The Magic and the Ash
I wish I would have been more proactive over the years about documenting what the process of recording a particular album was like in the moment. It's easy enough to harken back to the general atmosphere of a given record, or the broader strokes of the ups and downs of the process, but there is something genuinely interesting to me about how songs felt as they developed.
A final product sounds intentional. And by extension, projects an air of confidence onto the creator for that intention, even if doubts and questions continue to fester long after the final product has been finished. Was that song as good as the others? Was that song ready to be recorded? Was the performance good enough? Should I have made this choice, or that choice? Was that tiny imperfection worth re-recording a song? On and on it goes.
About a week ago, I released the sixth Metropolitan Guide album: The One That Isn't Burned. This record has more songs (10), more instruments, and more general sonic ambition than I have ever tried before. I think about how quickly I recorded Simulation Avenue when I started engineering my albums in 2015, or even how quickly I did a much more involved The Girls You Sang to Sleep in 2021. Where those albums took weeks, The One That Isn't Burned took months (7). The original version of the album --titled either “Phoenix Rising” or “The Magic and the Ash” depending on when you tuned in-- when I started recording looked like this:
The Little Bird Shuffle
Mirage
Phoenix Rising
The One That Isn't Burned
Orphans
The One to Tell Twice
Whatever That Violin Sang
"October Snow" was sitting around in an unfinished state and was always presumed to get me to my stereotypical eight tracks, but I didn't feel strongly about it in those early days. I had regular consideration to allow "October Snow" to sit on a scrap heap, destined for another Alternate Histories b-side release at some point down the road.
It evidently did not end up on the scrap heap, and mostly that is because recording this album took so long. The seven months it took to record these songs was as much about my ups and downs of motivation, desire, and enthusiasm as it was anything else. Don't get me wrong, I worked immensely hard on these songs, but in no world should it have taken as long as it did to get them recorded. When you have a tiny audience, it is easy to fall into the shoulder-shrugging, no-one-really-cares mentality. At the end of the day, I have to make the decision that writing books and music is just something that I do, regardless of whether anyone else ever cares.
Which is the exact sort of detail that I want a journal to document, a reminder that these sorts of things don't just happen, and they are, like everything else we do, reliant on an infinite number of circumstances --physical, emotional, psychological, or otherwise. Maybe they won't tell a story to anyone but yourself, but they undeniably tell one.
And define the end result. Precisely because I took so long to finish this record, "Vanguard" and "Tornadoes" joined the fold in time, and "October Snow" got its act together.
Having Sarah on board helped too. Not only did she bring an obvious cascade of musical impacts across the album, having someone so close to the project helped usurp some of those shaky feelings mentioned above, or at least bully them a bit. Maybe no one does care, but she cared. That's one more than usual during this part of the process. I think the short version of that is that she brought a level of accountability that I usually have to find for myself. I might like "The Magic and the Ash" for a title a bit more than the one I ultimately went with, but it sounds so, I don't know, precious? Lame? What I like about it is that the creative process does very often feel destructive to yourself, but yet manifests something out of that destruction.