i found out there are still a handful of cds left at ah some records. so if there’s anyone in the city who wants any of that stuff (maybe there’s a pop purist relative you really dislike and you want to give them nightmares), going to see james is your best bet, until i’m able to re-stock the boxes at dr. disc and phog. i should have some more supplies to go around in the next few weeks. there are people i’ve owed mail for a while now too…again, once i’ve got more materials to work with, those packages will be sent out. better late than clever.

a few days ago i sat down and made a quick note of all the different projected albums i’m playing around with in my brain while i work on THE ANGLE OF BEST DISTANCE. i was a little surprised to realize there are five of them. even by my standards, that’s nuts. what’s happened in the past is, i start to work on one of these projected albums, and then all the progress i’ve made on ANGLE is forgotten. this time that ain’t gonna happen. even so, it’s good to know i’ve got a huge pile of ideas and material waiting for me once i’m finished with my big magnum grope-us.

i think i’d like to look at releasing one of those post-ANGLE albums on vinyl. i’ve kicked around the idea before without ever letting it get beyond the brainstorming stage. maybe this will be the year it really happens. it’ll either have to be a double-record set, or an album short enough to fit onto one record. right now the idea of me making an album that’s less than an hour long seems almost laughable, but you never know. it’s happened before. there’s always a chance it might happen again.

can you imagine the uproar there would be from the people who already strongly disagree with my whole “giving away physical albums for free” thing if i gave away vinyl records in addition to cds? i think it would be hilarious. heads might explode. if that isn’t motivation to pop my vinyl cherry, i don’t know what is.

i also had a bit of an unexpected songwriting revelation recently, when it struck me that silence has become a pivotal part of the way i construct songs. a few people have pointed this out to me over the years, but for whatever reason, it took hearing one of the songs on the first disc of ANGLE to really hammer it home. with the song in question, there are two points at which everything drops out and it sounds like the song is over, only for the music to start back up again. they work as false endings, though they weren’t designed to be. and in listening to that song, i thought, “i do a lot of that, don’t i?” where a song is about to shift gears or head into a hook, it’s not unusual for me to bring everything to a sudden halt. it’s almost as if the music needs to catch its breath before moving on. it’s not something i give much, if any, thought to. it’s just a thing i do.

i was trying to figure out where it started, and i think the first time i really got into using silence and near-silent passages this way was on BEAUTIFULLY STUPID in 2002. songs like “i make myself sick” and “alcohol on an open wound” are full of pregnant pauses that are an integral part of the fabric of the music. what’s odd to me is that this was where i was starting to craft the songs more, instead of just improvising them all out of nothing while recording. you would expect there to be more lulls and pauses in situations where there’s no premeditation or safety net, but for me it’s the other way around.

and this was years before i’d heard the last two talk talk albums. i wasn’t into jazz or ambient music at all. there wasn’t really any music in my collection that used silence in that way. so it wasn’t something i took from anywhere else. it just grew organically out of what i was doing, at a time when i was making a lot of very angry, uninhibited music that wasn’t any kind of conscious breeding ground for that sort of thing.

maybe i just like space, and without realizing it, it’s become an integral part of my songwriting language. who can say?

over the past few weeks, i have been periodically messing with something i started writing more than a decade ago. i wouldn’t go so far as to call it a book, but it’s likely as close as i’ll ever get to that sort of thing. it’s sort of a musical memoir, focusing on one specific adventure spread out over a period of a few years when i was in high school. this is something i would never be able to publish or even share with much of anyone, not just because of how unflinchingly honest and uncensored it is, but because what it’s “about” wouldn’t be interesting to very many people who aren’t me. and i knew that going in. it was something i felt a need to document for myself, for some reason that still isn’t entirely clear to me.

i wrote a very rough unfinished first draft in 2001, after my initial brainstorm in 2000, and arrived at what i thought was my finished draft in 2005. returning to what i wrote all these years later, i found myself rewriting a lot of things, getting rid of clunky language, and writing a lot of new material to fill in some gaps. the more-final-than-ever-before final draft now runs about 120,000 words.

the thing that’s interesting to me is looking at who i was then, but viewing it through the lens of who i am now. it’s stepping back in time with the gift of hindsight, in a way. while reading and editing, i realized things i’d never even considered before (like the fact that the entire papa ghostface discography probably wouldn’t exist if i’d had a girlfriend for any length of time back in high school). and in adding more material to more or less complete the story, i’ve discovered that some of my favourite bits are the side-stories that have nothing to do with the main thrust of the thing. i don’t know if any of it is good writing, but i’m glad i wrote it.

there’s one bit i’d like to share, and i think it works out of context, even if you have no idea who lewsaw, my classmate richard, or mr. zawadski are. it’s about how one of the best high school teachers i ever had was a substitute in grade twelve. i’ve changed the name of the english teacher he subbed for, in the interest of avoiding hurting someone’s feelings a decade after the fact when it wouldn’t accomplish anything or give me any pleasure (not that i think there’s a popsicle’s chance in hell she would ever end up here in the first place…but you never know).

mrs. drake was my second semester english teacher. she looked a little like a short-haired brunette version of natasha henstridge. i probably don’t have to tell you how popular she was with the male students. it was a shock to the system for all of us, to have a female teacher who was that attractive.

the shock wore off in a hurry for me, because mrs. drake was not only the best-looking english teacher ever to set foot in a classroom — she was also quite possibly the worst. she didn’t just follow the curriculum; i wouldn’t be surprised if she masturbated to it. there wasn’t a single shred of character or soul in her class, or the way she taught it. some teachers, like mr. zawadski, make you feel smarter just from being in the same room with them. i felt like the time i spent in mrs. drake’s class caused large groups of my brain cells to kill themselves in a desperate effort to end the pain.

let me try and explain why i felt that way, and how she managed to make me despise a subject i had always loved. the really good english teachers encourage you to think for yourself and write in your own unique voice. i was lucky enough to have at least a few of those. a classy lady named mrs. gilham was way at the top of the heap. mrs. drake, on the other hand, despised and punished anything that even resembled personality in our writing. we were supposed to write the way a textbook read — cold, clinical, and utilitarian. anything deviating from that was wrong.

but it wasn’t just that. she would explain to us how she wanted an assignment or an essay written. i would write it just the way she wanted it. then she would tell me i hadn’t followed her instructions, and i would get a middling mark. every time i gave her what she said she wanted, she turned around and told me it wasn’t what she wanted.

in a way, you could say she was preparing me for a romantic relationship.

and the thing is, she was nice. she was a bubbly person who was almost always in a good mood. it was difficult to dislike her. but good god, she didn’t know a thing about how to teach an english class to people with functioning brains. if lewsaw at least never bothered to pretend he was an english teacher in the first place, mrs. drake tore everything apart until it ceased to mean anything. shakespeare was a bore in her hands. good books lost whatever it was that made them any good. writing was a chore instead of a gift.

i stopped trying to please her after a while and started looking for ways to have some fun. in response to test questions about macbeth, i wrote about the care bears cartoon that came on in the morning before i left for school, and how the theme song was weirdly infectious. i went out of my way to fail some assignments, and didn’t bother handing others in. i didn’t care. the joke is, i still got something like an 84% in her class. my latent writing ability was enough to get me through, even with someone like her at the cockpit. but i never hated a single class in my life more than i hated hers. it was abysmal beyond all reason.

the best thing she ever did was break her leg in a skiing accident. she had to take two weeks off, and our substitute teacher was mr. klein, a middle-aged jewish man with bifocals. he was almost violent in his hatred for the lesson plan mrs. drake had outlined for us. he threw it out immediately. he told us point blank that our teacher was an idiot. he used yiddish slang like tuchus. most of the students thought he was nuts. i thought he was the most brilliant person ever to set foot in our school.

he made shakespeare interesting, when i normally found the stuff pretty ponderous. he approached things from odd, unexpected angles. he got us involved in discussions, whether we wanted to participate or not. if someone was being an idiot in class, he kicked them out. he didn’t just ask you to leave; he barked, “get the fuck out of here.”

i hung around as long as i could after class everyday to talk to him. i wanted to soak up everything he had to say. he seemed to like me, but he wasn’t the kind of person who would come out and tell you a thing like that. he had a sort of controlled aggression about him that’s difficult to describe. he would act like he didn’t give a shit, but then he would say or do something that was the equivalent of a raised eyebrow, telling you in a subversive way not to take everything at face value. the classroom was alive when he was in it, charged with unpredictable kinetic energy.

he called me by my last name. “read tom robbins, west,” he said. “get still life with woodpecker. you’ll like him. now get the hell out of here.” then his face would soften a little and he would say, “be careful. there are a lot of assholes floating around this place.”

i wrote something for an assignment mrs. drake gave us right before mr. klein showed up, and i didn’t put any effort into writing about the actual subject at hand. i just wrote some random brain spill on a piece of paper and called it charlie brown sings frere jacques. mr. klein sat down at my desk, read it, and talked to me and a female student for what seemed like half an hour, while ignoring the rest of the class.

“the title is apropos of nothing,” he told me, but he said it in a way that conveyed approval. he told us in detail about a recent phone conversation with his daughter. he analyzed something i’d written out of my ass, and treated it like it had meaning and worth. he was interested in it. he was interested in us.

a few small groups of students in our class read scenes from macbeth in the auditorium. they tried to be funny and failed miserably. there was no invention or reinvention there. just moronic ideas poorly realized. my modernized hamlet reading that never was would have been a masterpiece next to this.

mr. klein stopped and talked to me in the hall for a minute at lunchtime.

“they fucked it all up,” he said, looking as unimpressed as i was. “but you know what they say…shit floats to the top. see you, west.”

he taught me more in ten days than the sum total of what almost every other teacher taught me in four years of high school, and it had nothing to do with literature. it was about existing. he was fearlessly himself, without apology. he said what he thought. he did what he said. he expected you to use your brain and break away from “safe” and familiar modes of thinking. he didn’t go out of his way to piss you off, but he didn’t care if he did. that was your problem. i wish i knew his first name so i could find his address and write him a letter telling him all of this. he probably wouldn’t remember me anyway.

mrs. drake returned, her leg still in a cast, and sucked the life right back out of the classroom. she regarded the residue of what mr. klein had done to her lesson plan with something approaching horror. the horny male students were happy to have her back, content to go back to nursing their semi-hard dicks through the pockets of their jeans. i felt empty.

a little bit of mr. klein stuck around, though. after her leg had healed, mrs. drake had us come up with thesis statements. i volunteered one, and she proceeded to pick it apart like it was a potential suitor she felt pity for. richard champagne, without putting up his hand, said, “i think it’s an excellent thesis statement.”

he argued with her. he got angry. he was eloquent and compelling. i felt like he was passionately defending me in a courtroom. every lame throwaway excuse mrs. drake threw out, richard tore it to shreds. he told her she was missing the point. he was the teacher, and she was the uncomprehending student. i sat there without saying a word, in awe. in the end, she lost her patience for a debate she wasn’t even intellectually awake for and said, “i’m not going to keep arguing with you, richard.”

after class i thanked him for sticking up for me. he was still upset about it. he had been slamming a baseball bat against a brick wall, but he felt if he’d just been able to get in a few more swings, he might have made a dent. i didn’t think there was any getting through to her, even with a jackhammer. i was moved by the effort anyway.

i also learned that i was far-sighted in mrs. drake’s class, when i began to have trouble reading what was on the chalkboard. i liked finally having an excuse to wear glasses. so her english class was good for at least one thing that didn’t involve mr. klein after all.

even with the space upgrades i’ve purchased, the music and video content i put up here on the blog has been adding up. a few months ago i sifted through the archives and got rid of some files that weren’t in use to create a bit of breathing room, but i was only able to do so much. after the most recent video progress report was uploaded, i only had a few hundred megabytes left to work with, which meant it would soon be time to pay for another space upgrade, or i would find myself unable to post any more video progress reports here unless i went to the trouble of hosting them elsewhere. and i don’t really feel like doing that. using videopress and having the videos live here on the blog works just fine for me.

in the first few days of the new year, i noticed something odd. on the media-related pages, where wordpress tells you how much space you’ve used and how much you have left, instead of a few hundred megabytes and something like 2.3% of my server space remaining, it said i had more than 15 GB available. i thought it must be a glitch, or a joke, and didn’t put much stock in it — until just this moment, when i got an email from wordpress telling me they’ve basically doubled the amount of space i have as a way to ring in 2012, free of charge.

thanks for the surprise, wordpress. i never saw that one coming. now i probably won’t need to buy any additional space for at least another year or two. handshakes and half-eaten cookies for everyone!

the first disc of THE ANGLE OF BEST DISTANCE is done. i think.

i made a rough assembly last night, and now i’m tweaking a few things to get the volume more consistent from song-to-song. i had to drop a few tracks in order to squeeze something close to the sequence i wanted onto one cd; it was supposed to run 23 songs long. now it comes out to 20 songs and just a hair shy of 80 minutes. i wanted to fit 100 songs on this album, spread out over 4 cds, but i don’t think that’s quite going to happen. i’ll be lucky if i can squeeze 85 songs in there. space limitations…always forcing you to shave things down.

i’m not sure how well this first cd flows. it jumps from a moody synth-heavy soundscape, to a happy-sounding blues-folk number, to something crawling toward sloppy power pop, to an austere acoustic guitar-based ballad, to a warped 11-minute spoken-word piece, and back again. if it was a standalone album and not just one part of a larger whole, it would be one of the most unpredictable, schizophrenic things i’ve ever done. i don’t think there’s any way to sequence the songs so they make any kind of linear sense, and arranging them in chronological order would feel pretty bland to me. the whole thing is a huge mess of music…so it seems to me i’m best off treating each disc as a quarter of the mess, letting things careen all over the place. better to be governed by what feels right emotionally, and not what would make for a tidier or easier listening experience.

i don’t know if i mentioned this, but for a short time i considered releasing the individual discs as four separate albums. then i realized how much more expensive and time-consuming that would be. trying to make something like this easier to digest would miss the point anyway. it needs to be one huge, imposing thing. it shouldn’t be any easier for someone else to get a handle on than it has been for me. hopefully it will reward the work it requires. at the very least, it might make for the strangest soundtrack you’ll ever have for a road-trip. it cracks me up that some of the catchiest, most accessible things i’ve done are going on this album, and i’m sure some people will listen and think, “why didn’t you just take those nice catchy songs and put them in one place? why did you have to throw in the goofy beatboxing and the song that’s just a bunch of stupid internet acronyms sweetly sung as a way of poking fun at how we’ve all intellectually regressed in the wake of instant messaging? why?!” the answer is, simply: because.

people could even go ahead and make their own shaved-down version of the album if they wanted, by taking whatever songs they like best and slapping them on one cd. i’d be a little curious to see what would happen there. it’s always interesting for me to look at the songs listeners isolate as being highlights or favourites. a lot of their choices surprise me. i’ve said this before.

so. one disc and 80 minutes down. three discs and 240 more minutes to go, give or take. it should be much smoother sailing from here.

i was going to backdate this to december 31, because all of the video was recorded before the new year, and the editing was only delayed this much thanks to some corrupted video data. but i don’t like cheating. so no backdating for me.

as the eldest member of the fuzzy duck clan says at the end, it’s all a little anticlimactic for a year-ending video progress report. it’s the shortest one there’s been in a year and-a-half. instead of the extravaganza that ended 2010, it’s more of a “get the last little bit of the year out of my system” hiccup. and i think that’s kind of fitting, given the 2011 i had.

still, it has its moments. instead of wasting new public domain film discoveries on such a lean progress report, i thought i’d return to bride of the gorilla, the very first film i ever chopped up back when i first hit on the idea of doing this sort of thing. i guessed (correctly) that i might have missed some good bits the first time around, since the whole re-contextualizing thing was new to me then. i think the intro works pretty well in the absence of the insane stuffed animal/puppet sing-along i was planning. what’s especially funny is the very end of the video, when i’m singing “i am unwittingly providing you with the means to escape” as raymond burr runs away. i didn’t plan that at all. i just grabbed a bit of video that seemed like it might work well with music on top of it, and threw it over there. only after the fact did i notice the synchronicity.

that seems to happen a lot.

so, welcome to 2012. i hope you enjoy my crooked glasses.

JANUARY

i write a random piece about the first go-betweens album, and lindy morrison — drummer in the go-betweens — leaves a comment. i proceed to fall over.

shortly after i manage to stand up again, the external cd burner for my digital mixer finally craps out on me, after almost 12 years of faithful service. a few days later, my cd printer dies as well. i manage to replace both essential tools without too much trouble (aside from the inconvenience of having to spend a good $1,000 i would much rather keep in my pocket). but after having two dymo discpainters in a row die on me, i make a note never to buy anything from defective dymo again, and invest in a different printer for my cd-related needs.

official solo cd #31 is released — MEDIUM-FI MUSIC FOR MENTALLY UNSTABLE YOUNG LOVERS. if ever an album title of mine was perfect for the music it represented, it’s this one. i don’t expect the album to get as positive a reception as the past several have, given how willfully schizophrenic it is even by my standards, but once again i’m wrong, with a few people telling me it’s one of their favourite things of mine they’ve heard. go figure.

FEBRUARY

for the first time ever, i manage to film myself recording a song and then edit the footage in such a way that the result is sort of a music video, where you get to watch me play and sing the song i’m playing and singing, in real-time. i’ll go on to get a lot better at it in short order, but the first attempt doesn’t turn out too bad, all things considered.

i discover, much to my surprise, that a dude in london, england has been playing my music on his podcast for quite some time. one of the happier unexpected side-effects of that brief period of time in early 2009 during which i was okay with the idea of entire albums of mine being up online in mp3 form.

i make a bunch of crude computer drawings to illustrate a heart-warming children’s book written by my friend joshua jesty, and sell a bunch of gear i don’t use anymore through the magic of kijiji. there will be a completely unexpected development that grows out of this in the next few months.

a companion album to MEDIUM-FI MUSIC is mostly finished, and slated for a projected release date sometime in april.

MARCH

i find myself engaged in an unexpected romantic adventure with someone who was kind of “the one who got away”; we lost touch about seven years ago and i assumed i would never see her again. before i know it, i’m sleeping in her bed and we’re sort of seeing one another. it seems pretty great for a few weeks, and i feel like i’ve died and gone to some happy place. all my cynicism seems to flake off of me like dry skin. then the whole thing turns to complete shit, creating a blindingly fast transition from “cynical single johnny”, to “sappy romantic johnny”, to “more cynical than ever before and once-again-single johnny”. i throw out the entire almost-finished album i’ve been working on, and start writing/recording much more personal material that better reflects where my head is at now.

APRIL

as an april fool’s day joke, i claim i’m finished with music and will be releasing a final greatest hits album as a way of saying goodbye. as flagrantly ridiculous as the joke is, a few people kind of half-believe it, which is pretty funny (here i thought the “essay by bono” was a dead giveaway).

work on the next album continues through april and may, and i make the unusual (for me) decision to play a proper cd release show for once in my life. i also start rehearsing with a rhythm section for the first time in nearly a decade — dan, who i sold a microphone to, happens to be good friends with liam (the resident physician at dr. disc), they have a long-standing rapport as a rhythm section, and we figure it might be fun to try playing together as a trio. turns out it’s more than fun, and suddenly i kind of have a band, when it was the last thing i ever expected to happen with anyone after the last band i had dissolved in 2002.

JUNE

GIFT FOR A SPIDER (official solo cd #32) is released. it’s the first balls-to-bones breakup album i’ve made in almost ten years, and the most unguarded i’ve allowed myself to be in my music in a long time. again, i have a feeling not so many people will be into this album. again, i’m wrong, and it debuts at #1 on the CJAM charts, staying within the top 5 for a month solid. i think that’s a new record for me.

i play a show at mackenzie hall to give the album its official release. it’s another affair where everything is free and a lot of music is played, but it’s also quite a bit different from the first mackenzie hall show. instead of a one-man balancing act, things are roughly split between solo and band performances. there’s a good turnout, the audience is as receptive as i could hope for them to be (i get them to sing along during a song about trying to save a group of young girls from an evil fake nun), and just about every insane chance i spontaneously decide to take seems to pay off, culminating in an epic spoken word improv to end the evening.

JULY

i find myself in the odd position of not knowing what to do next musically…it seems the bitter breakup album took a little something out of me. thus begins an extended period of writing a lot of songs but not recording much of anything at all. in the meantime, i revisit and re-evaluate CREATIVE NIGHTMARES, realizing for the first time what an important album it was for me, and how much i’ve grown to like it.

the blog gets its third and (thus far) final makeover; it’s the simplest layout of them all, but it feels less cluttered and more pleasant to look at than either of the other themes. i first typed “vinyl” instead of “final”. make of that what you will.

AUGUST

i get older. again. and here i thought you could just start skipping those birthday things after a while. i still don’t know what to focus my musical energy on, and continue to write a lot without recording much of anything.

SEPTEMBER

i play a gig with liam and dan at an outdoor festival. it’s…not a fun time. i have such a negative experience that i start to think i had the right idea when i just said to hell with playing live in any capacity, and concentrated on writing and recording exclusively. i make a note never to play another show i don’t have complete control over, if i bother playing live again at all.

OCTOBER

i write one of those borderline think pieces i spit out every so often, this time about barbara payton, after reading a book about her life. to my amazement, the author of the book comments on the post and tells me i get it. i fall over once again. i go on to write a long email to ray carney that i’ve been marinating in my brain for about a decade, thanking him for writing cassavetes on cassavetes, which introduced me to the films of john cassavetes and remains one of the best and most fascinating books i’ve ever read. he responds the same day with an email that is almost as long as mine. i attach retractable wheels to my back so my trips to the floor will be more pleasant, and become a temporary human gurney.

after years of half-assed threats, i finally sit down to untangle the story of my self-imposed musical re-education.

my friend james opens his own record store and gives me my own section.

my protracted period of musical inactivity (at least in terms of recording anything of substance) finally comes to an end when i resolve to finish THE ANGLE OF BEST DISTANCE — a tangled beast of an album i’ve been picking away at here and there since 2007 — one way or another.

NOVEMBER

i get fed up with reading bullshit on facebook from people who call themselves my friends while failing to ever communicate with me in any meaningful way, and deactivate my page. the facebook vacation of 2011 begins. i go one better and completely gut my cbc radio 3 page, since deleting it outright doesn’t seem to be an option. feels like it’s time to jettison some dead weight.

my friend joshua jesty comes down from olmsted falls to play a show at taloola, and we meet in person for the very first time, after sending epic emails back and forth for a good three or four years. the turnout at taloola is pretty much nonexistent, which is disappointing, but somehow it makes for a better show, since the few of us who are there end up being a part of what’s happening in a way we probably wouldn’t if there was a large audience present.

DECEMBER

i pass 100,000 blog hits/views — not an earth-shattering number for some people, but mind-boggling for a small potato like me.

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and there you go. as always, if you really want to get a feel for what went down, you can trawl through the archives or check out this year’s video progress reports. but there are some of the more notable happenings.

for reasons that mostly went unmentioned here on the blog, my 2011 was kind of a piece of shit. i’m not at all sad to see it disappear in the rear view mirror. at least it was a good year from a musical perspective; while i didn’t put out as much material as i planned to, i’m happy with what did escape, and i managed to put a good dent in that ANGLE OF BEST DISTANCE beast as the year was winding down.

most of the music i heard and films i saw this year that really moved me or got me going in some way were not released in 2011, so i see no sense in trying to compile a “least crappy stuff of the year in my opinion” list. you don’t come here for that sort of thing anyway. you come here for the dirty words and innuendo. you know it’s true.

i will give you this much: the most moving thing i heard all year was this. the most abysmal things i heard this year, if not in my life, were this, and this, and especially this steaming chunk of ass vomit.

musical goals for 2012? why not.

my plan for ANGLE — and i think it’s a pretty realistic one, all things considered — is to have the whole thing finished and ready to go by the end of march. i’m well aware of the fact that i’ve been setting myself deadlines for this thing off and on throughout the entire life of this blog, but there’s a big difference this time; while in the past i was always working on other things at the same time and had a general attitude of “maybe i’ll get to it”, now there are no other distractions, the album has my undivided attention, and i feel the urgency. i need to finish this thing before it gets away from me. so i will.

i’d like to make an artistic and unorthodox music video…not another chopped-up-public-domain-film experiment (though i enjoy making those and don’t plan to stop anytime soon), but a real music video that’s a wholly original creation. if i can’t find someone who’s capable and interested in directing/filming something with me, with no ambition to get on television or drum up any attention, i’ll stop trying to find a collaborator and just do it myself.

i have been storing new songs and ideas that seem like they don’t belong to ANGLE (while not hesitating to send new material over there where it feels appropriate), and after that album is out of the way i think it might be time to do something that kind of redefines whatever my musical language is at this point. so after taking care of an album that is almost insanely ambitious in size and scope, i’d like to do something that refocuses the ambition and channels it into completely different crevices. i feel like ANGLE closes a chapter for me, and after that it’ll be time to go somewhere else. maybe that projeted collaborative album with josh will come to fruition at some point in the new year as well.

and i’d like to see if i can find a mastering engineer who might be able to work a little sonic magic on a few albums from the back catalogue like YOU’RE A NATION and STELLAR, where i’m unable to do a proper restoration job of my own. if i can find someone who can tame the clipping and carve out the low end mud on the former and clean up the latter a little, well…it sure would be nice to be able to hear that music sounding a little more refined, if only for my own enjoyment.

we’ll see what happens.

the last video progress report for the year should be along in a day or two.

we used to use this white board to play hangman, and we drew all kinds of crazy things on it when i was a kid, but at the time we moved into this house it hadn’t been used in years. i thought i might give it a new lease on life as an ideas board. it would really come in handy if i ever had something resembling a band again, i thought — an easy way to keep track of what we were working on, and how far along we were. of course, a band wasn’t happening, so i just set it up and used it for my own nefarious purposes. that was what it looked like in late 2008.

this is what it looks like now.

note how the smiley face grew a mustache and turned evil.

what it’s turned into is not a list of things i’m working on at the moment (there hasn’t been room to write much new information on the board in a while now), but more of a safety net. if i’m having trouble figuring out what i want to tackle, or if none of the recent things i’ve written are screaming at me, i can take a look at the board and find something to work on. it’s now mostly made up of songs intended for THE ANGLE OF BEST DISTANCE, along with a list of projected albums that may or may not come to fruition at some point. with the work i’m doing on ANGLE, a lot of those songs should be getting crossed out over the next little while, so it might soon be time to wipe it clean and start fresh. a new board for a new year, maybe.

what else? i had a dream last night that put a new spin on the well-worn “love potion” theme. a girl removed a tree from the back yard of the object of her affection. the trick was, she needed to dig it out by the roots and then transplant it into one specific field, in a desolate wooded area, hoping it would survive the trip. she had to chop the tree into three different pieces in order to get it to fit in her truck, which seemed to doom the whole thing to failure. but somehow, once it was back in the ground, the tree healed itself almost immediately. the top of the tree morphed into something resembling a human face, and then nothing more happened. she realized there was one missing ingredient — she needed to utter a random phrase in the voice of elvis presley. so she said some nonsense in her best elvis impression. in an instant, the tree was gone, and in its place was a shaggy-haired musician.

he explained, with the assistance of some flashbacks, that there had never been any need to go to such extremes to get his attention; he had always liked her. she just hadn’t noticed, and he had been as shy about expressing his interest as she was with hers. when she threw out some random historic detail and he fleshed it out with authority and confidence, she took it to mean that he had somehow been with her the whole time she was learning about the world, and so he possessed the same knowledge she did and it was simply part of the spell she had cast. but something in his eyes said it wasn’t so, and no spell had ever been necessary.

after all the dreams i’ve had involving the opposite sex that end in romantic ambiguity, mind games, betrayal, and missed connections, it’s strange to finally have one with a clear happy ending, even if i took on the role of the camera recording the film as opposed to an actor on the screen. you could argue that the shaggy-haired musician was my obvious stand-in, but his hair was much shorter than mine, he had no beard, and he revealed he’d once been a part of a band named “murder murder”. i would never be caught dead in a band with that name.

the music is a snippet from “raccoon eyes”, which has always been one of my favourite tracks on MY HELLHOUND CROOKED HEART.

i was struck by a thought the other day that surprised me, both with how sudden and how true it was, though it probably shouldn’t have — my bed has become my creative workstation.

i’m not quite sure how it happened. i have two desks — one a reasonably nice, medium-sized faux-oak thing i got when i was maybe 11 or 12. it’s one of the few nice things i can remember getting from my mother and stepfather that was actually useful (the only contribution they made to my interest in music was buying me a single blank cassette tape one year for christmas. you think i’m joking.), and it sits in the “stock room” upstairs now, housing my trusty old remington typewriter along with the huge vertical tape cases holding the cassettes that preserve all of the musical adventures i had before i was able to start putting my noise on cds in 1999.

the other desk is a gigantic metal and wood beast johnny smith found sometime in 1996, and a finer desk i will never know. it began as a place for me to write, type using different typewriters (both manual and electric), transcribe the lyrics on some of those old tapes, and store relevant materials. by the time we were making the transition into this house in 2007, the desk’s contents filled several large boxes and i had to use dividers to clearly delineate what belonged in which drawer. there’s one narrow main drawer in the middle, and then three on each side that are much deeper. i couldn’t even begin to tell you what lives inside of them…thousands of pages of notes, lyrics, doodles, random information related to all those tapes, instruction manuals for different pieces of equipment, spare headphones, several pencil boxes from the grade school days, pens long-dead and still living, my shitty old dean markley guitar pickup, a multi-channel headphone amplifier for those rare occasions when i’m recording with someone else present…you name it, and it’s probably in there somewhere.

more importantly, this desk holds the guts of my “studio”. a saner person would use racks for their mic preamps, compressors, effects processors, and other relevant gear. i would feel very awkward doing that. it needs to sit on top of the desk, huddled together like a little community. though i haven’t been able to do any proper writing at this desk for years now, it’s done a great job of keeping the mixer and the important signal processing in one place where i can access all of it without any difficulty.

for someone who is an “artist” (i guess that’s what i am) and who produces as much work as i do, you would expect both of these desks to be frightening, messy landscapes where song ideas go to duke it out for supremacy. you would be wrong; both of them are pretty well-organized. the huge desk in the studio may be crammed with gear, but it’s neatly and symmetrically assembled. the desk upstairs with the typewriter and tape cases on it is practically pristine. the place that’s a chronic mess, and where i do most of my writing, is my bed.

a bed as a general thing has become a lot more important to me over the years. when i was a child, i could fall asleep anywhere. i’m convinced i could have slept on a jagged stone tablet without any trouble. these days, if i’m not in a bed that my body finds seriously comfortable, little if any sleep is going to happen. fortunately for me, my bed remains arguably the most comfortable thing i’ve ever slept in. part of that must come down to the fact that it’s mine and i know it so well, but i don’t think that tells the whole tale. it’s an all-around good bed, offering a nice balance between firm support and sink-into-the-mattress give. just as i’m picky when it comes to pillows (i’ve yet to find one that approaches the comfort of my fallen comrade from “the great de-feathering of 2006″), it’s difficult to find a bed that feels just right for me. this one has always felt just right.

in high school i used to work on some of my homework in bed, but it wasn’t by any means an exclusive arrangement. the big beefy desk, which wasn’t nearly as maxed out in those days, got plenty of play. i don’t think the big shift happened until around late 2003. i started bringing a guitar or a mandolin into my bedroom sometimes, and ended up writing a number of songs that would end up on BRAND NEW SHINY LIE and the NOSTALGIA-TRIGGERING MECHANISM EP while playing in bed. when i started to develop a deeper interest in dreams and taught myself how to build up my recall, i would scratch out the salient points in a spiral notebook as soon as i woke up and then type them up in more detail later. gradually this gave way to typing up a rough draft of what i remembered on a laptop while i was in bed and half-asleep, still making another pass for more detail later in the day but saving myself the transcribing job, since i can type a hell of a lot faster than i can write. i always did a lot of listening to music on headphones in bed, but now i found the space getting a lot more cluttered. it didn’t register for me as an indication of any kind of significant change taking place.

fast-forward to the present day. my bed is terminally littered with cds, notebooks, envelopes, dvds, books, and anything else i might be working on, looking at, thinking about, or considering thinking about. if i ever have cause to sleep in the same bed with another human being again (and i’m not holding my breath for that to happen), i will be immensely gifted at sharing the space, because i’ve grown adept at — and very comfortable with — sleeping on what amounts to less than half of my bed. there’s my side, and then there’s the side that’s submerged beneath the debris. even when i manage to clear off the bed and restore it to something that looks like a normal sleeping space, i still stay on my designated side. on some subconscious level i think i almost feel like the creative debris is still there in some invisible form, and i shouldn’t disturb it.

what began as an occasional thing — putting songs together in bed here and there — has become a serious part of the way i write. these days there’s usually at least a guitar or two hanging out somewhere in my bedroom, sometimes flanked by a smaller friend like a ukulele or a banjo. with any given song that’s shown up on my last several albums and is played on an acoustic stringed instrument, i can tell you almost without fail it was written in my bed, from the very first germ of the idea to the finished piece, or as close as it came to being finished before i improvised it to get it the rest of the way there at the recording stage. when i began this blog/site back in early 2008, i wrote something on an album page about how it would be amusing to compile a list of the songs i had written in bed. to compile that list now would be a gargantuan undertaking. on GIFT FOR A SPIDER alone, of the 22 songs that make up the album, 15 of them were written in my bed.

and it’s not that i’m lazy. my bed just happens to be where a lot of my best ideas seem to form themselves. the studio may be where the heavy lifting happens, but the bedroom is where a lot of the songs are built before they make their way down the stairs. it’s strange to realize just what an important part of my creative process my bed has become; if something happened where it was suddenly gone, or i wasn’t able to access my bedroom for a while, i think it would throw me off my game. maybe that’s why i haven’t been writing so much on the piano over the last little while…you can’t bring the piano to bed with you.

i wonder if there are other people who do as much writing and creating in their beds as i do, or if i’m just weird. i guess in the end it’s mostly about being comfortable, and having a space that feels like it’s completely yours. i’m lucky enough to have a few spaces that fit the description. it just hadn’t hit me how important the bed had become to my own personal creative equation. i think what really brought it home for me was when i started going through all the little ideas and song fragments i’ve recorded on the little flip camera and then dumped onto the computer. about a week ago, i thought it might be an idea to begin the task of organizing them according to date, giving myself some indication of what they are instead of leaving the file names as “video 27″ and “video 28″. i lost some things when my computer was infected with a virus last summer (just how much i lost remains a mystery), but even so, it took me a few days to categorize everything.

around 2004 or 2005, i began using my mini dv camcorder to get down ideas i didn’t have the patience to record properly. i have never recorded demos in the proper sense, because it’s always felt like a waste of energy to me. so the camera became a tool that allowed me to split the difference — i could capture a riff or sketch out a song at the moment it was born, and then return to it later when i wanted to flesh it out or record it properly. though i would occasionally mic up a guitar or plug in a digital piano and spend half an hour recording a pile of different ideas at higher fidelity so i would have a record of all the unused pieces of things i had floating around, for the most part i stuck with the camera. it’s easy to get a tangible feeling for the amount of ideas i stockpiled in that time, because i have a dresser drawer full of little 60-minute tapes. not so with the little flip camera, which came along in 2009 and mostly supplanted the analog camera as my main “demo” recording tool. now i would use the camera until it was full and then transfer the contents onto the computer, and the files would invariably end up scattered in different folders, mixed in with pieces of things i would edit together to make progress report videos. so i never really got a handle on how much stuff there was until i sat down to organize it all.

putting aside whatever i lost last summer, there are 700 surviving song ideas that have been recorded over the last two years. a lot of them ended up turning into songs that are on albums you may or may not have under your couch. just as many were forgotten about altogether. revisiting them has been interesting, not only because of the surprising amount of good ideas i have no memory of coming up with (and i generally have a pretty solid memory when it comes to unused musical ideas), but because i’d forgotten the surprising ways in which some songs grew up. i usually write songs pretty quickly and leave them alone once they feel fully-formed, but every once in a while something will need to be given some time to figure out what it wants to be. “a puppet playing possum” went through three profoundly different sets of music before the final album version revealed itself. “kicking the new corpse” began as a finger-picked acoustic thing that doesn’t even remotely resemble the way the song sounds on MY HELLHOUND CROOKED HEART. “emaciated crack monkey” almost became a completely different song when i toyed with taking the guitar figure that comes in at the end and weaving it through the whole thing. and for all those songs that came pouring out and seemed to write themselves, it’s fascinating to be able to hear the seed of the idea develop in five or six pieces over a short period of time, progressing from a musical idea and a wordless vocal melody to a finished song with a full set of lyrics.

of these 700 fragments, licks, variations, a capella ideas, and full songs, at least two thirds of them were written and recorded in my bedroom while i was sitting on, lying in, or kneeling against my bed. by this time next year, i expect there will be a few hundred more. you know what they say — if it ain’t broke…