CW25

I’ve always, with very few exceptions, mixed my voice/voices with the intention of the lyrics being intelligible. As a teenager in Durham, New Hampshire, in the early 90s, driving around town and scanning the radio, I didn’t like much of the music I heard on WUNH, the college station. There were a number of reasons, but one was that the vocals were chronically mixed too low, like the singer was ashamed of their lyrics or voice or both. My friend Ben and I, (compulsively) making albums on a borrowed 4-track, consciously didn’t mix that way. Bring the voice up.

Never the less, sometimes double-tracking or other effects can obscure certain lines. Or sometimes it’s fun to mix certain instruments too loud. I can hear what I’m singing, but I’m singing it, and I wrote it. And given that I like to work, start to finish, with no outside input—my friend Nick Bisceglia lovingly called the aesthetic “No Perspective” the other day when we were playing my new album, already mixed and sequenced, into his computer for (light) mastering and publishing—if people give me notes, at most it will influence my future work. The new thing is already done before anyone hears it.

And no matter how clear a vocal is recorded, and how hot it is mixed, when you’re singing crazy things, people will still struggle to understand it all. Maybe they can, but they’re not sure. I mess around with word order, sometimes I make up words. I make references that are difficult to catch, and references that are impossible to catch.

I don’t know why I’ve always been so strict about not printing lyrics. Maybe I liked forcing my modest audience to lean in and squint, at least a little? I know I liked the idea that if something in the painting was blurry, that was just how the painting was. (As opposed to the music-reviews idea, albeit almost entirely moot in my case, that the production and mixing are only halfway art—they’re also something nice and correct that you wear to the gala so you can get in the door. I.e., closer to “How good is this Wi-Fi signal?” than, like, looking at a melting church Van Gogh painted.) In any case, I’ve changed my tune. Maybe it was publishing a book of poetry, maybe it has to do with this newsletter. Maybe I just had fun typing up the lyrics for Jelly Road, the album I made with Blake Mills that came out last July. (We wrote the lyrics, like the music, together, but I did the typing of them when our little team (me remotely from VT) was designing the gatefold.) It was fun. My recent two albums have the lyrics on the Bandcamp. I’m also going to start publishing old lyrics here, a song at a time, with some commentary, some annotations.

The first of these, today, is a song of mine from 2012, from the album Maya Properties, called “mystical ringo.”