Songs From The Attic
Er... I Mean Basement
After a fruitful few years of resuscitating the recording bug that has inhabited my soul since I was a young lad, I haven't had a whole lot of time to tool around the basement studio in recent months. A grimy, year-long reconstruction project monopolized much of my time in said basement. That project is now complete, and it is once again a more pleasant space to occupy. With some rare free time at my disposal during the 2024 holiday season, I decided to get back to a long-term project of digitizing and cataloguing old recordings of original songs (“digitizing” is the process of transferring audio from old analog tape to a computer, where you can work with it using more modern and efficient tools).
It's a fun dance through ancient history. Enough time has passed that I can now just laugh -- rather than sigh in disgust and horror -- at the truly cringe stuff, which is most of it. I wrote some really bad songs back then. But a few songs have some merit, or at least have some personal meaning, particularly later in the period when I was very active. Unfortunately, none of those were ever recorded properly. By that time, I was trying to balance graduate school, a professional life and other personal/family matters with a rapidly fading desire to calibrate finicky analog recording machines using dusty, 60's-vintage test equipment in a moldy basement — analog recording produces a warmth that bougie young bands seek to this day, but it comes at a steep cost in equipment maintenance.
That period finally crashed and burned when I got married, started a consulting business, became a 20 hour a day self-employed software developer, and shipped the equipment off to a friend's studio in a sleepy town in Joisey, not to be seen (or thought of) again for close to a decade. Shortly after I reacquired the equipment, there was one exception, to record a memento CD for a cover band that I had played in for years with friends. The band was about to sink into permanent dormancy as members got on with their lives and moved to lands far away. I thought a recording project would be appreciated someday, when the nostalgia bug inevitably took root in the minds of various aging members. I suspect that day will arrive soon, with the unmistakable murmurings of nascent nostalgia having surfaced in more recent conversations.
But those sessions were the lone major exception to my recording hiatus during a period of twenty-five years. Otherwise, I ignored recorded music and all of the ancient technology under my stewardship, the mushrooming exigencies of family life being what they are.
Fast forward another decade or so. With all children well beyond diapers, I decided to resurrect & repair the equipment, learning some deep, practical lessons about entropy in the process. This included a lesson in baking old recording tape to make them playable (a now-infamous story of one tape manufacturer’s mission to save a few pennies — I will tell it another time). With the major technical problems solved, I finally embarked on an effort to digitize and catalogue all of my old recordings. That project is now complete — yay! And, strangely enough, I’ve identified a few songs that I think warrant some rethinking by more mature me. As a side benefit, I think I can finally sell all that old, finicky equipment -- which, again, is still in demand, thanks to the nostalgia of young bands for a time they never knew. Human desire has its costs.
Anyway, one song in particular, called Empty Wrong and Right, piqued my immediate interest. It’s a bit of rocker, which was not my writing style at that time. The song considers what passes through the mind of an innocent victim of a terrorist attack during the first minutes of confusion. I was surprised — and, to a degree, saddened — at how relevant the song remains almost forty years later. Listening to it now, it suggests the general shape of how I’d imagine a Lennon-penned Beatles song of that era, had the Fabs stayed together and John survived. It isn’t anywhere near that good, of course; it’s more of a general impression, recognizing with the passage of time just how spellbound and influenced I was by the Lads from Liverpool. As an aside, part of me wonders if John would have returned to writing edgier songs on subjects like this, after emerging from his stay-at-home dad, Double Fantasy era. An interesting question, which I will leave to the true Beatle geeks who find comfort in such conjecture.
I’m also surprised by the two guitar tracks on the recording, which are both very uncharacteristic of my playing then and now. I know they're me because I remember writing and recording the song in a whirlwind. They are surprising because the parts are executed fairly well by my standards. Both tracks need to be re-recorded because of tone issues, but I'm not entirely sure that old me can capture the raw flavor of the original performances. I will give it a go.
It's all very weird because I never considered myself much of a guitar player. But, apparently, I had developed some basic skills with a Strat by that time. So I will be on a mission to see if I can still summon my inner Pete Townshend …hopefully without hurting myself.
This whole process is my happy place. For me, there is a distinct “dream come true” element to digitizing the tracks from old recordings, and realizing that it is now possible to blend the best ideas from old parts with new ideas and improved (? - TBD) performances. The ability to dump the 80's drum machine parts is particularly transformative -- I should have been incarcerated, or at least fined heavily, for some of the stuff I did with the E-mu Drumulator back then. But all those rancid rhythm tracks are now instantly dispensable with the press of a mute button. So cool.
Even better, replacing them is so much easier nowadays. Well, maybe “easier” isn’t the best word. Oh sure, the toolsets for programming drums nowadays are amazing. The ability to work with what is effectively an infinite palette of hyper-realistic sounds, dynamics, rhythms and timings is a luxury that I could not have imagined in the early days of digital drums. It truly is a “kid in a candy store” type of experience nowadays. But the sheer scope of possibility in this space inevitably creates a lot of work that simply didn’t exist in a simpler time. But that’s fine — it is a labor of love.
Of course, none of that really matters if you lack experience with creating drum parts — and that was definitely true of me in those days. Predictably, the combination of limited equipment and lack of experience produced mute-worthy results. In the interim decades I’ve had the good fortune of playing with some very talented drummers, from whom I have learned a lot. The opportunity to leverage those many lessons with modern drum modeling technology is a blessing. And I am enjoying every note.
So, who knows, maybe I'll resurrect two or three lost songs from that weird transition period of my life. Seems like a good side project for 2025. I'm just grateful to have the minimal technical resources required to do it, along with some improved skills and maturity needed to separate the germs of interesting ideas from the piles of inconsolable rubbish. In that regard, it is nice that this is all happening later in life. But this is true in a broader sense as well, as it is so much easier to appreciate what you have, free of the dreaded FOMO of youth — a soul-sucking plague of the human heart that robs us of the joys of the present.
When you're buried in self-employment, and focused on raising a lot of kids for so long, it is difficult to imagine that such opportunities could ever arise before one's expiration date. But the sun rose on this era a few years ago during a particularly long and dark night of my life. I had the foresight to recognize the developing opportunity, capitalize on it, and build the necessary studio space on a shoestring. Since then, I've learned to appreciate every moment that I get, every musical lesson learned, every funny memory recalled, and every opportunity to mold something better from the audio clay of days gone by. God willing, I will be adding to the Songs section of this site soon, and sharing some of the fruit of my labor. When it happens, you will be the first to know!
Thanks for reading.