Storyhill Album "Shade of the Trees"

Okay, I am going to semi-toot my own horn briefly and say I love listening to the recently-released Storyhill album I produced, "Shade of the Trees," as much as anything I've ever worked on. Maybe because it gives the impression of "just happening," and not being worked on at all. Maybe it's got my fingerprints all over it, but if so, I don't see them. The guys in the band, John Hermanson and Chris Cunningham, challenged me to help them make the most stripped-down and intimate document of their music yet, and the plan we came up with was utterly minimal - just the two of them, live in studio, no overdubs, both voices singing together with two guitars and sometimes one. My plea to add pump organ was ruthlessly quashed by Johnny. Wisely so.

(So I bought a $50 pump organ and am adding it to all the songs for my new album instead. But that's another story.)

My mental image for the album was to make a super-detailed and painfully intimate record which almost sounds like they opened their laptop, pressed "record" on GarageBand and just started singing. But then secretly if you listened on a real stereo you'd hear the guitars vibrating in the air, you'd hear every bit of drama in the performances, you'd hear what The Postal Service jokingly called "the shrillest highs and lowest lows" in their song "Such Great Heights." Turns out, making a great sounding recording of two guys in a room is not as simple as it sounded. Whew. But we did it, with some serious help from engineer Brad Bivens during the tracking and mastering engineer Richard Dodd. My method in mixing the album: distortion, just beneath the threshold of hearing, applied liberally and with variety.

Okay, here's a link to a performance from the record (yes, we used the performance from this clip on the album, and you can hear filmmaker Tommy Stone's feet creaking on the floorboards more than once,) called "Dangerous Weapon." Eyes closed, inside the song, two voices sounding like one. I love these guys.

Happy Valentines Day and a New Song

Hi All,

Happy Valentines Day!

I've spent most of the winter in Minneapolis, snowed in and writing songs for myself. It had been a hectic and fun two years of touring and collaborating with various brilliant musicians, but the time had come for me to get into my own head, alone, and see what music was there.

I wasn't sure what would happen, but a lot of songs came out.

The recordings I've made so far of these new songs are very simple, usually just voice and guitar, maybe an extra piano or pump organ here and there. Sometimes not. I've done mostly brand new songs and a few from the past year and a half or so.

Here's a clip of one of those songs, "Everything Green." Tommy Stone, a filmmaker from Minneapolis, came to the studio where I work and filmed me recording it. Then he made this.


(Click the image to see the "Everything Green" clip)

I am sending this song to you all as a Valentine's greeting. Maybe you'll want to forward the link to someone you love, someone for whom you wish all good things. I would like it if you did. Please pass it on.

Peace
Dan

Carnegie Hall

Last night played a gig at Carnegie Hall in New York. Zankel Hall is their 600-seat theater and, oh, it sure is pretty. In typical Minnesotan fashion, I did not tell my relatives and friends that I was playing Carnegie Hall, and when some of them learned about the show and mentioned it to me, I made sure to clarify that I wasn't playing in the main hall with the New York Philharmonic, but in Carnegie's smaller performance space.

"What are you talking about? It's Carnegie Hall!" was their response every time. Maybe I can learn someday to drop that habit of backpedaling - why not just allow my friends and relatives to enjoy the moment?

Anyway, when I saw my poster there on the side of the building, underneath the Tiffany-style colored-glass logos, it was my turn to enjoy the moment.

The Carnegie show felt like an extension of the Hometown Tour I did here in Minneapolis a few weeks ago: easy-flowing, open, free-associative. That tour put a whole new batch of my older songs and also a couple of new ones at my fingertips: "Act Naturally," "FNT," "Something I Don't Know" among them. So I had lots of music to choose from last night, and I took advantage of that. Playing the amazing piano there also made me want to do more shows playing piano. I'm not sure how that would go but I think it would be interesting and I could improvise a lot more.

Brad Gordon, a multi-instrumentalist friend of mine, flew in from Los Angeles to play piano with me during the songs on which I played guitar. (And Brad played the clarinet on "Baby Doll.") I met Brad in 2008 on the Hotel Cafe tour, one of the more formative experiences I've had in a while, and by the end of that tour he and I had pretty much established a very nice blood-brother type of e.s.p. when we jammed together. Brad just plain plays the piano like a more skilled version of me. So of course I like performing with him.

At Zankel Hall last night, I shared the bill with Cory Chisel, who is a gravelly-voiced singer/songwriter from Appleton, Wisconsin, and with whom I had written a couple of songs maybe a year ago. He's an amazing singer, able to channel the spirits of Otis Redding, Bob Dylan or Ray Charles. We wrote together in Graham Nash's house, which could only have been more surreal and glorious if Graham Nash were home. As it was, he was not, but it was still a memorable time. At one point, Cory initiated me into his theory of Bob Dylan's vocal phrasing and how it changes from one period to another in Dylan's career. I wish I had recorded Cory's holding-forth - he can switch back from one era of Dylan to another, freestyling lyrics in the voice of each era. I laughed a lot. Inspired by Cory's outpouring of mojo, we wrote a bluesy and Dylanesque song called "Never Meant to Love You," which I adore.

At the end of my set, Cory and his singing partner, Adriel Harris, joined me onstage and we performed "Never Meant to Love You" and, if my experience is any indication (doubtful but possible), it was beautiful.

On my way out the door of the venue, one of the staffers considerately handed me the "three sheet" poster for the show. These are the giant posters, about 40" by 80", that they put up on the side of the building or on the wooden walls of construction sites and abandoned lots. After a brief moment of excitement, I immediately began fretting about how impossible it was going to be to get the poster onto my Northwest Airlines flight the next morning.

Then my friends Craig Wright, Jacob Slichter, Gillian Ryan, Steve Schiltz, and Jim Grant, along with Brad Gordon and Cory Chisel and his band and a lot of the audience from Zankel Hall, all went to a way-too-loud bar down the street and had a lot of whiskey.

Even later, Craig and I spent about two hours wandering around Midtown trying to find a sandwich. This kind of late-night search is a common-enough occurence on tour, when it can be very hard to find the one joint in Topeka or Toledo or Tuscaloosa or Toulouse that stays open late. But New York City! What has become of our nation's cultural capitol? Every hotel restaurant and bar seemed to have closed at midnight - the City may never sleep, but they don't stay open that late either. In fact, I'm sure they were wide awake behind their closed doors, eating the sandwiches my friend and I were seeking. In a typical bout of late-night urban aimlessness we took a taxi down to around 52nd and then wandered back uptown from closed cafe to closed restaurant to closed "all-night" diner, until we finally ended up at the Carnegie Deli, ludicrously near where we began.

But when our blintzes and a gigantic American-Tourist-Sized Corned Beef Sandwich arrived at the table, all was forgiven, and we loved New York once again.

Following this mini-adventure and my very short night of sleep (bedeviled as it was by Carnegie-Deli-Corned-Beef-inspired nightmares), I found myself zooming in a taxi through traffickless Queens, enjoying the scenery and wondering who exactly lives on Astoria Blvd., a pre-sprouted gentrification zone if I've ever seen one.

In the trunk, the giant poster; ahead of me, certain confrontation with the employees of Northwest Airlines. They were sure to see this huge roll of paper as a security threat, or worse, the sign of a Minnesotan pumped up with pride, and I could only imagine how crumpled or folded it would be by the time I brought it home. Or perhaps I would be forced to discard it along with the plastic water bottles and hand lotion containers of greater-than-3-ounce capacity which one can often see forlornly piled in the TSA Forbidden Container bin at the airport security checkpoint.

But no! my fears were unfounded. Instead of the old Northwest Airlines "we hate our jobs and so we hate you too" approach, I was treated to the now-famiiar new post-Delta-merger niceness: the crew found a spot in some special secret closet for my poster, and now it's home with me.

But where exactly does a Minnesotan put a gigantic poster advertising his own show at Carnegie Hall?

My show at Bryant Lake Bowl, Tuesday Sept. 24th

Tuesday at the Bryant-Lake Bowl was an excellent start to the Hometown Tour. (Or the "Staycation Tour" as my friends have dubbed it.) I've played there before and I dig the "tiny theater" that they have. I haven't seen many rooms around the country like it.

The gig also had its own unique vibe and proportion. I think my energy was all there, but a little weird. The songs and the notes were wriggling around like cats in a bag; the squirminess wasn't unpleasant, it was interesting, but it kept suprising me. For example the version I played of "Honey Please" was full of strange variations on the piano and changes of tempo and arrangement, nothing I had planned, they all just kind of happened. Which is great, actually, when the spirit of the night is more powerful than the plan that holds it together.
I also unveiled my "Live at the Pantages" CD, which is a mail-order and stage only fan piece for now, but which I'm very proud of. Bought special Sharpies, urged the folks all to buy the record, and signed a lot of them at the end of the night.
Here's the set list:

FNT - fresh from the Current performance I did before the show. I am loving this song again, the rhythm of the guitar part jumps from my hands without effort these days.

Hand On My Heart

Turtle Dove - yes, the Trip Shakespeare song.

Great Divide

Baby Doll - everyone sang along to the "no one else" parts. I finally figured out why that last "no one else" in the chorus has singer-alongers confused. It's not there on the album but it belongs there and everyone instinctively knows that.

Your Brighter Days - new song, wrote it about someone I met on a plane

Sugar - on piano.

Act Naturally - suprised myself at soundcheck by playing this song on piano. I almost never play it and certainly not on the piano, but piano/voice is the perfect setting for it.

Greece story - okay this is not a song, it's a long story about my trip to Greece to play on their Mad TV Video Music Awards show recently. My parents were at the BLB on Tuesday, so I told the people how my Dad had alerted me a year ago to the MILLION views of a Youtube clip of "Breathless." This was a clip that only has the static picture of the "Free Life" album cover. My Dad said that something must be going on, and when I found out what it was, an adventure ensued.

Breathless - I wish I could have sung it in Greek but I did the English version.

All Will Be Well - song by me and Gabe Dixon. Always makes me happy.

Free Life
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Honey Please - on piano, by request

Falling - also a request

All Kinds - nice singing everyone.

Gappy Information and the Multi-Tasking Illusion

I've been thinking about multi-tasking. I've never believed in it, never thought I saw anyone doing it well, or even actually really doing it. Never could do it well myself, anyway. Lately there's been a lot of talk about new research that shows how poorly multi-tasking works in comparison to doing one thing at a time. I like hearing that talk, of course, because it agrees with my already-formed opinion. But it's a subject that would interest me even if the research were saying I was wrong.

One reason I've been thinking about multi-tasking is that I've noticed people doing it around me a lot. I sit with friends at restaurants while they talk on their phones and answer e-mails at the same time they're talking to me. I feel like I'm sensing more often the distinctive "temporary stupidity" effect that occurs when someone is quietly checking and answering their e-mails while they're talking to me on the phone. Another reason multi-tasking has been on my mind is that it's in the news a lot. For example, there seem to be more and more stories about people getting killed by multi-tasking drivers of cars.

Another big reason I'm thinking about multi-tasking is that I've been making some changes to my life lately and I've noticed that a lot of the changes involve banishing multi-tasking from my daily experience. When I noticed that I was trying to banish it, I started thinking about it. Ironic.

My main conclusion so far is that multi-tasking is actually an illusion. A very convincing and vividly real-seeming illusion, but an illusion. And the reason that the illusion is so very vivid and real is that our consciousness is pretty much built to create the exact kind of illusion that allows us to falsely think we're multi-tasking.

The information coming to our minds through our senses is gappy, discontinuous, fragmented. Loud sounds interrupt conversations, but we comprehend and talk on. Beer salesmen and other fans pass in front of our eyes as we watch a baseball game, but we disregard the momentary gaps in our vision and continue to understand and enjoy the game. Even more basic, our eyes are constantly blinking shut, interrupting our flow of visual information, but we remain happily unaware of these brief moments of darkness.

Similarly, our actions throughout our days are constantly interrupted by sounds and sights that require attention. The doorbell rings during a conversation with a visitor; I get up, answer the door, sign the UPS driver's tablet, sit back down and continue the conversation. It's as though there were no interruption at all. The coffee which I put on the stove before I sat down to breakfast with my wife and daughters begins to boil; I get up, pour two cups of coffee, bring them to the table and resume eating my eggs, nearly unaware of the act.

So, our minds gather all of this gappy, discontinuous information from many different channels. And yet our consciousness feels smooth and continuous. If someone asked me about my breakfast I wouldn't say, "I ate two eggs for a few minutes, then was interrupted by the coffee boiling, then sat down and resumed eating my eggs and drinking my newly made coffee." I'd just say, "I had fried eggs and coffee," and the statement would feel complete and true.

For many years, I've been reading as much as I can about consciousness and what it is, and one theme returns again and again: one of the main functions of consciousness is to create and sustain for us an illusion of smoothness and continuity in our minute-by-minute experience, even when our senses are receiving interrupted, unrelated, or even contradictory signals. This feeling of smoothness may be an illusion, but it is a very useful one. It allows us to make sense of our actions and sensations, it allows us to maintain a coherent story as the sometimes confusing and contradictory information flows to us through our senses.

My impression is that when we multi-task (or think we are multi-tasking), we are engaging our minds' capacity to create this illusion, and then mistaking that illusion for reality. It's a misappropriation of our minds' capacity to create continuity from fragments. We are doing several things, spinning several threads, each in a discontinuous and gappy way, but our minds obligingly provide for us the illusion that each of these threads is discontinuous, unbroken; that we're doing all of these things continuously at once. We think we are multi-tasking when we are actually serial-tasking - attending to one thing at a time, each one in a choppy and discontinuous way.

Thus the sensation that we could still be "working on" the driving of a car during the same time in which we are reading a text message from a friend. Yes, we do feel very vividly that we are "still paying attention" to the road during those gaps, but that is because our minds are built to create just that illusion in our experience.

The illusion of smoothness and continuity isn't fully formed in us from birth. It develops and is refined over time. For example, a baby panics when its mother walks away to the next room. It's as if she has vanished from reality. But as the baby's consciousness develops, it learns to believe that Mom is "still there" even though she is out of sight. (Once this lesson is learned, it is a source of pleasure: when our mother hides behind a tree, we can delight in the magical feeling of knowing she's there even while not seeing her, and enjoy the suspense of testing our little theory - Yes! I found you!)

Or when we speak with a friend on the phone and the reception begins to deteriorate, we can keep the conversation going even through huge gaps in the transmission. In fact it takes a pretty radically bad connection to force us to give up and shout, "I'll call you back later!" We are able to take that interrupted sound information and either fill in the gaps with probable words, or if the gaps are too long, we just accept the gaps and stay in a suspended state, feeling that the next sentence might fill in the context and the gappy sentence will eventually make sense.

Films take advantage of this ability of our minds in a wonderful way - we can watch a scene which leaps from one character's speaking face to the other character's listening face and back, then to another wider view of the restaurant in which they are sitting, then to the image of the waiter carrying a tray of food through the swinging door of the restaurant kitchen, and then back to the faces of the two characters as they continue to talk. The sound of the film changes radically with each edit. And yet we don't think of this scene as a jarring series of unconnected pieces of information. We think of it as "the scene where the two characters are talking in the restaurant." The gappy information feels smooth.

Now, this creation of smoothness out of gappiness is really useful. Imagine if every time someone walked into the next room, you were suddenly unsure whether or not they still existed? How could you plan for the future if you couldn't assume the continuous existence of, say, your spouse, who has merely walked into the next room? 

Also, imagine if you were unable to hold a conversation in a loud party where lots of other people were talking loudly around you. Or if you were unable to speak to someone during a series of brief but very loud interruptions. For example, what if you couldn't understand the lyrics of a song because a kick drum kept interrupting and briefly obscuring the sound of the singer's voice, as it does at any rock show and on lots of great records. (I would be particularly sad if I couldn't listen to singing while there was a drummer drumming.)

But when this illusion becomes unhelpful is when we engage it while trying to "save time" by doing several things at once. I spoke recently with a friend about this and he told me that sometimes he finds that he's "missed" the last couple of minutes of a phone call because he's been checking his e-mails on his cell phone while talking on the phone. "The weird part is that I'll be thinking I'm paying attention to the conversation but I suddenly realize that I have no idea what the other person has been saying. I find myself then listening carefully to what they say next, to try to get some clue or hint to what they've been talking about. That at least reduces the chances of my saying something irrelevant and looking like a jackass."

And of course it becomes a matter of life or death when the drivers around us on the highway are reading their e-mail, operating scanners and printers and thumbing text messages while driving, happy in the illusion that they've been watching the road during the same two minutes in which they've been feeding papers into the scanner. The blithe look on the face of the woman talking on her cell phone who recently sailed through a red light a few feet from my car was the happy face of someone having a very nice and involving conversation. But she obviously wasn't as aware of the world around her as I would have liked her to be.

In my life as a songwriter the temptation to believe in the multi-tasking illusion is not physically dangerous, but it's dangerous to the writing. It's so tempting to go from looking at the online rhyming dictionary to a quick peek at my e-mail or the front page of the New York Times' website. These seem like harmless and brief interruptions, and of course given the way our minds smooth over interruptions and gaps, they almost seem like no interruption at all.

But achieving the state of mind necessary for creativity is like lighting a match. Sometimes it's like lighting the match between cupped hands on a windy day. And it's not always easy to re-light it when the match is allowed to go out.

When I'm writing a song, I need uninterrupted time during which I have nothing else important to do and nothing else important to think about but music. Maybe you can, but I can't multi-task and be a songwriter. The minute I get on the phone and discuss something important or stressful or complicated or even something which engages my problem-solving mind, the songwriting flame flickers or goes out. The minute I open my e-mail application on the computer, the flame goes out. And it takes another half hour for me to get that fragile flame lit again, if I even can. 

And we all know why people multi-task in the first place; extra half-hours are rare and precious in information-age America, year of 2009.

In a future entry, I'll write about the kind of distractions and interruptions that help me write songs. Perhaps I'll talk about parenthood and multi-tasking too.

Dan's latest book report is on "The Freedom Manifesto," by Tom Hodgkinson

I was drinking espresso after lunch at my newly discovered favorite cafe in Minneapolis, Common Roots, and reading a book that my brother gave me recently. The book was "The Freedom Manifesto," by Tom Hodgkinson, and it is an inspiring and funny and lighthearted outline how to go off the grid, unhitch oneself from the expectations and burdens of modern society, and revive the joys and inspirations of non-modern life. If the book is an extended leftist pamphlet, it is one with no self-righteousness or drudgery, but instead with special emphasis on enjoying our time on earth. Tend a garden; grow your own vegetables; cancel anything with a monthly fee; get out of debt and stay out; drink more beer with friends; cook your own food; let the kids find their own entertainment outside; ignore the government; start a neighborhood council and use it to throw a great party every year; stuff like that.

I was laughing out loud at one particularly pungent paragraph and an employee (manager?) of the restaurant approached me while he was busing a nearby table.

"What is that you are reading?" he asked.

"It's called 'The Freedom Manifesto,' " I said, and I gave him an earful about the book, the new convert's hard-sell. He said it sounded great, and that he'd look around for it.

A few weeks later I was back in Common Roots ordering lunch and espresso at the counter. The man who asked me about the book was ringing my order up. "You're the guy who told me about 'The Freedom Manifesto,' right?"

Yeah, that's me.

"I read the book, it was great, leftist politics without the overseriousness."

Yeah, I said, I thought the same thing.

He turned to another woman behind the counter who was pulling a shot of espresso for a customer. "Hey, this is the guy who told me about that book," he said to her. She told me she had read it and enjoyed it herself. "She loved it, too," she said, indicating another employee.

I was very pleased that I was able to introduce this fantastic book to a handful of new readers. If any of you out there like the Common Roots cafe, or just want to read a very interesting book about getting free, you may want to read "The Freedom Manifesto," by Tom Hodgkinson.

It's a Hustle and a Game and a Gift

A reader pasted this quote as a comment on my recent post about file-sharing.

"When someone downloads a piece of music, it's just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work. Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator. People who look at music as commerce don't understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property. I'm not interested in selling pieces of plastic. I'm grateful that I've sold enough to have a house, take care of my kids and live decently. But that's a gift, not an entitlement. I don't want potential fans to be blocked because the choice to check out our music becomes a financial decision for them." – Jeff Tweedy

First of all, I find it beautiful that this comment was copy/pasted from another source; using someone else's words to express our own thoughts is an interesting aspect of this whole discussion. I do it all the time.

Second, I totally agree with the Tweedy quote. Music is not about selling pieces of plastic, it's about sparking a connection between people, and about giving the listener joy. When you give people joy, there's a good chance they will reward you somehow. But the exchange doesn't work as well when the artist treats their work as a product for sale, and demands a reward from the recipient.

Still, I can't help noting that Wilco gives us an awful lot of ways to buy pieces of plastic with their recordings on them! So even if Jeff Tweedy isn't interested in selling us pieces of plastic, someone in the band is, and makes them available to us to buy if we like. (I just bought "Wilco (The Album)" and I love it.) Maybe Jeff means that he's not primarily interested in selling pieces of plastic, that selling pieces of plastic is not an end, but a means of getting his music into the ears of his audience. And that downloads, paid or unpaid, are also ways to do that. If that's what he means, I'm completely in agreement.

I read an amazing book recently, called "2666", by Roberto Bolano. In one passage, Bolano describes the attitude of one of his characters, a novelist, towards his own work. The passage struck me as one of the best descriptions of what it's like to be an artist that I've ever read, especially the odd and interesting relationship between art and the commerce of art. Archimboldi, the character, writes in the day; his main job is at night, as a bouncer (or doorman) at a bar.

"Archimboldi's writing, the process of creation or the daily routine in which this process peacefully unfolded, gathered strength and something that for lack of a better word might be called confidence. This 'confidence' didn't signify the end of doubt, of course, much less that the writer believed his work had some value, because Archimboldi had a view of literature (though the word 'view' is too grand) as something divided into three compartments, each connected only tenuously to the others; in the first were the books he read and reread and considered magnificent and sometimes monstrous, like the fiction of Doblin, who was still one of his favorite authors, or Kafkas' compplete works. In the second compartment were the books of the epigones and authors he called the Horde, whom he essentially saw as his enemies. In the third compartment were his own books and his plans for future books, which he saw as a game and also a business, a game insofar as he derived pleasure from writing, a pleasure similar to that of the detective on the heels of the killer, and a business insofar as the publication of his books helped to augment, however modestly, his doorman's pay."

Making art is very little like experiencing art; I agree. And I think many artists would agree with Bolano that an artist's life is partly a hustle and partly a deeply interesting and satisfying game to play just for the joy of it.

One thing almost every artist will tell you is that making art is very time-consuming; having a full-time job is pretty much death for many artists' work, since the job leaves so little time for making art. Thus the hustle; if only to buy time in which to make art, artists often try very hard to make their art pay. We look at every paid piece of work as a way to buy the time to do more work.