How does your music tell your story?
How does your music tell your story?
And god wasn't I cute as a kid?
Today, I want to talk about the hidden (yet very audible ways) in which I share my story with my listeners.
I make music for many reasons: to satisfy my clients, to surprise and entertain myself, to share an idea or a feeling with my audience. I also make music to feel connected to myself today and yesterday. Really, I make music for largely the same reasons that most anybody else might make music.
But what I am particularly interested in lately is how I connect with myself in my music. It has never been quite as simple for me as writing autobiographical songs. That is something that I do, though. My most recent release, Run, while not telling a story per se, is a song completely about my experience with ADHD. However, I would mostly describe my writing process as intuitive. I am never actively trying to share something specific in my music. I much prefer to let it emerge and decide what it might mean to me later. When it comes to engaging my past in my music, I am finding that process is becoming far more intentional.
Is music the export or the process?
Lately, I’ve been telling my story more in the process than the music itself. If you’ve read this newsletter for a while now, you likely won’t be surprised when I say that I am a very process and practice-driven music maker. The .wav file at the end of my mix bus is the byproduct, not the end goal. I’m always more interested in how I continue than what I’ve done.
My process in general is very sound oriented. The thing that I love the most about working in a DAW is that it allows me to work with sound in the same way that a painter works with paint. It’s a canvas that affords me the opportunity to manipulate, transfigure, and re-imagine any sound in service of the music that I’m making. No other instrument affords me that freedom. And so I can’t help but think of the musical potential of every sound that I hear.
Listening for the music hidden in sound has completely redefined my relationship to the world around me. I hear the melodic potential of a resonating bike rack. I think about pulsating motors in terms of rhythm. I ascribe value and grant attention to everything I hear because everything I hear contains within it, whether inherently or latently, the capacity for music.
My heightened relationship with sound extends to my past as well. Every time I visit home, I hear something that I haven’t heard in years and I am stopped dead in my tracks. I am hit with a flood of emotions and memories. I think about what music it could be in the future and I think about all the times I’ve heard it in the past. I hear new sounds as well whenever I’m home that makes me think about things differently.
I have to record those sounds every time I hear them
I have such a strong desire to capture these sounds whenever I find them. From snippets of conversation with my grandfather to my in-law’s grand piano, I have an insatiable desire to preserve these sounds and incorporate them into my music. I may not write a song about my in-laws but the decade of memories I share are woven into the tapestry of my music. The more music I make the more this will be true. My life and my memories will be hidden in these songs.
Take for example, my song Run. I mentioned above that it’s a song about my experiences with ADHD but there are memories hidden throughout that song that nobody would ever know, though I’ll share them with you all.
There are two memories of mine hidden in the first few moments of the song. The opening synth is actually a recording I made the night of my 10 year high school reunion. As I was walking to the restaurant the reunion was being held at, a single cicada started singing in the tree above me. It almost made me cry. The sounds of cicadas singing in chorus is the sound of summer to me. It’s a sound I’ve missed since moving to Seattle, and to have one sing for just me last summer wasn’t a moment I could let pass. I’ve since turned that cicada into the beautiful instrument you hear at the beginning of Run but you should also hear it as I found it (equally beautiful):
Layered over top of that synth is another recording of mine in a mostly raw form. This recording is the ambience of the Seattle light rail on the first morning of PAX West 2023. It was crammed full of so many people excitedly on their way to the convention and the energy was palpable. These kinds of moments are often best captured through image but I think they can be equally captivating when captured through sound.
Finally, the piano you hear halfway through the song is a recreation of my in-law’s grand piano. I adore how sea sick it sounds and I refer to it as “lovingly out of tune.” In the first moments of the documentary CODA, the late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto spends time with a grand piano abandoned in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. He gave such respect and honor to this instrument that began to return to a more natural state and I have thought the same about every piano I’ve met, whether it has been abandoned or simply overdue for a tuning.
I hope to revisit and document as many sounds from my past as I can — and share them with you
This act of sonic documentation has completely invigorated me creatively over the past year and I don’t think it will show any signs of abating soon. My sound as an artist is my memories given shape and form. They might still be intangible as sound, but they are far more tangible as sound than locked away in my mind.
I hope to sonically document every era of my life. The Voice Memos app on my iPhone goes back almost a decade at this point. I have instruments from my time playing in bands that I want to sample and create new instruments from. All of it I’ll share with you, slowly but I promise surely.
Early next week, I’ll be posting my February instrument for paid subscribers. It’s a beautiful instrument made from recordings of wind chimes belonging to my grandmother and my wife’s grandmother. I planned on having it ready for y’all this week but to be honest, I needed more time to map out all of the possibilities in this instrument. Trust me when I say that it’s as beautiful as it is creatively inspiring. I hope you’ll feel the same.
Until next time.
Quick Hits
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