Guy With a Guitar

This past week, I made new mixes of some "old" songs, produced between 2011 and 2016, which I'd always felt I'd not mixed well, and remained favorable enough to me to try to give them the treatment they'd deserved. It was also to be a dual experiment: to see how my abilities might have advanced in the past few years, and how differently I might hear this music now, since it was made with guitars on it, and I haven't played guitar in a couple of years. Most of the results were improvements, and others were compromises. I replaced some of the synth/keyboard sounds due to how their parts would set in the new mixes, cleaned-up some dirty audio tracks, added some compression here and there to tame errant dynamics, switched most of the drum and bass sounds for new ones, and made mixes with the strings and piano isolated from the rest of the arrangements of a couple of songs. All of these songs remain among my favorites of those I've done, and contextualized in this manner amount to a fairly strong album.

The impetus for this came as I'd hit the final stage of an album of new material, which I'd been letting occur at its own pace, stepping back from it every so often in order to let decisions make themselves. I think it's kinda lame to keep revisiting one's past glories, but the new mixes felt like unfinished business, which for the past month has been a theme of my personal life, as well. Every so often, one has to step aside from one's own life and assess how far one has come, how one's outlook has changed, and how one feels like going about things now. We get habituated to the way we've "always" done things, to ways of thinking which had belonged other situations or been appropriate for past stages of our lives. One can persist in ways of thinking, behaving and operating, without realizing that one has outgrown them or that innovative modes and methods would be more appropriate and effective, or just not an outmoded impediment.

One thing I have given-up is playing guitar. It's not that I plan on never doing so again, I just got tired of writing guy-with-a-guitar songs. In doing the new mixes of the songs, last week, I could hear how I had been bound by my own capabilities and limitations in playing that instrument, and thereby prone to repeating ideas and techniques. It became like a conversation that one keeps having with someone whose friendship one has outgrown – you two keep returning to it because it's a vestigial basis for the bond between you. That's how I feel with guy-with-a-guitar music. I can still appreciate the songer-singwriter thing, the band-guys thing, et al., but such also feels like relapsing into old habits which had held me back (though I do grant myself one instance of drinking alcohol per season). Scraping and clanking away at a guitar is just not what I want to do, anymore. When I started playing guitar again in 2011, it was exciting to be making pop-rock songs again, but it also diverted me away from a much more imaginative musical adventure on which I had embarked without the encumbrant baggage of guitar in hand. I'd like to find my way back to that path in the wilderness.

Listening to these "old" songs with new mixes, I realized also that, after the point where I'd left-off, I couldn't have done anything new with guitar. By contrast, some guys-with-guitars I've known have been quite successful by doing the same things as they had a long time ago. There are some musicians who fret that doing something new might alienate their established audience, despite that some people might welcome the change or be newly enamored of the stylistic divergence. I myself don't have a sense of having an audience, and I am always concerned that I might not be doing something different enough from what I've done before. Moreover, my artistic life lies on the same continuum as my personal life, so if I'm experiencing an overhaul in my attitude toward how I lead my life and deal with others, I'm going to feel that I should be writing different types of songs and making different-sounding music. Even if this not be conscious, it is inevitable. I'm tying to express, not to impress.