Journey To Mars
Writing this album began on the evening of Friday, October 25, 2019 in a hotel room at the Doubletree in Columbus, Ohio. I had just arrived for the Ohio Valley Filk Fest, one of the major yearly conventions for science fiction and fantasy-flavored folk music, and immediately signed up for the "Iron Filker" contest.
Each year at OVFF, there are two songwriting contests: the first, announced months ahead of time, asks for songs written to a theme (in 2019, that theme was "Music is the universal language," and I had that song in hand when I arrived) for the second, the "Iron Filker," the theme is distributed on Friday night, the first day of the convention, and songs have to be written by, and performed on, Sunday afternoon.
I actually enjoy the challenge of this kind of writing exercise; I've always been a fan of the late Harlan Ellison's ability to crank out a short story in a few hours sitting at a typewriter in a bookstore window. Constraints can be enabling, and the idea of a time-boxed writing assignment, for me, is a creativity booster. So, after picking up my badge, doing the happy round of hellos and hugs, followed by a brief visit to the first-night filk circle, I settled in to consider the prompt, "Lost in translation."
Each year at OVFF, there are two songwriting contests: the first, announced months ahead of time, asks for songs written to a theme (in 2019, that theme was "Music is the universal language," and I had that song in hand when I arrived) for the second, the "Iron Filker," the theme is distributed on Friday night, the first day of the convention, and songs have to be written by, and performed on, Sunday afternoon.
I actually enjoy the challenge of this kind of writing exercise; I've always been a fan of the late Harlan Ellison's ability to crank out a short story in a few hours sitting at a typewriter in a bookstore window. Constraints can be enabling, and the idea of a time-boxed writing assignment, for me, is a creativity booster. So, after picking up my badge, doing the happy round of hellos and hugs, followed by a brief visit to the first-night filk circle, I settled in to consider the prompt, "Lost in translation."
These days, I write most first drafts of songs electronically, using a delightfully tiny Sony ICD UX-533 digital recorder to capture phrases and quick sonic sketches, and the Google Keep iPad app for brainstorming and refining lyrics. What follows is the Keep transcript in the left column, with today's annotations in the right. I haven't edited anything that appears, so, yeah, some of it's a bit cringey.
FYI—There was stiff competition at the 2019 Iron Filker. This song didn't even place.
Scroll all the way down for the audio development, showing the evolution from the raw Columbus recording all the way through to finished product.
FYI—There was stiff competition at the 2019 Iron Filker. This song didn't even place.
Scroll all the way down for the audio development, showing the evolution from the raw Columbus recording all the way through to finished product.
|
10/25/19 Friday night, 11pm
Loooost in Translation Partial capo 2, a la It's Alright Ma CRISPR/Cas9 Reading frame lost its registration Mitohondria mutation Unanticipated chelation methylation And your protein Lost in translation You are replicants In a tumbling hollow sphere With moving lights And pseudoscience gear Nothing is stable We have no information Everything we know Is lost in translation Livin in a cave Watching shadows on the wall // get projected // in projection We're all laboratory rats At Dr. Penfield (Benway) beck and call // hacked our connections // and Penfield hacked all our connections Nothing is for certain It's all interpreted sensation All of our ontology Is lost in translation Walking through the forest Of counter factual narration Our epistemology Is lost in translation The failures in the system Are invisible and self sealing Nothing that we know Is not the product of self-dealing Calibrated something Is the best of a bad situation Our phenomenology Is lost in translation Fish aren't aware of water Nor humans our conditioned perception // humans of perception Every//any time we say we know it That's an act of self deception There's no way outside of Our egocentric situation Our phenomenology Is lost in translation We don't even have a clue About the matter we're comprising The rules of physics/cosmos Are just our own devising Situation hopeless A loss of information Our cosmology Is lost in Translation Do n at the Planck length Where it’s strings or loops of spacetime And the energies are massive Well beyond our Situation normal With a collapsed wave equation Our idea of quantum gravity Is lost in Translation |
My first idea came in the form of a rhythmic reading of the title, stretching out the word "lost." This felt like it would make a good repetitive element, and I imagined singing it against a 3-chord strumming pattern. I immediately put my Kyser partial capo on and tried the chords out. Felt good, but I wasn't ready for melody yet.
I started right out thinking about technologies of "translation," and began brainstorming. Part of the challenge in a songwriting contest is to pick a direction you think will be different, so I began casting about for non-linguistic metaphors. Some of this was just to explore the conceptual space and test where it might go. Almost immediately, I came to the end-of-verse hook, with a line leading into "lost in translation." I immediately locked that in. Replicants. This bit of exploration went nowhere, but out of it came the kernel of the verse structure: descriptions of problematic notions, with a shifting focus from verse to verse a sort of running catalog of things, systems, and processes that were lost in translation. Livin in a cave. These are the first lines that survived all the way to final. By this point, I was beginning to zero in on a verse structure. The first take is how it came out as I was riffing; edits appear after the slashes. Some were immediate, some came over the next day. When I'm trying to capture a draft at this generative phase, I tend not to go back, but rather try to keep pushing forward. Editing at the point of utterance kills spontaneity; it's all about the "Yes, and..." Forest. There are a couple of "forest"metaphors on the album, but it didn't survive in this song. However, I did begin to see the triad of human perceptual issues (ontology, epistemology, phenomenology) as a frame for the early verses. Failures in the system. None of this survived. I will often just put nonsense syllables or "something goes here" to hold space in a line rather than slowing down the process. Especially when I'm time crunched (and it was heading on toward midnight by this point). Phenomenology. I knew I wanted to keep phenomenology, so I tried to working backwards: what would get me to that? It occurred to me to slip in one of Marshall McLuhan's famous sayings: "Fish aren't aware of water." Don't even have a clue. Noodling with the notion of reflexivity, thinking about that Alan Watts line "people are the universe looking at itself," but this didn't feel like it was going in a good direction. Planck length. Tried another approach to picking up the uncertainties inherent in contemporary physics. Basically more noodling. By this point, it was after midnight, and I was just grinding metal. In these writing situations, I find that my subconscious will pick up on the work I'm doing, especially if I can load it up with a basic rhythm and some lyrical beats to hit. So I crashed. |
|
10/26/19 Saturday morning, 5am
BRIDGE Well we’ve been down this road before And we’ve studied all the rules We see the charlatans and quacks Treating us like fools The answers don’t come easy When they come at all But the royal road to knowledge // progress Won’t be stopped by any wall The Fox is in the henhouse The fools are on the Hill Deepak Chopra’s in the counting house // there's Russians in our ballot box / Instagram Fondling the till // waving/dropping hundred dollar bills And the mango Mussolini Tweets away his fabrications // twitters out his The promise of America // vision Lost in Translation BRIDGE 2 Anti-vaxxers on the left And deniers on the right The one-eyed judge is in the middle // and a flash mob in the middle // botnet Looking for a fight You got college prices going up And wages coming down And with his finger on the Twitter // We all are Number 6 now And the circus is in town Well I went to ask the Bishop For a couple words of wisdom But they'd put him in the big house For abusing little children All our former moral centers Underwent evaporation // vanished in evaporation The core institutions of our culture Lost in translation There aren't any answers But the questions still worth asking We're only middling scholars // though it's hard to pay attention And we suck at multi tasking We are easily distracted By decontextualized information // disconnected Hey, buddy, look, a squirrel! Lost in Translation We've amused ourselves to death With a mechanical bride // Squeezing reason through a funnel We processed our simulacra On a Disneyworld dark ride // In a Disney-themed dark tunnel We are stateless thoughtful nomads on the rhizome Apres nou, le conflagration All of Western culture Lost in translation The acolytes of weapons // Heston Say its either guns or butter // demand their guns be buttered And we are fresh out of ammo // So the schools are all installing Heavy metal roll down shutters Any moderate position Is considered capitulation // howled down as capitulation A rational gun policy // safety // Any middle ground on safety // at all Lost in translation There are clouds on the horizon And we can see them growing It's not like no one warned us // We're children of the batfrog Feel the consternation growing And we struggle to be authentic Against interpretation All the handmaids in the state house Lost in Translation We're the children of the batfrog We're the secret heart of fandom We dream the dreaming dreamers And we harmonize at random We all need to put our shoulders To the wheel//boulder of imagination The voice of. // the xx of Orpheus // Or the crystal voice of Orpheus is // power of the myth // before the power of our music // before the Lost in translation Well we confront all these dilemmas // it’s a Prisoners Dilemma All these problems have arisen And we have trouble deciding // facing down the Hobson's choice Between charnel house and prison // of charnel No one left to ask for guidance In this world of fragmentation Guess we'll have to make our own meaning // guess we're stuck here at the crossroads // we’re livin at the crossroads Lost in translation It’s a Prisoner’s dilemma It’s a comic book adventure And we’re lying on the boardwalk // stumble down Picking brains out of our dentures We’ve been sold an anesthetic When what we need is deep sedation We’re zombies on the half-shell Lost in Translation |
 The Batfrog at Doubletree Columbus
Woke up with an entire bridge, melody, words and all, running in my head. I grabbed the iPad and started typing madly. Most of this survived to final exactly as my subconscious created it. This doesn't happen for me often, but when it does, I usually don't tamper with the stuff that comes out. I think about Rilke, standing on the cliffs at Duino Castle, hearing the Elegies come howling at him out of the Wind, and just write it down. Fox. This line suggested to me that a fruitful direction for at least some verses might be our current mediated political reality. I was snarkily happy with the double-entendre, so I capitalized "Fox." Fools became "tools" in final to avoid repeating it from the bridge. Chopra was a misstep; by the time I got to the end of the verse I knew the right way to fill this in; this was an immediate loop-back and edit Anti-vaxxers. While I didn't know how long the song was going to be, I knew it was likely to need another "bridge." Technically, I was writing this as a "chorus," because the Iron Filker requirement is "three verses and a chorus." It took a while to circle back and drop in "botnet." That probably didn't happen until later in the day. The one-eyed judge was, as Dylan fans may suspect, a riff off "Shelter From The Storm." Wasn't happy with the repetition of Twitter. There are some things in a song you should only do once (i.e., use any unusual word). Bishop. Most of the this verse survived all the way to final. By now I was on a roll, and was casting about for cultural phenomena that suffered from "translation" issues. I immediately went for the disjunction between the Catholic church's doctrine and their less-than-stellar response to a history of sexual abuse. Any answers. This verse popped up, but felt like it was at a different level of abstraction. That was okay; I knew it would fit somewhere. Amused ourselves to death. Continuing with the higher level of abstraction, this immediately felt like it was going to end up near the tail end of the song. I packed a lot of stuff in here: Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves To Death) Marshall McLuhan (his Mechanical Bride was a 1951 study of advertising that prefigured many of the ideas in Understaning Media), Jean Baudrillard's theory that simulations come to precede reality, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomes. Acolytes. I had taken a break to grab breakfast, and when I came back to the room, this verse came out. Almost immediately, I went back and adjusted the first lines; that was the most satisfying feeling of the entire weekend: the buttered/shutters couplet was, for me, one of those high "Fuck, yeah" moments. Every once in a while you get a couplet like that and you feel like you really nailed it. Doesn't happen all that often, but when it does... "rational gun policy" You can see me struggling with the right level of abstraction in rewriting this line. For me, lyrics, like poetry, work best when they describe reality at a slant. Clouds. Almost nothing survived from this verse, but I really loved the image of "the handmaids at the state house," which was a really powerful protest tactic at many state capitals, Providence included. One thing that survived was the idea of incorporating "the batfrog," which is a venerable genre/geek image, with a tie-in specific to the OVFF hotel: there's an emergency light just outside the main function room which looks like a frog but casts a bat shadow. Even as this was coming out, I knew it would be the final verse for the con-only version of the song. Orpheus. Struggling with the right level of mystic overwhelm here. Confront all these dilemmas. It's pretty clear in retrospect that I was running out of steam here. Sometimes that means you give up, sometimes you can power through to a second wind. And sometimes, you just get one good bit: this one gave me "prisoners dilemma," which became the nucleation site for the next, usable verse. Prisoner's dilemma. I was getting ready to head down to the con, and this one came to me as I was taking a shower. |
|
Saturday morning, 11am
Well we do t know what comprises Most of the universe’s matter But we might not see the answer If it was served us on a platter Don’t around the Planck length Things get weird in the regime of At the temperatures and scales of Bose-Einstein condensation Our notions of reality // what is, are Are lost in Translation We have no response That is not mute capitulation The children of the Sixties Lost in Translation |
I was in between sessions at the con and came back to my room for a quick break and writing session. Most of it was editing the prior verses. By this point, I was also pretty sure of the chord progression for both verse and chorus and I ran through what I had. Still didn't record it; wasn't quite set enough for that.
This was a complete rebuild of the early effort to talk about physics. I started out using Bose-Einstein condensation as emblematic of uncertainty; that's the way I performed it at the con. The change to quantum gravity came much later. The "is, are" turn was another of those happy moments. Mute capitulation. Wasn't exactly sure where this verse tag was going to go in the song, but it felt like a usable building block. |
|
Saturday evening, 11pm
Veterans living on the street And children locked in cages Walkin wounded stuck in cubicles Livin Kubler-Ross's stages And we have no response That is not mute capitulation The children of the Sixties Lost in Translation |
I hadn't decided on verse order yet, but this came out as I was playing through what I had, and it was pretty clear that it belonged in the second "bucket" of content: First section was philosophy, then the chorus, then the political and social verses, then the second chorus, and finally the higher-level abstractions.
I remember spending a lot of time just playing through what I had, and looking for the seams, patterns, points of connection to try to find the best order to put things in. I knew I had enough material; I was just looking for the right sequence. |
|
10/27/19 Sunday morning, 10 am
We're livin in a cave Watching shadows in projection Like laboratory rats And Penfield's hacked all our connections Nothing is for certain It's all interpreted sensation Any effort at ontology Is lost in translation Well we don't know what comprises Most of the universe’s matter But we might not see the answer If it was served up on a platter Things get weird in the regime of Bose-Einstein condensation Our notions of what is, are Lost in translation Fish aren't aware of water Nor humans humans of perception Any time we say we know Is an act of self deception There's no way outside of Our egocentric situation Our phenomenology Is lost in translation BRIDGE Well we’ve been down this road before And we’ve studied all the rules We see the charlatans and quacks Treating us like fools The answers don’t come easy When they come at all But the royal road to knowledge Won’t be stopped by any wall The Fox is in the henhouse The fools are on the Hill There's Russians in our Facebook Waving hundred dollar bills And the mango Mussolini Twitters out his fabrications The promise of America Lost in Translation Well I went to ask the Bishop For a couple words of wisdom But they'd put him in the big house For abusing little children All former moral centers Undergone evaporation Our core institutions Lost in translation The acolytes of Heston Demand their guns be buttered So the schools are all installing Heavy metal roll down shutters Any moderate position Branded as capitulation Any middle ground at all Lost in translation Veterans living on the street And children locked in cages Walkin wounded in the cubicles Of Kubler-Ross's stages And we have no response That is not mute capitulation The children of the Sixties Lost in Translation BRIDGE Anti-vaxxers on the left Climate deniers on the right And a botnet in the middle Looking for a fight You got college prices going up And wages trending down We all are Number 6 now And the circus is in town There aren't easy answers But the question's still worth asking Though it's hard to pay attention And we suck at multi tasking We are easily distracted By random information... Ooh, hey, look, a squirrel! Lost in Translation It’s a Prisoner’s dilemma It’s a comic book adventure And we stumble down the sidewalk Picking brains out of our dentures We’ve been sold light anesthetic When what we need is deep sedation We’re zombies on the half-shell Lost in Translation We've amused ourselves to death Squeezing reason through a funnel We precessed our simulacra In a Disney-themed dark tunnel We are nomads on the rhizome Apres nou, le conflagration All of Western culture Lost in translation We're the children of the batfrog We're the secret heart of fandom We dream the dreaming dreamers And we harmonize at random We all need to put our shoulders To the boulder of imagination Before the power of our music is Lost in translation |
I went down to breakfast early with my iPad and grabbed a table away from everybody else. I had two cups of coffee and started re-arranging things. I copied all the verses to the bottom of my Google Keep file and moved them around until they felt right.
About 10am, I set up the iPad next to the public computer in the lobby, retyped everything into a Word document, and printed out copies to distribute to the judges. Then, I went back to my room, spread the printout on the bed, and played through the whole thing into the digital recorder. Here's that sound file, with authentic Doubletree room tone. I didn't notice the repetition of "capitulation" in two successive verses; that's the kind of mistake that slips through a first draft written this quickly with too much caffeine and not enough sleep.  With first-place ukulele
By February, I had an idea of putting together an album. On Feb 8, I won the Common Fence Music Community Hoot against acts from around RI, largely, I suspected, on the strength of "Lost In Translation." I promised I'd write a ukulele tune (which ended up being "Walking Off The Earth.")
I thought at the time the album was going to be like the one I had done in 2019: recorded in my basement, in GarageBand, so I hacked together a demo version. It is, as they say, loose. During "February Album Writing Month," or FAWM, I cranked out a bunch of new material, and began to have a sense of what might fit together on an album:
Feb 1: Sigmund Freud's 115th Dream Feb 2: Down To The River Feb 5: Trail Of Mars Feb 16: Into Thin Air (originally "Just Barely There," the theme for the March, 2020 Rhode Island Songwriters Association "Songwriters In The Round" show. Feb 26: Walking Off The Earth In March, as we all know, things went sideways. I played "Just Barely There" at the RISA show at AS220 in Providence on March 11, just before the world shut down. At this point, I started noodling with the idea of reaching out to artists I knew who were being impacted by the lockdown. I had money saved in the bank earmarked for attending conventions—which, even in March, I could predict were going to be canceled for the foreseeable future. I still didn't have a name for the album, but I put together the demo versions I had and reached out to A.D. Puchalski, a comix/graphic artist I really admired. She had done illustrations for a piece I wrote for WWIII Illustrated years ago, and I just loved the look and feel of her work. She listened to the early demos and came back with some amazing sketches, one of which really stood out, an early iteration of the astronaut and guitar. That locked in the title for me: Trail Of Mars. The final graphic, which she sent on April 2, was just so gorgeous I knew I needed to bring the rest of the album up a notch to match it. So I rewrote lyrics, played around with order, and thought about how to make this a more professional project. And in May, I set up a call with Ellis Paul to talk it over. I'd been attending the New England Songwriters Workshop that he and Laurie MacAllister run every Labor Day in Connecticut, and I knew he'd have some good insights and suggestions. And he did. Over a couple of Skype meetings, he pointed me in the right direction (get a real microphone; work with a pro engineer, engage top-notch session musicians) and offered powerful revision pointers on a couple of the songs (Down To The River, Into Thin Air). I took most of his suggestions; any lyrical missteps that remain are purely my responsibility. So I called up Mark Dann, who had recorded, mixed, and mastered Ellis's last album and who, fortuitously, I had once worked with back in my time in New York when I had recorded with Bill Bly of Left Field. He actually remembered working with me and was interested in taking on the project. He reiterated advice on buying a high-end microphone, so I got the best one I could afford, a Shure SM7B, and sent him a test. After some tweaks (leaving enough space at the beginning of the track in GarageBand, recording both mic and DI versions of the acoustic guitar) he was ready for me to start tracking. Here's the absolutely terrible sounding May 20 click track (GarageBand won't output the actual metronome, so you end up looping a drum track for reference, which is what you hear.) And here's what came back, the basic vocal and guitar mix. You can hear spots where I drifted off tempo and Mark has pulled me back onto the beat; absolutely critical when you're going to layer stuff on top of it, especially remotely.
Mark suggested an absolutely amazing drummer he knew from NY, Eric Parker, who had played with folks like Joe Cocker and Lou Reed. And he was willing to work on the album. So on June 7, over Facetime and a cool online ProTools connection, I was sitting in Rhode Island monitoring in real time as Eric laid down drum tracks. He had listened to the guitar mix, and came super prepared, with really tasty ideas for every song; I don't think we ended up recording more than two takes of anything. By the next day, Mark had mixed it in.
I'd already been reaching out to the folx who'd been teaching at the New England Songwriters Retreat. Both because I knew them (at least, slightly) and because they were amazing musicians that I wanted to support during a time when every live music venue had been forced to shut down. I was amazed and grateful when they all said yes. I was totally overwhelmed by the lineup: Abbie Gardner's dobro and vocals, Craig Akin's bass, Tracy Grammer's violin and vocals, Jim Henry's electric guitar and mandolin, and Laurie MacAllister's vocal. This was more than I could have hoped for.
Craig Akin was up next, laying down bass against what was now the guitar, vocal, and drum track. Here's the brilliant bass part incorporated into a June 16 mix. For "Lost In Translation," I wanted a cool electric guitar part, and Jim Henry came up with some absolutely mindblowing stuff. Here's the raw material from a July 7 take before the mixdown. The balance is weird, but you can hear all Jim's cool EBow effects.
And this is Mark Dann's rough mix with everything as of July 9. For anyone who doubts that mixing and mastering is an artform comprising unique skills and high-level musicianship, this is presented as a counterexample.
|
Finally, in the spirit of finis coronat opus, here's how the final release version sounds with the music video.