: melodies dawdle above and around chord changes, rotating their way
through bridge, chorus, and verse. Some musical structures (the opening chords
of “The Late Great Johnny Ace,” for example) defy rationale: E major and Bb
offer terrifying contrast upon which to impose a melody, yet the progression
persists throughout much of the verse section of the song. “Allergies” also
offers bizarre and sparse construction, as if intended to feature the
disjointed narrative (delivered in part through a vocoder), set against strange
and immense electronic beats.
My interpretations of these songs have been hard-fought, a
side project while my complicated life tumbled forward during three difficult
years. These tracks were produced during dark periods of professional and
personal uncertainty. I began some tracks in the fall of 2013, and in the
spring of 2014 I began producing individual sessions for each track in earnest.
Sharing a home with my then-partner, I had amassed an unparalleled collection
of keyboards and organs, storing them in the backyard shed. The studio became
complete when I purchased a second-hand PC, installing Windows XP and a
four-channel audio interface produced by the now-defunct Aardvark Company. I
had been calling our shared home “Clarksville Road Studios,” but with the addition
of a dedicated multi-track recording workstation in the ‘shed,’ the Tunbridge
World’s Unfair was born. For months, the layering of keyboard tracks, bass,
guitars, banjos, drums, and vocals kept me working deep into the night. To keep
in some heat and keep out some moisture, I lined the walls and ceiling of the
space with black plastic sheeting, creating a virtual trash bag inside the
shed, and a timelessly dark, studious environment. Once the leaves fell and the
nights turned downright cold, I’d still amble out to the backyard structure,
decked out in coat and scarf, seeking escape from stress through overdubs. By
December 2014 I was rushing to complete the project, hoping to distribute CDs
to friends and family during the holidays. I did complete a version, but in
haste used a series of digital audio plug-ins recommended for mastering without
paying enough attention to each track’s frequency response: the end result was
obscene and thunderous, as the compressed bass drowned out all else. I returned
to the studio in February and began remixing.
Soon, I was adding bass, additional banjo and acoustic guitar, and, for many
tracks, piano. My tracks feature two pianos: a 1927 Wing and Sons upright
grand, and an 1885 Steinway. The Wing was my first piano, the one on which I
had learned my first chords (purchased by the woman who would become my son’s
mother, a few years later). Ornately decorated, I learned to play chords on
that piano, despite the fact that the soundboard had already been repaired
once, with bracing on either side of the most dramatic cracks. The buzzing
persisted as my playing got better; the anomaly was much worse once the piano
was delivered to my former partner’s house in Tunbridge. Realizing a tuning
wouldn’t be sensible for such a damaged instrument, I made a snap decision to
purchase a restored Steinway from a local technician in the spring of 2015, and
was easily some of the best money I’ve ever spent. The way the percussive
chords slipped into the mix was astounding; this recording represents my
initial attempts at capturing the sound of a quality antique piano. Other
endeavors that feature this instrument will pay more attention to capturing its
tone, and not just its hammers’ attack. Every project, it
seems, bears with it a learning curve, in terms of the best use of the
available technology. The relationship between the performer-- and their head space-- and their instrument is fickle and ever-changing.
For me, a non-professional musician, instruments themselves
gather sentimentality, laden with memories and histories (perhaps this is not
the case for the dozens of professionals who played on Simon’s original album;
their relationships with their instruments may be more utilitarian). Midway
through this project, I traded my red electric bass for a sixteen-channel
mixer: the bass was a buzzy and heavy axe, sold to me by my then-girlfriend,
during my senior year of undergrad. On a trip south, I found a Hofner copy, and—even
with its faulty vintage strings—I wanted to use it, over the “red bass.” I said goodbye to it, as well as my first
piano. Many of the rhythms are derived from interplay between drum machines,
linked via MIDI to trigger each other (the Yamaha RM1X and Yamaha PSS-6300 are
especially great in this respect): as “software synths” and other digital devices
enable new creative heights in the recording studio, I remain interested in the
intentional misuse or repurposing of recorded sound, through unconventional or
outmoded means of production. Electronic and experimental music have sought to
explore new technology, at times risking the exploitation of audiences’
attention: what if popular music was not rife with electronic beeps and blips,
but only—and carefully—infused?
Studio technology can influence creative decisions. I
decided to include a reprise-of-sorts of “Allergies” (the middle chord
progression only), after hitting upon a punchy and vibrant string section by
chance. I included a “remix” of “When Numbers Get Serious,” hoping to
accentuate the song’s focus on digital privacy and the then-encroaching
Information Age. This ‘bonus’ track went through many manifestations: a piano
solo, bass solo, electronic whirlwind, etc., until becoming the hybrid it is. These
tracks are over-produced; many feature more than two dozen unique instruments,
with some mixed so softly as to probably be inconsequential to a listener’s
experience. The intention, however, was there: like a gamer addicted to the
pursuit of the next level or boss battle, my additive recording process has led
to compulsion, obsession, and has served as an ultimate and creative
distraction. Some vocals comprise a dozen takes or more, singing in too-close harmony, wrapped together in reverb. Some basslines are thunderous, others too weak. My work on the drum kit may be the farthest-from-professional efforts in these recordings. None of these transgressions, however, are unforgivable, upon recognizing that I don't do this (or any of this) for a living. What digital hobbies will our children and their children engage with? I find joy in the completion of a digital work (especially as publication of original material on YouTube provides a sense of finality), and hope to help instill such rewarding experiences inside of new and emerging technologies: because end-user content consumption-- be it music, video, or in other forms-- is (to me) less interesting and less important than those who choose to interact with the vast and unknown populations out there on the Internet.
Sound recordings already offer an interesting and well-documented rhetorical conundrum: may one represent another, through the repurposing of an original artifact? As visual art contended with collage, sound recordings-- including the use of sampling others' words or music-- are still figuring out how best to attribute original creative thoughts in sound. These tracks include samples, procured not digitally, but through
the use of a schoolroom record player and manual manipulation of a vinyl
record: the then-President of the popular tourist attraction Strasburg Railroad
(of Strasburg, Pennsylvania) explains the legacy of his engine; “Think Too Much
(b)” contains samples from Rick James’ “Below the Funk (Pass the J)” and a
Jamaican reggae album; “The Late Great Johnny Ace” contains samples from a
sound effects album produced by Realistic and sold by Radio Shack in the 1970s.
Edward Snowden’s voiceover is taken from his TED Talk in 2014. Like Beck and
other artists, I am interested in how popular music may bear a ‘soundcollage’
characteristic, in addition to carrying a singable tune.
Were I not dismantling and relocating my studio, I may still
be pouring over mixes and overdubs (perhaps needlessly). The total project was ‘mastered’ in early
June of 2015: a finalization process combining digital and analog technology.
In all its flaws and faults, I am proud to offer these twelve completed tracks for your enjoyment: easy time will determine if these consolations will be their reward.
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