The Roller Rink

I learned how to use my voice in a roller rink. Let me clarify that, because surely the image that jumps into your mind when I say roller rink doesn’t match up perfectly with the place I’m talking about.
Noone had worn roller-skates in this place for at least twenty, maybe even thirty or forty years. It was just a big decaying skeleton of a roller rink, an enormous half-rotten whale. The exterior was all boarded up with plywood where the windows used to be, so that from the outside it looked like a condemned warehouse, and if you walked by it on a desolate avenue in some stagnating city you wouldn’t even notice it. You would walk right by without even looking at it. This roller rink, however, this monstrosity, was very obvious, because it was sitting in the woods, surrounded by pine trees.


It was (and still is) located in a state park in southern New York, and at one time, although your imagination would be hard-pressed to believe it now, the place actually functioned as a flourishing haven for adolescent romance. My father and my uncle can attest to this, because they spent their childhood summers at a campsite not far away, and they would occasionally take their summer loves there for an evening of doo-wop, soda-pop and backwoods kissing.
But somewhere in the decades since my dad’s youth, the dusty administrative offices of the New York State park system, in their groggy amnesia, lost track of the place, and it became a shell of itself, a broken, decomposing abomination, which, for a few summers in the early nineties, served as a creative haven for me and my friend Bill Trinkle.


To get inside, we’d pull back one of the plywood boards and slip through a window. It was treacherous business. The actual skating floor was half ripped up (the wood had probably been used for other projects around the park over the years), so the majority of the interior was a mess of beams and boards and rusty nails and frayed electric wires. There remained, however, a significant portion of the skating floor in tact, the center section, and this served as our stage. Once we worked our way out there by balancing across the underlying structural planks, we’d just start singing. We’d absolutely let loose, and we didn’t care how things came out. There were hundreds of swallows that dwelt in the roof beams, and once we started making noise, they’d begin flying around above us in figure-eights. The light shot through the holes in the roof in thick luminous shafts, and we’d just sing ourselves silly, until we’d released every possible emotion we had in us and let free every demon in our young souls. Nowadays, they make these nifty hand-held field recorders with little condenser microphones that record in both mp3 and WAV formats, and I often wish we’d had one of them, so I could hear what we sounded like just one time. It’s probably better off, ‘cause most of the time I’m sure we sounded like cacophonous garbage. However, when I’m trying to write a song these days, I sometimes picture myself in that dark vibrating cavern, with not a care in the world.

Different or Similar?

Some books or artworks shock you out of your normal state of thinking by shedding light on a culture or a time period that has (or had) a completely different value to your own or a completely different approach to some aspect of human existence. Works like this expand your understanding of the potential for human variety, and it’s not always pretty. Other books or artworks awe you by revealing a part of humanity that is fundamental to people in all time periods and in all places. When I first read The Symposium, for example, I remember being absolutely delighted to learn that even two and a half millennia ago people shared my love of getting together with friends specifically for the purpose of downing wine and having a heated discussion. As we learn about other people and other cultures, it’s natural to the human mind, I believe, to categorize every new aspect of their lives in this dualistic fashion: does this demonstrate human variety or human affinity? Is this different to me or is it the same as me?

A while back I read a book called The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by a guy named Bernal Diaz del Castillo, and it’s a really good example of the first type. He was a soldier on Cortez´s expeditions into Central America in the 16th century, and the book is his first-hand account of how a few hundred Europeans, with horses and guns, swept through the heart of the Aztec Empire and brutally conquered an entire civilization. The story is told in a somewhat simplistic way; Diaz was a soldier by trade, not a writer. Despite the book’s stylistic clumsiness, however, it´s an amazing read. The constant action, along with the intrigues between the various tribal factions that the Spaniards fought against or formed alliances with, keeps you turning the pages in anticipation. At the same time, however, it’s deeply disturbing to anyone with a modern respect for the diversity of world cultures and for humanity in general.

A major impression from the book that has stayed with me is that there were facets of Aztec culture that are truly incomprehensible to post-Renaissance Westerners, and Diaz’s descriptions definitely focus more on the differences, rather than the similarities, between Aztec and European cultures. How could human sacrifice possibly be a common and acceptable practice, for example? How could they splatter the walls of their temples with blood and hang decapitated human heads around their cities? Diaz goes into grotesque detail about the things he witnessed. These people obviously thought about life in some very different ways than we do. (I’m sure they had drinking parties, though.)

I recently saw a highly entertaining example of the latter type of work, the kind that awes you by revealing something universal and fundamentally human. It’s a short documentary called Tag by a fellow named Chad Calease, who I had the opportunity to meet and hang out with this spring. The film pieces together interviews with individuals (literally from all over the world) talking about different forms of the game tag that they played when they were kids. As I listened to these people’s stories and heard their reflections on the game in its varying styles, I definitely felt a sense of wonder. The film makes you stop and consider a childhood game (one that we probably all played at some point) from an adult perspective, and in recognizing its deeper, psychological implications, you feel a serious connection with humanity. It’s pretty cool, and it’s definitely worth the time… you can stream it right here at Chad’s website: http://thinfilms.net/.

Recording in London (Part 4)

I've been working in schools for years, and I generally wake up not long after the sun, even when I'm on vacation. It's not just from habit, though... there's surely something genetic about it. My dad, who's an early-riser, loves to reccount how when I was a child he'd often open his eyes in the morning and find my face staring at him from about six inches away, with my eyes wide open, just waiting for some company. The early morning cartoons would only keep me entertained for so long.
Brian and I live on nearly opposite schedules. He's a true night-owl, more from insomnia, he says, than any preference for the dark hours. A pattern was established pretty early on in my stay, and we worked with it over the next eight days or so. We'd stay up all night, usually until about sunrise (I was adjusting to his schedule, obviously). I'd eventually throw in the towel, and Brian would stay up for a few hours by himself, drinking wine and playing the mandolin, skyping with his girlfriend in Argentina, or taking care of business stuff on the computer.
I'd try to sleep as late as I could, usually wake up before noon, then lay in bed listening to The Odyssey on my Creative Zen and praying I would crash out for a few more hours. Regardless of whether I did or not, there would be some serious time to kill before Brian was up and ready to start recording. I'd usually head into the neigborhood to buy some groceries, sometimes cook something up and sometimes grab myself a curry lunch special on Brick Lane, which was right around the corner from his place. Then I'd just play guitar in the living room and wait. It was a wonderfully comfortable and spacious room, a bit surreal with a hundred-year-old piano and a dried-up Christmas tree that Brian and Thea had decided to keep into the spring for some reason.





It worked out well, 'cause I liked having a few hours of practice before recording. My hands were so warmed up by the time I sat in front of the microphones that I could usually bang out my guitar parts in just a few takes, sometimes just one or two. It saved us a lot of frustration... there's nothing more disheartening than doing twenty takes in a row and not being able to land one that's perfect, totally buzz and error-free. It makes you feel incompetent. Nowadays, it's easy to edit out any errors, but I'm a purist; I like knowing that the song is as real and unsynthetic as possible.
Anyway, Brian would get up in the afternoon, deal with chores and business stuff for a few hours, then we'd shut ourselves into the studio somewhere between 5-8pm. We'd work until we lost the inspiration, usually between 2-4am. Then we'd go upstairs, crack some wine, and Brian would cook while I played him songs that didn't make my final cut for the sessions. Brian is no amateur in the kitchen, btw; he's a serious culinary artist, no joke. Two of the standouts during my stay were braised duck burritos & crawfish soup with coconut milk and mango. We'd eat, drink and talk till I couldn't hack it anymore, then I'd leave him sitting there to occupy his sleepless dawn however he could.





In total during my stay we recorded thirteen of my tunes. It took one day to do the microphone trials for my voice, as I wrote earlier on, one day to do the microphone trials for my guitar, and about three to actually record all my guitar parts. I was in London for ten days, so the rest of the time was for vocals and for bringing in other musicians.

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is like sushi. There´s something repulsive about sushi that some people never manage to get over. On the other side of the coin, it inspires such fanatical passion in those who love it, that its devotees are inevitably trying to convince the repulsed to try it one more time, to approach it with a fresh frame of mind. I could go on, but I´ll leave the analogy at that (it doesn´t work if you´re Japanese, I imagine).
I´m sure some people love Bob from the start, but for the many of us, he´s an acquired taste. Maybe acquired isn´t the right word either, because it often takes only one song or one album, heard at just the right point in our lives, to be won over for life. And once you fully experience the levels that his music can work at, there seems no limit to how deeply you can explore him; there´s just so much music and so much documentation of him and his amazing life, not to mention the fact that there always seems to be more stuff being made by and about him. In 1966 John Lennon caught a lot of slack for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but if you must compare a musician with the Son of Man, it would be more apt to say something like this: Dylan's story has such profound mythological implications that to the artistic-minded person, studying his life can provide as much inspiration as does the New Testament to the spiritual layman. But, of course, that´s just one listener’s opinion.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan seeped through my ear’s resistance in 1996, because the lyrics of “Don’t think twice, it’s all right”, perfectly encapsulated the mood of the breakup I was going through at the time. His songs have comforted people that way at least a billion times, I imagine.

Bradley Bergey

Last night I went to an art exposition in Poble Sec at Iluminarte (http://iluminartefotos.blogspot.com). A friend of mine, Bradley Bergey (http://www.crywonder.com), is one of the most interesting contemporary painters I’ve met. There are a lot of artists, illustrators & graphic designers out there today, and just by living in a city and walking the streets on a daily basis (and watching TV, of course), we’re all awash in cool & often unique visual images. In the last few decades it has become progressively more difficult to create 2-dimensional pieces that stand out from the constant stream of respectable art coming at us, but Bradley’s work definitely does stand out. His pieces combine an obvious obsession with materials & process (incorporating collage, wax, and elaborate layering and scraping techniques) with conceptual ideas that dwell in the realm of fundamental psychology and mythology. There are a few lines from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech that often echo through my head when I come face-to-face with vital artworks, whether visual, literary or musical:

...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again… leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Bradley has a distinct ability to present those universal truths with a freshness that’s devoid of the least pretension. There’s an archetypal eeriness to his work that can stop you in your tracks, because the themes he presents in the most intriguing of his paintings spring directly from the core issues we all experience in our lives and minds. Click on his website link above for a fast and simple presentation of some of his pieces.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell

My memory of the first time I ever heard Neil Young is lost in the stratosphere, but After the Gold Rush was probably the first album I ever permanently ingested. It was definitely the first album I over-listened to, but I can’t say I really got sick of it, because even today it sometimes seems as fresh and beautiful as ever. Neil has a defined gruff edge that really attracts the lone wolf in all of us. He’s like the grown-up child of the woods who made it in the big city, who recognizes its grotesque sides but can’t keep himself away from it. Music marketers would call it his brand, but it seems so genuine that he becomes this endearing figure, and I couldn't resist empathizing with and emulating him.
Joni Mitchell had a very similar thing going on, but hers was wrapped in femininity. When I was fifteen my dad bought Blue on CD, and those first chords of “All I Want” sucked me in like a vacuum cleaner filled with sirens. If you get into that album, it stays with you for life like some comforting safe-haven, one in which the ridicule of any thought or emotion is the gravest sin.
Throughout high school, I slowly assumed all of their records and those of the artists they were most associated with: Crosby, Stills & Nash, Van Morrison, Dylan, Baez, Ritchie Havens, America, James Taylor, Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, Cat Stevens, The Band, Paul Simon. I was into other stuff, too, lots of classic rock (a lot of which I never put on any more), but those big time singer-songwriters from the 60s and 70s were really my core interest and have remained so despite a wide broadening of horizons.

Recording in London (Part 3)

The next day Brian and I got to work in his basement studio:













First job: microphone trials, determining which microphone to use to capture the vocals; everything else would be crafted around the voice, so establishing the sound we wanted for the voice was the first step. Basically, you sing a few lines and capture them on every available mic, then listen to each one and compare tonal qualities. Here's a picture of all the microphones when they were setup:


The mics you see in the above photo:

-Neumann TLM 103
-AEA R44 (ribbon mic)
-AEA R92 (ribbon mic)
-TELE FUN KEN AK47 (a tube mic, w/ its own amplification)
-Blue: Kiwi
-Shure Sm57

I sang a few lines from "In the black space", then we listened, and after clicking back and forth dozens of times (with Brian selecting and deselecting various plugins to accent certain frequencies), we determined upon the AEA R44 for its old-school analog qualities.



This mic is actually a remake of the RCA R44, which, Brian had informed me, is the mic Billie Holiday used to do a large percentage of her recordings... it was chosen objectively, though, since when listening to the various tracks I was unaware which track corresponded to which mic. It was thus chosen solely for the way it sounds, not for the fact that it was the coolest looking one nor because of its association with Billie, one of the original pioneers in vocal recording. The irony is that I'd read a biography of her not long before this, so images of her life had been floating around in my head over the previous months, her scrappy, poverty-stricken youth in Philadelphia, her pinnacle days as the queen of the Harlem club scene, her horrific and pathetic demise in Manhattan's Metropolitan Hospital in 1959, with police guards stationed outside her room to prevent her friends from supplying her with smack. Her friends were doing this not simply to deviously help her get high, but rather to keep her from having to confront two life battles at the same time: cirrhosis of the liver and heroine withdrawal. The two-front war proved too much for her body, and there was outrage among her friends at the authorities' unwillingness to allow her to overcome cirrhosis before putting her through an enforced withdrawal by vigilantly overseeing her hospital bed. Before leaving New York I had wanted to go see her grave in the Bronx, but I failed to do so... eventually I will, though.



Between finding all the cables, setting up the mics, singing and listening over and over, this took quite a few hours. Brian and his roommate were having a party at their place that night (it was Saturday), so people had actually showed up before we were finished, and a few folks had come into the studio with us. London parties start quite early, apparently. This is seemingly due to the cultural habit of starting to drink as early in the evening as possible, which in itself is a result of the fact that ever since World War I and the "Defense of the Realm Act" of 1914 (when the government tried to force people to drink less, sleep well & be good workers) pubs in England have closed very early in the evening. During the Great War pubs had to close by 9:30pm, but this has very slowly been relaxed over time, so that the legally accepted time is now 11pm.
Toby, who I met the previous night, came into the studio just before we started to wrap things up for the day, as did one of Brian's friend from recording school, who lent us another pair of ears. Eventually we worked our way upstairs, and things were kicking... I've moved around quite a bit in the last ten to twelve years, but this was definitely one of the most international parties I've ever been at. I met people from Poland, Moldova, Argentina, Portugal, Russia, Korea, Slovenia, Sweden, England, and Switzerland, not to mention me and Brian, from New York and Texas, respectively.

Recording in London (Part 2)

On Friday, April 3rd, 2009, at around midnight, I landed at Stanstead Airport and got on the train to Liverpool Street Station. I had woken up at 6am that day to pack my bags, then worked the whole day, just had time to swing by my apartment in Sant Gervasi to grab my backpack and guitar, then headed off to El Prat, Barcelona's main airport. Flying in commercial jetliners has never ceased to completely freak me out (I'm totally fine until I'm actually in the air, but every bump, every mechanical noise, has me grabbing the armrests in a vice grip), so I ate a couple of Xanax in the airport and ended up sleeping for nearly the whole two-hour flight. It was fantastic... I highly recommend that stuff, if you don't like planes. Needless to say, however, I was more than a little groggy on the train into central London. Prior to my trip, I had uploaded an audiobook version of The Odyssey onto my mp3 player (I needed some inspiration for my own journey, and Homer never fails me), so I sat back on the train and listened as the scene was layed out: the suitors have invaded Odysseus' household, Telemachus is still a frustrated and passive adolescent, Athena presents herself in the guise of Mentor. I zoned in and out while gazing at the strangers packed around me. I thought about my first guitar (a used Ovation with giant cracks in the top that I bought for $70 at a shop in Red Hook, New Jersey) and wondered where it was. I thought about the time Brian and I had bused it from Granada to Lagos, Portugal with a couple of girls from the Instituto Don Quijote. We spent the weekend jumping off cliffs and wandering around the surreal, rocky beach-scapes with bottles of vinho verde.








When I arrived at Liverpool Street, I texted him and he came out to meet me. There was a small party in full swing at his place... a very small party, in fact, but there was an energetic vibe flowing. I met Thea, Brian's roommate, his friends Toby Slade-Baker and Alex Lodge, who work together at Felt Music. Toby makes some serious underground house and techno music, DJs and has a production company (http://www.living-city.co.uk). Alex, upon finding out I was a librarian by trade, expressed a devout passion for books and opened a discussion about some of our favorite authors.

Recording in London (Part 1)

"They say it takes ten years to make your first album."
Quite a few friends have said that exact phrase to me in the last year or two, or nearly that exact phrase, and despite my aversion to hackneyed words of wisdom, my particular story definitely supports it. It was about ten years ago that the goal of recording an album became my over-arching focus. It's not that I started making music ten years ago. I had been singing since I was a little kid. The first song I ever remember singing was "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" from the 1978 musical Evita by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. That song was a huge success around the world when I was about three years old, and throughout my earliest days I used to sing it to my parents in the car and around the apartment. But it was only about ten years ago, when I was around 22, that I decided I wanted to start making albums.
It's taken me this long, but two weeks ago I got on a plane from Barcelona to London for my first real recording sessions in the studio of Brian Leininger, sound engineer, creator of Echotrip , and personal friend of mine from my days in Granada, Spain. We met there in the summer of 2003, when we were both studying Spanish at the Instituto Don Quijote. We drank more than we studied, for sure, played songs on the rooftop of our residence hall, wandered around the Albayzín together, spent nights among the gitanos at one of the last vital holdouts of authentic flamenco in all of Andalucía.
One afternoon, on our way back into the city from a hike up into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, we got lost in some thicket, and after working our way through it for half an hour, stumbled into a back wall of the Alhambra, just behind the gardens of the Generalife. We saw in front of us, heaped against a hidden rampart of the once impenetrable fortress, a refuse pile where the gardeners had obviously been dumping leaves and grass and branches for years. We climbed our way up the mucky, decaying mound and just managed to sneak over the wall and infiltrate the palace. We were only breaking into a museum, but I couldn't help feeling like one of the soldiers of the Catholic Kings in the late 15th century. With our dirty blonde hair, Brian and I probably looked more like German mercenaries than Spaniards, but none-the-less, we shared a certain pride in our feat. If you go through something like that with a person, you're bound to collaborate again, I guess.