New Album ready for Streaming

The Human Form Divine is ready for streaming! A long 15 months after I started recording demos, this pandemic-produced album (really more of an EP at 23 minutes) is complete! A snappy, stark album with prog-rock leanings and recurring musical themes, it’s the best-sounding album I’ve ever produced, with stellar guitar, bass and drums leading the way thanks to Griffin Cobb, Julian Wrobel and Sam Heinz.

Listen to The Human Form Divine on:

• Spotify

• Apple Music

• YouTube

• This website

Here’s a bit of background on the project:

On June 19, 2018, a few months after completing my album The Great Divide, I wrote down the song order for what was to be my next album. I thought I was all set. I took some time to pursue a few other activities, including scoring my daughter Sarah’s brilliant animated short, and by the fall of 2019 I was ready to tackle a new project, but when it came time to start laying down basic tracks, I found myself uninspired. Bored. Unexcited. I needed to scrap my plan and start over.

Around that time, I purchased a harpejji, an amazing stringed instrument I’ve written about before, and started messing around with a few musical motifs, including some chromatic odd-timed stuff, and I wondered about doing a sort of prog-rock type project. I went back to a bunch of song snippets I’d recorded on my phone over the years, and one that grabbed my attention was a little tune I’d hastily written in April of 2014 while taking a walk around the neighborhood. I called it “Bunker Song,” and it provided me the jumping off point that I needed to proceed with a thematic album.

I composed the Phrygian mode melody from the title track while attending High Holiday services in the early 2000s, when a reading captured my attention, taken directly from Reform Judaism’s Gates of Repentance prayer book: “Disfigured lies the human form divine, estranged from its center.” I love that line! I even half-thought about doing an album of Jewish-themed content at that time, but instead set the melody and lyric aside, only to find over a decade later that they would work wonderfully in the context of my new project.

Additional important propellants were the compositions my son Sam created in his high school music production course. He had a half a dozen instrumental recordings, and between these and several half-formed compositions that I’d jotted down over the years, I was gradually able to whittle things down to several musical motifs that I used to flesh out a number of songs, most notably the title track and “Sea Song,” which comes from a piece of music Sam wrote called “C Song” because it was – you guessed it – in the key of C. I wrote the intro of what would become “Sea Song” in January of 2015, the instrumental intro to “Obfuscation” in August of 2016, the chordal theme from “The Human Form Divine” later that December, and most of the music for “Race to the Bottom” in May of 2017. Sam composed the suspended themes from the title track and “Sea Song” in the spring of 2017 and the brilliant chord sequence of “Unsettled” in December of 2018. I added a melody and B section for that song, but tossed out the B section for this recording. I’d like to do another version of this song as a bossa nova with a jazz band for my next project.

From there, songs came together quickly. As always happens, a few pieces were written contemporaneously. The vocal section of “Why Not” was written on December 26 of 2019, and a few weeks later “Obfuscation” started to come together, as well as the completion of “Bunker Song” and the lyrics to “Race to the Bottom.” I decided to keep the project short and snappy at 23 minutes, and in hindsight this was plenty to keep me busy.

I completed song demos in March of 2020 and then the pandemic hit. Sam and his bassist buddy Julian Wrobel (from The Great Divide) rehearsed the songs on their own, eventually getting together during the buildup to a late-July socially-distanced recording session at Kiwi Audio in Batavia, Illinois, engineered by Brad Showalter and Mark Walker. As was the case for the previous album, both Sam and Julian created parts for the songs rather than just winging it, and the results are gratifying. Check out Julian’s bass riff during the title track or Sam’s drum break in “Obfuscation” – those are parts I could never compose, much less execute!

My daughter Jessica may not have participated directly in this recording, but she came through in a big way by recommending her friend Griffin Cobb to add guitar tracks remotely from Louisville. What a godsend! Throughout August and September Griffin tirelessly recorded scores of guitar tracks, transforming what I heard in my head into real-life performances. How gratifying! And we were never even in the same room!

Meanwhile, my daughter Sarah completed the album cover in short order after sharing a few rough sketches with Sam and me for our approval. She captured the struggle of being human perfectly. The album cover was completed a good six months before the album was.

I added keyboards and vocals in September and October, and then – as I always do – struggled mightily with the mixing process. I shelved the task for a few months over the holidays, and then began in earnest in January, finally completing the mixes in March with the help of a few of my friends. I sent the mixes to Collin Jordan of The Boiler Room, and viola! The album was finished! All it took was 16 months of hard work. I gotta find an easier way to do this next time.

The Year of the Small Movie

If you like “small” films, 2020 was your year.  Next week the 93rd Academy Awards will take place – with people present, no less – celebrating the movies of 2020, a strange year in so many ways that it seems fitting that the film industry wasn’t exempt.  With theaters closed or sparsely attended in 2020, many movies were held back for release in 2021 or were released with little fanfare on streaming services.  I missed seeing previews – often the biggest indicator for me on what to see – and instead had to trust that I was getting wind of good films despite abbreviated or non-existent theatrical runs. Ultimately, I watched twenty-two movies released in 2020, including all eight Best Picture nominees, and while many of them were really good, the mood and feel of many of them were – for lack of a better word – “small.”  I was struck with a maddening desire to watch some honest-to-goodness plot-twisting Hollywood creations, words I never thought I’d utter. 

In 2018 when I saw The Florida Project, I was blown away.  I wrote then, “The Florida Project is one of those rare films that I gravitate toward – short on plot, long on characters and realistic slices of life.”  And while that’s still true, it turns out that if you watch a dozen Florida Project-type films in a row, suddenly small slices of life don’t seem so novel anymore.  In fact, they can seem downright infuriating.

In quick succession I watched Mank, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami, The Forty-Year Old Version, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Dig, Malcolm & Marie, Sound of Metal, Supernova, Nomadland, Minari, First Cow and The Father.  Goodness.  Some of those films are excellent – of these, I liked One Night in Miami and The Forty-Year Old Version best – but by the end of that run I was practically begging for a plot.  A development.  A murder.  Something!  Something more than two guys surreptitiously milking a cow!  Too much of a good thing can in fact be too much of a good thing.

In the midst of all of these films, my wife and I also watched Promising Young Woman and Judas and the Black Messiah, and both of these nailed it.  Excellent films, and for us, a breath of fresh air to kick off the dust of our plotless movie run.  Sadly, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and The Forty-Year Old Version garnered no Oscar nominations, and One Night In Miami was ignored for Best Picture and Director.  That’s the way these awards shows always go.

But when reviewing this year’s films to last year’s, it seems like a lifetime ago when we were cheering on Parasite, Ford V Ferrari, Jojo Rabbit, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood (plus Uncut Gems and Knives Out), a better batch of films than this year’s, in my opinion.  I’m holding out hope that the 94th Academy Awards will celebrate a terrific set of movies both small and large.

The Nightmare of Mixing Audio

In drummer Jacob Slichter’s excellent book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, he examines the music machinery behind the rise and fall of his 90s band Semisonic.  When discussing the release of their ubiquitous hit, “Closing Time,” Slichter reveals how the song went through several mixes and how each was devoted to a different audience:  Bob Clearmountain handled the initial mix, but Jack Puig remixed it to give the song a heavier edge for alternative radio, Don Gehman did a pop mix, and Puig returned for an acoustic mix.  Depending on what radio station you listened to, you might be getting an entirely different sound to your favorite song.

With the advent of streaming services, I have to believe that alternate mixes are employed less often today, but Slichter’s story illustrates just how important – how defining – mixing is to a song, no less than the musical performance.  In the hands of a gifted engineer, mixing can push a decent song into the stratosphere.  In the hands of an amateur, a really good song can end up sounding merely adequate.  I’m more the latter than the former, but I’m getting better.

I’ve sent mixes for my new album, The Human Form Divine (available on streaming services in a month or so) to a mastering engineer in Chicago, and I’m praying that I’m still happy with them when I get the tracks back.  We shall see.  I’m allowing myself a few weeks of distance from what was an arduous process filled with second-guessing, self-flagellation, irritation, bewilderment, resignation and – ultimately – some degree of satisfaction .  I am not a natural mixing engineer, and it shows; I started mixing my new album last October and finally finished in March!  It’s a good thing I don’t do this for a living.

Part of the problem is that I’m dealing with imperfect recordings.  For example, when we recorded drums and bass in the studio, we couldn’t get the snare to stop rattling whenever my son Sam hit his toms, so at home I had to go back and substitute every tom hit with a sample tom hit that we recorded in isolation (thank goodness we did this as a fail-safe tactic) and mute the snare accordingly.  I employed a similar technique on the snare when raising the volume wasn’t possible due to the accompanying hi-hat and cymbal interference. 

In the studio I also didn’t notice that the bass was drastically out of tune on two tracks, mostly because we were only recording drums and bass and there wasn’t a reference track that allowed us to easily recognize off-the-mark pitches.  Oops!  NOTE TO SELF: TUNE YOUR INSTRUMENTS BEFORE EVERY RECORDING! The bass performance on the title track of my new album was so good that I didn’t want to lose it because of tuning issues, so I ended up copying the bass tracks (one amp and one direct) six times, changing the tuning differently on each grouping to end up with one relatively in-tune performance.

But mostly the mixing process is challenging because my ears don’t pick up on subtle distinctions.  I’m good at broad brushstrokes – volume, panning, and basic compression, for example – but the nuances of slight variations of compression or EQ are largely lost on me.   Luckily, with a lot of trial and error, over time I used a few techniques that I was able to employ across the board.

Thanks to my bassist friend Johnny’s suggestion, for the first time I used saturation to help bring out a track rather than using a lot of compression.  This was a tricky balancing act, and one I’m not sure I mastered it, but I was able to get bass and snare to cut through mixes a touch better without having to squash the hell out of them. Even so, on some busses I used parallel compression a bit with good results.

I also utilized sidechaining extensively.  With the help of a couple of tutorials, I ended up doing the following:

1)      Ducking the bass slightly to make room for the kick.
2)      Ducking the overheads slightly to make room for snare and toms.
3)      Ducking guitars and/or synths to make room for vocals or solo instruments.
4)      Ducking a vocal delay bus with the original vocal track so that the delay can only be head at the end of a syllable.

The above helped enormously, as getting the vocal and snare tracks to sit in a mix has always been a challenge for me, as has the kick/bass relationship. 

Also helpful was being aware of accentuating frequencies in the 300 Hz range to allow bass guitar to be heard on smaller speakers.  I’m amazed at how the bass disappears on many professional recordings from long ago when played on tiny speakers such as those on a cellphone.  Today, mixing engineers are more cognizant of this inevitability.

I also used a high-pass filter on multiple tracks, boosted my vocal a touch at around 1800 Hz, and used a high shelf boost on overhead busses for a bit of sheen. Eventually, I created a kind of EQ blueprint that worked for these particular recordings.

Even with all the above and more, I had to go through mix after mix after mix of each song, listening on five different sets of speakers (studio monitors, stereo speakers, car speakers, a decent Bluetooth speaker and my phone) plus a pair of headphones to get a sense of what was and what wasn’t working.  And once mixes were complete, I got additional feedback from my son and two of my musician friends, Johnny and Anthony.  Luckily, by the time I sent them the final mixes, they agreed that the songs were in a good place, requiring just a few minor edits.

I have aspirations of one day hiring all of this out and getting someone who I trust to handle the entire mixing process so that I can free myself of this nightmare.  But then again, what fun would that be?  As much as I say I hate the process, I also love the challenge.

New album forthcoming!

The 2021 Brewers

It’s that time of the year again!  Opening day of Major League Baseball is upon us.  I couldn’t be happier that a full season is – if not guaranteed – at least a possibility.  Rewind a year ago and things were looking mighty bleak.  This year, I fully expect to attend a few games up in Milwaukee once I receive my second vaccination and give it a few weeks to do its magic.  Can’t wait.

A week or two before the 2020 baseball season was called, I predicted 74 wins for the Milwaukee Brewers, good enough for fourth place in the NL Central.  They ended the abridged season at 29-31, the equivalent of a 78-win season, and they did indeed finish in fourth place, earning a playoff spot due to the expanded format and losing to the Dodgers in the first round.  Making the playoffs – even with a sub .500 record – was a minor miracle given the dreadful team batting average of .223.  Even Christian Yelich couldn’t put wood on the ball, batting .205.  I gotta believe that this year’s team, while not expected to be an offensive juggernaut, will perform better this season.  If they can, the Brewers have a chance to contend for the NL Central division title.

General manager David Stearns only made a few moves this off-season, most notably the signing of second-baseman Kolten Wong, which moves the poor-fielding Keston Hiura to first base.  This is a huge step up for the Crew, both offensively and defensively, though Brewers fans will likely cringe each time a potential double-play ground ball is hit toward Keston.  Brace yourselves for a few errant throws into the outfield.

The other pickup is outfielder Jackie Bradley, a signing that was likely influenced by the question mark surrounding Lorenzo Cain’s return to center field after a year off.  Bradley is a career .239 hitter, so I wasn’t exactly wowed by the signing, but the former Red Sox player is terrific defensively and helps provide insurance and flexibility.  He also bats lefty (as does Kolten Wong), allowing manager Craig Counsell some latitude with late-inning matchups. 

Stearns tried to sign Justin Turner at the hot corner, and this would have been quite a thrill, but for now Travis Shaw returns after a year in Toronto.  His batting average went up a bit last year, so perhaps he’ll return to 2017-2018 form, when he provided significant pop from the left side before struggling mightily in 2019, when his average plummeted to .157 over 230 at-bats.  Overall, this looks to be the weakest position in the Brewer lineup.

Otherwise, Milwaukee’s lineup is adequate. Orlando Arcia and Luis Urias will likely share shortstop duties, Manny Pina and Omar Narvaez will man behind the plate, and Yelich, Cain and Avisail Garcia will join Bradley in the outfield.  If a few Brewers manage to have career seasons, it could be a decent lineup, but outside of Yelich, it’s certainly not an intimidating offense.

The pitching also has some concerns, but again, if a few of the starters can have career years and if the staff can stay healthy, they could be effective, if not dominate.  Last year the team ERA stood at 4.16, good for sixth in the national league (but a full run behind the Dodgers).  Incidentally, the seven best NL ERAs all made the playoffs, while five of the six worst run-producing teams made the playoffs.  Pitching matters!  Luckily for the Crew, all of last year’s starters – led by Brandon Woodruff and Corbin Burnes – are returning, though for now Freddy Peralta and Josh Lindblom have swapped starter/reliever roles, and last year’s core of effective relievers return as well. 

One pitching question mark is last year’s NL rookie-of-the-year, reliever Devin Williams, who posted a phenomenal 0.33 ERA as a setup up man for closer Josh Hader, and who’s returning after sitting out the playoffs last October due to a shoulder injury.  We shall see if he can stay healthy for a full season and achieve some degree of success.  Hader’s dominance of 2017-2018 has taken a few modest hits, but he’s still a hell of a good closer, and if he manages to make his changeup a more significant part of his repertoire – as he claims he will – watch out.

All in all, this should be a Brewers team that’s entertaining and competitive, though not awe-inspiring, and with Craig Counsell at the helm and a lot of match-up opportunities, I think it’ll be an exciting season that ends with the Brewers in the hunt for a playoff spot.  Give them 84 wins, perhaps enough for a wild card.

One final note: 2021 will be the first Brewers season without Ryan Braun in the lineup since 2006.  I could not be happier about his absence.

3 Books on Filmmakers

You may have heard some recent buzz about Mark Harris’s book, Mike Nichols: A Life.  It’s a great read, and it also serves as a gateway to two other books on filmmakers authored by Harris: Five Came Back and Pictures at a Revolution.  I wish there were more, as over the past six weeks I’ve immersed myself in film history and wish I could stay a little longer.  Harris’s gift for writing accessible yet meticulously researched prose, while providing historical context and contemporary criticism, makes for quick and enjoyable reading; it’s not often that I devour 1600 pages over three books so willfully.

Pictures at a Revolution tells the tale of the five Best Picture nominees for 1967 and how they represented a shift in Hollywood from the old system of strong studio moguls to an auteur-led revolution influenced by European filmmakers, a movement that was enabled by the unravelling of the production code of self-censorship that had entrenched itself in Hollywood for thirty-five years.  The book is also a lens into how films are made.  How?  Almost always painstakingly.  Threads of a film are woven, untangled and woven again, screenwriters are hired and fired, studios and directors are wooed and wooed again, budgets are slashed, insecure and egotistical actors are mollified – it’s a wonder that films get made at all.  Bonnie and Clyde took five years from its inception to its completion, and even then it required Warren Beatty’s indefatigable drive, charm and the threat of a lawsuit to overcome dismissive reviews and lackluster studio support to get the film widely distributed. 

Most interesting to me was Harris’s portrayal of actor Sydney Poitier, who appeared in two of the five nominated films that year – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and winner In the Heat of the Night – and who was the biggest box office star in America in 1968, the year I was born.  His success and exposure came at a price, as Poitier struggled to toe the line of pushing for more three-dimensional roles that would still play well with white audiences, while simultaneously taking heat from a black populous who was tired of being patient with racial progress.  Poitier was quoted at the time, “Wait till there are six of us – then one of us can play villains all the time.  First, we’ve got to live down the kind of parts we’ve had all these years.”  Namely, maids and butlers.  I can not imagine what Poitier must have gone through, and I may have to read his memoir next.

If the stakes seem high in Pictures at a Revolution, they are off the charts in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, a book that documents how five Hollywood film directors offered their services to capture war footage and produce films for U.S. soldiers and citizens during World War II. Once again, Harris provides the social context of the time, when there were strong forces opposing any effort to promote the war – especially by Jewish studio heads – and he also illustrates how the challenges of filmmaking were no less arduous within the bureaucracy of the military than within dictatorial Hollywood studios.  Budgetary and supply constraints, inept leadership and egos make the art of movie making difficult in any situation, and certainly more so when the state of the world is at stake.

Five Came Back helped to humanize directors who were only names to me: I feel like I have a better understanding of who John Huston, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Ford and William Wyler were, and I also have profound respect for their sacrifices and heroism. Wyler shot footage from bombers flying over Germany (and suffered major hearing loss as a result).  Stevens and Ford were on the beaches of Normandy.  Huston made an important film about returning soldiers suffering from mental ailments. (Unfortunately, the film wasn’t released when it could have done some good.)

But here’s the added bonus: not only is Five Came Back a stellar book; it’s also a three-part documentary, currently streaming on Netflix.  But wait…there’s more!  You can also view the films that the book references, from John Ford’s Battle of Midway to George Stevens’s important footage of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, an experience that forever shaped the director’s life.  Between the book, the documentary and the original films, it’s an abundance of riches for film buffs and historians alike.

I’m looking forward to Mark Harris’s output in the coming years.  If there’s one minor quibble I have, it’s Harris’s penchant for offering attributions deep into a long quote, so that the reader doesn’t initially know who’s doing the speaking.  I wish he’d rectify this habit.  But hey, he writes better than I do!

I highly recommend all three of Harris’s books to date.