a careful disorderliness is the true method
I don’t know how you write with music on in the background. Is it a gen x thing? I had to do a bunch of admin this morning: updating my bandcamp with the new music (it’s bandcamp Friday IYKYK) so I clicked over Lofi Girl on YouTube which, if you too are a gen x type or a baby boomer god help you, is a YouTube channel, or channels, that present a simple repeating animated image of a college girl with straight cut brown bangs studying with her big over-the-ear headphones and maybe a cat on the desk sleeping beside her and you get to listen to what she presumably listens to, which are Lofi ambient music meant for the purpose of — complimenting? Ignoring? Working in spite of? Color me luddite.
Listening to background music is fine for editing photos, entering T shirt sizes, uploading videos. But the moment the old subject-predicate game begins it’s curtains for the ol sonic ticklers as far as I’m concerned.
What I’m trying to say in a way hopefully more on the sharing side than the advertising side — a dubious parsing if you ask me — is that the live video for my acoustic take on Meet Me at the End of the World, is now available for you to watch. I think its awesome, in the way that unadorned things are. Like steak. Salt pepper olive oil being the correct answer. Sometimes I make videos where it looks like you’re watching a thing happen in a room but really you’re watching a staged version of that thing. Fine but not quite.
This isn’t that.
The cameras play the role of court stenographer, documentary director, eye witness.
They show what happened. You can tell it’s not staged because I would never make those facial expressions on purpose.
This video completes the cycle for this new song of mine: four different ways to show you why I think Meet Me is worth your while. Live acoustic video, Official video, Lyric video, and a Visualizer. Some cost money to make — one a little, one a lot — some cost nothing but time and imagination. Each had its own unique awards.
For instance the lyric video — one of the free ones — sprung from a very simple idea: let me invite people into my studio, where I work every morning, sitting in my desk and writing in my little journal with a pen.
Except, how to present that in a compelling, aesthetic way?
My first try was a failure — I didn’t understand the limitations of the workflow I was using. But I thought about it the next night in a half dream and figured out a way around and through. When it worked — that is to say, when my vision met reality — it was, satisfying. And to my mind, original.
There are a lot of lyric videos in the world, but I haven’t seen one anything like what I made. Also, the way I write songs prioritizes specific language and word choice so it makes sense to put a similar emphasis on its visual presentation. Plus handwriting is the opposite of AI.
The Official Video, on the other hand, was all about picking a team and letting them do their thing, starting with director Mila Vilaplana. Her vision took my thesis — falling in love feels like the world is ending and beginning at the same time — and set it during a Viet Nam protest era, where, absent the narrative strictures of traditional storytelling, the lovers sashay into a parallel universe and put their feelings to a choreographed dance reminiscent of one of my favorite films, ‘Singin in the Rain.’
Forty five people worked on the official video. To be honest, I barely had anything to do with it, apart from showing up on my call time and sending the wardrobe people my size card. To play only a small part in a large whole is a joy mostly unknown to the folksinging world. Out here we’re all doing our own thing. But in film everyone has a job, so in the end the product is, accordingly, everyone’s. Plus Randa a got to do one of the things she does best, which is directing armies of creative people to a common task. Working with my partner in life on a shared vision, is another piece of the pleasure.
I’m trying to draw your attention to the pleasure inherent in the act of making, which is the part of the artistic process over which you have at least some control. The rest of it is — the reception, the validation — slippery and, if you’re hoping to kick a big whole in the side of the world, mostly disappointing. With notable exceptions.
Making art is a privilege and a calling. And fulfilling to make something new in the world, something beautiful according to your own tastes. A large part of why I make art is to increase the confidence in other people who have a similar impulse but need a little encouragement.
I have a lot more to say on this but we’re en route to Kentucky on a five hour drive with our four month old and it’s my turn to drive.
Listen to Meet Me at the End of the World (Acoustic Live version) here.
Watch the Meet Me at the End of the World (Acoustic Live version) video here.
Buy the Meet Mes on Bandcamp, the Studio version, the Acoustic, or both.
Buy tix to our East of Eden Music and Lit Fest Sun May 18 (almost half gone)
Buy the Limited Edition T Shirt here.
