For six years I’ve been recording, mixing, re-recording, re-mixing – obsessively. ilyAIMY’s songs have sat, never collecting dust, but being worked and reworked and panned and re-panned and distorted and reverbed.
And Heather’s been breaking me of it. For the past two months she’s set deadlines, made schedules, checklists and she has come over 3-4 days a week and held my feet to the fire and my mind in focus, because it’s time to end it.
It’s a crazy endeavour. Two discs, 21 songs. Mixing and mastering it myself with advice from friends that I’ve tried to follow but have sometimes ignore. I go rogue. I come back. There’s a billion ways we could’ve done things differently, but that’s where the obsessive side of things needs some outside force to cut it off and move on.
I’ve occasionally fallen prey to Facebook ads about mastering and Instagram ads for plug-in sales. I’ve discovered that “analog” is code for “hiss”. I’ve learned a LOT and feel like if I wanted to I could do a …. 20% better job 50% faster starting from scratch, but Living is kinda like that. When I wrapped it up a second time I’d know I could do it again, 20% better and 50% faster than THAT time.
Approaching an album like Life. The Journey is the destination, and these 21 songs have been the Journey for the past 6 years, songs that should’ve been recorded long ago, songs that have waited. Many of them were written as VOM prompt songs. Some of them go back to the First Trump Ascendancy and are sadly even more relevant the second time around. But now I’ve got MORE songs waiting in the wings of my mind that I can NOT write until this process is done. There’s no time, yet.
I wish Heather’s writing was more present on the album. I wish my guitar playing was more evident. But both our fingerprints are all throughout and there’s no denying our presence even on songs where we don’t appear at all (at this point I don’t think there’s a song that doesn’t include Heather’s voice, but there’s at least one on which I literally am solely the engineer). ilyAIMY, as a band, is an exercise in getting out of one another’s way, and that has informed the writing, the recording, and the EQing of every track.
I’ve waited six years to put this out and it really, really reflects the creativity, the beauty, the brutality and the raw, frankly unpolished THING that is US. Listening to it I’m extremely proud and enjoy the playback more than I’ve enjoyed on any previous project.
(though on this one thing I’m still going to go back and tweak Heather’s vocal just a LITTLE bit… and … the cajon’s just hair too bright and… )
It’ll never be DONE, but we have a deadline and at that point we shall abandon this project and move on with the next. Because Showing You How To End It is a trick. Things end arbitrarily, sometimes with and sometimes without a trail. CHOOSING how to end it is really powerful though. And there’s things we want to get said because Life can take that choice from you at any moment… And when Life surprises you by chugging right along. Well, it’s on to something new.
(greetings from I-70, riding hard West to Cumberland)
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