|
|||||
  |
|||||
Live Summer Session - with 17 new songs and more than 45 minutes of original music - was released to the public this week, and feedback is already pouring in from around the globe! If you're just tuning in, Live Summer Session was recorded in my living room this summer, LIVE, in a single emotionally turbulent take. A few of the songs had been brewing in my head for a while, but I composed most of the music on the spot, impromptu, as the tape rolled. I had a nice big stack of my lyrics notes to reference, and I just let the inspiration take over me from there. There weren't any producers telling me what to do (or not to do), no engineers giving me another take - just me and a Yamaha S80 digital piano, going at it. It was the first time I had let loose in over a year, and it was an emotional occasion. As I stood behind the microphone with my fingers on the piano keys, I thought about all the mistakes I had made in my life, the choices that had almost destroyed me. I thought about the hearts I had broken, the friends I had taken for granted, and the people I trusted who had come to betray me. The pain and disappointment I had been through on the road to my dream seemed to rise up in my soul like a black viper to poison me, and my heart cried out for a reason. Why did I have to endure all of this suffering? What was any of it for? But then I thought about my dream, and how I refused to let go of it, even after I was robbed and beaten and left with nothing. I suddenly realized that I had come all this way to make my dream come true. This is what I had been fighting for. This moment right here. I wept between songs as angels and demons waged war within me. And the tape caught all of it. This was guerrilla record making at its absolute guerrilla-est - and I'm not referring only to my performance aspect. Since I don't have a piano, we had to borrow one from a Dutch rock n roll band, and we even rigged a boom microphone stand out of a floor lamp, an old aluminum hospital cane, and a used-up roll of wrapping paper. Conventional? No. But sometimes you just have to go with your instincts. I've been relying very heavily on my instincts lately, and my songwriting has come to depend on my ability to surrender to the inspiration whenever it strikes. When I clear my mind and let the music take over, my hands seem to move on their own, and my voice utters words I haven't premeditated. This is pure instinct. It's like riding a wave. You just take a deep breath, hop on, and hang on as long as you can. That's basically how I songwrite when I'm composing impromptu pieces. It's a lot like channeling. Or free associating. And it's super fun, because anything can happen! It's pure creativity. Needless to say, this method is different from that of most other songwriters, who tend to spend a significant amount of time writing a song before they record it, thoughtfully mapping out chords and rhyming verses - you get the idea. I can write songs that way too, but I just love to compose impromptu, and I had months, no, years of madness inside me that just kept building up and building up, until the dam broke and everything came rushing to the surface the day I recorded. Musical percolation. And that's what we captured on Live Summer Session: emotion in its rawest musical form, still gelling. And it was a huge risk, putting out a record that was basically a demo. But we were able to capture something magical by doing it live and impromptu, and people really seem to be connecting to the rawness and realness of it. It's good to be real. You know, I get letters from teenagers who want to be musicians, but they don't think their voices sound as good as the ones on the radio. What they don't realize is that they've probably never even heard a real voice on the radio before. They've only heard the twelve or so songs major FM radio stations play at any given moment, and that means Matrix-style production on cookie-cutter songs with a computerized digital vocal collage instead of a real emotional voice, production team technique instead of personal artistry, and little or no variation, ever. A lot of people don't realize that the music they hear on the radio was put together by a team of producers using a computer, and that bands couldn't come close to reproducing their radio sound live. Of course there's always an exception somewhere, but the general rule is that all mainstream acts today record vocals one line at a time, and they sing each line of the song, like, 300 times before the producer (or team of producers) sthrough the 299 bad takes to find the one good take. They do this for every single line of the song, line by line, over and over and over, and when they finally make it through to the end of the song, they paste everything together in ProTools until one seamless vocal performance has been digitally created. Next they run the digital vocal collage through various digital filters that add fullness and richness, and finally they pitch correct everything so you'd never know if the singer was off key the whole time. And then they record layers upon layers of background vocals, which they add to the lead vocal, and then they drop everything into an instrumental track to make a full song... which they then master, market, mass produce. And that's what you're hearing on the radio. That's not an artist who wrote a song and then played it into a mircophone at the studio one day. That's a collage of a singer's digitally altered voice singing a song somebody else wrote for them, that a group of other people produced. It's just not very real, is it? And yet those same recordings-by-committee are being played at live concerts, while the "artists" lip-synch along. And all this time you thought you were paying full ticket price to hear live music... not a CD you already own! But that's the truth of it. Ashlee Simpson isn't the only lip syncher out there. Most pop artists lip-synch to pre-recorded tracks, or sing along and have their live vocal mixed in with the pre-recorded track by the soundman. It's like the biggest farce in the history of music has become an industry standard. But that's exactly why I think people are so excited by Live Summer Session. It isn't some over produced, cut-and-paste track that was put together in Pro Tools by a huge assembly line of producers, engineers, writers and arrangers. It wasn't co-written by somebody else, or slicked up, or glossed over, or otherwise tweaked to make me sound better than I am able perform in real life. Basically, the fans love that it isn't a big lie. And let's face it... a lot of records these days are big fat lies. I didn't always know this... but I'm so glad I learned. I used to think I wasn't good enough to be a professional musician, because I heard CDs and songs on the radio, and I thought the artists literally didn't make any mistakes. I used to think everyone who sang a song wrote that song, too. They don't. Once I learned the truth, though, all bets were off. I figured I had a chance after all, but if no one had told me, I might still be hiding behind my living room piano, singing for the cats. Please, take a stand and support real music by ordering a copy of Live Summer Session from my online shop. Proceeds put food on my table and go towards making more music! Musically Yours, ~:o) Christine
| |||||
