Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

my music

Gigging the Smash Fantastic

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When I started my musical journey half a lifetime ago if you had asked me if I would ever play “Eldery Woman Standing Behind the Counter in a Small Town” to a packed bar at a post-Christmas party in DelCo, my answer would have been, “Hell no.”

I mean, there are few things I enjoy less in life than 90s Pearl Jam, the fickle music tastes of bar crowds, and Christmas. Also, half a lifetime ago I was straightedge. (I’ve always thought Delaware County is pretty decent, though.)

Yet, half-my-age Peter would have been entirely incorrect in his judgmental utterance, because that is just what I found myself doing on the day after Christmas as Ashley and I played our first legit headline appearance as Smash Fantastic.

And you know what? I liked it.

Smash Fantastic mid-song, as shot by Tara B.

All last year Ashley and worked on our repertoire of cover songs as our non-work project together (the teamwork of which made us an even more killer pairing in the office). What started out as a sparse 30 minute set in June has now blossomed into more than three-hours of a mega-pop acoustic jam in which you will quite certainly recognize nearly every song.

This presented a dilemma. Ashley is a Clarkson-level trooper when it comes to wailing through the tricky vocals in our set, but not even The Original Idol herself can rock for that long uninterrupted without getting a little hoarse. Thus, when we scored our DelCo bar gig, it was left to me to quickly add some solo covers to our repertoire to give Ashley an occasional mid-set breather.

Except, Ashley is singing my solo cover repertoire – all Madonna and rocker chicks! She’s doing my “Like a Prayer,” my “Bad Romance,” my “Since U Been Gone” … we even mashed up my formerly solo “Man in the Mirror” into a righteous duet in the original key.

That meant I had to learn to sing songs original performed BY OTHER BOYS. Ugh. Even worse, they couldn’t be a bunch of obscure Rufus Wainwright and Elliott Smith, because the whole point would be to keep the bar crowd interested while Ashley caught her breath.

Thus the Pearl Jam. Everyone knows it and, despite my enduring disdain for Mr. Vedder’s vocals, I can match him pretty effortlessly right down to the warble.

(Not as good as Wes does, though. I really need to record that for posterity at some point.)

After an opening salvo from Ashley, “Elderly Woman” was the first song I played solo. As I started the circular 5-4-1-4-1 chord progression I took a moment to reflect. This is the first time you are ever in a bar playing a song they want to hear, I mused. And they did. I think. It wasn’t the biggest crowd-pleaser of the day (which was surely “We Are Young” or “You & I / What’s Up,” and maybe my “Forget You”), but people nodded in recognition and kept on drinking.

No fleeing the room. No snide, very-audible remarks about my bad singing or theoretical sexual orientation. None of the stuff that I always hate about bar gigs.

At the end of three hours we closed with a killer “Like a Prayer” and encored with “Behind These Hazel Eyes” and a roaring “Rolling in the Deep” and I pronounced with great certainty that we had just played one of my favorite gigs of all time – yes, complete with Christmas and bar and Pearl Jam and all of it. It was 100% fun and 0% stress, and I got to hear three hours of music I love … it just so happened that I was also playing it with one of my friends.

In a weird and slightly twisted way, “Elderly Woman” was the highlight. I might write my own music and prefer to cover Gaga to any guy out there, but when it comes down to it I now have the performance chops and the confidence to hold down the mic on just about anything – whether I actually like the song or not.

As for our repertoire, next up from my most-loathed list is a little number by Jason Mraz.

Musical Fingerprints

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I often lament that there is no instruction manual to being a rock band, and one of the areas I most frequently wish Arcati Crisis had some sort of guide to is selecting songs when your band has multiple songwriters.

Ideally, this guide would be written by The Beatles, or maybe Fleetwood Mac. However, Gina would probably not read it if it was written by Wham!

(What is the grammatical rule for punctuating sentences that end with a name that includes punctuation? Like, I didn’t mean that sentence to be exclamatory. I certainly don’t want Gina to think I am shouting (again) about her not liking Wham!)

(There it goes again. Damn you, Wham!)

Lately Gina and I have been on a new-song-selecting kick. It is interesting to pick multiple songs at the same time because we always choose one song from each of us at a time, but there is a huge disparity in the pool of selections. I write a lot of songs – anywhere from 6 to 20 every year – in many different styles. Pop, folk, rock, country ballads. I’m all over the place. Gina writes relatively few songs. There have been years when I have only heard one or two finished ones, even if she has many others lying in wait. Yet, Gina’s songs are much more thematically consistent.

Thus, the selection process is a bit madcap. A few weeks ago, I played twenty-five songs for Gina to select a mere two. I had my preferences, but I have long since learned that it doesn’t do any good to try to force Gina’s hand into a pick. The resulting song will suck. Gina has to hear a space for herself inside of it.

In the midst of reading the monstrous New York cover story on Grizzly Bear, I discovered they utilize nearly the same process.

Ask them who they’re thinking of when they write, and it’s not an end listener—it’s the other members of the band, who might dislike what’s been written, or lack anything to contribute to it, at which point it’ll be tabled. “Everyone has to have a fingerprint on every song,” says Droste. The whole thing sounds like passing major legislation through Congress.

“Maybe it’s a lot,” says Bear, “that we’re asking ourselves to all be four democratic voices on everything. Maybe that’s not common.”

It is common, Grizzlies! See, this is why we need a guide.

(After reading, I was inspired to listen to Grizzly Bear’s new LP – Shields. It was very well-produced – transfixingly so. Yet, not a single melody was memorable. I felt pretty similarly about their last record.)

(I don’t think my votes would be very popular in their democracy).

By contrast, Gina played me a mere seven songs (a bumper crop, for her), of which I became immediately obsessed with six, so then she had to go back and choose four more of mine. One of hers was about zombies, another about Ben Franklin, a third particularly ingenious one about Daylight Savings Time. It helps that I am a massive fan of Gina’s sensibility in just about everything.

However, there was one I was not obsessed with. Gina also played it for me earlier this year, and at the time I said I thought it might not be done. I made the same argument a few weeks ago. “Maybe it needs more of a refrain,” I said, “or a slightly different chord change in that middle section.”

Now I realize – after Grizzly Bear so succinctly summed up the democracy of songwriting – that there is simply no room for my fingerprint on the song. It is distinctly Gina, with very little room left for my own devices. I am trying to convince her to change it to make room for my fingerprint, but it doesn’t really need it.

How is it that I have always understood that about Gina’s choices in my songs, but never about my choices of hers?

See: we really need an instruction manual.

Who are your people?

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With Jake exported to lovely Rochester, New York for  little while, Gina and I have retooled our mid-week rehearsal into a sort of combo rehearsal, business meeting, new material audition, and general goofing-off night.

Which, honestly, is not so different than what it was when Jake was around for it, but now it’s been officially christened as such.

One of the things we talked about last night was something that came up over impromptu dinner with Matthew Ebel and Nan at #140Conf in June.

Matthew is an indie musician who is totally on the path of 1000 True Fans – and he makes it work spectacularly with steady touring and releases combined with a subscription service and webcasts. He was also the first ever musical director of the conference. I’ve wanted to sit down and chat with him ever since a brief run-in with him at the 2010 conference, so I was psyched to catch up with him about touring, songwriting, and our shared love of Amanda Palmer.

Eventually, conversation turned to my own motley collection of musical acts. Matthew set down his drink, stared me down across the table, and said, “Who are your fans?”

Now, I’m not so delusional as to think I have a massive fan base across all of my acts, but we’ve accumulating our steady listeners over the years. I began to stammer about them, but Matthew cut me off.

“Look, you’ve got friends who dig you. Fine. That’s not what I asked. I said, ‘who are your fans?’ Your people?”

This is the rabbit hole that Gina and I headed down last night. Matthew’s point to me over that dinner was that it’s all well and good to have fans here and listeners there, but it pays to know who your true demographic is. Twenty-something 70s nostalgics? Steam punk enthusiasts? X-Men fans?

It’s basic marketing, and I do it at work all the time at the start of a new project. We produce ad campaigns towards a specific audience, so why not do the same thing for our music?

I guess some musicians might shy away from this whole concept because it’s not artistic, or some frilly bullshit like that. Whatever. In the old, “find a label to be your patron” model of music, there was some marketing person and their intern out there scrambling to figure out your target audience so you could focus on being an ARTISTE.

Well, now your target audience is your patron, as it should be – and it’s your job to know who they are. Figuring out who they are doesn’t mean you have to write songs just for them or anything like that. It’s just a matter of fishing where the fish are. If all the Star Trek fans dig your music, then you better be playing it somewhere where Star Trek fans congregate. Matthew’s point was that putting together that thousand-plus fans is a little easier to do if they aren’t all one-off transactions.

So, who are our people? I don’t know. People in Philadelphia and People on Twitter are apparently categories too large, and People With an Endless Fascination With the End Times But Not In a Morbid Way might be a little too specific.

We’ll figure it out.

(Thanks to Mr. Ebel for a delightful dinner, and for hopefully being gracious about all of the misquoting of him I just did above. Be sure to check out his Lives of Dexter Peterson.)

smash in the studio

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I haven’t recorded much new music for you since we moved into our house in 2010, which is downright odd, since now I have an entire music studio to produce in instead of an itty little 12’x12′ home office slash studio slash dressing room slash equipment shed.

The space is a plus and a minus. It’s a plus to not have all of my guitars piled up on top of each other in my walk in closet so I can never play any of them. The minus is, I’m only really working in the studio if I’m working in the studio. Do you catch my drift? It’s not like I’m trying to choose a shirt to wear to a party and taking a quick listen to a mix, or EQing vocals between blog posts.

Just after agreeing to try being a band, as shot by @SuzyMags. Yes, I am wielding a neon green yoga mat, like the fucking rock star I am.

I spent yesterday locked in the studio, building an acoustic track from scratch for my new covers side project, Smash Fantastic.

I know, I know – another project? Am I ever going to make a freaking blog post, let alone focus on a band?

My excuse is that Smash Fantastic really plugged a hole in what I want to be doing. I love cover songs, and I love big-voiced woman. I tend to err in those directions for my own solo sets, but there’s only a pretty specific audience for my covering Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga.

Plus, let’s be honest, when am I every playing solo anymore?

Enter my friend and colleague Ashley. She has the pipes for those sorts of songs, but not an outlet for the sound. After a few months of messing around progressed to having a serious repertoire and a pair of performances, it seemed like time to have a demo.

Thus my day in the studio – first alone, and later with Ashley, covering one of our favorite songs line by line.

It felt really good. Not just the recording of it, but the knowing what I was doing, and the having the space to execute my vision without clearing a pile of clothes from where it was hanging over a microphone stand.

Now I just have to spend enough more time in the studio to turn the sum of 28 multi-track recordings from Arcati Crisis, Filmstar, and Smash Fantastic into actual, listenable songs.

I guess what I’m saying is: new music, coming soon!

Trust

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I am sitting alone on the step in the small front hallway of my house, playing guitar.

A cage of microphones, stands, and cables surround my body in such a way that I can’t turn or stretch. If I drop a pick it’s lost to me. I just grab another from the tin sitting beside me and keep playing.

Gina, Zina, and Jake are less than 25 feet away – I know, because that is how long the 1/4” cable plugged into my guitar stretches. I can’t see them. We have erected a wall of cardboard boxes in the door frame that leads from our hall into the living room. Gina and I puzzled it together on Saturday while she hummed the theme to Tetris.

I can hear them. Only faintly through the boxes, but loud and clear over my massive, ear-cupping headphones. Gina chirps in a variety of accents through her control room mic, keeping me informed of the action in the other room and singing my songs on my behalf. Jake and Zina communicate via their instruments.

Every track I have ever released has been engineered, mixed, and produced by me. That means any time you have listened to me as a performer I was also busy thinking about a lot of other things, like if the mics are placed correctly or if the bridge is going to clip.

I can’t do that from this side of my wall of boxes. The control room is 25 feet away. Gina and Jake are the ones engineering my songs, and Zina is driving them. My only job is to sit on this step and play guitar the best I know how.

It was hard during my first song. I was still barking commands and telling Gina just how to cue each track. That did not last for long. It didn’t need to. If I can put my musical life in Gina’s hands, then who else can I trust?

That’s the word I keep coming back to in my tiny guitar room, stare fixed on the sideways logos on cardboard boxes as Gina cues up another track. Trust. I don’t know if I ever understood rock bands before now. I liked them and obsessed over every detail of their album credits, but I don’t know if I understood them.

Now, in my little box, I understand.

Rock bands are about trust. Every note, every rhythm and chord, is another blind fall. If you cannot trust the rest of the band to catch you it will never ring true.

I am ready to plummet through another take.