Just watch the fireworks.

I'll stay up as late as it takes.


So, I near the end of another July 4th in Boston and we're still in love. Happy Findependence Day, y'all.

A new kind of Walden.

So I've been realizing I'm a huge loser lately, but that's starting to be ok I guess. I got off work really early which is rare for a Tuesday, so I went to Harvard stadium to play soccer. Then I came home; and realizing I have no friends anymore, and still a little heavy in thought about stuff, I decided a late night swim in Walden would be relaxing. So I drove to Walden alone, waded in and swam around for a half an hour or so, at least 10 minutes of which I was just floating on my back looking at the stars. It had just rained earlier, so the sky was really clear and the water wasn't cold. About 100 yards out, a layer of fog sat just above the surface of the pond and the wind in the middle seemed to be blowing it around.

And in all this beauty I encountered not another human soul.

This is highly recommended.

Yo Yo Moon

I took the first step towards fulfilling a long held ambition to play the cello by renting one yesterday. I played a C major scale and fumbled my way through the bassline of lean on me. But I'm gonna start rocking it soon...just you watch.

Survivor.

Thanks to JG, BKH, KW, EM, JM, JN, Mom, and the Word.

Still hurting, but understanding the whys a little better. You are my strength.



I can't believe it's raining again.

Well... then, okay. I guess.

Ok, as of today the horse ran off with someone else. New cliche metaphor needed.

There's other seahorses in the sea?






I hate my life sometimes.

"You gotta get back up on the horse."

I hate that advise. I get the point, I just don't like the metaphor. I've been thrown from a horse before, and beginning to date again when you're not really interested in these girls is nothing like remounting a horse that bucked you. It's scarier.

I like the same girl I've liked for the last 10 months.

I don't see how going out with girls I don't like is supposed to help me move on.

The Mullet

So, as many know, I attended a Nascar race in NC last weekend. Lisa cut my hair into a mullet. And...pics.

Angry Fat Kid

I bought a guitar amp, and no, I didn't break the bank. I spent $129 and got the loudest, meanest 5 Watt amp ever. After playing it, Jason said it looked so cute, but then screamed like an angry fat kid.



He also observed how the controls on this amp are kinda like the male libido...



On/Off and Volume.

Very peceptive Jason.

Where are you and what have you been doing?

That's a set of questions I've been getting from everybody from my mom to some of my best friends with increasing regularity. Here's a semi-comprehensive series of answers for those who harbor the same inquiry.

1. Applying to the part time MBA program at Boston University.
2. Starting my own small business with Jason and Ryan.
3. Shopping for rental space we can easily convert into a recording studio.
4. Buying musical instruments and recording equipment at a furious pace.
5. Sorting out health insurance and taxes.
6. Paying lots of bills and trying to eclipse all his debt.
7. Still cheering on Senator Obama.
8. Working nights and barely seeing anyone except his girlfriend, business partners, and occasionally his roommates.
9. Went to the Bon Jovi concert in Pittsburgh with Annie.
10. Livin' on a prayer.

Barely a blog.

This pizza was delicious.

Anybody want to be my best friend in the universe?

Lend me the money to buy this...

I'll kiss you or wash your car weekly for the rest of your life, plus pay you back within 4 months.

Don't judge me.

So, I went to the AFC Championship game yesterday...

For FREE. Thanks Gina for being stuck in Maryland and Bob for having awesome friends. Go Pats!

Anybody who's ever moved a grand relates...

On most days I like my job.

But not when I'm in till 2am on Monday, then 4am on Tuesday.

I blame Mitt Romney. Just lose already.

My new love.

I'm in love again. I haven't been in love for well over a year, so I figure it's alright. And I'm gonna have to spend quite a bit to get her, but I've decided it's worth it. Her name is Rebeca, now I just need to decide which color. Please cast your vote.

Baby Blue?

Or Gold Flake Sparkle?

Jason came to Boston, and it went something like this...

So this is the New Year...

I am a bit of a Scrooge when it comes to doing super touristy things. Tourists are super annoying and the 'highlight reel' approach to a vacation seldom appeals to me. So I was a little hesitant about doing New Years Eve in Times Square, New York City. The mandatory waiting in a pen in the freezing cold for 8 hours was not encouraging me much either.

But the unwritten law of New Years is you kinda have to go where the girl goes. And Annie wanted to do Times Square. We actually had a totally good time. My best college bud, Jason came along after spending a few days in Boston. Mr. Slow-Mover himself, kissed the face off someone else in our group at midnight (it remains a barely guarded secret whom). Also joining us were L-to-the-Puggle, her mission companion and her friend Erin, and my old roommate Yancy.

The cold was bad, but the pen wasn't very crowded, so we had plenty of room to move around. We did the wave, the limbo, a congo line, and played some pretty fun games. Joining us were a fun little group of "I can't believe they're not mormons" and some frightening drunk Australians who were very fond of shouting Wanker. I got to see The Bravery and Velvet Revolver too. All in all it was a fun evening and the thrill of screaming "Happy New Years!" with millions of other people is really pretty cool. Then there's the mass singing of Old Lang Syne, New York-New York, and Imagine. I'm a little disappointed that The Final Countdown didn't make the playlist, but you can't ask for everything, I suppose. Pictures...




P.S. The girl on the left in this last pic is the female double of Al Deans. (With the obvious additions of hair and breasts) Not just looks either, behavior too. It was very disturbing.

Gina broke her foot...

And she asked me to write something funny on her cast.

I'm getting on a plane in 2 hours.

And still I blog! So, as an Arizona boy, I've never developed much love for snow. It's cold and wet, and while it can be beautiful, it can also be terribly inconvenient stuff. You've gotta shovel it, scrape it off your car, step in large mounds of it to get to the parking meter, etc...

But I loved doing this.


That's the girls' who live upstairs door.

I came home and found my roommates and home-teaching companion David diligently piling snow high against their door. (Mind you, David and I home teach the girls upstairs) A few weeks ago the two younger girls in the house announced that they were initiating a prank war with us. The proceeded to hide our shampoo or steal our pillows. Little stuff. Trouble is, none of us think little when it comes to prank wars. We default in our minds to much weightier fare, like lighting doors on fire, setting mice loose in the house, or leaving upper-deckers. The first like 4 pranks I thought of would have flat-out ended our friendship. But this one was good. Severe, but not cruel. So I joined in, though truthfully the job was mostly done already.

The determined efforts of David to the project were admirable. He really got behind this with all his heart. Thanks Dave. Big ups to my roomies who managed to scale back a bit and still put the stank in prank.

I want this T-Shirt.

"Rockin' the Suburbs just like Quiet Riot did..."

So my newest roommate Ben is a musically talented fellow. More importantly, he's a musically motivated fellow. We often break into spontaneous covers of Chicago or Lisa Loeb or 2Pac, or Debbie Gibson. On certain early afternoons, evenings, and Saturdays we take turns on drums and electric guitar rocking punk and 90's grunge. We have fun, but often lament our limited ensemble. There's a lot of musical instruments in this house and only 4 hands and feet inclined to play them. Simply stated, we are in need of a 3rd or 4th rocker. Now recruiting. Submit to applications to this blog.

Hahaha

From Dooce.

So... the blog.

Well, I have severely neglected the rites of blogging for several months now. I even fail to read anymore. For goodness sakes, Kristy has even blogged like 7 times since I last read the blogs. Which means Natalie has blogged approximately 657 times (I stopped counting) and Laura Pugmire has still not blogged once.

Hell, even Criddle has a new blog these days which, had I known about, I would've one the name Cindell contest. I rule the Ewok movies. Ok, enough ranting, it took me two hours to read blogs tonight... that's what happens when you get behind.

Just say the word... Stu, Stu, Studio.

Hi-Tops

I designed my own chuck taylor's a few weeks ago on the converse site. They arrived today and are rad. Chocolate brown with navy blue tongues and gray highlights and laces. They even have Mooney sewed into the canvas.

What an awesome term.

Click this link.

OK, who wants to go see her with me on Friday?

Game 6.

Was totallyfreakingawesome. See?

Then you take the recycling out. That's not part of it, but still very important.

So I've decided this week I'm putting my studio back to work. I have too much nice stuff to never use it and while I love my job at NPR it's not exactly stirring the creative impulses in me very much. I'm gonna start by recording some local people for free and see if I can't get a little bit of business underway.

"It's bizness, it's bizness time... you know what I'm talking about it's the time we do the bizness."

It's hard.

I'm used to blogging at night. But the new schedule has me kinda backwards. The morning is now the time that I am most present of mind. I'll have to start making time to hit this puppy in the morning or the blog might disappear entirely.

I feel like I should blog.

So I will. Not much to say. Had a cool date this weekend. Sometimes it's just nice to have a good one even if it doesn't lead anywhere... restores faith in the process when (let's face it), at times, there is precious little.

I also am enjoying work quite a bit. We're fundraising now, which if anybody knows about public radio, is a pretty crucial time of year. If you've never given to public broadcasting you should... from 7-9am on Monday some very generous donors will even match your pledge dollar for dollar, and you can pledge as much or little as you want. See WBUR.ORG for details. You can listen to 90.9FM this week too for all kinds of cool giveaways encouraging donations. The government's support of public radio amounts to less than 7% of annual operating costs, so they really do depend on listeners quite a bit.

Otherwise, I've had an uneventful week. My music listening has been sort of bizarre this week though. Erasure, Garth Brooks, Peter Gabriel, James Taylor, tomorrow I think I'll go with Talking Heads or Rancid... or Rammstein, yes, Rammstein.

Du. Du Hast.

This morning at 6:12AM

My body took its revenge for the way I've treated it for the past 3 weeks.

If you suddenly take your body from comparative normalcy to very late nights, long shifts, long periods of no food followed by rapid ingestions of burger king, when your system is not used to fast food, and throw in a harried and inconsistent schedule of taking your medication... your body will respond with:

6 or 7 minutes of violent nausea.
10 minutes of painful dry heaving.
Throbbing headache behind your right eyeball.
Coma until noon, at which point you realize you somehow slept through church.

Sorry body.
I'll be better to you this week. I actually bought groceries.

I'm sixes.

6 things I especially love right now.
Being employed again.
All the new stuff for the iPhone.
John Lennon.
Weeds. (I know, I'm evil, but it's funny)
The Ewok Movies.

6 things I don't especially love right now.
Working nights.
Migraines.
Having less free time.
Not sleeping well.
Summer ending.

This made me chuckle today...

I was reading a movie review on NYTimes.com and laughed when I saw the correction...

P.S. Arizona is great. Nieces/Nephews cute as ever. Little bro gets home Friday. Funnily enough, he has a P.P.I. with my mission president who is my home stake's Area Authority, so I should get to see him too Friday. Better shave huh?

What do you call the beautiful girl on a banjo player's arm?

A tattoo. This was one of at least 20 banjo player jokes I heard the car talk guys spout off today while I was waiting for my production department trainer to arrive. WBUR Boston's NPR station should be an interesting place to work. First day went well. They had me edit some shows together from script which I apparently did pretty well at. I also got an explanation of how the different studios route their audio and how we integrate other stations like the BBC and NPR National into the broadcast.

No, I'm not done.

I've been without my computer. I have it back and will continue my "favorite albums" thread for a while. But I hereby call on Kristy Williams, Lora Fisher, and Jasmine Ewing to blog. You slackers.

III- Led Zeppelin

While the first 4 Led Zeppelin albums were all technically unnamed, the 2nd and 3rd records actually use publish the numerical value on the sleeve. So I think it’s safe to call this album Three. One and Two were fine and all, but Three was a really incredible record. It opens with “The Immigrant Song” which if you don’t recognize by name you would certainly recognize by the first vocal. This track is widely regarded as one of the most hard-rockingest songs in history. I particularly love the live performance of it on BBC television. The songs on Three are the strongest of any of Zeppelin’s previous records, which might be accurately described as just jamming with a central idea. The most free-form song seems to be the slow blues jam “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, but even here it seems like there’s more of an arrangement. “Gallows Pole” features Jimmy Page on the hurdy-gurdy which makes this record cool all by itself. If you don’t know what a hurdy-gurdy is, you should. If you’ve never heard the climax of Gallows Pole either, you need to before you die. “That’s the Way” is probably tied with “Going to California” for Led Zepellin’s most beautiful song, especially in the BBC arrangement where mandolin is substituted for the slide guitar. “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp” is some seriously cool bluegrass turned rock action. And the closer, “Hats Off To Harper” is a really cool study in slide guitar. I looked all over You-Tube unsuccessfully for video of Union Station’s Jerry Douglas playing it on Dobro at a bluegrass festival.

The Unforgettable Fire- U2

The Unforgettable Fire is proof that the Irish band called U2 used to be cool. This album was made in 1984, 2 years before “The Joshua Tree”, which exploded U2 into the kind of international success that few bands ever experience. For those who don’t know, U2’s guitarist calls himself “The Edge”, and he’s at least 62% of the reason U2 sounds good. That holds true on this album but at a higher percentage. The other guys are all great players. Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton Jr. are one of the most solid drum/bass combos in all of rock. And Bono legitimately had some pipes to be reckoned with for most of his career. To his everlasting credit, his voice is shot nowadays mostly because of the gutsy way he sang from 1982-1992 (plus all the drinking and smoking). But it’s Edge that takes the songs to sonic heights. An early pioneer of all things echo, he plugs his guitar into so much delay and reverb on this record he sounds like 20 guitarists. And it’s not a cover, he is really a fantastic guitarist with great tone and real chops. This is also the album he started playing Vox AC-30’s on, bespeaking his excellent taste in amplifiers (I play the same amp).

This is the first of 4 U2 albums produced by Brian Eno with or without Steve Lilliwhite (this one without). And his excellent string arrangements are all over it. The record is very dynamic and honestly the first digital mastering of it robbed it of a lot of it’s magic. It was made in Dublin on the only 24-track tape machine in the country. For bigger songs like “Wire” and “Indian Summer Sky”, several downmixes of Edge’s guitars had to be made to allow room for the strings and vocals. Later collaborator Daniel Lanois called this U2’s last “rebellious record” coming after “Boy”, “October”, and “War” all steeped in lots of things to say about nuclear proliferation, the refugee situation in Africa and the South Pacific, apartheid and obviously, the Irish-British tensions at home. Bono characterized it differently, saying this is when they “stopped bitching and started preaching” and describes the songs on this record as celebrations of the few people who refuse to accept the situation. That’s not to say it lacks angst. As Bono ends “Wire” with the dismissive “Here’s the rope, here’s the rope... now swing on it”.

I like it cause it’s messy. Messier than U2 ever allowed another record to be. Edge’s guitars bleed into everything, Larry’s drums are not locked into a tempo, in fact, they’re all over the place, and the others just go with the feel, but that’s what music is supposed to be like. Bono belts himself horse and even out of tune, and he keeps belting. It’s really kind of beautiful. I think U2 got kinda sterile over time, and I generally say “Achtung Baby” was their last good record. But when they play these songs, and it’s pretty rare, except for “Pride (In the Name of Love)” and “Bad”, they’re still raw, cause they never subjected them to the critical process of everything after. That’s the U2 I love, and since I’m never gonna pay over $100 to see them again, I’m probably never gonna see them again.

The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner- Ben Folds Five

It’s possible that the most interesting thing about this very interesting record is its name. Ben Folds Five drummer Darren Jesse says “Reinhold Messner” is the name he and several high school buddies used on their fake ID’s to get into bars. A friend had a posterboard of an AZ drivers license with that name and they all took their picture standing in front of it. Once Darren was arrested after being beat up, and the cop called in the whole name before realizing the 17 year old in front of him claimed to be 34. It turns out Reinhold Messner is also the name of a famous mountaineer. And the name of the album had to be changed from “The Biography of Reinhold Messner”.

This was Ben Folds Five’s 3rd and final full length album, made following the explosive and unanticipated success of the single “Brick” from their previous album, “Whatever and Ever Amen”. While the first two ‘BFF’ records were made in the trio’s home studio in a very expeditious all at once method with little in the way of overdubs and touch ups, Unauthorized Biography was made over the course of several months in 4 of Sony’s largest US studios including most initial tracking at Sound City in Los Angeles and RPM in New York. The album was produced by Caleb Southern and mixed by Andy Wallace, both personal friends of the band and players on the album. The trio didn’t just step up into big studios, they beefed up the instrumentation to include extensive arrangements for Strings and Horns, orchestral tympani, Moog Synthesizer Bass, Fender Rhodes, and huge vocal passages reminiscent of Queen.

The album opens with an incredibly dynamic wake up track called “Narcolepsy”. Leading into the first single “Don’t Change Your Plans” where Ben’s lyric indicates for the first time a fatal disease. The theme of death and references to disease reoccur throughout the album (which honestly has as many ups as downs), and consequently many fans began to circulate rumors that Ben was dying, citing evidence that he had recently married for the first time in his life and had a kid. It turns out, rather that Ben and the boys had actually written a sort of concept album. Inspired by the diagnosis with Leukemia of a fairly regular muse of his, a man named Fred Jones, Ben wrote Don’t Change Your Plans, Hospital Song, Regrets, Jane, and Mess. Darren wrote the most haunting track of the album, “Magic” (a song I love dearly) about his recently deceased mother. And Ben’s dad left an odd answering machine message that turned into the ethereal “Your Most Valuable Possession”. But then there’s the moments of sheer stupidity and bliss like the second single “Army” that you listen to BFF for, that don’t fit nicely into the concept album formula. “Grew a mustache and a mullet. Got a job at Chic-fil-a.” I love the album because it represents what Ben had never done before (or since), and that’s really get down to the business or recording his phenomenally good music phenomenally well. I love his raw aesthetic, but it is a beautiful and rare pleasure to hear his music polished and clean. This is a meticulously arranged and recorded album, and a stunning one at that.

Violator- Depeche Mode

While Depeche Mode had written a lot of really successful and amazing music, their first defining album for me, was “Violator”. My sister had it on cassette along with Erasure’s “The Innocents”. I stole them both and ran the tape ragged. I’d never heard something as blissfully dark as “The World In My Eyes” or as singable as “Enjoy The Silence”. “Halo” and “Policy of Truth” were similarly somber, yet begged to be sung along with. This very idea of melancholy, foreboding pop was so infectious. Of course I soon discovered The Cure and The Smiths and a love affair kinda set in with this kind of music. That first experience with Violator though, has never left me.

It’s one of those special records made when digital recording was just starting to emerge, made with a number of digital synthesizers and drum machines (although using some analog synths like ARPs and Oberheims) but still recorded on analog tape. More and more records in the 80’s were recorded on Digital as the decade went on and there’s a general sterility that can sort of be felt on a lot of the music from that time. The digital technology was young and higher sample rates/bit depths weren’t an option on most equipment, so recordings lost some of the fullness and intimacy they could have had. Not Violator though. If there’s two things it definitively is, it’s big and intimate. You should honestly buy this album if you don’t already have it and play it loud over some decent speakers and feel it’s seriousness. This is pop music that is not playing around.

St. Elsewhere- Gnarls Barkley

One of my favorite recordings of this past year is Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 debut, St. Elsewhere. Gnarls is the collaborative effort of eccentric but introverted ‘hip-hop’ producer Brian Burton (known as Danger Mouse) and Atlanta rapper/singer Cee-Lo Green (named Thomas Calloway, and hardly an introvert himself). Danger Mouse became famous the new fashioned way, via the internet. He got the idea to attempt a mash up of an ‘a capella’ mix of Jay-Z’s Black Album with the historic Beatles’ LP commonly referred to as “the white album”. A purist at heart, Danger Mouse made certain every single sound in the album is sampled from the Beatles’ album. After discovering he made a pretty cool mashup of "Helter Skelter" and "99 Problems", he decided to see if he could pull off the whole thing. After successfully completing the project, he sent it to some friends and before you know it was all over the internet, popularly coined the Grey Album. Danger Mouse gained an overnight reputation as a sampling phenom. He finished an album with Jemini and teamed with M.F. Doom to produce the DangerDoom project “The Mouse and the Mask”.

While the range of his beat-making skill was being appreciated on those projects, he blew the doors open with St. Elsewhere, sampling from a huge range of musical styles(including Peruvian music and Silent Film scores) and incorporating a healthy amount of live instrumentation. Cee-Lo’s incredibly versatile vocal abilities helped take these songs to interesting new places. The influences of gospel, rock and roll, Mo-town, soul, funk, punk, new wave, and hip hop of the old and new school are clearly evident in this unique musical hybrid. They released the single "Crazy" in the UK and made history as the first single to be certified number one from downloads alone. It evidently caught just as quickly in the US as at their American debut show at the Coachella Valley Music Festival, nearly everyone in the audience sang along to "Crazy". I know, I was there. Their live show is an awesome, nutty party which I took part in 3 times on the first US tour alone. Highlights of the record for me are the opener "Go-Go Gadget Gospel", shortie "Feng Shui", the drum heavy "Just A Thought", schizophrenic "Transformer", and epic "Storm Coming".

I actually understand very little about the process of producing and engineering records like this, and that’s part of the reason on so impressed by people who can do it so well. Positively no one could have made this record like Danger Mouse, which pretty rad if you think about it.

Continuum- John Mayer

You either like John Mayer or you don’t, but you pretty much can’t ignore Continuum. In speaking of the change in his music recently, Mayer said “I’m growing up, and I wanted my music to be relevant 20 years from now like the music I love. Pop music is so easily dated.” Last year John decided to leave Grammys and chart positions behind in favor of making the music that he loved. (Ironically gaining him higher chart positions and more Grammys than before) He teamed with Springsteen’s drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino for a brief run as the John Mayer trio. Then they went into Manhattan’s Avatar Studios to record Continuum. I was working at Avatar at the time but didn’t work on the album at all because my supervising engineer was working with Billy Joel. It’s fun to know I was nearby though, and probably broke down mics on some of these sessions.

While Mayer calls the music on Continuum “blues” generically, it embraces the R&B and Soul styles of many popular artists of the 60’s and 70’s and legitimately forges some new territory of its own. As a guitarist, I love the tones he gets on this album. I’m pretty sure it’s all Stratocaster guitar-wise, but man I want to know what some of those amps are. Some musical highlights for me are the ‘guitar, then rhodes, then hammond’ solo sequence in the falsetto-full “Vultures”; the muted trumpet sound he gets out of his guitar on “I Don’t Trust Myself With Loving You”; the hugely wet spring reverb of the Fender Vibrolux on “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room” or the Claptonesque main theme of the same song, or its overdriven Princeton solo.

As a piece of recording art it’s interesting because they went for the almost reverbless sound of Motown records. Even the drums are very dry which is interesting considering Avatar probably has the best big drum room in the country. The one notable exception to this is the Steinway B in “Dreaming With a Broken Heart” which sounds as huge as John Lennon’s piano in Imagine. The album was recorded on the sonically rich medium of analog tape, which I’m happy to say is making a major comeback these days. He sings into a Neumann U-67 And the SA-CD mix comes right off the repro head of the Spitz Modded 1/2” Ampex. (That little tech moment was for Jason) Translated, it’s beautiful because it’s not trying to be modern. It’s embracing the weaknesses of an “outdated” technology because of the sound.

Lateralus- Tool

This is that other album I wouldn’t recommend to all of my readers. Quite simply because it probably rocks too hard for you. All other bands on Earth that aspire to be “heavy” really just wish they were Tool. Cause unlike other ‘heavy’ music, Tool will not seem wussy 10 years later. Tool will never sound wussy. It will only sound awesome. While Aenima kinda blew people away and put Tool on the map, it was their third full length album that made me learn to appreciate the music of Tool. Lateralus is the very definition of bad@$$. I actually don’t know a lot about the recording process of Lateralus, so we get to skip the history lesson and jump right into why this record sounds so good.

I only know it was recorded and mixed in more studios than I care to count and principle production credit is given to the band and David Bottrill, a producer known (up to that point) only for his work with King Crimson in 1995 and Tool’s first 2 albums. He is now one of the most highly demanded hard rock producers in large part for the sound of Lateralus. Most often this album is classified as “prog” or progressive rock because of the mathematically complex rhythms and modal structures that dominate the music. In the end, if the interest factor were merely that it’s complicated and hard to play though, I don’t suppose I would like it very much at all, as most “prog-rock" bores me to death. It’s that it’s so easy to surrender to. Start this album so you can hear it loud and clear and then make sure your stereo can handle what’s coming. The opening drums in The Grudge will make you want to go hunt Elk with your hands. The dynamic range (softest sound to loudest) of this record will catch you by surprise even after lots of listens. The clearest example is the song “Parabol” which is mostly pretty quiet but the last guitar swell exploding into “Parabola” will knock you on your butt. No one in the world sings like Maynard James Keenan. He can sing the softest parts then scream like an army like it’s effortless. The ‘single’ on Lateralus was Schism, a song as fascinating to me today as it was 6 years ago when I first heard it. I’ve never heard another bass or guitar sound like that... like they’re a perfect extension of the drum set. Many of the sounds on this record are honestly still a mystery to me and I love figuring out how sounds are made. If I hadn’t seen the band reproduce them live before my eyes, I’d believe most of them were synthesized or highly manipulated in the studio. The album continues on it’s ‘make you listen carefully then tear your brains out through your nose’ course to the very end which culminates in inharmonic noise and static over some absurdly incredible drumming. Sometimes I feel like I could kill a black bear with my bare hands when this album is finally done with me. Fortunately, I’ve never been near a forest at those times.

The Dark Side of the Moon- Pink Floyd

So this is one of those “duh” records and one I could go on about forever, but I’m consciously attempting to keep my thoughts on dark side brief. The Dark Side of the Moon was recorded in 1972 in the world renowned Abbey Road Studios in London, on a pretty much one of a kind E.M.I. recording console that every other studio in the world wishes belonged to them. This is, of course, where The Beatles recorded their Abbey Road album (named for the studio, not visa versa). Production is credited to Pink Floyd and Engineering to Alan Parsons.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a pioneering “concept album”, addressing themes like madness, aging, mortality and death, social conflict, war, and materialism. These themes are advanced not only by the music and lyrics, but by the unique soundscape of the album. There’s a lot of sound that can’t be described as musical in nature clamoring for attention on the tape. A low (nearly inaudible at times) ‘heartbeat’ plays for the entire length of the album appearing most prominently in the intro and outro. Voices are heard throughout the album some laughing maniacally and many answering questions posed about personal violence, death, fears and insecurities, and insanity. Employing a much wider range of instrumentation than previously, Pink Floyd incorporated female vocals and saxophone, and experimented with tape effects, looping, sound effects, panning/flanging, and the very new technology of synthesis/sequencing.

Entire books have been written about the recording and mixing of this record, but I believe I can summarize why it’s such a great record fairly briefly. It’s very simple. The music is not trying to be out of reach, the lyrics are accessible and everyone can relate to the subject matter. It only spends enough time being unique to keep you interested then it just reaches out and rocks the way you expect four of the most talented musicians in the world to rock. The sounds are fantastic, the approach is revolutionary, and the result is timeless. It’s a record that satisfies completely. You feel motivated to make the most of your time, to enjoy your life and not fear death or age. You’re less inclined to wear away your life in the pursuit of material things, and more inclined to look with sympathy on the plight of others. AND... let us not forget that it succeeded in rocking super hard while doing it.

Ten Summoner's Tales- Sting

Where’s he gonna go next? Well, to Sting. No, this is not a joke. I know, I’ve been all over the map so far, and I assure you, the future bodes no more homogenous. Ten Summoners’ Tales was recorded in 1992 and 1993, Sting’s first ‘pop’ album since the dissolve of The Police in the mid 80’s. Sting recruited Hugh Padgham of the Townhouse Studio in London, who had produced The Police’ final album Synchronicity, to produce and engineer and a handful of his players from his solo ‘jazz’ albums, including guitarist Dominic Miller and phenom drummer Vinnie Colaiuta.

Sting did most of the musical arranging himself (an accomplished bassist/classically trained guitarist), playing off his drummer, guitarist, and keys player. He took many melodic ideas and designating them in his mind for various horns, strings, reeds, and random instruments. He and Padgham finalized these ideas and booked studio musicians where no immediate players were known. Possibly featuring more outstanding players than any pop album in 20 years, the songs of this album sprang to life in the studio in the hands of gifted and disciplined musicians. Sting has recalled with fondness and regret that no other album he has ever recorded brought musicians to life like this one. Hundreds of takes were made of those eleven songs with alternate bridges, newly incorporated solos, and variances on the arrangement so Padgham and Sting would have options. The process of recording finished, the rigorous process of screening takes and making arrangement and editing decisions came to task. This album was recorded on two synched decks of 2” 24-track analog tape. Perhaps only Jason will understand and appreciate the difficulty of making numerous 48 channel edits and arrangement decisions post-recording on this medium. (Nowadays it’s a cinch.) In any case, the album took a few months to finalize and mix. When the album was presented to legendary engineer Bob Ludwig for mastering he ‘gaped in awe’ before his speakers and listened to it seven times before he set to work, calling it one of the most astounding pieces of recording he’d ever heard. The title, by the way, is a play on Sting’s actual name, Gordon Sumner, being ten “tales” and an epilogue.

I love this album because of the staggering musicianship (coolest Hammond Organ burn of all time on ‘St. Augustine in Hell’). While studio musicians are usually very good players, you don’t typically get to hear it on a top 40 record. Believe it or not, that guitar part on Brittany’s song was probably not that dude’s finest minute. This record is different in that regard. Every player on it is doing something neat. Everyone is giving something special to this record. Brian Wilson used to pull that kind of performance out of his players, but even then, session tapes indicate it was often a difficult process. On this record, everyone who came just gave and gave and the result is honestly incredible. If you don’t like Sting, I can completely understand. But a real careful listen to this album will give you a kind of reverence for the musicians who lend their various voices to a song, and the magic that can happen when they decide to let it happen together. That unity may be the hardest thing to achieve in any musical collaboration or performance. It’s especially hard to capture on tape after successive hours in a studio. Believe me, I know.

The Ugly Organ- Cursive

This is the first record of maybe two, I don't feel comfortable recommending to everyone who reads my blog. It is an incredibly brave and dynamic record. It also frequently plunges me into or keeps me hankered in depression. So be careful. It most certainly is not a happily themed record, and blanketly fails the 13th Article of Faith test. But I'm of the opinion that much of the best art, literature, and music of the world is kinda dark. Sometimes this is to demonstrate the need for morality, as in Madame Butterfly. Sometimes it's just to show us how depraved we really are. Either way, I'm not convinced such work is without value or purpose.

The Ugly Organ is both a metaphor for and a character in the drama that is this album. Frontman Tim Kasher plays guitar and organ all over the album and cellist Gretta Cohn contributed heavily to this album and left the group about a year and a half later. The Organ and Cello also play musical "roles" though it's less like lietmotif (i.e. Peter and the Wolf), and more like a continuing dialogue of differing perspectives. The album is post-modern in the best sense possible, that it's constantly calling itself into question. An accusation will be made only to be followed by a questioning of that accusation. Tim never says he is right without shortly after implying he's a fraud. It's very introspective and very intense. I will not use the word emo. The greatest crime in the history of the word 'emo' may be that it was used to describe both Cursive and Dashboard Confessional.

The album's best value is in it's songwriting. This is just plain, great songwriting. Next to that though, is the brilliant musical texturing. Thousands of talented musicians have dedicated much of their lives to the ideas of dissonance, dischordance, and random noise. (The way many talented artists have dedicated much of theirs to modern art which is less concerned with complicated strokes, than the building blocks of shape, color, and perspective themselves.) But rarely have I heard it so perfectly put to use. There's moments when you honestly wonder how long they spend bending and bashing in the pipes of that organ or how long that guitar had been out of tune or if Tim got kicked in the throat by a pack animal before he stepped to the microphone. There's a lot of musical moments that don't sound quite right. But it's because all this business about divorce, and hatred, and meaningless sex isn't quite right. This world isn't quite right. Finally, the poetic and dramatic value of the work is unnerving. Take out the booklet and read the words of the "play" and you will be floored. For a man that has gotten a lot of things pretty wrong in his life, he sure understands a lot. Whether it's a discussion of art and marketing, a scene-play between a scorned woman and her gentleman caller, or an unhinging of the Pinnochio story, the thing just has merit. It's good on too many levels to be bad. Technically, the recording is nothing spectacular. It's not shoddy either. It's PERFECT. A lot of times I've felt like I've suffered as an engineer by knowing a lot. I learn how to make things sound amazing, and forget that sometimes there not supposed to sound amazing, in fact, some things are supposed to sound downright uninteresting. I listen to some of my first recordings and am regularly surprised by how good they are, cause I didn't have any experience to get in the way. I just had to go on what sounded right. I admire the restraint of an obviously talented engineer who made this album sound exactly like it should.

Spilt Milk- Jellyfish

British/American Hybrid Jellyfish released their first record "Bellybutton" to critical acclaim and moderate international success. The record did particularly well in the UK. The foursome were considered somewhat of a pop supergroup. Jason Falkner (guitars/vocals) had been at the front of several succesful American bands, Roger Manning was a widely recorded studio keys/synth player and an outstanding male alto, his brother Joseph was an excellent bassist and singer, and the drummer... well that's where Jellyfish is a little different. The band revolved around the drummer, who sang lead vocals, wrote a majority of the songs, and played his set standing up. A huge influence on me as a singer, songwriter and drummer, Andy Sturmer was the thing that made Jellyfish weird (and cool if you ask me) and thus hard to market. It's easy to see what was attractive about the group. They routinely interpolated unmistakable tributes to their big influences, namely the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, and Electric Light Orchestra. All very popular groups with installed fan bases. It was the fact that you could call much of the rest of what they did circus, carnival, or pirate music that presented a challenge.

In 1992 Charisma called on Jellyfish to write and record the 2nd LP in their 3 album contract. Sturmer and Falkner had already had some spats and Falkner left the group. With an increased budget for this project, the group sought out the eccentric producer/engineer Jack Joseph Puig. Puig consented to record the album, but insisted on months of preproduction. So Jellyfish lived in the live room of Ocean Way's Studio A. Literally, the fold out of the album art shows a stitched panoramic of the room (incidentally showing off some of Puig's legendary instrument collection) and you can spot sleeping bags beneath pianos and organs. Then one day, Puig announced that they were finished, and that he'd scheduled a chamber orchestra for overdubs in 2 weeks. So they recorded all of the instrumental tracks for a 12 song album in 2 weeks. Not an easy job, especially if you've ever heard this album and have an idea how many different instruments are on it. The orchestra recorded Sturmer and Manning's spastically wonderful arrangements which consist of mostly flourishes and random bursts of "hello strings!" Vocals took another couple of weeks which is also amazing if you've ever heard the complexity of vocals on this record (think Queen meets the Beach Boys, meets Ben Folds Five). All without an ounce of pitch correction. As an interesting note, the album was released to meager sales despite rave reviews and following the American leg of the support tour, Charisma dropped Jellyfish.

Spilt Milk may be the most sonically interesting thing I have ever listened to. Every sound is vivid and attractive. I've listened to it thousands of times and I'm pretty sure I have every note and every noise memorized and I'm still floored by it. To really appreciate it you have to have a wide listening experience and not mind all kinds of musical ideas being mashed up and spat at you at random. If you enjoy that sort of thing, Spilt Milk may change your mind. Or it may change your life. I love it, and I'm sure that says some things about me... But do you love it?

Clarity- Jimmy Eat World

While Arizona rockers Jimmy Eat World finally hit it big with their subsequent release "Bleed American" in 2001, it was their 2nd full length, released in 1999, that cemented them as one of my best loved recording artists.

"Clarity" was an amazingly brave record for such a young band. Already stifled by their label's bristling interference on "Static Prevails" (so named because of Jim's feeling that the album was too static, that every song sounded the same), Jim Adkins and Tom Linton holed up in their basement in Mesa and wrote the album in 7 weeks. Jim then sought out producer Mark Trombino with a copy of the demo. Upon listening to the songs, Trombino told Adkins he would produce the record for half of his normal label rate, explained that he thought the songs needed no rearrangement and he could start recording that week. They rented out studio A at Sound City in Hollywood for a month on the label's advance and didn't even tell the label they'd begun writing/recording. In a little over a month Trombino and J.E.W. had produced a stunning album with a great deal more variety than 'Static". Capitol's primary criticism was that the album didn't have a uniform sound, but they were frankly thrilled at the product to cost ratio and consented to release the record. They waited an entire year, until a handful of fans were literally picketing the label to release the record. Sales were not what Capitol had hoped and following the tour supporting Clarity, Capitol dropped Jimmy Eat World.

Clarity is an amazing recording to me, because it's a pallet of great sounds. Every drum hit, bass swell, and guitar tone is planned. The best colors are selected and perfectly blended to form the ultimate musical bed for some of the best written songs I have ever heard. From the first strains of organ on "Table for Glasses", you feel like you're in for something. You're intrigued just enough by the brevity and intensity of that first track, when the assault of heavy, delayed drums in "Lucky Denver Mint" takes things up a couple notches. The crunchy guitars in "Your New Aesthetic" back a thinly veiled contempt of the label's efforts to make their music "marketable". The record continues as a dynamic roller coaster until the early climax. "For Me This Is Heaven" has perhaps one of the most beautiful lyrics I have ever heard. "And this is what she says gets her through it... If I don't let myself be happy now, then when? If not now, when?" The record concludes with "Goodbye Sky Harbor" and a 13 minute CODA of drum and vocal loops, orchestrated by Trombino's genius in ProTools. Most engineers will tell you Mark Trombino is good for drums and vocals. His drums are great, but his vocal approach to Clarity has forever defined the unique sound we now associate with Jimmy Eat World. There are moments on Clarity where 10 or more vocal parts are going at a time. And there's almost always at least 3 harmony lines to choose from. That makes this album one of the most enjoyable to listen to over and over. You can sing a different part every time.

I was asked an interesting question today.

One that does not, I'm afraid, have a very simple answer. In reference to what I do, I was asked, "What makes a recording good?" Or perhaps, better stated, "What makes one recording better than another?" The answer to this question is, of course, steeped in subjectivity and far from simple. One of the best ways I have found to answer the question has been to recommend my favorite recordings to others. In that spirit, I'm gonna spend the next several posts talking about some of the best recordings I have encountered personally. This list will not be exhaustive and is certainly not in any particular order. I encourage you to find and listen to some of these records and let me know if you like them or not.