ilyĀIMY

I slept in today. I’d like to say it was Lovely, but in truth, at the moment – “sleeping in” really only means lying in bed until the weight of inactivity begins to crush me. I wish it was relaxing, but it just feels like wasting time.

I waste too much time.

We’ve been working HARD in the studio. Chewing through mixes. Heather and I haven’t really worked together this way much, not recently at least, and trying to find a happy medium in the way we approach things without frustrating one another is hard. She’s very micro, I’m very macro, and in theory those two approaches should (and often do) complement one another extremely well, but there are moments when it’s extremely frustrating. I’d like to think we are both respectful of the other’s expertise, but in practice I fear we’re both generally impatient with it. I really want to be working on an overall EQ thing while she’s checking “tips and tails” of cello tracks – and when I’m working on a pingy high ring in the mix she really wants to fix a specific PUH sound in a vocal track.

At its simplest, truest definition, I think art is simply craft + obsession. Artists are people who use their craft as a coping mechanism. Perhaps for the world, perhaps for their own emotions, but perhaps simply for a hatred of things hung imperfectly, or a desire to smooth edges. Art is created by those of us who have to go back over and over again to check if we turned off the stove, and by those of us who burn down houses because we’re so obsessed with a perfect line that we forgot to check it even once.

I’m fighting with myself at this moment. I’ve been reading up on a problem that I’ve been having in my mix, and I’m obsessing over it – which means I’m GOING to solve it – but I’m fighting myself so that I do NOT go into the basement at this moment. I do NOT fire up my computer and dive back in. I can hear it all ringing in my ears and I need a little silence.

The fan of my laptop calms, and the air conditioning cycles down, and the cat is upstairs, and a distant lawnmower kicks in. I’m listening to the edges of my hearing, pausing in my typing just to hear the hush. My ears still test well, but I’m aware of their limits. There are weak points in my spectrum where I’ve been scarred by bass and treble in very specific ways and there’s a quiet background ring that feels newly permanent since a feedback blast from a sound engineer that I think I’d merrily go and kill. I try to be understanding because I can think of about 4 instances where *I* was that sound engineer. Once at Teavolve, once at Monocacy, twice in my basement. They burn in my memory as moments of shame, and I hope that that most recent blast from a sound engineer in Connecticut keeps him up at night… because I can hear it even now.

The obsession is taking over and I can’t stop thinking about the mixes even though we’ve done at least 6 hours a day for the past week. I’m going to force myself to go upstairs and take a shower before doing anything else, or it’ll be time to go to the gig tonight and I’ll realize I haven’t done it – and my hair must retain its lustre! Then, I’ll let it dry in the glare of my monitors.