Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

self-critique

The 30 for 30 Project

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When I hatched one of my typically insane musical project ideas – to record 30 songs from the 30 years of my life for my 30th birthday (maybe in the 30 days of September?) – I was working from the assumption it would stay an idea due to my perfectionism. The concept would be safely tucked away as an iTunes playlist with all of the other covers projects that I’d never started.

"Endless Love" by Diana Ross & Lionel Richie was the number one record in America the day I was born. While I won't say that I'll NEVER cover it, you definitely won't be hearing it later today as my pick from 1981.

Then, August happened. I kept posting every day, and really enjoying it. I finally found a blogging rhythm, eleven years into my experiment. I thought, maybe the idea isn’t so crazy after all. Maybe I should do it.

The issue is that I haven’t recorded any new solo music since we moved into the house last June. I have hatched half a dozen cool projects in my head, but I haven’t launched a single one.

This seems paradoxical. I have a studio now. Space to set up and stay set up without having to drape suit jackets over my microphone poles and check email from within a lattice of quarter-inch cables.

I mean that literally. At the old house my studio was my office was my dressing room. It was common to find a discarded microphone atop a pile of wireframe sketches and freshly laundered underwear. Gear shared a walk-in closet with board games and old copies of Rolling Stone. Switching to a different guitar meant risking sending up a tinker-tape parade of brightly colored Monopoly money in my hallway if I moved a box the wrong way.

And you know what? It didn’t stop me. I recorded two seasons of Trio, four Arcati Crisis Live @ Rehearsals, and over a dozen solo demos that became my Brown Bag Demos, Vol. 1. Now I have an entire attic committed solely to recording, and the well has suddenly run dry.

Actually, the well is quite wet. I have the best intentions. The new wrinkle is that with space to set up a perfect signal chain the issue is no longer my willingness, but my perfection. Everything has to be perfect. Perfectly planned, perfectly rehearsed, perfectly executed.

The Rolling Stones' 18th American LP, Tattoo You, held the top album spot when I was born. I won't be playing "Start Me Up" at any point in this project.

Perfect makes things hard. Bobbling that one chord change? Delay it. Tickle in my throat? Cancel it.

30 for 30 is different. I am not promising perfection. I am not promising that I’m going to get it done in 30 days. I am not promising you will know all the songs. I am not promising polished studio cuts. I am not promising all of the covers will be perfectly played.

And, I am certainly not representing it as a collection of my favorite, most-cherished songs.

No. All of that leads to perfectionism paralysis.

What I am promising is a single take video play-through of a song from every year from 1981 to 2010, with some commentary along the way. No cherished favorites. No multi-track demos. No perfection.

Just me and the music.

30 for 30 starts later today, in 1981.

it’s a glam rock life

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At about midnight on Saturday Gina and I were having some issues.

At that time we were on the third song of our full-length, fully-electric Arcati Crisis set at Fergie’s pub.

Actually, we were about four minutes into trying to start our third song, my one-minute and six-second tune, “Glam.”

In case you are bad at rock math, 4:1 is not a very good prep-time to play-time ratio.

On the left side of the stage, one of Gina’s two lowest strings was a hair out of tune. On the right side of the stage, I was playing the opening riff to my own song in the wrong key (which sorta made Gina’s ever-so-minor tuning issue a moot point).

Even in the moment I was struck by the Alanis-Irony that after six months of preparing for our big electric debut we were having the kind of rock-stoppage that regularly felled us a decade ago when we were acoustic teenagers, all while our brand new drummer looked on, bemused.

That’s rock for you. You can practice all your high flying solos and set up an awesome effects chain, but rock has some basic requirements to fulfill and one of them is playing in the same key as each other (unless you want to play more experimentally and/or with a lot more distortion than we do).

You don’t think about this stuff when you watch a pop band play their new single on Saturday Night Live. They have guitar techs. The drummer has a click track in ear so they can cue samples. One of the guitarists is actually playing into a midi sequencer so it doesn’t matter too much if he’s a hair out of tune. And on every chorus the singer is doubled by a ten-track, four-part harmony pulled right off of her record.

That shit is way above our heads.

Of course, if one of them forgets what key the song is in they’re still in trouble, so I suppose what I’m saying is Gina would do fine on Saturday Night Live, but I would be immortalized in my own Ashlee Simpson moment.

But not really. Because I am a freakish perfectionist, and we had played all of these songs hundreds of times already, and we already played an awesome sneak preview date and teaser set and two awesome songs, and I was not about to let me forgetting for three measures the song was not actually in F ruin my night.

The upshot of this story is that the gig was awesome. The whole “Glam” snafu was barely a blip. On our third try we just started the damn thing, and after the eight seconds of dischordant intro all of our issues were over. We proceeded directly from that into a raucous debut of our cover of “Moonage Daydream.” Then we played Gina’s brand-new “Song for Mrs. Schroeder” for the first time, and turned in pitch-perfect versions of “Apocalyptic Love Song” and “Love Me Love Me Not” to end our first set.

I even hit the little hammer in the last verse of “Love Me Not” I had missed in our last few rehearsals.

Over an hour later we closed the night by launching into one of the most awesome, hard-rocking versions of Gina’s seven-minute epic “Brother John” that we’ve ever unleashed.

When it was over we said thank you, doled out sweaty hugs to our friends that had hung around until last call to catch every song, and got paid.

And then I drove a car inside of the Philadelphia city limits for the first time ever – at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning – and I didn’t even kill any drunk douche bags on Walnut.

In sum, the “Glam” incident barely even ranks. I’m only devoting precious digital column-inches to it as a reminder that the stupid crap that happens to me in the middle of a show only has to matter if I let it.

Otherwise, it’s eight painfully out-of-tune seconds out of a three-and-a-half hour gig, and that is a really effing good out-of-tune to awesome ratio.

The Human Calculator v. The Harmony Jukebox

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That would be a pretty dull superhero fight, huh?

Actually, the title refers to Friday’s post, which drew a quick comment from someone who built a straw-man of “The Human Spellchecker” to stand next to my snarky Human Calculator.

I’m so high-and-mighty about math, but do I use a spell-checker when I blog? Would I deny people a spellchecker too in my dedicated Ludditism?

The answers are, respectively, “occasionally” and “of course!” The existence of tools to assist us doesn’t replace the need to master skills or knowledge on our own.

Consider the source. I take for granted that I’m comfortable doing both of these things. I have to proofread words and numbers as part of both my jobs and my hobbies. It’s in my best interest to be a knowledgeable snob about both.

Maybe they aren’t the best examples for me.

I always say, “music is like calculus to me.” Yet, I’m a musician. I don’t have wonderful pitch, and I am not a natural singer. I can’t pluck perfectly in-tune harmony notes out of thin air like E or Gina, each of whom I refer to as “The Harmony Jukebox.”

When our band learns a new song I usually have to play along on piano at first, and when I sing harmony in the car E has to sing with me the first few times. And I have to pay careful attention to breath support, shaping, and phrasing to stay in tune.

At some point I have to sing the notes myself in an effortless way. If I never eliminated the piano, or E, or the careful attention to every note, I wouldn’t be much of a musician. I mean, yeah, they have auto-tune for that now, but what about performing live.

Bottom line: being a musician is hard work for me! Sometimes it isn’t any fun at all.

What if math was that hard for me? Would I sometimes just whip out the calculator? Probably. But just like music, I’d still want to know how to do it myself. I still want to possess that knowledge.

What about you? Forget grade-school antics like math and spelling. What is a difficult skill that you have to reproduce daily? Do you use a tool to assist you? And, can you still perform the same task without the tool?

Trolls Under the Bridge

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As I spend more time working on Social Media projects at work and at home, one of the most recurring topics is “Trolls.”

It’s a broad topic. Trolls can be anything from vociferous-but-reasonable dissenters to people with an agenda of annoyance and an axe to grind. Each species merits a different reaction.

The Air Force created a terrific Web Posting Response Assessment – effectively, a Troll Taxonomy Tool & Decision Tree – to aid in selecting a response. (Here is a PDF of a recent version, for your reference.)

It’s a great tool – it distinguishes between several layers of negative responses. There are true “Trolls” (negative purely for the sake of it), but also responders are who “Misguided” (negative based on incorrect info) and “Unhappy” (negative based on a corresponding negative experience).

This simple, one-page chart has been a sanity-saver on a few projects in 2009. It forced my teams to stop a cycle of second-guessing – evaluate, respond if-needed, and move on.

That’s why my thoughts went to the assessment last night, when I received a comment notification on one of my videos. The comment was to the effect of “this dude can’t hit a note.”

I tried to objectively place my responder in the tree. Clearly he had a negative experience listening to me. He’s also misguided, because I’m definitely hitting many notes quite well in the video, and his comment wasn’t subjective.

Ultimately, though, he’s just a garden-variety Troll – spreading negativity for some intangible reason it’s impossible to dispute. So, per the Air Force, I’ll monitor it, but won’t respond.

That’s the success of more than my crack Air Force training. Three or more years ago that sort of comment would cripple my confidence. I would probably apologize for his negative experience without ever assuming he was misguided. And I would stop playing the song, probably for months!

Yesterday, he just made me smile. These days I’m a lot bigger than one or ten trollish comments. I sound how I want to sound; if I didn’t, I would have never posted the video.

That’s the same confidence you must have in your brand to make good use of the Air Force tool. If you’re unsure of the product or service you’re offering, every dissent turns into a potentially reasonable complaint.

From there, it’s all apologies, and you’ll be overrun with Trolls.

Daily Demo: Icy Cold

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Here’s a brand new HD video of “Icy Cold” with beautiful hi-fi multi-track soundboard audio. It comes with a story.

Okay, story-time.

Ten years ago (less 24 days) I was a freshman in college, and I wrote a song called “Icy Cold.”

It was an odd one – very oblique lyrics in one of my more unusual alternate tunings (at the time) made it a challenge to sing and play. I left it off my 2000 demo CD Other Plans and, curiously, also did not consider it for my 2001 studio disc Relief. It remained bound to my apartment, where it factored in to a few of my favorite Trio recordings.

Around the same time I wrote “Icy Cold” – 86th in a rapidly-expanding list of songs – I decided that it was time for me to start playing shows.

Being rather ignorant as to what that entailed, I assumed that I would just phone up a local, mostly-acoustic venue where people I liked frequently played and explain that I wrote tons of awesome songs, and then they would invite me to play. (Later, after my initial flush of success, I could upgrade to playing the TLA or the Electric Factory).

The Tin Angel being the only local mostly-acoustic venue that I knew of at the time, I sussed out their booking information and rang them up.

That was the extent of my year-2000 booking experience at the Tin Angel. No follow-up. No booking. No flush of success.

To be fair, I would have been an utter disaster. I know some people so wonderful that their first ever show was at the Tin, but I was not that kind of wonderful in 2000. Sure, I had the awesome songs, but I could just barely sing, and I was playing a guitar that didn’t even especially stay in tune!

Over the course of the past ten years I’ve done a lot to rectify my singing and guitar-playing issues, and I’ve played in a lot of amazing Philly venues – including the Tin Angel, as part of a showcase with Arcati Crisis. Yet, I’ve never fulfilled that original goal of ten years ago – being featured solo on the bill at the Tin.

Well, that’s going to happen on Friday at 10:30 p.m., so when it came to choosing the first song to post in 2010 in this glorious new HD audio/video combo format it seemed natural to choose “Icy Cold” – especially given the slights it experienced in 2000 and 2001.

Plus, it’s really freaking cold out.

That’s my story.

PS: I owe the hugest possible shout-out to Tim Jahn for explaining Adobe Premiere Pro compression codecs to me via Twitter at the eleventh hour (literally) to make this beautiful video possible. Tim writes a blog of occasional, thought-provoking bulletins that I have been enjoying for months. You can also follow him on Twitter.