Acoustic mail

A few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to my bestie from high school. Wrote as in wrote by hand. Then I put it into an envelope, sealed it, put a stamp on it, and walked to a nearby postal outlet to turn it over to Canada Post for delivery.

All that is becoming pretty odd anymore, and sometimes disquieting.

I've become so accustomed to writing emails that save a copy of what I wrote. There's no copy of what I wrote to my friend. I have a general idea now of what I wrote about, but I couldn't tell you details. There's a risk in any writing, but a handwritten note is a bigger risk than most. It's very much of the moment.

When I write with a keyboard and computer, I edit constantly. I rarely just pour out a bunch of words without checking to make sure they make sense and say what I want to say, rewording here, tweaking there, cutting and moving and deleting. Handwriting, unless you're copying from something, goes from brain to paper. You have to get it right the first time unless you want to blot things out or even start over. You have to think linearly and even slowly enough to capture your thoughts in ink.

Once I've finished an email and clicked "send," Gmail gives me a maximum of 30 seconds to have second thoughts and recall the message. A letter popped into the post has no possibility of recall. Many a comedy sketch has been based on that fact.

Emails are "free" to send — I pay only with all the information Google extracts out of me every time I use it. Nothing is really free. The letter I sent to the United States cost me C$1.30. If what I'm sending is special, I consider that a bargain. It's not hard to be more special than an email.

The letter took several days to reach my friend. I don't know how long, because I didn't pay for tracking. An email message, on the other hand, after that 30-second grace period, is in the recipient's inbox within seconds, on their mail server if not yet viewed on their own computer or phone.

It had been a long time since I'd written anything more than a Christmas card by hand, and I didn't even do very well at that last year. It took a lot of time for me to build up to actually writing that letter. The trepidation was real. But once I was into it, at the right time, it was quite satisfying.

Sending letters is starting to feel like an anachronistic indulgence. I'm having a physical message brought from one coast of one country to the far coast of a different country. It's kind of amazing governments still provide a service like that.

Letters sent in the mail are a really inefficient way to communicate. And yet they can be a deeper, richer way to communicate. Email has its place, but maybe writing more by hand would be good for me. Maybe I should take a risk and be less edited.

I'm doing better at Christmas cards this year. I might just keep surprising people by scrawling notes and popping them in the post.

Troublemaker 2.x

In 2017, I was asked to participate in the second round of Troublemakers, a program by community development group Reel Youth that matches young, queer filmmakers with queer community elders. It was the second year of the project, thus Troublemakers 2.0.

Most people seem to think I'm much less introverted and neurodiverse than I am. I have tried hard to fit into the normal world, and I think I give the impression that I'm better at it than is really the case. This is why people invite me to things like Troublemakers.

I said yes because I thought it was a great project and an honour to be asked to participate. But sometimes you should say no to things even if you disappoint the person asking, and that time I should have followed my gut.

It was a difficult weekend for me.  I was uncomfortable going in. I felt out of place. Group exercises felt awkward and sometimes even painful. I met many wonderful people that weekend, but I was just in the wrong frame of mind for a big group thing. I felt bad because I had put myself in the situation, and then bad again because I hate being a drag.

At the same time, the very young filmmaker I was assigned to work with had issues of his own. He wanted to make the interview entirely spontaneous. We tried that on the first day of shooting, but it left us with pretty much no usable footage. So on the final day, one of the mentors helped fix the questions, and then kept us on script while helping the filmmaker stay focused and positive. I could have prompted less generic questions, but I did not. I just wanted to cooperate with the process. I wanted the filmmaker to do well too.

It worked, pretty much. The film came out well enough. It's well shot and edited. I recognize the person speaking. The music stuff was good. I also talked about sex, which was about as close to the edge as we got. The rest is trivial. I hadn't let them know in advance about any other troublemaking, and the questions didn't go in that direction, so it's a pretty untroubled film.

I could have re-upped and participated in Troublemakers 5.0, but I knew it would be no better a fit for me now than it was four years ago. Instead, I'll write about the trouble I made that I should have talked about when I had the opportunity.

I went to a private Catholic school run by an order of teaching sisters. I was smart and had unrecognized ADHD, so I was often bored and in need of stimulation. I had a bad tendency to latch onto troublemakers and then join in with them. All the way through grade eight, I had excellent academic marks and terrible conduct marks.

None of that was "good trouble," just acting out. My troublemaking improved in high school. I became an environmentalist when that was still considered extreme. I wore a black armband on the first anniversary of the Kent State massacre. My friend and I were hauled into the principal's office for creating and distributing an unauthorized publication. I used my position as yearbook editor to make a political statement in the opening thematic section. As class valedictorian, I made a speech at graduation condemning the widening war in Vietnam, and I urged my fellow newly enfranchised 18-year-olds to vote for change.

At university I participated in antiwar protests. There was a big one in the autumn of 1972 in front of an armory where a Nixon fund-raising dinner was going on. We were run off by police after someone set fire to a car.

I had a folk music show on campus radio, and I aired a whole lot of controversial stuff during my four years at the mic, staying just this side of having the Jesuits come down on my musical selections.

In 1975 I was part of the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which Jeremy Rifkin led before he went off the deep end. We staged an all-night concert and protest at Concord Bridge, where President Jerry Ford made a speech commemorating the 200th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War (we did not succeed in interrupting the festivities).

After university, I got involved with the Clamshell Alliance. I was part of a huge protest at the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power station. I was less afraid of meltdowns than I was concerned about the disposal of nuclear waste.

When I started making original music in the 1980s, it was raw and sharp and in yer face. I wrote anti-Reagan diatribes. I railed against the shallowness of modern life and the siren song of consumerism and wealth disparities. I had been brought up with strong ideals. They got pretty smashed up in 1968 and the years following, but I never lost them.

I shifted from music to acting in the late 1980s into the 90s. I was not making a lot of trouble then, other than for myself. I moved to Vancouver in 1994. I spent many years working, saving up to buy a house, and living through shit like 9/11. I made no appreciable trouble for many years.

I started to break out of that in 2006, the year I volunteered for a queer help line at Qmunity (then called The Centre). I even helped train new volunteers. In 2009, I volunteered at the first Girls Rock Camp Vancouver. At the time, it was still pretty subversive to help girls to make their own music and play together in bands, and this was an organization that was mostly run by queer women. I did GRCV for its first two years. I then helped to run Ladies Rock Camp so we could subvert the grown-ups too, and finally went back to GRVC for one more year.

Thanks to Girls and Ladies rock camps, I connected with local musicians, local women, and local queer women. In 2012, my bass-playing spouse and I formed Lisa's Hotcakes with two other rock camp alumnae. Hotcakes wasn't exactly a subversive band, but it goes against the norm to have older women making their own music together. And we were three-quarters queer.

In 2014, after Hotcakes was done, I became a charter member of Femme City Choir, a group of queer femmes, all of whom were younger than me, usually much younger. While having fun singing, I got steeped in queer, activist Millennial thinking. I learned a lot from them, and when I didn't agree with them, I learned a lot on my own. They prompted me to re-evaluate just how progressive I was and where I could do better. My time in FCC was not always easy, but I think it was crucial to the way I think today.

I feel as though I've regained my youthful fervor for change, with a lifetime's-worth of better ideas of what those changes should be. I joined the BC Greens, not exactly the establishment party, and volunteered in the two most recent provincial elections. I helped make New West Pride the most accessible Pride festival around, and then worked to keep reducing and eliminating barriers.

The election of D. Trump as president of the United States certainly focused my thinking. He was much more alarming than Nixon or Reagan or even Dubya. My long-time anti-fascism became popular again. The non-racism I was brought up with became anti-racism. The feminism I had never lost became more important than ever.

Not all old people become conservative. I support land back to Indigenous peoples. I want radical, effective action to mitigate global heating. I want white supremacism to die with a stake through its heart. I'm not as energetic as I was when I was younger, but I'm still ready to make trouble to make change.

All things in moderation

That was my mother's motto. She was pretty extreme about her moderation.

I had a glass of wine last night whilst watching TV, the end of a bottle that I've been using for cooking. It was a'ight. It mostly made me sleepy. I did not suffer for it. I'm glad for that. I'm still hoping that when real summer happens (we've had two pseudo-summers so far), I will be able to enjoy some beer. With company.

I pop into Twitter from time to time. I have posted or shared a few times and replied a few times. I'm not feeling compelled to go through every tweet in my feed that has shown up since the last time I looked. Apparently I'm using the hours (yes, hours) I used to spend on Twitter doings something else. I don't feel that I have the time to give to Twitter that I once did.

I miss knowing what's up with friends and neighbours. I miss feeling connected and better informed about issues. I do not miss the compulsion to check my timeline often, getting wound up by Twitter, or having to censor myself so as not to give offence. I do not miss GIFs, TikToks, or snark.

I am not going to preach the joys of reducing social media and/or screen time. Everyone has to figure out what works for them. The difference in my brain is still noticeable, but my brain is weird.

I'm currently reading The Obelisk Gate, the second book in The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. If anything, I'm even more absorbed in it than in the first book, The Fifth Season. Jemisin's world invention is astounding. And all while telling a rippin' yarn, she says important things about us and the society we live in.

I'm also reading another ostensible self-help book, another that I learned about through CBC Radio 1, called The Dance Cure by Dr. Peter Lovatt. If it helps my self, great, but I'm mostly interested in the what happens in our brain and body when we dance. Very interesting so far. Maybe I'll start bopping around the living room like no one is watching.

The bluebird of Twitterlessness

 It's Day 6 without Twitter. All is calm. All is a'ight.

I've enjoyed using Twitter since 2007, back when normal people thought it was silly. My engagement ramped up when a certain twice-impeached former would-be dictator occupied the White House, the same time as those who had scratched their heads for 10 years signed up, and Twitter exploded.

I watched from the country next door as the country of my birth waved its Confederate battle flag, murdered its Black citizens, had its highest court packed with right-wing extremists, and almost lost its democracy. I went in even harder when COVID hit. We also had a provincial election, and then a U.S. presidential and congressional election. For lots of reasons, it was important for me to try to keep up with several streams of news and views.

For a while, I had been feeling that I might be consuming more media than was really good for me. I started wondering how much time I spent using Twitter, and what I might do with the time if I stayed off Twitter. It reached a critical point for me when I was reading Hunt, Gather, Parent (but that's a whole other story) and felt that I needed to stop consuming, to be thoughtful, and to consider what might need to change in my life.

The main thing I did more of without Twitter was read books. I finished Hunt, Gather, Parent, and then zipped through a novel for my local book club. I'm a fairly slow reader. I can't get rid of the reading-aloud voice in my head. But I feel as though this recent reading was rather effortless. I also found that I enjoy reading more. I had always though retirement would be good for reading, but until now, not so much.

I've written more as well, but otherwise I haven't added a specific activity other than reading. Reducing my media consumption is not magic. I would be spending time working in and enjoying my garden anyway. I haven't adding any extra cooking. I haven't played music! (Hmmmm.)

I noticed, though, that I was getting to things more quickly than I used to. I got dressed earlier, was out in the garden earlier. I even did some household chores that weren't particularly fun with much less procrastinating than usual.

An adult diagnosis of ADHD is hard to obtain, so let's just say that I have ADHD symptoms and have had them for as long as I can remember. Now, correlation does not equal causality, but since I got off Twitter, my symptoms have decreased noticeably.

Most obvious for me is distractibility. Why did it never occur to me that Twitter was the apotheosis of distraction? It was working as designed: drawing me away from whatever I was doing or trying to do, keeping me engaged, winding me up, and keeping me coming back for more.

Less distraction means better focus. Improved focus might be why reading feels easier. It helps in getting me through my day more like a functioning adult. My anxiety is lower. I'm feeling more relaxed than I have been for a while.

I had thought, or told myself, that Twitter was a net positive experience for me, that the good I got out of it and the satisfaction I got from using it outweighed any negative effects, which I have always known were there. I now know that even if the negative effects are few, they definitely weigh in my life more than the many positive effects.

This is not a controlled experiment, of course. Life is full of variables. I had my first vaccine jab several weeks ago, and although I haven't changed my behaviour and likely won't change much before jab #2, I'm probably a little more at ease and feel a little less endangered. Hunt, Gather, Parent curiously gave me, a non-parent, many things to consider.

There was a knock-on effect as well. Without Twitter, I spent much less time looking at my phone, and sat at my laptop only to do actual work and not just use to Twitter and let that turn into surfing aimlessly. Even my light use of Facebook got lighter. Mostly I watch for birthdays.

I haven't been off Twitter entirely. I respond to direct messages. But lately, I've been trimming my following list a bit at a time and then checking to see if my timeline seems more manageable. People in my city stay on the list. Twitter is a curiously good connection among people here whom I might not encounter otherwise. And I keep accounts I wouldn't want to be without, so far.

I need to know what's going on in the world. I need to keep myself open and learning. I need to stay in touch with neighbours. I also need to manage my anxiety level. I don't expect zero anxiety. I don't want to live in a bubble. But I can't let my need to stay connected have a negative effect on my well-being.

Somehow, I need to get what I want and mostly avoid what I don't want. I need the news and views and connections, but not full throttle. I'm not sure yet how I can make that happen.

(I shall now hypocritically post a link to this post on Twitter and Facebook.)

Less than intoxicating

Hello, my name is Véronique, and I...stopped drinking.

I didn't resolve to quit. I wasn't drinking too much. In fact, I had been drinking less and less. But at some point around Christmas, I didn't buy any more beer or wine. The wine cellar was already down to a single bottle of Viognier ice wine. I recall one Irish coffee around the holidays, then no more.

I love beer and wine. I love alcoholic beverages of all kinds. But they no longer love me. Upon reflection, they never really did. When I was younger, I could better tolerate alcohol's ill effects, but I still suffered from many a hangover. As well, a combination of alcohol and my relaxant of choice can produce its own bad effects.

As I got older the ill effects became worse, and have become much worse since I turned into an old-age pensioner. I wouldn't get hung over. I'm reasonably sure it was migraine, or maybe even both, if that's possible. Brain capillaries misbehaving and brain dehydrated at the same time? Seems logical. If that sort of thing happened, I would lose the whole day. Sometimes I was sick to the point of not being able to keep down water for several hours.

There's nothing worse than having a raging migraine but being unable to ingest caffeine, and then getting a lack-of-caffeine headache added in.

The maddening thing would be that bad mornings after, even mildly bad, didn't always happen. In fact, they didn't happen very often, and they were unpredictable. Many times, I could have a couple of glasses of wine or two pints of beer and be fine the next day. But another time I would have a single glass of something and suffer the consequences. And the worse effects were getting frequent enough to finally convince me that I didn't want to go through one of those days again.

I sip more Oasis mango and peach-mango juice than I used to. They have a lot of sugar, so I try not to drink too much. Tasty though.

I really don't want to have to avoid alcohol entirely. I would love to share porch beers this summer (being optimistic). I very much enjoy a glass of good wine with food. And sometimes cider is particularly satisfying. But I'm a little afraid even to test the waters. I have an open bottle of white in the fridge from when I made ragù bolognese last week, and no immediate cooking need. Do I dare try a small glass?

I imagine I will at some point. I don't want that wine to become undrinkable or unusable. I don't want to go all summer without my current favourite summer craft beer, hazy (or New England-style) IPA. But I'm in no hurry. Aversion therapy works! Nasty, but effective. So it might take me a while to hop off the wagon. If indeed I do.

Shape the world

The somewhat shambolic release of Shake the World was completed today. I uploaded my cartoon cover to OneRPM and clicked the button that will send the album out to streaming services -- some more quickly than others.

The album is far from slick, but then so was last year. This record is really a record of my 2020, the depression, the anxiety, the increased consumption of various coping things, the difficult learning curve, the intensity of being on the edge.

I could have used this as a demo and then recorded everything properly in a studio, or even more properly in my own studio. But that would have been a different album. There's nothing that says I can't re-record any of these songs if I feel like it. But this album exists, and it is what it is.

The work is not completed until I do some follow-up to see if I can interest anyone in playing this music on good old-fashioned campus and community radio, but I need to do other things as well. Spring is springing. Gardens to tend, books to read, dessert to bake. Drawing more pictures, taking walks, getting back on the bicycle. Getting vaccinated. Getting in good trouble. And soon, no doubt, I will be unable to resist heading back downstairs to Studio Exigu.

For sin she must atone

"Tears of a Crone" started as a riff recorded on my phone, from about the same time as "Edge of Arpeg." It wasn't quite as bouncy at first. It got that way as I played it over and over, imagining different phrasings. Lyrics were not coming to me, and yet I knew it needed lyrics. Unlike "Edge," it didn't have its own melody.

It wasn't long before I was calling the riff "hip-hop." I don't know what prompted me to go in that direction. It's not like white grandauntie had ever demonstrated her flow. But it remained "hip-hop" as I tried to write lyrics.

And then, just as with "Nasty Boy," I found some lyrics. Judging by the notebook I found them in, I had written them not all that long ago, and yet I had no recollection of them. The rhyme scheme was AABB, like a lot of songs I've written. It soon became apparent that those As and Bs needed to be doubled. I threw out an entire verse that sucked, and then basically doubled the remaining doublets. I loved that process! I found I really liked having those four rhyming lines in a row to say what I wanted to say.

The chorus might be tongue-in-cheek. Sort of. Notice sin shows up yet again. Catholicism is hard to get away from!

Metronome, strummed Stratocaster, capo 5. That's the core of the song. Yes, I left the generated rhythm track in on purpose. Djembe felt right for the percussion, and I love any excuse to play it. I improvised off the rhythm guitar. Then I improvised the lead guitar off the djembe. It's odd to have a musical conversation with yourself, but I was really happy with how it worked.

I really enjoyed the chance to record quiet vocals. I do not have a big voice by any means. On my list to order: a decent pop screen. I did learn how to reduce the sound of plosive "p" and "b" hitting the diaphragm of the mic during the mix, because I had to, but much better to prevent it.

I think I'm proudest of this song. It came together late. I have no idea where some of those rhymes came from, but I love these lyrics. They feel very good in my mouth. And this recording was the most problem-free.

It's the answer to "nothing to say" in the opening song. It's a coda to the loud and messy "Shake the World." I had never written anything like it, and I don't know if I will again, but I'm glad I did it once.

Shake the world all over

"Shake the World" was quickly written for the 2017 rock lotto to benefit Girls Rock Camp Vancouver. We needed one more song quickly. I brought in the chords and some lyrics, and the other members of lotto band Stussy (not Stüssy) added their parts.

This song is about young people. Greta Thunberg inspired me. My Millennial bandmates inspired me. Many young people inspire me. I don't say "the kids will save us," but they're often doing their part and sometimes more than their share.

The arrangement is similar to what we did in Stussy. I played drums pretty much as Sunny had done, with the snare off. I played the doubled flanged guitars at the end to evoke Ida's keyboard playing. We did a long outro at the show, and she led it. And finally, I played the bass part that Lauren played in that outro section. The guitar descends from A to G. But the bass plays D to G. That's what makes the odd tension in that chord, because the bass add a fourth to the normal triad chord and changes the feel completely.

This was a technically fraught recording. Many things went wrong that I had to overcome. The live drums that seemed fine before mastering again are fighting the compressor, although on this song that kind of fits. I always intended for the outro to have a psychedelic-era Beatles feel.

Come to Jesus

I wrote "Some Kinda Change" after Lisa's Hotcakes stopped playing (we never actually broke up). T-Bone and I practised it in V+T, but I felt it was more a song for me or some band in my head than for the duo. It needed a bass.

The song is some kind of story, but I didn't really set out to tell a story. The suggestions of story evolved out of word play. I seem not to be able to write about nothing. As with several of my songs, there's a relationship in it. The relationship in "The Easy Way" is hetero, but this one's a lez thing. Lesbians having adventures. People in my songs have the adventures I don't have.

That snarly guitar near the centre? For years, that and the vocal were the song, and this production stuck close to that feel. In fact, that guitar is a scratch guitar, the one you play first as a guide so you can then add other instruments. I thought I'd replace it, but I liked it better than every other take.

I played live drums again, like "Nasty Boy." I hit the snare on 2 and 4 with eighth notes on the floor tom, all the way through except for the stops in the middle section. I'm old. It was exhausting but exhilarating, but I was happy with the result.

I wish I could have recorded the drums better, but for some reason it had not yet occurred to me that I own a PA, which has a mixing board with six inputs that I could have used to mix several drum mics into the stereo signal that my computer interface accepts. In future, whenever I want to record live drums.

"Some Kinda Change" goes back to my roots in simple, hard-edged music: Neil Young, Keith Richards, the Stooges, the Gun Club, the Jim Carroll Band.  There's sin in here, as in some of my other songs. There's even some Jesus. My approach to music and art are to struggle against both personal and human limitations and to make something good from whatever bits and pieces of talent I have. This song is a good illustration.

Too much love?

I need to draw the cover art again. The last one wasn't good enough, and when I tried to improve it, I made it worse. So it goes. Back to song blog for now.

Sometimes, songwriting grinds to a halt. When that happens, I look for ways to get it going. It might mean working with a different instrument — piano, for instance, instead of guitar — or starting with really basic chords. "The Easy Way" came out of doing the latter. Just one, four, and five until the one variation at the end of verses two and three.

I made up the story in the song. I think I wrote the lyrics pretty much in the order they are now, although I rewrote the third verse a few times.

I had not planned originally to include this song on Shake the World, but it started to feel like it belonged. "No one ever says there's too much love" is one of my themes for last year, I think. Just when we need more love, and action driven by love, an alarming number of people are on the anti-love side (usually while professing the opposite). And even though I wrote this song a few years ago, it feels even more true that we were foolish to think we could take the easy way.

I had doubled both acoustic and electric guitars, but the song started to feel too sweet, lacking edge, so I simplified the mix. The guitar solo is pretty conventional, but it's some of my better playing. The one guitar under the voice in the third verse is played with the capo way up high on the seventh fret. I love using a capo. It doesn't just let you change the key of a song. It lets you change how the guitar itself sounds.

Ode to a loser

The dissonant ending to "Edge of Arpeg" gives way to the big major chords of "Nasty Boy" and its dissonant subject.

"Nasty Boy" started as another guitar riff, but one so commercial and normal sounding that I wasn't sure what to do with it. Then I found lyrics I had written, and the two fit right together, and I got over how normal it sounded and went with it.

It was already called "Nasty Boy," but it wasn't about anyone specific. I rewrote a several lines with a particular antagonist in mind, one who occupied the office of President of the United States for four, long, horrible years, and how now been turned into a bronze idol.

I'm happy the song came out as well as it did. It was the first one I recorded, the sessions during which I wrestled with technical issues and my own steep learning curve. I was not happy with how individually played drums were coming out (partly due to a latency issue that affected timing), so I decided to play live into stereo mics. I recorded the big strummed guitars, doubled. I recorded big fat guitars to take over after the bridge. I managed the two-part guitar solo. I doubled my vocal and then recorded the second vocals that repeat "STFU and get out of the way" through the outro.

If it reminds you of "Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller Band, it's supposed to. If it sounds like the drums and cymbals especially are doing battle with the compressor, well, I've learned a few things about that.

No singing required

"Edge of Arpeg" started as a guitar riff that I recorded on my phone. (Why do we even call it a phone anymore?) I tweaked the riff a bit and formalized it, but the core line that you hear at the beginning is pretty much what was on my phone. I thought I would write lyrics for it, but no topic and no melody line suggested themselves. It already had a melody, and that was enough.

When I recorded that first part, however, I realized it was not enough. It was A part, B part, A part, C part, and then repeat. Nothing changed. So I played a descant starting at the second repetition of the sequence. And then when I got to the final shortened repetition, I realized I needed one more change. Thus, the chords high up on the neck. All in three-quarter or six-eight time, I'm never quite sure.

It needed a title, but it wasn't about anything. It just sounded pretty. How about something pastoral like "Swans Among Lily Pads" or "Waltz of the Water Nymphs"? At some point, I realized that it was entirely made up of arpeggios—chords broken into their component notes. And then I played with that, and voilà, "Edge of Arpeg."

My original project list had a different 6/8 song, but then I didn't think it fit. And I thought an instrumental would be something a little different. Now it's one of my favourite things on the album.

Turning on a dime

I wrote "Elusive" during the Lisa's Hotcakes days, but I knew it wasn't a Hotcakes song. T-Bone and I recorded a really sludgy version as our loud drums-guitar duo V+T. That was not how I heard it in my head, so I wanted a second crack at it.

The song grew from something that was happening to me at the time, but now it feels more generalized. As well, even though it means something, it was also me having fun with the AAABAAAB rhyming scheme. It took me a while after I'd written the song to realize that the song has no chorus, just three verses, the last one repeated.

This was the first song I worked on after I crawled out of a mid-pandemic funk. I knew I had to change how I recorded the drums. I was happy playing the kit and recording in stereo, but I was much less happy when it came time to mix and master. As well, I knew I didn't have the chops to play what I heard in my head, so I recorded each piece separately.

The rest is bass, several guitars, and a vocal. Nothing fancy. Some ringing Peter Townshend chords in the middle eight. The "solo" after that is me fretting an open E chord and banging the strings randomly with the side of the pick. It's pretty much the V+T song deconstructed and reassembled.

Definitely not ok

I need to change the cover of Shake the World. Again. The moon in the clouds picture was too small. Sainte-Chapelle in Paris is too generic. So I'm coming up with concept number three. I'm mulling, I thought I'd give you some blah blah on the songs. I'm supposed to do that kind of thing on video while I'm recording, but I was a little busy.

The first song on the album, "Not OK," is also the oldest, and the last one I recorded. I wrote it in 1982 for an art-punk-dance band called Kinetic Ritual. The quarter-note snare and kick drums recall both "Annalisa" by Public Image Ltd. (I was a huge fan at the time) and "Mystery Achievement" by the Pretenders. Gang of Four is in there somewhere too.

Kinetic Ritual was about pushing boundaries, so I made the juxtaposition of chords and phrases purposely confusing. The change from G to E to G to E etc. is offset by two beats. So instead of something like GGGG EEEE, it goes GGEE EEGG. That was always hard to convey, even to myself, as I learned during this recording.

I'm not sure why I made such an ancient song part of the album, but it seemed to fit 2020. Was any of last year ok? Was anyone doing ok? The song was stuck in my head, although I did need to listen to a 1982 rehearsal recording on cassette to remember all the words. Being a political art-punk, I was railing against the loss of political content in post-punk music. We were now in the time of MTV and shiny New Wave dance music. And of course the title and refrain are purposely a play on John Lennon's line "I've got nothing to say, but it's okay" in "Good Morning, Good Morning."

I recorded "Not OK" in a frenzy of activity after Christmas. It's quick and dirty with some guitar that felt pretty good. I played the individual drums separately, both for better control of the sound and because it was hard enough for me to play one drum at a time on that song, never mind the whole kit. Respect for KR's drummer, Dr. Gym Shortz.

Hello, world

The internet democratized the release of music, but the open water that is now accessible and onto which you launch your small craft seems infinite. You and literally millions of other people are trying to get billions of other people to pay attention to their artistic grains of sand in the ocean.

Nevertheless, we persist. Or some of us do, for some period of time.

Shake the World is now on the !earshot distro list, so the songs are available to programming directors of campus and community radio stations, but I need to follow up with individual emails to individual program directors to try to gain visibility and possibly to send them Bandcamp links.

Once OneRPM finally gives its blessing, the songs will percolate out to streaming services. I'm supposed to follow that up by making playlists. I didn't do that for Mostly Still Underfoot, and it shows in lack of plays. I need to learn how do use my Spotify for Artists account to better advantage.

Did you ever notice that just making music is not enough? If you create a work that no one hears, it might as well not exist. It's like the proverbial tree falling in the proverbial forest devoid of sentient listeners. Unless you do, or someone does, everything possible to get the work noticed, you're not taken seriously as an artist. You have to do business kinds of things to have artist cred. Talent ain't poot unless someone knows about it.

The other night, I saw the documentary Hitsville: The Making of Motown. It shows how Berry Gordy masterminded a one-stop shop with in-house writers, producers, promoters, marketers, and eventually musicians, all in the service of the recording artists whom Gordy signed. The collection of talent was incredible, but what struck me most was the supportive environment in which they worked. You didn't have to be talented at everything. You had a building (and later several buildings) full of myriad kinds of talent.

I've only been part of a tiny indie label, but at least some things were taken care of. Now it's all up to me. I miss having a band of people with talents I don't possess and connections with musical support people who do their thing better than I ever could. I love doing some things myself but can't stand doing other things and consequently don't do those thing well.

I'm not trying to "make it" like in the old days. I'm retired and doing fine and can afford to make music for love. But for me, music has always been communication, and communication needs listeners. I envy visual artists who can grab eyeballs with relative ease. Even writing has a lower threshold of entry. Music requires more attention and is easy to pass by.

It's my choice. I will either learn whatever promotional tricks an old dog can learn, or I will learn to content myself with creating for a tiny circle of listeners at best.

Shaking my world

I'm listening for the umpteenth time to Shake the World, eight songs that I played and sang and recorded and mixed and mastered from May 2020 until now. Testing before release, making adjustments. The songs are already on Soundcloud, but for me, Soundcloud is a place for rough ideas and trying things out. I'll put all kinds of things on Soundcloud.

Bandcamp is another level. I've never published anything on the Veroluna Bandcamp site that wasn't recorded in a real studio by a real engineer, mixed with a real engineer, and mastered by a real mastering engineer. Most of what I've uploaded is me in a band. V. Diz was a solo thing, but did not feel too exposed. I feel fully exposed releasing Shake the World.

Going into a studio, even if you don't play and sing superbly, wizard engineers can do all kinds of things to make you sound your best. Shake the World is my first totally DIY project, at least the first that I have brought this far. By all rights, if there hadn't been a pandemic on, I should have taken this material into a studio, possibly got some help on things like drums, and recorded it properly with an engineer, followed by a proper mixdown and proper mastering. But there was a pandemic on, and there still is. It's possible now to work in commercial studios, but it wasn't when I started this project, and DIY became part of the rules.

If I had gone into a studio...well, to be honest, I don't know if or when I would have gone into a studio. I didn't feel confident to book studio time on my own, without a band. I was mulling, but that was as far as it had got.

But with my own studio, however, primitive, it was a whole different story. I could not have afforded to do what I did in a real studio. Recording in a real studio on a reasonable budget means you have to bring fairly complete songs in. Shake the World is the result of constant creation. I wasn't on studio time. I was on my time. It was thrilling and terrifying.

I had to struggle with and work through issues, I had to learn a great deal so I could use the studio to its full potential. I wrote and rewrote, I created arrangements, I changed parts, I added new parts. Some parts I played in a kind of frenzy that left me wondering where they came from.

There is pain in the playing, both physical and psychic. I'm no spring chicken, and a lot of energy was being sucked into doing battle with authoritarian forces in the country of my birth whilst a virus swirled around us. But in the playing there are also elation and joy. Sometimes there's even steely determination.

Recording took place in two intense periods that bookended a good couple of months of depression and no work. I could have used those months to redo some of the parts, but used the time I could. Undiagnosed ADHD, my old friend, compelled me to complete the recording phase by the end of 2020. I needed to get this done, using the tracks I had. I needed to move on.

On good days, even knowing all the above, I hear Shake the World as a cheeky indie album whose brilliant material and quirky execution overcome the recording problems, extraneous noises, and questionable notes. Some people record stuff poorly but with heart, and it says something, and some listeners get it. That's the best I hope for, and on good days, what I can believe in.

On bad days, my stomach hurts at the thought of being this naked in front of whoever might wander by Bandcamp. Is it too audacious to release recordings that are not nearly as good as I could have done in a real studio with a real engineer and mastering engineer, and not even as good as if I had taken more time and played every part until it was its best? Is it ridiculous to release a work that is deeply meaningful to me but will come across to others who knows how? I've never felt this vulnerable in my long and storied semi-pro-at-best career.

And yet I persist. I might reconsider distribution to streaming services (or OneRPM might reconsider for me, since my cover photo is not up to their resolution standards). But Shake the World is on Bandcamp, and it's going to be made public, for better or for worse, warts and all. What's the worse that can happen?