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.
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?
