JOHN MCDAID
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Journey To Mars

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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."

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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.


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
PictureThe 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.
PictureWith 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.
©2020 John McDaid. All Rights Reserved.
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