Introduction:
Learning Through Failure

Whatever little I might know about recording, I learned by making some of the more atrocious records imaginable. My own losses as an artist became others’ gain, potentially. (Not to coddle any reverse-grandiosity, but one would be hard-pressed to put forth something more foibled than my debut LP at age twenty.) I failed to fulfill my own potential due in large part to a tendency to micromanage the creative process and, consequently, lose the forest for the trees. Much like the exemplary party-host, who makes sure every detail is in place but forgets to properly greet and engage the guests once the actual moment arrives, or the bride and groom who are too exhausted from stress to consummate on their wedding night.

My hard-earned and painful lessons in the guaranteed imperfection of perfectionism led to a liberation of sorts: the acceptance of my own shortcomings, if not the utter celebration of limits and “mistakes” as useful partners, however uninvited they might be.

In a nutshell, it boils down to, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” Keep it feral, is the theme.

First and foremost, a producer’s job is to hopefully provide a more clear-eyed—though, undoubtedly, still highly subjective—point of view. It is the overall Big Picture arc of a work that needs tending to—to help find the heart of each song, the center, and clear away waste to bring clarity to the narrative.

An artist can no more fully understand what makes them special than a beautiful person can comprehend why others find them attractive. We are so poorly attuned to ourselves that one truism is how we almost always disown the very qualities that make us unique—despising the nose that makes our face interesting, refusing to play our best song(s).

Yet even the history of film and “glamour” themselves attest to some of the most arresting figures not only being blemished, but that feature as being the key ingredient to their appeal: Humphrey Bogart’s lisp, Katharine Hepburn’s tremor, Jimmy Stewart’s stutter, supermodel Lauren Hutton’s gap-tooth, Elizabeth Taylor’s mole, and so on.

A fundamental task is to get the ego out of our ears.

Rather than trying to control outcomes, our energy is better utilized toward just “being ourselves” and finding (or creating) a natural niche in the world. The challenge is not so dissimilar from the one facing those who are clinically depressed, a condition that is often largely based on people stubbornly insisting that circumstances “should” be a certain way, rather than better devoting attention to dealing with things as they are—to give up all hope, accept death as an inevitability, and engage with whatever is.

In my experience, almost without fail, artists will only play their standout songs last and highly reluctantly. This is because they do not, and ultimately cannot, know what their own most illustrative work is, any more than we can see our own face without a mirror. (And even then, can we ever really see ourselves in a manner undistorted from the noise of our own internal filters? Almost all information we receive arrives secondhand and preprocessed by our self-image. Despite even quite mighty efforts, most of us are bound to remain prisoners of our own subjectivity.)

This accounts for the shock most of us have experienced when seeing a stranger in a shop window, that after a split-second we realize is us. Or the rejection of our own voice that most of us express when we hear ourselves on a recording for the first time: “I don’t sound like that.” Beyond any of this is the fact that those engaged in that act of self-absorption literally change themselves—the very thing that they are looking at—as a result of that action.

And this is why every autobiography is, in fact, a work of fiction.

The better songs almost always have to be pried from the grip of an artist’s vanity. The strongest performances and/or melodies usually occur during soundchecks, as gear is being broken down or on the way out the door, in the parking lot or hallways. Ironically, the bulk of magical moments happen in the candid breaks between the actual recording, and thus pass by, lost forever. For every great album, there is a shadow, unrecorded collection that would trounce that which exists. And the better of these two is irrecoverable.

One night I found the leader of Tinariwen crouching down between some trucks in the sheer blackness to “hide” from an overzealous engineer that the musician was dodging like an insolent student. With a long-lost friend, he was almost whispering an ancient lullaby that his mother used to sing to him and that he reported afterward he had not played in decades. It was fragile and transcendent, but he refused to share it officially outside that one mystical moment that kept the five people present breathless for those seconds’ time that seemed to be temporarily suspended.

The strength of those “just one more” final tunes is the very freedom and ease with which they are delivered, liberated from the hindrance of formally sanctioned “performance.” I’ve learned the hard way that equipment best never be unplugged until after the musicians are for certain long gone or finished, and the record button should almost always be on.

Often “the end” proves to actually be the beginning and everything else prior, just a warm-up. This is attested to by the wisdom of many ancient societies, where rehearsals attract the largest audiences and the shows themselves are secondary.

I continue to be motivated today by the same heady sensation that enchanted me to first pick up a guitar at age six, the identical rising feeling, high in the chest on those hallowed occasions that an undeniably exceptional creation is unexpectedly revealed. From day one of plucking out an instrument, my goal was not acclaim, but simply to be part of that process of sharing, hoping to catch a few of those unmistakable, lightning-in-a-bottle moments that lend an almost supernatural high. Over time, it dawned on me that my favorite tracks from most albums were often the more stripped down and raw ones—the B-sides—and also that I almost invariably preferred the “before” pictures in beauty-remedy ads.

In the end, what captivates me are those figures who could be categorized more as in supporting roles than in glamor roles.

My penny-pinching days of vinyl-record hunting in used bins and flipping through the mildewed, landfill-fated countless corporate cookie-cutter acts affirmed for me how much more value there was in an anonymous contribution to society’s greater good than the napalm of fame. One sagacious maxim cast-off by a forgotten farmer, vagrant, or housewife (e.g., “A stitch in time, saves nine.”) resonates constructively for generations, long after a thousand trendy death-metal, New Wave, or EDM albums have met their predestined end, only to maybe, at best, be revived as the butt of some danced and/or sung, ironic-nostalgia joke. That is, if they are remembered at all.

It is far better and more meaningful to be a Jo Jones (from Count Basie’s band), who introduced the foot-pedal for the hi-hat cymbal or Gospel singer Julius “June” Cheeks who reputedly became the first performer to defy institutional gravity and walk into the audience while performing, collapsing boundaries with just a few short steps.

Acknowledged or not, we live as inheritors of the collective history and wisdom of the unknown, the “ghost writers” who shape most culture. The names may be forgotten, but the influences continue to long be felt.

By design, what follows here is neither scientific nor scholastic. It is just one person’s opinions and observations from a life spent under the spell of recording’s alchemy that makes it possible for the deceased to speak to the living.

The structure herein is composed of mini-chapters, designed to be opened to any page and read in random order, potentially. These words are humbly offered as stimulus for thought and reflection. “Riffs,” as it were. I hope in some small way it proves helpful to your own expressive endeavors, whatever they may be.

In the end, I may not “know shit.” But stealing another’s voice—particularly when it may be the only material thing that they have left—not only speaks, but screams for itself. And if it is done with a smile on the face or a compliment on the tongue, that disingenuousness and denial only deepens the injury and divide. (It should not be forgotten that historically, among the first steps of enslaving a population is outlawing the enslaved’s language to help insure their submission.)