On Monday night, I tried to record "The Times", the ninth and final song for the album. With Dave and Kate overseas, and the rest of the songs nearing mixedness, time is running out to get this one recorded. After clearing it with bandmates, I decided to play it all myself with the help of my friend and Ranger Spacey bandmate Karl, who offered his work's warehouse as a venue. This aligned nicely with my ongoing pursuit of ever-higher levels Bruce Springsteenissitude (Born in the USA was recorded in a converted factory called the Powerstation), so after work on Monday, i set up a makeshift studio there to record this last song.
I didn't realise, however, that Karl's unassuming IT warehouse in the back streets of Marrickville adjoins Boeing's Australiasian turbine testing plant on one side and CERN's southern hemisphere large hadron colliding facility on the other. These are assumptions i made based on my analysis of the loud droning sound that persisted all freakin night. This was fail #1.
Editing the turbine solo.
Fail #2 was that i had only demoed this song acoustically and hadn't really given a lot of thought to a drums/bass/guitar arrangement. There was a lot of tense floundering going on as i tried to write parts on the run... I was even considering changing the key of the song to accommodate the droning. It was becoming obvious that a more developed demo was the only thing we were going to get out of this session.
Briscoe is the brainchild of Bart Denaro’s (my) promiscuous encephalon (thank you thesaurus.com). After years behind a drumkit in Kid Confucius, I have decided to ditch the instrument I am pretty good at, and pick up the guitar - an instrument I am pretty shit at, and sing (getting better all the time but let’s face it, I ain’t no Ian Dury). Luckily I have a band full of musicians who are at least as good as Ian Dury, maybe even better.
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Usually when someone says something like “I was born to swim the 200m butterfly” you expect them to break a Commonwealth record as a minimum, so I do realise the arrogance and expectational peril inherent in a statement like that, but as much as anyone was born to do anything I feel like music is my thing. It’s not like I think I’m a prodigious talent or anything (obviously), but I turn into a horrible jellied mess when I go musicless for any stretch. I have become an addict in the best and worst senses of the word.
And I do stray- I get so easily demolished by self-doubt/hate; stymied by the ongoing internal court battle of the people vs the relevance of music as a life’s mission (Your honour I ask you, what the fuck good is this doing for anyone?!); demoralised by the dilapidated state of the music industry; prodded by the social pressures that come with imminent thirtydom, real-jobism, houses, $$$ etc etc.
I experience all of these to varying degrees all the time, and in spite of the sense of running out of time, the dealing with self-sabotage, the knowingly working towards an end that probably doesn’t exist, I still feel like a god when Thunder Road blasts through my buzzing car speakers, you can't escape that shit.
I think there's a raging dissonance in most people I know. The tension between what we are doing and what we feel like we should be doing is both what drives us and impedes us in pushing boundaries, acting, reacting, creating, searching – I use music to help resolve this dissonance. Ironically, my made-in-mexico fender jaguar can’t stay in tune for more than half a song, but you’ll hear that yourself soon enough. We're currently working on album #1 and the cockeyed jag is all over it. Recording it ourselves at Dayjob Studios aka my Mum's spare room - profesh.
Anyhoo, I’ll leave you here with one of my favourite lyrics of all time- it is all of the above in perfect distilled form, again from Bruce Springsteen who I recently found out is half Italian. Paesan!
“There’s something happening somewhere, baby I just know that there is.”
