A Way of Being
Simulation Avenue turned ten yesterday. I’ve written a lot on this album over the last few years, so I had initially not intended to write anything on its anniversary, but the urge to keep accumulating writing about my songs has won out 24 hours later.
I think about where life was during the recording of the album. I had never recorded myself before —my previous albums had all been engineered by others. I had this song called “Simulation Avenue” that I thought I would play over the Blue Yeti USB microphone I had and record the song inside Adobe Audition 1.5, about which I basically knew nothing.
The approachability of the setup was the key; the Blue Yeti plugged directly into the computer’s USB port, bypassing a need for an additional audio interface. It created an environment that allowed me to jump right in.
Despite that environment’s limitations, I was able to quickly produce something, which then let me start fiddling within the program equally fast. I didn’t have enough bells and whistles at my disposal to get drowned by them. When I heard a basic rendition of “Simulation Avenue” play back to me, my whole musical world changed. Sure, it didn’t have the pop and polish of the studio, but I could work with this. If what I was hearing was the floor of what my recordings could sound like, this was alright. This was something I could do, something I wanted to do.
I think it was also the moment my music career started turning inward. It was a moment when I recognized a chance at a closed circuit; I could write, play, record, and listen to my songs without anybody, or anything, else. This wasn’t a death of wanting my songs to impact other people, but it was the death of thinking that all that frustration that came along with that was required for my music to exist, for it to thrive.
Perhaps all writers are guilty of such things, but if anyone ever has the “privilege” of reading through my many journals, they will undoubtedly realize lots of repetition—of ideas, of lines of thinking, of literal copy/pasting. When I first decided to start active journaling about my creative life, it was March 5, 2022. Like this entry, the whole journal experiment started with Simulation Avenue. Everything in my creative world seems to point to Simulation Avenue being some kind of starting point. I keep coming back to it, and so I can’t help but think that something did fundamentally change when those eight songs came into being.
Which is noteworthy because I have several other places before Simulation that might have served as equally valid starting points of interest. Maybe it could have been my first ever EP in 2008, full of poorly performed cover songs, save for the one poorly performed original song — “Untitled.” Or maybe it could have been my first original EP, The Part to Play, in 2010. Or maybe the band album, Something with Trees, in 2011. Or maybe Lesser Tragedies and the simultaneous birth of A Metropolitan Guide in 2013. Maybe it was the publishing of my first book, A Link to the Past: Stories of Growing Up Gamer, in 2014.
All of those seem as valid of gateways to a creative life I wanted to explore, yet Simulation Avenue remains the gatekeeper. It certainly is not my best album, and even more certainly not my best sounding album. The only thing I can look at is that inward turn, the moment when I stopped chasing this vague dream of “making it.” Simulation serves as the moment where maybe I “grew up” as a musician. Not in ability, not in songwriting craft, but in learning that this creative life I was building had little-to-nothing to do with this love and attention and money I set out for. Simulation was when I first started to get it, and so it feels like everything before it was prep work, an education of the things I needed to learn if I was going to succeed in the ways that actually mattered. Rick Rubin says in The Creative Act that being a creative, or an artist, is not about production, but rather the way someone moves through the world. It’s about “a way of being,” not how many songs you write. Preach.