A Big Project - concluded

I first learned how to use a computer to record music in April, 2003, after a “surprise wedding” where I’d written one of the songs. I suppose that is not entirely the case - when I was in the recording studio in the summer of 1993, I learned how to operate (to a small extent) the software that studio used to record digitally.

But I first learned how to use my own computer to record music in April of 2003. The first song I recorded was the wedding song, “Among the Lilies”, an adaptation of pieces of the Song of Solomon. I immediately noticed that the results were better, far better, than I could get from my 4-track multi-track tape recorder. In the time since, I’ve written and recorded a number of songs, and gotten better at it with the passing of time. And I’ve gotten a lot of help - my wife, my sister-in-law, and my brother-in-law built me a recording room in the basement, and set up my music gear in it for my birthday in November, 2003. They built a room in my house, and I didn’t notice! Only a combination of my obvious day to day stupor with their quiet and carefully plotted work allowed that to be a surprise. I may tell that story in detail at some point.

For my birthday this past year, my wife got me a bass guitar. It was the missing hole in the picture - to sound authentically like a one man band, I had to be able to add real-sounding bass, and not just foot pedal bass from my Yamaha organ. The only instrument I am really expert at is the guitar, but I’ve mustered enough competency at the other instruments that I can sound like a one man band, when I record all the various instrumental parts - just so long as I keep the guitar front and center, instrumentally.

After a few weeks of furious work, where I’ve been re-recording some of the earliest songs that have some recording flaws, I’m done this musical project that has been gelling in my head for a while. And now that I am done, I have to decide what to do with it.

In short, I am thinking of putting out a CD. I’m far enough along in my thinking that I’ve even thought up cover art. The group I was in back in 1993, you see, had begun recording a second album in 1994. Already distraught with my spiritual state, I had poured my agnosticism into song, and had written a concept album about this agnostic state. In one song from the recording, I wrote:

I make my living as a musician
A doctor to the soul if you will
But I’m not sure that I’m much of a physician
Cause I’m not that sure there is a soul to kill

This was the monster under the bed - is consciousness, is the soul an illusion, as some Buddhists might say? Was it a simple reality that life, in all its apparent meaning, is really an illusion in the chaos? I titled the disk “Body and Soul” and had designed a cover art motif, a world hanging in space, with a happy face spray painted on it.

I am using the same art as deliberate irony today. No longer in any way agnostic, I’ve truly recorded the songs I am happy to call “Body and Soul.” Instead of tracking my journey in the Dark Night of the Soul, they begin with my emergence from the dark night (which I chronicle in a song called “Leave the Light On.”)

The darkness leaves no place to hide
From the monsters in my mind
But this blue light sketching shapes on the bed
Tells me what I need to find


And then I sing with everything I have bathed in that light. I wrote the song over a Pentecost experience, one of many such blessings I’ve enjoyed in which swirls of blue light lit up my bedroom one night when I was alone, and filled the room with a soft glow and bathed me in light and love. I know that the clouds pass over this light from time to time, but I know they are clouds of my own making. The Light has always been there, and the darkness will never prevail over it.