How Music Works (32 page)

at my New York apartment, and with Camus Mare Celli and Andres Levin

at a brownstone in Brooklyn. I racked up lots of frequent-flyer miles in the process, but most of the time I recorded economically, as each group had their own home-style studio.

The record,
Feelings
, was necessarily done piecemeal, a few songs at a time, rather than in a concentrated burst. This too was new to me. The

record evolved incrementally, and I had time to think about where it was

going (or where it could go) as bits of each song and eventually the vari-

ety of song styles became audible. This more leisurely approach opened

up the risk of my becoming indecisive, because I’d now have the option

to postpone decisions regarding arrangements or which vocal take was the

good one. However, I hoped that by this point in my life I’d internalized a

fairly rigorous decision-making process and that I wouldn’t leave too many

options dangling. Although it was technically possible to pile up tracks and delay making most decisions, I knew that I did have some intuitive sense of

where a song wanted to go, so I would make a commitment quickly when-

ever possible.

Though visiting all these folks where they lived became expensive, one

could sense that a whole new era of music making was beginning. With the

advent of relatively cheap recording equipment with studio-quality sound, not only would anybody with two turntables and a microphone be making records,

but everyone else would, too, in an incredible variety of styles and approaches, everywhere and anywhere. Musicians didn’t have to migrate to the big cities

with their expensive studios anymore. If they were careful, they wouldn’t get DAV I D BY R N E | 175

themselves in hock to the record companies either. As the costs of recording dropped precipitously, emerging musicians all over the world were increas-ively on an equal footing with professional and well-funded Western pop/alt/

urban musicians. Amateur musicians have always been equal as far as playing

and writing go, but now more and more of them will be taken seriously—the

quality of the recordings will be virtually indistinguishable.

HOMEMADE

I first saw a performance by Ultima Vez, the Belgian dance-theater group

led by Wim Vandekeybus, in Seattle in 1991. I was knocked out. They were

inspiring and inventive right down to the sets—I think that piece featured a backdrop of thrift store dresses all stitched together.

Wim, the dancers, and I spoke after their show, and we more or less kept

in touch after that. Some years later we talked about me doing music for

a film that Wim had in mind based on a Paul Bowles short story. The film

didn’t happen, but the project managed to get us back together. I went to

Brussels, where I watched an early rehearsal of the piece that would become

In Spite of Wishing and Wanting
. I liked what I was seeing and I offered to try to do as much music as possible, even the whole piece. I said that if Wim

and company would like a trial, I would send them rough musical sketches

as test material.

By now I had started getting the hang of recording with my home gear

all by myself. I did almost all the recording for this project in my apartment.

We recorded the strings, horns, and a few other instruments in a studio, but those sessions were generally fairly short. This was another big step away

from where I had begun—that horrible feeling of not being in control of how

things sound, the clock ticking, being at the mercy of strangers. The mixing, however, was still done in a “real” studio. A fresh set of ears at that stage can be useful, as one tends to fall in love with parts for reasons that no one else can actually hear.

In Spite of Wishing and Wanting
, recorded in 1998, was the first record I owned completely, so I began to sell copies at my concerts. I didn’t sell very many, but it was satisfying to know that even that limited income helped offset some of the production costs, and it was equally satisfying that I had done 176 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

so much of it myself. A new kind of music economy was coming into being,

mostly facilitated by new recording technology.

THE WORLD AROUND US

Igo about my business, mostly here in New York, traveling from Mid-

town to my office Downtown and back up again. Often I go to Brooklyn,

less often to Hoboken or Queens. I live in an industrial neighborhood, but

there’s a family that lives across the street from me, and a sweatshop across the street, too. There’s a police station next door, and farther down the

block is a halfway house, a Chinese/Mexican take-out, and an Off-Broadway

theater center.

Sometimes it seems as if writing a group of songs is like getting groceries, or doing the laundry—banal things I do more or less on a day-to-day basis.

We deal with the issues involved in our mundane activities as they come up,

and songwriting might be viewed similarly, as the response to specific and

even pedestrian needs. It might seem that in our day-to-day activities there is no overall plan at work, no consideration of where things are ultimately

going. So too, sometimes, with the process of writing songs. Little decisions are made invisibly every minute, and the cumulative effect, and the often

unspoken principals that have guided them, define what appears to be, in

retrospect, a conscious plan, with an emotional center and compass. What

begins as a random walk often ends up taking you somewhere, somewhere

that you later realize was exactly where you wanted to go.

During the time I was writing the songs for the record that became
Grown
Backwards,
there was love, anger, sadness, and frustration in my life. There were two wars: one begun out of revenge and the second seemingly to con-solidate oil interests. Huge amounts of money were expended in what seemed

to be obviously futile and counterproductive efforts that many felt would not only bring death to many innocent people, but would end up making us, as a

nation, less admired and certainly less safe, both physically and economically, for the foreseeable future. Along with many others, I felt angry—alienated,

even—and I did my best to stop the rush into the second conflict, but it was inevitable. It seemed like a misdirected legacy of a nation still stunned, hurt, reeling—a fighter ready to strike out at anything that could be accepted as an DAV I D BY R N E | 177

enemy. I blogged, and began a campaign that resulted in full-page ads in the
New York Times
and
Rolling Stone
urging restraint. You can see an example of one of those ads on the next page.K

But it was hopeless. Recent studies have shown that people ignore facts that contradict what they want to believe. Even “smart” people I knew, and many

others I respected, were convincing themselves we had to invade. It made me

feel like I didn’t know my country and its people, or even my own friends anymore. How does one react and respond to that? I felt lost and adrift in my home.

What kind of music would emerge from living with those feelings? These were

not simply abstract political ideas. I felt angry and fucked up every day.

Protest songs? They can express what folks are already feeling, what they

sense but have not yet been able to articulate, but they’re maybe not the best way of changing people’s minds—or even encouraging a second look. Ultimately, it’s an act of hubris to try to do so. Maybe, I was thinking, songs and music should instead present an alternative path. Maybe songs can make an

emotional case for inclusiveness and openness instead of just being critical.

Maybe songs can
be
that possibility, rather than just a rational argument for it. I didn’t know if I could write songs like that, but I was thinking about it.

I’d had a wonderful time performing the songs from my previous record,

Look Into the Eyeball
, so my instinct was to refine that approach and continue down that road. Musician and composer Stephen Barber had rear-

ranged many of the string parts for the touring group, and I suggested that

he do all the new arrangements on this next record. The string players on

those North American dates were from Austin, Texas, like Barber, so he

could work with them and iron out any issues on the next set of songs

before we went into the studio. In keeping with the idea of presenting an

alternative to what I saw as lies and the ugliness we were being dragged into, this set of songs was even more lush than what I had recorded a couple of

years earlier. The opera arias I’d been hearing and had been moved by not

long before were signposts, in a way. I sensed that I wanted something that

could be unashamedly pretty and full on, so I covered a couple of those

tunes as a way of making that point. I didn’t try to sing with the typical

opera voice—I wanted the songs to be understood as the proto-pop songs

they once were. People used to sing the catchy arias as they worked and

played; everyone knew them. The closest I came to making an actual protest

song was a cover of a Lambchop tune, but the lyrics for that came from an

178 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

“If we go into Iraq unilaterally, or without the full weight of international organizations

behind us, if we go in with a very sparse number of allies…we're liable to supercharge

recruiting for Al-Qaeda.”

—Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Commander

UN inspectors have destroyed more Iraqi weapons than all the bombs used in the '91 Gulf War —

without the loss of a single life.

WAR ON IRAQ IS

WRONG

AND WE KNOW IT

DON’T LET BUSH, CHENEY, AND RUMSFELD

DROWN OUT THE VOICES OF REASON!

DISARM IRAQ WITH TOUGH INSPECTIONS

Musicians United to Win Without War

www.moveon.org/musiciansunited

Autechre

Fugazi

Pharoahe Monch

Eric Benet

Emmylou Harris

Lou Reed

T-Bone Burnett

Natalie Imbruglia

REM

Busta Rhymes

Jay-Z

Raphael Saadiq

David Byrne

Donnell Jones

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Capone & Noreaga

K-Ci & Jo Jo

Russell Simmons

Rosanne Cash

Angélique Kidjo

Sonic Youth

George Clinton

Kronos Quartet

David Sylvian

Sheryl Crow

Massive Attack

Tweet

Ani DiFranco

Dave Matthews

Suzanne Vega

Steve Earle

Natalie Merchant

Caetano Veloso

Missy Elliott

Mobb Deep

Wilco

Brian Eno

Nas

Lucinda Williams

Fat Joe

Outkast

Zap Mama

YES! I want to help stop the rush to war with Iraq.

Your contribution will be used to fund additional efforts to get

the word out and to help avert a war.

“War is not the answer.”

Name

—Marvin Gaye

Address

City/State/Zip

E-mail

Make checks payable to MoveOn.org

Mail to MoveOn.org, 336 Bon Air Center #354, Greenbrae, CA 94904

DAV I D BY R N E | 179

K

Egyptian poem dating back thousands of years—a cry against violence and

alienation. Not a lot has changed.

I recorded my demos of the songs at home, and now I was getting more

accustomed to yet another technology that once again changed the way I

worked and recorded. Bulky machines were no longer needed to record demos;

even at home you could now record into your laptop (or a regular desktop

computer) using music software and some fairly modest gear.

I’d had a revelation about a year previously, after I’d been asked by Brit-

ish DJs X-Press-2 to write a tune and sing over a track they had. I had pre-

viously admired their work, so I said I’d give it a try. They sent me a track which I loaded onto my laptop (a black plastic Mac G3). It took a little time to learn the software and the audio connections, but once I figured them

out, I recorded a vocal on the laptop and sent it back to them. They then

made further changes to the music under my vocal. Whereas at first what