Today, April 14 2024, I finished recording my new album, Capistrano.  The album runs 38 minutes and 40 seconds.

I started working on the album on November 23, 2014 so that means that this one album of 39-ish minutes of music took me a grand total of 9 years, 4 months, and 23 days to create meaning this is officially the longest gestated album I’ve ever worked on, beating The Lavone’s 1999 album “The Hiatus” by about three years.

There is still mixing and mastering to do, artwork to create, etc., but no more recording.  I tracked the last bits this afternoon and made the first test mix of the album and just listened to it twice.  I pronounce it good.  I will attempt to take less time on the next one but apparently this is what needed to happen for this one to be born.  To quote Captain Kirk, “Who am I to argue with history?”

People occasionally ask me about how Nuclear Gopher happened.  There is sometimes a sort of wonder that even though Rhett and I were two nice Jehovah’s Witness kids from the neighborhood we started this crazy experimental band and then an underground record label.  The assumption seems to be that we must have been rebels or trying to stir things up or “be worldly”, in Witness lingo.  Honestly, though, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Nuclear Gopher has deep roots that go back to before I was even born and one thing led to another and another until that seemed like a natural outcome.  I usually tell people that music is the family business.  Here’s a bit about that, with some multimedia accompaniment.

I can trace the family business back at least as far as our maternal grandparents, Joseph and Ethelwynn (Hineline) Brunette.

That’s them in the pic, below is the two of them singing a beautiful rendition of the song “Drifting and Dreaming”.  Give it a listen.  It’s gorgeous.

The Brunette clan was a big, boisterous, musically gifted, Catholic family with thirteen children, of whom my mom was the tenth in line.  Grandpa Brunette played guitar and sang, Grandma played the banjo and sang, and all the kids were taught to sing at an early age, often into a microphone connected to a reel-to-reel tape recorder and sometimes they even sang on local radio programs.  It was one of the main family past times and that’s how our mom spent her childhood.

Here’s a 1956 radio appearance by The Brunette Children singing “Gonna Get Along Without You” and “Ringo Rango”:

Mom experienced two major tragedies when she was young.  First, she lost her father when she was only nine years old.  Then, when she was eighteen, she lost her then fifteen year old brother Jerry in a car accident.  Those two loses made a major mark on her.

Mom was a shy girl, very pretty, and a helluva singer.  In another life she could have been Cher.  But she told me many times that she had always felt lost, like she was adrift in life, never given a chance to properly grow up.  She got married almost immediately out of high school and became a mother to my brother Rhett not long after.  When I was born fourteen months later my mom had just had her twentieth birthday.  That’s a lot for a young person to live through.  I think about how she must have felt, only twenty years old and already a mother of two, married to a man she hadn’t known for long, still mourning her brother and father… It makes sense to me that the message of the Jehovah’s Witnesses appealed to her at that time.  I can understand why she listened when her neighbor told her about the last days and an interpretation of the Bible that was entirely new to her Catholic trained mind.  I can likewise understand why she clung to music.  That was her lifeline, her connection to her past.  To quote my dear friend Cindy Elvendahl, music was her savior.

She and her brother Rick had formed a band called Special Export.  It was a cover band, they played at supper clubs and parties and wedding receptions.  Over the years the band went through various iterations, name changes, and phases, but it was always there when Rhett and I were growing up.  Even as Rhett and I (and later Reed and Robbie) were being taken to meetings at the Kingdom Hall and raised as Witnesses, we also attended band practices and gigs.  Mom was always the star of the show.  She didn’t play any instruments but she was this glamorous lead singer and people were always so impressed by her voice and, man, it was like living with a celebrity.  Of COURSE we wanted to do it too.

Here is mom with her gold microphone singing “Girl From Ipanema” in the late 80’s.

It’s hard to remember a time in my life, even as early as four years old, where Rhett and I weren’t trying to make music.  We had a record player and a bunch of hand me down albums and we sang along to The Beatles and Barry Manilow and Grand Funk Railroad until we were sent to bed.  We pretended to be rock stars, we drummed with pencils on the furniture, we planned gigs and put on little shows for any audience we could find, neighbors, our parents, or the other kids in the home daycare that mom ran for extra money.  I have a sign hanging in the Nuclear Gopher studio from a “concert” we put on as The Rockboys when I was six years old.

Rhett started sitting in on drums with mom’s band at paid gigs when he was 7.  I bought my first electric guitar at 12.  Like I said, the roots run deep.  And a little “derp”.

Rhett was so good at drums at such an early age that he attracted the attention of a group of young adults from a nearby congregation who, like my mom, were forming a cover band to play weddings and the like.  The others in the band were all in their 20’s but they brought the little 12 year old drummer into the group because he was really really really really good and he could also sing.

It was a 50’s band called Hubcaps and Hearts and when Rhett joined, they decided to use the Sutter home as their practice space.  This was great because we had a room in the basement that we had been using as our “music room” ever since The Rockboys.  There had been a drum set in there for five years but suddenly there was more.  Guitars, amps, microphones, keyboards, speakers, it was real gear, gear we could never have afforded, and it was just sitting there most of the time.  Of COURSE we recorded music with it.  That had been one of our primary hobbies for years and now we could try to do it on another level.

Rhett, Reed, and I were calling ourselves ROW at the time.  We always had a penchant for picking band names that were people pronounced wrong and in this case ROW was supposed to be like the British word for a fight not like something you do with an oar in a boat but I digress.  The sudden access to equipment caused the three of us to record our first album as ROW which we called “Terror Again” and it was a blast but Rhett and I struggled a bit with Reed.

“Waldo Koterman” by ROW

It wasn’t Reed’s fault, he is a brilliant and amazing person, an awesome kid brother, and he later became a spectacular musical recording artist but at the time I was 12, Rhett was 13, but Reed was only 9 and he didn’t know how to play any instruments.  Rather than wait for him to catch up, Rhett and I chose to start a new band with just the two of us.  We called ourselves The Lavone (another pronunciation problem for most people, it’s meant to be pronounced like “love own” but people usually pronounce it “love on”, whatever…) and that was the fateful moment.  The Lavone started in 1986 and was never officially “broken up” although our last recording session was in 2003 and Rhett died in 2005, ending it for good.

How it started:

“My Adventure Flowerland” – 1986

…  and how it ended up:

“Blues Around My Soul” – 2000

Nuclear Gopher exists because The Lavone existed.  The Lavone existed because of mom, and grandpa, and ROW, and The Rockboys, and Hubcaps and Hearts, and me and Rhett sharing a bedroom and a brain, and all of that stuff that came before.

For the first three years of The Lavone we made albums and in early 1989 I recorded a song called The Gay Laughter of Nuclear Gophers, a title I found written on a slip of paper while cleaning my bedroom one day.  I vaguely remember waking up from a dream and scribbling it down in the middle of the night but I don’t remember the dream.  It randomly happened to be the most recent song I had recorded before Rhett and I bought our first 4-track recorder so the words “Nuclear Gopher” were fresh in our minds when we christened our studio and the label just stuck after that.

It’s not a particularly great song.  It was just this sort of  guitar experiment that I recorded.  The idea was to use a brass slide in a sort of bowing technique to create an ambient soundscape and various forms of tapping to make something synthesizer-esque using only a guitar.  In case you want to here it, here it is, “The Gay Laughter of Nuclear Gophers” by The Lavone from January of 1989, the accidental namesake of the whole kit and kaboodle.

So, there you go.  Nuclear Gopher was born not as an act of rebellion but as a fairly innocent outgrowth of an innate passion for making music that we got from our mother, who got it from her parents.  We recorded our music because we made it.  We labelled it because it was fun to do so.  It wasn’t until we grew up that it ever occurred to us that it might be unusual to do this inside of our religion but even then, so what?  Unusual doesn’t mean wrong.  When I think of Nuclear Gopher I think of something born out of sharing something I love with people I love.  That was the origin and that’s still the point.

The other day it occurred to me that the most uncommon interest I have, the one I am least likely to get into a conversation at work about, is songwriting. I know plenty of other people who write songs, I play in a band with three of them, and I have a lot of songwriter friends but as far as “normal” people go, songwriting is not a common activity. You can’t just drop “so, I wrote a new song the other day” into casual office conversation and expect anybody to say “Oh really? Me too! Have you recorded a demo of it yet?”

I work with lots of people who play a musical instrument of some kind, piano or saxophone or guitar or violin, but they don’t compose new music, they just play music written by other people. I work with lots of people who enjoy music, who listen to it constantly, who can discuss it at length, but it never seems to occur to them to write any of their own.

Even my mom, from whom I inherited my musical talents, a woman who sang on stage semi-professionally for my entire childhood, is not a songwriter.

It’s mystifying to me because I’ve always written songs, quite naturally. It is so natural that for a long time I just assumed it was something that everybody did.

The first song I ever wrote that I still have a recording of is from kindergarten. I wrote (and recorded) a lot of songs in elementary school. They were mostly silly lyrics but I made sure even way back then that I had verses and choruses and melody and structure and rhythm. One song I wrote called “I’m Insane” even had several movements in different musical styles. When I listen to the recording today I’m kinda blown away by how musically sophisticated it is for a second grader. There is even a piano piece with no lyrics called “The Burner” that I wrote back then.

It’s not like it’s ever been easy. Even now, after having left a trail of over four decades worth of songs strewn in my wake, I still wrestle with the challenge of composing new music. I think of it like fishing for some sort of elusive species of fish. I go through all the trouble of waking up at dawn, loading up the boat, heading to the lake, and then I cast and cast and cast for hours without so much as a bite until I manage to land one. It’s lonely work and for every time I succeed in finding a song, there are a dozen where I get nothing or wind up with a song I don’t even particularly like.

If I’m being honest here I think it’s one thankless pursuit.

And yet, also being honest, it’s the thing I have the most pride in, the work I find the most personally rewarding. Songs I’ve written are also my anchors to important pieces of my past. When I hear a song I wrote, either as an actual recording or just playing in my head, I remember the time and place of my life when that composition happened and I relive pieces of my past. Sometimes it works the other way around, I remember something that happened to me and then a connected song comes into my mind. The times in my life when I let myself fall out of the songwriting practice are the ones where my memories get the fuzziest, the years that feel “lost” somehow. As if, failing to enshrine them in songs, I never really got a good mental record of what happened. Times in my life that I remember but don’t have songs for feel as if they could have happened to somebody else or as if I could have read about them in a book rather than having lived through them.

Even though I haven’t released much music of my own over the last several years, spending my time playing with other bands doing other music, I have written dozens of songs at home that will probably never be heard outside of my studio and my head. Even when I don’t perform or record my songs for other people, I still write them. I have to.

Weird, right? Of all my interests and pursuits, songwriting is easily the weirdest one, and yet there it is. A thing I do because I am compelled to do it.

Last night I mentioned to Esther that I had written a new song the other day. She asked about it, what was it called, what was it about, could I sing it to her, and so I pulled out an acoustic guitar and played it. After I was done she asked me to read the lyrics back to her again and told me that she thought they were really beautiful and that my lyrics are one of the best parts of my songs. I thanked her and felt a little flustered, showing a new song to another person (even one who I have known intimately for 18 years), is one of the only things I get legitimately nervous about. Most people don’t know how to respond to a new song. They either love it immediately (if it’s super catchy) or they listen without really hearing or absorbing. New songs from any source often take several listens to find their way into your brain and during those initial listens a person may not even know whether or not they like the song. They may just be absorbing it.  A lot of people struggle to internalize new music after they hit their 20’s so it’s a lot of ask of somebody, if you think about it.

If the source of the song is a person they know, they may feel as if a response is required of them, as if they need to say something about the song, “that’s really great” or “I liked it” but it’s kind of a lie because they probably don’t actually have an opinion yet. There is novelty and there is familiarity and a song that is catchy often gets you with the former while a song that stays with you often requires the latter. If I was the sort of songwriter who created a lot of catchy ditties that set toes a tappin’ it might be easier. Unfortunately(?) I’m the sort who often writes intellectual/emotional poetry set to guitars and drums. I am what I am. I have my “catchy pop tune” moments and I know them when I hear them, but they’re the exception rather than the rule so I have become used to keeping a lot my music to myself and avoiding putting people in the position of having to respond in real-time to my face. I prefer to record and release, thereby allowing the listener to engage with what I make on their own time and on their own terms without my awkward presence standing by.

It’s not as if I get a lot of negative responses. I’m happy to say that I’m objectively pretty good at songwriting. I’ve written some songs that are excellent and I know it. I’m a lifelong student of music of all genres and eras, I know the difference between good music and bad music and I’ve written both, but I’ve written more good than bad, which is nice. Writing music is a tough thing to do and it’s good to know that I’m good at it but that doesn’t help with the whole awkwardness thing when it comes to presenting it to other people.

It’s now 7:15 in the morning, I’ve been up with my coffee since 6:00, and most of that time has been spent writing this post. It’s the Tuesday after the long Memorial Day weekend and I need to be back at my job today, doing technology things, the work for which I have been paid in the filthy lucre of the realm for most of the last three decades. Most of my three day weekend was spent doing work around the homestead. I dug out and replaced a broken fence post that supported an automatic driveway gate, which I also repaired. I filled some gaps in a few retaining walls. I did some photography and developed and scanned a few rolls of film. And I composed drum parts for the new song I played for Esther last night. I’ve recorded two demos of it since I wrote it and I think I now know it well enough to attempt to track it for real this week.

I need to post this, jump in the shower, put on some clothes that aren’t pajamas, get a warm up of coffee and then I think I’ll head out to the studio and take a crack at writing another one before I turn myself back over to the world of corporate America. You never know, I might get lucky and catch a big fish before the morning stand-up meeting. A kid can dream, can’t he?

My elder brother, Rhett (1972-2005), was a musical prodigy who explored and experimented with music from pre-school until his untimely death from blood clots in his lungs at the ridiculously young age of 32. I grew up in his musical shadow and I constantly wonder what songs he would be making today if he was still here to make them.

I will be first to admit that although I loved my brother fiercely, I did not always understand him or where he was going with his music. For almost 20 years he and I formed the core of the experimental art-rock band The Lavone (which rhymes with “the phone” not “the fawn” in case you are wondering) and in that time we recorded 16 albums worth of lo-fi indie weirdo music that, it nothing else, amused the two of us immensely. Rhett and I often worked in a sort of alone/together process. We would independently write songs, sometimes more fully formed than others, and we would bring them to each other for completion and elucidation. I would usually take a guitar, figure out a few chords, write some lyrics, and bring the idea to Rhett who would fill in the drums and the rest of the production. Rhett usually worked in a more, shall we say, oblique way. Rhett would have the whole song in his head and would come to me and attempt, in vain, to get me to hear it too. He would play one or two chords, usually chords involving more fingers than it seemed he ought to have, and he would hum or sing a line or two, and then he would paint a verbal picture of the rest of what he was hearing and I would smile and nod and wait for the core of the recording to appear from one of his solo sessions on 4-track. Then he would play me the fleshed-out version and say “See!” and I would be completely incapable of connecting the thing I was hearing with the two chords I had heard a week previous but I would always be astonished.

Sadly for Rhett, he spent most of his musical life trying to stuff 48-track musical ideas into 4-track recording technology. Many of his recordings sound muddled and muffled, not because he intended them to, but because he had to bounce down so many tracks onto so many generations of tape in order to fit all the parts in his head on to the recording. He only spent the last 6 years of his life with access to modern digital audio workstation technologies and some of what he did with that freedom still gives me chills and I am one of the few people (perhaps the only one) who can hear his earlier recordings on tape while simultaneously hearing his full-color vision in my mind because, well, I was on the inside of his process.

It was recently suggested to me that I should create a curated playlist with commentary for the world and the idea appealed to me (although this is clearly not what Scott had in mind) so I have set myself the challenge of putting together 7 songs that highlight, for me, the things that made my brother’s music so powerful and influential in my life. Why 7? I don’t know. Seemed like a good choice for an arbitrary number. Are these his best songs? I don’t know. But they are songs that I have returned to over and over and over again for many many years.

1. Oh No – When Rhett was 16 he fell in love with a 29-year-old woman and she loved him back. This did not go over well with our parents and they stopped the two from seeing each other. Nothing physical ever transpired between them, but they were absolutely kindred spirits and when Rhett was cut off from her, his heart was shattered. I always found it interesting that as an adult Rhett ended up marrying a different woman who was also 13 years his senior. This first song, “Oh No”, was recorded in 1988 and appeared on one of the early albums by The Lavone recorded on a home stereo before we even had multi-track capability. Armed with only a Moog synthesizer, a guitar, bass, a drumset, a microphone, and a delay box, Rhett created a moody, sad, impassioned, ethereal, poem of a song that captured his teenage heartbreak. He played every instrument on this track via overdubbing, playing the drums first and then playing the keyboards along with onto a second tape, then adding the vocals and guitar onto yet another tape. This song was a staple of The Lavone and we performed it on stage at what turned out to be our final live performance in 2000. At that show, 12 years after he first laid it down, I finally got to play along with one of my favorite early Rhett songs. Years later I would record a cover for myself, but I give you here the original, The Lavone’s “Oh No”.

 

2. Hi, My Name Is Rhett Sutter – My second choice dates to 1991 which, at the time, seemed a lifetime from “Oh No”. “Hi…” appeared on The Lavone’s 1991 album “A Concert For No-One” and featured an older, wiser, 19-year-old Rhett attempting to paint a musical portrait of himself. Rhett started his musical life as a drummer so I always thought it was fascinating that his self-portrait at the time is set to the simple beat of a metronome and focuses instead on a sort of deranged carnival of synthesized sounds while he sings about how he sees himself versus the roles he plays versus how people interpret him and what he wants to be. This song has, to put it mildly, a lot going on. Despite the driving metronomic beat, almost nothing else ever repeats, there are few motifs, and around 6 minutes in the song appears to be fading out before storming back for some discordant piano notes. I remember him working on this one over the course of a few weeks. It is experimental and abstract, hardly a pop song, but it’s original title was “Here I Am” and he was attempting, to the best of his ability, to put the inside of his head on tape and if you surrender to the weirdness, this song is about as honest and compelling to me today as it was the first time he played it for me back in high school.

3. Gossip Gossip Gossip – I cannot even begin to describe how much I love it when Rhett growl-screams “really gets on my nerves / it’s cheesy / it’s lying and vain / all the stupid people / got nothing better to say / than gossip!” at the beginning of this song. It was the early 90’s, he was maybe 20 years old, and he here is just spewing beautiful venom at the top of his lungs over a sequence of truly diabolical chords that I could barely play. This song was recorded as part of our short-lived band Purple Triangles which brought Rhett and I into recording partnership with Chad Astleford and Sy Park. Unlike on most of the previous Lavone recordings, PT generally recorded as a foursome and so Rhett had to teach us to play his insane chords which he wrote on a piano and then looked up how to play on the guitar. This session he was a mad conductor, counting us in, writing out our parts, and literally guiding us through every twist and turn of the mini-symphony about the shallow vapidity of “all the stupid people”. All the Triangles sessions were fun, whether we were recording Sy’s brokenhearted power pop, or Chad’s blistering guitar solos, but the Gossip Gossip Gossip session was for me one of the purest joys of that year of recording. Rhett was so into it, such a studio tyrant, and I had no idea what the end result was going to be, only he did, and the final song still rocks my socks, I still think this is one of the quintessential Rhett vocal performances, and I’m still kinda mad at him for bending my fingers into all of those unnatural shapes.

4. Spiritually – Of all the fan mail we ever got back when NuclearGopher.com was a thing, two stick in my mind. The first favorably compared my brother Reed’s song “Melinda” to the Indigo Girls, which infuriated Reed to no end (he hated the Indigo Girls) and made me laugh hysterically. The second called this song, Spiritually, “the best song I have ever heard”. If I were forced at gunpoint to pick the most Rhett song of all the Rhett songs, this might be the winner. Recorded for his first released solo album “Rhett!”, this song has it all. Marvin Gaye-esque vocals, synth strings, slide guitars (I get chills around the 3-minute mark when they sweep in), unexpected chord changes, funky drumming, discordant soloing, and a surprise ending. I consider it all the more impressive when I consider that he wrote, performed, engineered, mixed, and mastered this thing all by himself using only a four-track tape player. Rhett was a deeply spiritual person who believed wholeheartedly in God. He didn’t usually write directly about this because the religion we were raised in frowned on that sort of direct messaging but he put it front and center on this track and that too, was Rhett. These songs are supposed to demonstrate some of his many different facets and so many of them are on display in Spiritually it really is quite a perfect showcase of who my brother was.

5. Floatin’ – On the final Lavone album, 2000’s Isotope, Rhett was finally unleashed from the confines of the 4-track and given all the tracks he could eat and he responded to this suddenly broad canvas by cramming 40+ tracks of audio into a pop symphony that weighs in at just over two minutes long. Saxophones, flutes, bass harmonicas, walls of voices, layers of percussion, banjo, this is the full Brian Wilson, the full Phil Spector, the full Polyphonic Spree, you can listen to it 30 times and find something you missed on every listen. I have now been listening to Floatin’ for 20 years and I still feel like the song is a rushing river that is pushing me, lifting me, tearing through a canyon, on-rushing, overwhelming me. He spent months on this one, bringing various people into the basement studio, teaching them the parts he needed them to play, borrowing instruments from friends, all to finally record that epic, towering, spectacle he had been aiming for all those years but lacked the technology to execute with this clarity and focus. He was so happy working on Floatin’ and he made a point of having each of us Sutter boys take a verse. Reed goes first, then Rhett takes the second verse, and then I get the third verse. I was honored.

6. Blues Around My Soul – If “Oh No” is representative of the early days of The Lavone, “Blues Around My Soul” is the perfect representative of the end. The final Rhett track on our final album, I have always thought of this song as the closing statement from The Lavone and therefore the end of an era of my partnership with my brother made all the more poignant for me by the fact that we had no idea that would be true at the time. Yes, we recorded a little more Lavone music over the next couple of years (one other song completes this list), but we never released another album together and most of our final recording sessions were lost to history. BAMS is a beautiful song with lush arrangements, beautiful harmonies, stirring chord changes, and an amazing vibe that makes me tear up every time I hear it. In this song Rhett was writing about his sadness over our mother’s deteriorating mental and emotional state at the time and the heavy toll it took on her relationships with us kids. He had long told me that he felt he was unable to connect emotionally with her, always felt abandoned and unloved, and he poured that into this song. It wasn’t his only work on the subject, but this one came at a particularly tough time for us all as she was beginning to suffer from the delusions and issues that would ultimately cause her to leave for parts unknown, never to be seen by any of us again. I don’t actually know where my mother is or if she is still alive and I can’t help but think on that while I listen to this one, knowing I will never hear either of their voices again.

7. Keep On Receiving Joy – Last but certainly not least, I choose “Keep On Receiving Joy”, from Rhett’s final album, Londa, recorded and released in 2004, the year before he died. This song was originally recorded as The Lavone and is actually the last released song that he and I worked on together. I contributed guitar and some backing vocals and the rest is pure Rhett. This song turned out perfect, IMO, but it’s development was a long and winding road featuring at least three alternate versions with completely different vocal and lyrics and at least one alternate title, Omens and Signs. We put in a lot of session time trying to get this one to match the picture in his head and when I edited together the photo montage for his funeral service, this was the song that concluded it. I really could see no better choice. This is a perfect song from his final album that perfectly reflects his tastes, his talents, and his beautiful soul and loving heart. Rhett could never have known that this would be among the final acts of musical creation of his life, but I know “Keep On Receiving Joy” encapsulates what he would want for anybody. Love. Joy. Peace. And harmony. Always harmony. Keep on receiving joy.

I haven’t released a new album since The Coal Room EP in December of 2014 but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been musically active. The last six years have been rather productive, actually. I spent some time as a member of the band Robots From the Future, also a stint in the band Fistful of Data’s, I played a handful of solo sets, I released a couple singles with music videos, I sat in on drums for a couple “adult jam” style gigs with friends, and then I joined up with my current band, Awkward Bodies and we have played some great shows and released a few singles as well. Still, I have missed being a recording artist unto myself so this year I hope to change that a little.

I’ve accumulated a bit of a backlog of solo material, enough for more than one album. I’ve winnowed the list down to a decent dozen or so and I expect that I may just start working my way through recording them. It’s no exaggeration to say I’m overdue for a legit solo album.

Since I was in sixth grade I’ve always been involved in one band or musical project or something and have only had a few years where I didn’t at least appear on some sort of recording that was distributed for public consumption in some way. Last year I appeared on three Awkward Bodies singles, the year before that I released a video single for one of own songs, Ostrich, but 2015-2017 was a three year dry spell right on the heels of The Coal Room (and the rather obscure RFTF single “Bloody Baby” which appeared on a comp). And that’s OK. I’m at peace with it. During that time I took some sax lessons, I played shows in a few bands, I kitted out a new studio at a new house, I wrote and recorded new music, I was involved in a pretty cool upcoming Nuclear Gopher documentary… basically, I was very active, just not in the recording arena. But I miss it.

Just this week, I had a recording session with Lemuel “Ace” Herlihy (Michael Heuer) for what will (hopefully) be a followup to our 2014 ambient/experimental/noise smash hit album “Nininger”. The mess in the photo above is from the session. That was really fun and if all goes according to plan we should see that record done in time to submit it for this year’s RPM Challenge. I’m thinking we should call it “Nininger 2: Electric Boogaloo (Return of Ignatius Donnelly)”.Awkward Bodies has been an extremely rewarding experience and tonight we will be having our first practice with our new lineup. Lem Herlihy and I will get together again next week, I hope, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll do what I did with The Coal Room and lavoneloveletter and just take a single session to get the bones of whole new album laid down and then finish it off with overdubs over the course of a few weeks/months. I have the songs. What is stopping me?

My mother was singing in a band when I was in the womb which means that my first time on stage with a band was before I breathed air.  I think that pretty much doomed me to the life of a musician.  Granted, I realized early on that the musician thing wasn’t particularly lucrative so I started a career in software development to pay the bills, and it has done so admirably for my entire adult life, but I continue to do the musician thing.  By my count, I’ve been involved in the production of over 40 different cassettes, CD’s or digital music releases as either a songwriter, musician, engineer or producer and I still love it.  Performing and recording music is a central thread in my life’s story.

Today I am planning a new recording studio and developing material for a couple of new recording projects, but this morning I keep pondering how I got here and what all those previous music projects actually mean to me.  Why keep doing this?  Clearly it’s not to “make it big” or become rich and famous.  So, why?  The answer differs from recording to recording.

The earliest recordings made by my brothers and I were strictly kids playing at making music, at least for me.  But that early playground led to a lifelong passion for all of us, so it’s hard to dismiss.  Rhett was first to blossom when he turned out to be a childhood drumming phenom.  I took a few more years to start figuring out guitar and songwriting throughout middle school and high school.  By the time I turned 20, though, I had learned multi-track recording, audio engineering fundamentals, multiple instruments, songwriting, and the lot.  I had matured from a kid singing in the basement into a young man who was serious about being a musician.  I think of all those early albums recorded in school as an extension and maturation of the learning process that started as soon as our hands were big enough to hold instruments.

Throughout my 20’s, I was learning a whole different skill set.  How to be an adult.  How to raise a child.  How to manage money and build a career.  I feared that I would lose sight of making music.  I feared that the creative spark would be overwhelmed by “real life” and I would be one of those guys who looked back nostalgically on the “good old days”.  It almost happened.  Maybe it would have, but I never let that idea of myself as a creative person disappear from my mind.  As I learned to develop computer software I used the technical skills I developed to work on building an online record label.  I learned how to use digital audio workstations to record and produce music instead of older analog 4-track equipment.  Eventually my brother died, our band ended, I went through some major life transitions, my indie label folded, and music took on a whole new role of safety net and survival mechanism.  I recorded a bunch of solo material and you can find it here on this site.

Through all of this, music has helped me bond with my brothers and with friends, given me an outlet to say things that I couldn’t say any other way, provided me with a constructive domain in which to apply other skills as I learned them, served as a psychological health practice, and (of course) it has been a lot of fun.  It is also incredibly satisfying that so much of the music I’ve been involved with is recorded.  It’s like I have most of my life on tape in one way or another.

I can listen to myself at age 8, singing the first song I ever wrote while my brother drums in the background.  Or at age 14 when I wrote the first song I really felt proud of.  There I am in high school falling in love.  There I am in my 20’s celebrating the birth of my son.  I can go online right now and hear my 30 year old self losing his religion and his brother and his grip on the life he thought he was living.  It’s all documented in this strange, mostly public, way.  I am keenly aware that the music I write and record today will be heard by my future self and will bring the thoughts, fears, feelings, desires, and circumstances of my current life to his mind more than any photograph or video can do.  It’s like a diary plus a photo album but with the intimacy of encoded thoughts and a spoken voice and the awareness on my part of exactly what it all meant to me at the time.

When I think about the music I am making right now, I’m not thinking of posterity or my future self or entertaining anybody or making money or getting famous.  I’m just saying what I find within myself to say, when I go looking.  I’m casting around for feelings and thoughts, listening to my own mind for snatches of melodies that I might want to use, giving myself subconscious commands, sketching melodies or words with instrument or writing utensil in hand, digging around for something that inspires me to hit record.  I do this now because it’s what I’ve done for so long that I don’t feel like myself if I don’t.  I really am doomed.  And I think that’s OK.