The Magic and the Ash
Something that I wish I would have been more proactive about over the years is to document, in the moment, what the process of recording a particular album was like. 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, if nothing else, intentional. And by extension, projects an air of confidence onto the creator for that intention, that no matter all the work it took to get there, the artist felt grounded on where the songs ultimately landed. While I won't speak for others, I will say for myself that those doubts and questions continue to fester long after the final product has been created.
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 that made it a bear to create. I think about how quickly I recorded Simulation Avenue when I first started engineering my own albums, 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). I don't mean to write the album, just to record it. 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 back in April 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 semi-presumed to get me to my stereotypical eight tracks, but I didn't feel strongly about it. I had regular consideration to allow this collection to be only seven songs, and let "October Snow" 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, it had time to cook. Of course, 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 all too easy to fall into the shoulder-shrugging, no-one-really-cares mentality. You have to find reasons to care when few others do, which has been a battle for the last decade of my creative life. At the end of the day, I had to make the decision that writing books and music is just something that I do, regardless of whether anyone else ever gives a shit. It's part of the person I have decided is the best version of myself. And so the writing continues.
Which is the exact sort of detail that I want a journal to document (for myself, or anyone who might have interest), 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. Though I have specific feelings about every song, I now can't imagine this album without those songs.
Having Sarah Riskind 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.
On a conceptual level, I think 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. Magic from the ash, as it were.
There will be more written about the individual songs in future journal entries, but for now I hope these new songs find you well, and that the magic they attempt to create was worth the ash it took to get there.