Also, there's this.

Photographs.
Taken by Meredith Cheesbrough at The Tranzac.

Remember the Mountain Bed, by Woody Guthrie.
In other words, pretty much everything anyone could hope to say in a song.

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves?
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds?
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves
Face, breast, hips, and thighs
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled wood vines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky
Your fingers played with grassy moss, as limber you did lie
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots as you lay thinking there

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees where singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head...

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed, my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again

I went to Romania. Which is quite possibly the strangest place I have ever been. It is like going to Europe, but a Europe in an alternate universe, where the last 50 years of history didn't happen, and all kinds of other stuff did instead. And somehow there are still castles and lost villages and gypsies and traffic jams and bizarre music videos and incomprehensible ettiquette and ruins in forests that you can just find.

I mastered the record yesterday. Or rather, the wizard known as Peter J. Moore did. He managed to pull the whole messy thing together and give it a patina, an overarching colour that I like. While also making lattes, demonstrating different mic pre-amps, offering to lend me expensive equipment, discussing mic placement, and playing me freshly recorded tracks by my favourite lost Toronto singer of the 80's.

It is strange just how happy I feel to be done this.

Snowheart

The Album is done!!!

but not mastered...

Mixing/Construction.

The house next to mine is under construction. At least, it's supposed to be under construction, but it sounds more like some kind of war is being waged. From nine in the morning to seven at night there is a constant barrage of drilling, yelling, dropping of tools, stomping around, more drilling. Sometimes the walls shake and hairline cracks appear in the plaster. Sometimes I am convinced that the drillbit is going to come through the wall and into my head.
I avoid being too close to the walls.

Sound does funny things. I'll hear someone talking, or fiddling with something, and it sounds like it's coming from my bathroom. Or the opposite wall. In fact, it's always coming from next door. Yet my brain is so fooled that I've started almost having hallucinations. I hear something, and my brain presents me with an interpretation of it. 'Someone has just come in from outside and is trying to steal your kitchen table' it says.
My dreams involve giants and backhoes.
This has been going on since July.

Nevertheless, I've been mixing the record. Or at least trying to. When my roommates aren't home and I'm not working or rehearsing or going away or running errands or in one of those weeklong segments where I hate all my songs and have no wish to play them on full volume -these are the times I am mixing. It's time consuming, mostly because I recorded the record myself, and this is something I don't necessarily know how to do. Sometimes I hear some sort of high pitched noise, or some kind of interference, and then it takes me an hour to figure out that last year, when I recorded the vocals for a song, I had my printer on in my room and it somehow communicated a completely inaudible sound to the microphone, which dutifully recorded it and passed it on, unrecognised until I got these two massive mixing speakers from Long and McQuade. They are merciless. You can hear everything on these things. Even the secret language of printers and fluourescent lights.
Did you know that the sound of the earth rotating can be detected at 4 Hz?

I have found that hearing is a matter of context. What we hear depends on what else we hear, or what we see. For instance, when you listen to somebody sing, you don't hear all the little noises they make with their mouth, because you are selective. You select what you want to hear - the voice - and block out everything else. That's why recording can be so tricky.
I often record thirty to forty tracks on my songs, mostly of random, unplanned embellishment. In the final mix, much of it will be mostly inaudible, but it adds strange colours. In one song, I swear that I can hear the sound of a tap come on, and water start to flow. This doesn't happen of course. I'm pretty sure that sound is the combination of some hiss on a percussion track and a particularly sharp note on banjo. I'm not sure. But I'm fascinated by the visual picture my brain presents me with. In another song, a phone rings in the far background of a chopped up drum track. In the context of the song, it is impossible to tell there is a phone there. If I zero in on the sound, it is a fraction of a second long, but the song suddenly seems more urgent.

It's hard to focus, here amongst the drills and power saws. And I need to re-record a few things, which is impossible given the current climate here on Bellwoods. But I will perservere. This album needs to be finished.

Next week: more on why it's taken me four years to record an album.