Writing and pre-production of "Self-Evident Truths"

Pre-production is everything done before actually laying down the final song tracks in the studio. This includes the writing and arranging, rehearsals, demo recording, and planning for the studio sessions and mixing. Normally the greater time spent working these things out the smoother all the other phases become as issues and problems have already been dealt with or, at least, considered. In many ways this was an easier period for me as a solo artist since there wasn’t anyone else to consult about the songs, although there is also more pressure doing it all yourself. In the end the quality of the recording rests completely on your shoulders based on each decision you make along the way. But the upside is that, save for time and budget considerations, you don’t have to make any compromises about what you want.

I first started writing “Self-Evident Truths” while supporting another original musical project. Watching that come together I realized songwriting was not the mystical art I had believed it was and decided I should give it a try. Thanks to digital recording technology now priced for everyman and all the instruments at my disposal I was able to create very full sounding demos in my home studio from day one. I generally worked in sections, creating a series of short passages then coming back and seeing what would fit together. Quite a few came from old notes I had written over my younger days and deposited in the bottom of the piano bench at my parent’s home, others developed from plinking around until I came across a musical phrase I liked and then began to focus on and develop. Eventually I would decide I had the necessary sections for a song and begin to knit them together. Oftentimes these transitions between wildly different phrases (in terms of feel or tempo) proved more difficult than coming up with the verses and choruses themselves. Prog rock offers the opportunity to incorporate a diverse range of styles but they still have to fit together as a unified whole.

Besides just going where my fingers took me I sometimes started with a particular idea about the song structure or groove. I was looking for a diverse palate on my first album so I consciously tried to incorporate a variety that I found interesting from straight-forward rock beats to jazz and ballads. With one of these ideas in mind I’d experiment with chord progressions or riffs that fit that mood, often starting on keyboards then adding in the bass and finally a drum track. For this album I first crafted the drums by layering several tracks of drum sounds from the synthesizer to get the sound of a complete kit; first just bass and snare drum, then adding cymbals, finally tom-toms. I did all of that manually, not by programming as it just proved far to complicated while I was involved in rapid brainstorming. One can truly create some killer drum tracks this way, but beware the complexity! Layering three tracks is essentially have three different brains provide your rhythm which can be a problem when one brain tries to reproduce that later on single kit. At the time that bothered me little as I never expected to have to play the drums myself…tying up a huge burden you think someone else will carry is easy:-) We’ll come back to that later.

The lyrics all grew up separately from the music and were modified and grafted onto the songs in the final stages of writing. I found that poetry required a different kind of concentration than working with the notes and was best done away from the studio and without immediate consideration of how the words might fit into a melody. My “method” normally began with a phrase or sentence that might immediately spawn additional phrases around it, or that I might come back to later and try to fit into something else. Only “Self-Evident Truths” and “A Perfect World” developed “top down” from an overall concept, the rest came from tossing out phrases and seeing where they led. The only thing I could be certain of was that I wanted to cover topics not being addressed in most music, and that I wanted to avoid the message of the song becoming a bludgeon hammering on the listener’s head. While there is certainly a place for songs with an obvious moral I preferred to approach the subject as something worth the listener’s consideration and study and, consequently, a development or clarifying of their own opinion. Perhaps it sounds clichéd or pretentious but I wished to provide an invitation to identify the reasons the listener believed what they did about the topic, not just how they felt about it. Feelings are a fine thing and have an important place in human interactions, but there is much that requires a factual logic if we’re to arrive at solutions to many of our societal problems. An over-reliance on the well of emotions to create one’s worldview results in a lot of contradictions and muddled morals. I would suggest many of us aren’t challenged often enough to understand or explain our beliefs in this age of the slogan and sound bite. But I digress into my philosophical monologue! When I put the lyrics on top of the various music I found that the melodies generally wrote themselves based on the chord structure. While this might bother songwriters who believe in the sanctity and preeminence of the melody I can only plead prog rock as my excuse…working in this musical genre I felt free to place more emphasis on the underlying harmonies as the key parts. And there was the limitation of my own vocal range though, as with the drums, I didn’t necessarily expect to be the one to sing it in the end. 

Once the writing was finished I worked for quite a few months with a number of other musicians to try to finish out the project in a complete band format. Although there was enthusiasm for the songs there were also some struggles with the technical requirements of the songs, overall goals and timelines of the project, and plain old burnout. It’s really asking a great deal of a musician to exert a tremendous amount of time and effort to try and prefect someone else’s song regardless of the potential market value if they’re not getting paid. And there also we had a wide range of opinion on whether to move forward with any expectation of commercial gain as an “originals” band, become a cover band that played some originals, or just remain a recording project. Frankly, by the time most musicians reach middle age or beyond they’ve given up any hope about “making it” in the music industry so my idea of taking it as far as we could met with a mixed reception at best. In the end we went our separate ways, but not before playing a couple of shows that proved the music could be done live, and that even audiences that had no interest in prog would appreciate the musicianship required to accomplish it. That was important encouragement.

After a few months breather I took stock of where I was and decided I had come too far to quit, so I’d proceed as a solo project. This meant I had to get limber again on the drum kit after a 15 year break from it and find a guitarist or guitarists to help me complete the album. Both proved problematic as first I live in an apartment, so the drums had to be kept across town where I could only get to practice a few hours a week (recall earlier what I said about a “three brain” part having to be performed by one…my chickens certainly came home to roost) and second some of the same problems from the band arose with various guitarists I contacted. I was trying to put together something along professional lines, but trying to demand that of players who made music for fun…cross purposes, I’m afraid.

Eventually I took the risk of working through www.StudioTraxx.com, an online service that connects musicians-for-hire with those that require their services. Needless to say I was nervous about attempting to do on-line what I had been unable to accomplish face-to-face, but it proved a most fruitful experience and I found most of the talented group of six-stringers that you hear playing on the album. Using the readily available recording programs on the market these players were able to complete their parts and e-mail them for inclusion in the mix at my local studio. Oh, the technology! So now it was time to actually get everything on tape (ok, actually digits:-).