I worked on several mixes by myself today and then Luke came over and we hammered through all the songs in five solid hours of work. He’s such a trooper, I think he used the bathroom once.
I have to say, I’m extremely happy with how well these songs have turned out. Hearing some of them for the very first time with completed percussion tracks and mixed properly made me want to cry. I’m not even joking. I have some of the greatest friends in the world. That is a fact. And although only a handful of them worked on this album with me, the effort they put in has been humbling. As for Luke, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone work so hard on something that wasn’t technically their own work. It should be made known that Luke Ragsdale owns a huge part of this record creatively. I could have made this album without him but it wouldn’t be even 10% as good as it is now. We’re both so excited to reveal it to everyone over the next couple days!
March 2012
30 posts
Now, Now
Tonight I saw Now, Now, Vacationer and The Naked and Famous play live. It was pretty spectacular. Now, Now’s new album sounded wonderful live; so good in fact, I bought the CD from them. The Naked and Famous were more than spot on. They had a fantastic light show, about as good as any I’ve ever seen. Their full length translates incredibly well live: it’s one giant dance party. And all the bands were so appreciative and humble.
All Electric
I’m happy to say that absolutely no acoustic instruments were used in the making of this new EP. That includes the “string” section which is comprised of synth strings, ebow, and now this electric violin running through a delay pedal and hooked into my Vox guitar amp. Neither Emily or I had ever recorded an electric violin before so we didn’t know what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised to find it recorded just like an electric guitar. Emily was brilliant and we tweaked the delay pedal for some awesome sounds. She even played some death metal violin near the end but once we layer it you probably wont be able to tell.
At night, I had an awesome time mixing two of the tracks with Luke who, as it turns out, has a much finer ear for mixing than I do. I think I attended one too many loud rock shows when I was younger.
My friend Amy and I shot some footage for a promo video for the new album today. I’ll post it up here when it’s done!
Luke showed me the percussion he’s been working on for a few of the tracks. It definitely adds a punch. I borrowed some huge stereo monitors from my friend Scott so we can mix the EP like semi-professionals. Later, I combed through seven tracks of vocals and pieced together the exact map of what I want people to hear come from my voice on two of the songs. Down to each syllable. It looks like Frankenstein in sound wave form. But hey, at least I don’t use autotune.
I finished tracking the bass with Kenny today and we found some sweet virtual amplifiers to use for it. I feel like the bass is our secret weapon on this record. It definitely wears the pants in one of the songs.
Vox
I finished tracking the vocals today in this tiny practice room at the school of music. Mostly because I just wanted to get it over with. I was there till 1am.
I finally nailed down a date and venue for the EP release show today! It’s gonna be fun. I’m going to play acoustic versions of all the very electric and electronic songs on Year Two. We’ll play the tracks off the EP and have a short discussion session about the lyrics. I hope people ask questions. I have a bad feeling that no one is going to ask questions.
I started recording vocals today, my least favorite part of recording. Interestingly, I found myself liking some of the demo track vocals better than the ones I was performing today. I may try to mix some of them in. Also, interesting (at least to me), some of the lyrics I was singing really stood out to me today as being very strong. It’s odd because I’ve been living with these lyrics in my head for about a year or so now. Maybe physically exerting myself to sing them over and over again brought something new out of them for me. I feel like some of them are almost angry but not at any one person, just more frustrated with the system and what it does to us. On this EP I’ve used some of the strongest and darkest metaphors I’ve ever used but I don’t think most people will bother to look deep enough to discover that. It’s potentially very controversial to the medical community but again, I have serious doubts that people will read into it that far. My hope is that they would so that this discussion will finally gain some momentum.
I know many people will see the lyrics and brush the album aside as one giant complaint about medical school being hard. But it’s about so much more than that. I really tried to ask difficult questions about what it means to be a human being and how we react to the people and society that shape us. Consequently, I really feel that people who aren’t concerned with the medical world at all will still find something that resonates with them in this album. The thing I’ve written about is not just the medical student experience, it is the human experience and so much of the emotion that comes with it.
Youth Lagoon
I saw Youth Lagoon play a pretty short but pretty fantastic set tonight. One of my favorite things about the show was that the guitarist only had one pedal and the frontman (Youth Lagoon himself) Trevor Powers had a really simple set up (for an electronic musician) consisting of only one full keyboard, one synthesizer, one drum machine, and an effects module for his vocals. The tone of everything was perfect.
Really didn’t get too much done today. Mostly because almost all of the EP is done already! That’s a good feeling. I think I spent a couple hours messing with a single synth part.
Today was a great day. I spent a whole lot of it with Luke and Kenny finishing up the guitar on the EP. It’s so odd but the solution we finally found for the most problematic song on the record, “Spit It Out” was a guitar piece that I actually wrote and performed myself and some bass riffs that Kenny put together. It’s always completely surprising to me when the solution to a songwriting problem has to do with something I performed as a musician because I consider myself to be such a mediocre one. If it wasn’t for Kenny having confidence in the part I wrote and played, I would have tossed it aside and we would probably still be looking for a solution. Meanwhile, my co-producer, Luke’s knack for programing much more refined percussion elements over my shody, generic placeholder drums is amazing. He showed me a track he tweaked for “White Mass” today and it’s just what the song needed.
If you want to check out the tracklist and a tiny bit of the album art for the new EP, you can head over to the bandcamp page.
Tonight, I watched an intriguing DVD by the band Sigur Ros called Inni. Its unique treatment of their concert footage really provides a memorizing lens through which to engross yourself in their moody sonic landscapes. Along with their last DVD, I think it provides the perfect setting for digesting their music.
I got to record the second to last guitar track I needed, and the only rhythm guitar on the record, with my friend Ashton this afternoon. It went well. I’m so excited, we only have one more song to record guitar on and we’re doing it tomorrow morning. Of course, it’s going to be the most difficult track to wrangle in yet.
Mutemath
I saw Mutemath tonight and I can’t begin to tell you how incredible it was. I’m surprised that they remain so consistent at how well they put on a show. The energy and audience interaction were superb. They are an enormously skilled set of musicians. For my money, it’s the best live act in the country.
I met with a first year today who is what we call “burnt out”. He reminds me a lot of myself at that point actually. A romantic who feels isolated, seeking truth and meaning in things not many people seem to be worrying about. I wont go into details because I don’t think it’s appropriate but I will say that the conversation was just another sign to me that I really need to release this collection of songs and to try in earnest to ignite a discussion about the mental health of medical students.
I had another wonderful night tracking guitar with Kenny. We got another song under our belts. The album art is starting to come along nicely. Also, I received help via email with the Latin I needed to finish naming the final track on the album from a wonderfully kind professor who I’ve never met. The last track is called “Tabula Inscripta” and is Latin for a tablet with a permanent inscription carved into it. The first track, which I named over a year ago, is called “Tabula Rasa” meaning blank slate. It is of course a well known phrase because it stands for the idea in psychology that a human being is born with no knowledge and any knowledge we eventually possess comes from experience. I think these two tracks act as great bookends for this EP. They help create a narrative arch to what is essentially five different (yet connected) discussions on the mental, emotional, and spiritual state of second year medical students.
Delay
As in guitar delay, is a very good thing. It’s delicious really. Now I’m speaking in synesthesias.
My test at least felt like it went pretty well. I finished with 34 minutes left to check my answers which is remarkable since last time I barely had 10. I also felt like I had a really good grasp of what was going on in most of the vignettes. Some of them were like splitting hairs between two similar disorders because the stories were so vague. They’re the types of questions where if you had the actual person in front of you, the answer would be obvious. I hate those. But overall it felt pretty good.
Later, I went over to my friend Kenny’s house and we finished guitar for two songs! I’m so happy with how it came out. Meanwhile, my co-producer, Luke finished some percussion we needed for another track. Things are coming together.
Well, my test isn’t until 1pm tomorrow. I feel pretty good. Maybe good enough to pass. We shall see.
Life and Love In the Library
It was a good study day.
I made plans to record this week after my test. I’m pretty excited. The guitar consistently positions itself as my favorite instrument and every time I record with these friends of mine, I feel the magic and beauty of the thing resonate inside me. My 14 year old self with my first electric guitar and practice amp (which I still own) playing power chords to punk songs is elated, I’m sure.
My practice tests have been pretty consistently passing. So that’s good news. I know the test will be a whole lot different but I’ve tried my best to simulate it and it would appear that I’m on to something.
Some days I feel like medical school has taken more from me than it will ever give back. I felt like that for a good portion of this morning. Maybe it’s a perspective problem. Maybe I’ve unconsciously dealt a heavy hand of anthropomorphism to the institution of medical school so I can actively hate it. You can’t hate a chair, or a brick building, but you can hate a person. And that’s what medical school has become to me. This person I live with every second of the day. It’s like a terrible marriage forged out of necessity and fueled by guilt and suspected sadism. We need each other but as soon as we don’t, neither of us will want anything to do with the other. For now, we go to sleep and wake up in the same bed. Hardly a word passes between us that isn’t absolutely necessary for survival. We share calendars and phone books, electric bills and this tiny apartment I rent. We stash notebooks and folders in places where the other person wouldn’t think to find them. Personal things, if at all possible, must remain hidden. I don’t ask questions. I don’t care what goes on when I’m not there. We have separate friends, separate families, separate circles of influence. Sometimes we eat meals together. If I fail, if we fail each other, these writings will serve as a record of our divorce. An explanation of our “irreconcilable differences”. I don’t think any literate judge could argue with its contents.
Perhaps, at some point, I may have fancied her. But those memories are very faint.
Study, Study, Study
Crepes
Searching for Some Good Veins
Today I began designing the layout and album art for the Year Two EP in earnest. I met with the art director of the med school who helped me figure out the resolution issues I had. Then tonight I raked through all of my Gray’s Anatomy again to pick which images to use. I love using them because it proves that they are real pieces of art and not just bland textbook illustrations. There’s life in these drawings and I want to show people that.
Whew! I breathed a tiny sigh of relief today when the student affairs dean pushed two familiar looking papers across the desk for me to sign. It was an official letter from the board stating that they wanted me to retake the surgery clerkship and not the whole 3rd year over saving me perhaps 3 and a half months of time if I am able to pass this upcoming psych exam. Still, I’m pretty sure this means there is no way on earth I will graduate with the class I started with and residency is also a distant murky picture. And I have no idea how I’m supposed to pass the surgery exam when I take it a third time (which, by the way, if I fail, they would probably have no choice but to kick me out of medical school entirely). But I’ll take what I can get. That news, early in the morning, energized me to run through a whole slew of psych problems that I probably otherwise wouldn’t have made it through. Now I’m thinking about watching Trainspotting again to get a better picture of heroin addicts look like. You know, for educational purposes.
I don’t really have anything to say. I just know tomorrow is most likely going to be the end of a big chapter in my life and the beginning of another. I’m not sure which one I’ll like more. But then again, it never really matters what I like. Things just happen the way they happen. And I am never in control.
This weekend, I feel like my personal failures are under a magnifying glass. Maybe it’s just the impending doom of Monday morning getting to me.
I finished the demo of this song called “The Sketch and the Sound” today. You can listen to it here:
It’s part of a collection of songs I plan to write over the next five years or so.
They’re all going to be stories about growing up and what it looks like when we lose our childhood.
I had a terrible nightmare last night. I was working in some hospital like building in the middle of nowhere with my sister who was a nurse. There was hardly anyone around but we got this patient in on a stretcher and she was dying. For some reason I needed to place a needle in her chest so I did but it didn’t help or I couldn’t place it right or something. She went into cardiac arrest and my sister and I took turns doing chest compressions trying to revive her. It was really intense. I was yelling at my sister to work harder but she was getting tired because the chest compressions wear you out after a while. Finally we gave up and let her go. Then I noticed some sort of rubber makeup prosthetic on her ear that made it pointy. I peeled it off an then looked in a mirror that was on the wall. I noticed that I had the same kind of rubber mask on but it was covering my entire head. I looked like a goblin. I peeled it off layer after layer until it was gone and my head seemed very small. It was bizarre and the whole dream was pretty terrifying.
On a lighter note, I got this ebow in the mail today that will help me finish up the Year Two album.
I’m pretty happy about that.
Apparently, the board met this morning and made a decision about what I need to do next to progress in my medical education. It may involve repeating third year or most of it. Anyway, the soonest meeting I could get with the dean who’s gonna fill me in on the decision was monday.
It’s gonna be a long weekend.
I don’t know how I failed the surgical shelf exam a second time but I did.
I think I’m pretty emotionless about it at this point. I’m more puzzled than anything.
I had all the time in the world, studied every review book and question bank I could get my hands on and I wasn’t anxious at all. Objectively it doesn’t make sense. If I was analyzing someone else in this situation I would be just as perplexed.
When I spoke with one of my advisers over the phone this afternoon, he adamantly questioned the validity of the extensive neuropsych testing I underwent. He believes that there is no way something can’t be wrong with my brain.
I don’t know what to believe. I look for answers and I come up empty handed so I look for answers again. And it never stops.
It’s comical really. All throughout med school, I’ve always heard people say things like “yeah but no one fails third year”. Well here I am with my toes hanging off the edge of that supposedly safe cliff, waiting for the slightest wind to push me over it.
