A friend told me about a book he once owned: one-page summaries of different jobs, including three intelligent questions you could ask someone in that line of work. The questions are surprisingly useful, he said, especially in small-talk situations. No bluffing required, no need to draw tenuous connections to your own experience. Just a bit of informed curiosity to set a good conversation in motion.

One question you could ask any working musician is “Do you prefer working in the studio or playing live?” I think all musicians have a preference when it comes to studio vs. live, even if they enjoy both, and will be happy to share their reasons. It goes to the heart of why they play music, the aspects of the art they’re drawn to, their particular identity as a creative person.

For me…I am, at heart, in the studio camp. There’s something thrilling about the process; it’s a kind of hunt, a patient stalking of elusive quarry. You lay out the most enticing environment possible, then wait for the Form of the song to come wandering through. It’s a deliberate, painstaking process, with none of the immediacy of live performance. But the ego tends to disappear more easily too. There’s a purity to nailing a take and having the engineers nod assent: all you get is the taciturn “I think that was it—one more for safety,” instead of the rush of applause and autograph lines. You know you’re doing it for the music and not to impress anybody. You just want the music to be right.

It was not an easy song to write, nor to record. Alex must have spent four solid days composing the string arrangement; we stayed up all night beforehand double-checking it. “It’s like Sudoku or something,” he would say, eyes bleary from LCD light. “There’s pretty much one correct solution, and each choice affects all choice going forward…” But I think we got it in the end. Nice puzzle-solving, Wong.

Photos from the string sessions are on Eric Cheng’s site. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen: not only does he swim with sharks, he still rocks the cello. Thanks for joining us, Eric!)

Antebellum

In the fall,
we circle through the leaves
and talk about the little ones.
And we smile, but never say too much.
The moment always vanishing.
One by one the neighbors’ lights come on.
Our October day is almost gone.

I know the border lines we drew between us
keep the weapons down,
keep the wounded safe;
I know our antebellum innocence
was never meant to see the light of our armistice day.

In the spring,
we climbed the rolling hills
and talked about our budding plans.
And we smiled,
our faces like a mirror
showing us our secret sides.
But then the fights:
the sharp words splintering the night,
how I couldn’t be what you’d need…
but oh how I could make you bleed—

I know the border lines we drew between us
keep the weapons down,
keep the wounded safe;
I know our antebellum innocence
was never meant to see the light of our armistice.
But how much would I give to have it back again?
How much did we lose
to live this way?

You’ll go home—I’ll stay here—
seasons keep on marching—
I’ll stay here—you’ll go home
with only strangers watching—

No, I can count; yes, it has been over a month since we started. It’s a fits-and-starts recording process. Lots of location scouting, practicing, phone calls and emails in between. Not to mention trips to the bank and crossing fingers that my deposits clear in time.

It’s been a fantastic week: keyboards and one glorious day with a chamber string orchestra, which was preceded by several all-nighters of composing (Alex) and transcribing/editing (me). More thoughts on this whole delirious process when I’m not falling asleep in middle-airplane-seat position.

Here’s lyrics for an album song not yet played live. Haven’t figured out how to make a performance capture the sense of scale required.

Watershed

while you were building your empires
I was still sleeping
I was still sleeping
while you were setting your woods afire
I was still dreaming
I was still dreaming

now I will unsettle the ground beneath you
send my waters ashore
creep into your bed
find you in every corner

while you argue it over
I am not waiting
I am not waiting
while you retreat to your comforts
I am not fading
I am not fading

I’ve done this many times before you
old Shanghai
New Orleans
Amsterdam and Mumbai
strange new creatures
to scavenge your pores
oh I’ve done this many times before you
ashen sky
lightning storms
deltas to desert plains
wartime on every border

I’ve done this many times before you
watched the pattern take form
children your time is done
if you say it’s done together

Greetings from a business park in San Clemente, one of the unlikelier places to find a recording studio. I’ve been getting my tacos de pescado fix every time we break for a meal. There are two small windows in the live room; from the piano bench I can see blue sky, edges of palm fronds, rays of endless sun.

We tracked drums, bass and keys for three songs today, and we’re now totally exhausted. These are not easy songs to play. Sometimes it’s obvious from the start that something’s going to be tricky (e.g. “Stray Italian Greyhound”—why oh why did I write so many sixteenth notes in there?). Other times it catches us by surprise, and we spend hours zeroing in on exactly the right flourishes, finding the pocket of the groove, then letting go of all that thinking and giving a performance that simply feels right…there’s a reason why top session musicians are paid so well. Relaxed concentration is a precious resource.

But oh, it is nice when things finally fall into place. One song, “Augustine,” spent three years in purgatory before finally clawing its way out in March, then jostled onto the recording schedule despite my misgivings. Hearing it in the studio today, I think it may have a chance of going on the album. Scrappy little fighter, that one.

oh my god
what have I done
chasing some mirage in my Mojave sun
don’t say every chance is lost
please don’t say anything at all

lead me now
I understand
faith is both the prison and the open hand
bells on low on high
will you ring for Augustine tonight

Backstage in Montclair, New Jersey. Stephanie White is rehearsing with Robbie LaFalce in the other room—what a voice.

I took the train this afternoon: the J out of Brooklyn, then the F up to 34th Street, walked one block west to Penn Station, then hopped on NJ Transit’s Montclair-Boonton Line. From Walnut Street station it was a little less than a mile to the Unitarian church here, past lawns and rows of trees in bloom, through the wide-sidewalked downtown, my suitcase wheels playing a drumbeat across the tiled brick. It’s probably all the glimpse I’ll get of Montclair this time around, but it’s a glimpse at a good pace, one that allows for noticing details, watching scenes unfold. I like East Coast transit systems for this reason: the reminder of how constraint begets new possibility. You inhabit the world differently when you can’t move around in a bubble.

My choice of transportation today was a practical decision; getting out of New York by car on a warm Friday afternoon is madness (we once sat in five hours of traffic to get to Newark for India.Arie). But this plan only worked because Outpost in the Burbs had a piano waiting for me, it was a solo show, and I had a ride back home if I missed the last train. When Alex and I rode the subway to Central Park for the Green Apple Festival, lugging his percussion gear up and down endless flights of stairs and across several blocks on the Upper East Side, that was…well, a symbolic gesture. It just seemed wrong to take a car service to an Earth Day event, that’s all.

So what’s a real long-term solution? We’re not going to make a habit of taking public transportation to duo or band performances; it simply isn’t practical (or even possible, if I have my keyboard). Doing the right thing when it’s massively less convenient will only go so far. There’s only a certain segment of the population willing to make that kind of trade-off on a regular basis, and eco-conscious behavīor needs to be society’s default for it to be effective on the required scale.

It seems like a lot of this does come down to advocacy and policy, in the end: higher fuel efficiency standards, better funding for public transportation in all cities, recycling programs that accept compostables and a wide range of plastics, and so on. Meanwhile, I keep adding items to my personal list of “stuff that isn’t hard to do, so I might as well.” Though you’d be surprised how much you have to fight sometimes to deploy a reusable shopping bag.

Here are two links to studies I’ve discovered recently—one heartening, one disheartening (at least for me, lover of BBQ and a good cheeseburger):

Nudge, by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein: “Thoughtful ‘choice architecture’ can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice”

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2006 Report: “Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars”

Things are brewing nicely around here. The leaves of album #4 have dropped into the water. It’s ambitious, this record, on pretty much every front; at times I already feel I’m in over my head but in that exhilarating way, like falling in love with someone way out of your league.

More on all that later. For now, if it would please you to check out the following:

Ari Hest’s 52. He’s recording and releasing one new song a week for all of 2008; you can subscribe to the series or get one song at a time. Ari could easily coast on the strength of his voice alone, but the man has a real songwriter’s knack for melody, and you’d be hard pressed to believe he’s producing these beautiful tracks alone in his living room. Did I mention that he doesn’t have any formal music training, and that he’s learning how to engineer and mix as he goes? The Ivy League’s got nothing on the community of overachievers I find myself in these days.

The New York Times has launched a group blog about the songwriting process. Current contributors include Suzanne Vega, Roseanne Cash and Andrew Bird—another one of those okay-either-I-quit-music-or-I-learn-how-to-be-like-THAT artists, for me.

…I’ve come to believe that recording and playing live are two completely different animals. Live shows are adrenaline-fueled and spontaneous: if you want to capture that then you should put out a live show recording. But the kind of record you want to listen to over and over again in your bedroom or car is something else—a carefully carved piece of sound…

The only thing that separates a mess of seemingly disparate observations and a song is a moment of excessive confidence. As time goes on words and ideas begin to catch and gather around the original suspiciously arbitrary seeds of inspiration.

- Andrew Bird, “Natural History”

Project Vote Smart shows the Congressional voting records of all U.S. presidential candidates.

Open Secrets chronicles their campaign financing.

Saw amazing live shows recently: Kaki King circled home on her world tour to play at Bowery Ballroom, her set veering from crackly (locomotive fingerpicking, German metal) to cloudy (looped lap steel) and back again with ease, her band somehow locked-in and loose at the same time. Noe Venable played a gorgeous CD release concert at the Zipper Factory, with almost of all the musicians on The Summer Storm Journals on stage together: trumpet, violin, contrabass, marimba. Noe feels like a songwriter of another age, whether past or future I can’t tell—her lyrics have the weight of myth, and the music sounds like folk songs from an undiscovered country.

I have worn steep heels
and a dress too tight
I have pressed my life
against sharpened things
and bled sentences
and shed innocence
like unwanted skin
in the woods part of when

- Noe Venable, “Woods Part of When”

Though at first I declared that it was about the silliest thing I’d ever seen, right up there with those SuperPoke! and Which Ninja Turtle Are You? apps on Facebook, I confess: I am now on Twitter. You can follow me if you like.

Finally, here’s the first seed of a new song. Well, “new” in the sense that I’ve never played it in public; this loop has been sitting on my computer since last June. It’s since grown into a five-minute dissertation, which will appear in all its overwrought glory on the next album.

no gringo (original loop)