Took a little time off this month, but here’s a few morsels of inspiration that have been infiltrating my eardrums and eye holes…

As far as music, been listening to Alexander Tucker’s album Dorwytch.  I’m not feeling his voice 100% but there’s some nice stuff there.  Been checking out the Clams Casino mixtape, good music for doing computer work.  NPR’s been streaming the new Roots album, dig that, and hooray for Questlove.  I picked up the new Fleet Foxes record over the summer, but kind of forgot about it until last week – great cold weather music, wish our vocals could sound that lush…

For reasons that will be apparent at some time in the future, I’ve also been revisiting a few of my favorite animated films this month, specifically Sylvain Chomet’s two major works: Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, as well as Adam Elliot’s feature length stop motion film Mary and Max.  Great stuff.

Oh, and The Walking Dead has been the highlight of my week lately.

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I don’t have a smart phone.  My phone handles calls and texts pretty well, and that’s about it.  It has a camera, but I don’t really use it.  When people ask why I don’t have an iPhone, I usually have two answers: it’s kind of expensive for the extra services, and I’m next to a computer most of the time anyway.  Lately I’ve added a third reason – if I’m out in the world and urgently need to look something up, the person next to me probably has a smart phone.

But as I was writing this post on creativity, I realized that one of the things that keeps me creative is observing the world.  Watching people, digging the vibe of different environments, taking mental snapshots of reality, becoming inspired by those random moments when the sights, sounds, smells, etc, come together to create this feeling that I can only express through music.

But when I sit in a public space taking in what’s going on, I notice that nearly everyone is engrossed in their phone.  A couple at a table are fidgeting with apps instead of talking, the bass player sitting next to me is playing scrabble, a dude at the bar is checking a baseball score every two minutes.  No one seems involved anymore.

And I know that I would be the same way if I had a smart phone.  I have no idea why things that happen on a screen seem so much more interesting than reality, but they definitely pull at you.  I suppose the world can seem boring if you let it.  But I don’t want to spend my time fidgeting, I want to leave myself open to inspiration.

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I was doing a lot of computer work this week, mostly working on our new website, a taste of which you can see here on the LSFG blog.  Listened to a lot of hip-hop, highlights were Q-Tip’s solo albums, Blakroc, and Wu-Tang chamber music.  All enjoyable, but not necessarily inspiring (though the Blakroc album is kind of badass.)

For true inspiration, this week was all about Medeski, Martin, & Wood’s documentary Fly in a Bottle.  Lots of awesome studio footage.  Check out the trailer, especially Medeski’s hammond solo.  Damn.  So expressive…

Also finally got around to watching a round-table discussion called Talking Funny, with Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Louis C.K., and Ricky Gervais.  Obviously the topic is stand-up comedy, but so much of what they discussed can be applied to music.  Definitely reaffirmed my thoughts about quality control and always trying to make your next song better than your last.

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Not long ago, a young musician I know was experiencing a bout of ‘creative block’ – sort of like writers block, but a more broad spectrum affliction.  When he had time to sit down and write a song, or play his guitar, or whatever, the ideas just wouldn’t flow.  He asked me for advice.

I make my living (meager as it is) by being creative.  This was my dream as a child, and though the reality turned out to be completely different from how I envisioned it years ago, I am extremely fortunate to have reached this unlikely goal.  Very few of the kids who say they want to be firemen when they grow up turn out to be firemen.  I think the reason I accomplished this is 10% luck, 20% talent, and 70% stubbornness.  Next month will mark my 10 year anniversary of not having a ‘real’ job.

The downside of being creative for a living is having to be creative for a living.  Any day that I’m not productive equals a day sometime in the future that I won’t have any money coming in.  The frustrating flip side of that coin is that anything I create today won’t put food on the table for months and often years from when I create it.  Because of this I don’t have the luxury of ‘creative block’ – I have to work.  But it also has to be good.

Over the years I’ve noticed there are a handful of things that seem to have an immediate, positive impact on the flow of creative juices.  They are:

• Quiet exercise (no music or crowded places, preferrably outside)
• Sustained healthy eating (especially avoiding sugar)
• Watching movies (they don’t even have to be that good to spark an idea)
• Daily reading (for me, well-written novels are where it’s at)
• Thoughtful observation of the world around me (being aware of my environment and asking ‘why?’ and ‘what if?)

Unfortunately the first two are a constant struggle for me to maintain.  The third and fourth are quite enjoyable, but time consuming.  Luckily the fifth one comes naturally.  But when I’m able to strike a balance between all of these things, the music, words, and ideas flow freely from my mind.  You’ll notice that there isn’t anything directly musical on that list.  I’ll address that some other time…

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Love Songs for Giants will be available at a lot of different places – Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, etc. If you’re going to spend your hard-earned money on our music, please keep in mind that a much larger percentage of the purchase price goes to the band if you buy it through our website (via bandcamp.) Also, the whole cloud-based streaming model is a farce. Cornfed Humans was pretty ‘successful’ on streaming sites like Spotify and all the money we’ve made from streaming it probably couldn’t buy us dinner.

Also, we very much appreciate everyone who has pre-ordered the record. To be honest, we never quite broke even on the CFH release, but thanks to our great fans (and cutting some costs on this release) we’ve made back over 15% of our budget already and the record’s not even out yet.

Anyway, we’re excited for you all to hear the new version of this record. Sorry it took so long – I think most musicians will agree that as soon as you write a new song, your old songs lose a bit of their appeal. Honestly, it was hard to get motivated to prepare a release of music that’s very ‘old’ to us at this point – but once we started hearing the new mixes we fell back in love with this music.

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Input/Output. He’s some stuff that inspired the work this week…

When we needed a quick dose of weirdness to feed our eccentric/grandiose side we cued up Make a Rising’s New I Fealing EP.

Cleaning up the studio, putting away mics, and wrapping cables after a long day of recording drum tracks seemed to go quicker while listening to the Get it Together album by Sola Rosa.

While staring mindlessly at html and css code for our new website that we’re working on, a few spins of Umphrey’s MGee’s new album Death by Stereo hit the spot.

And for general inspiration as musicians, the new video from Snarky Puppy got the old creative juices flowing.

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One of the reasons it took so long to put out this record is that it was recorded at the old studio with the old equipment and didn’t quite stand up to the current stuff we were doing (sonically, not musically.)

We spent a long time deciding how we wanted the final version of LSFG to sound. We started from scratch with the mixes, did some additional editing, and even re-recorded a few things. We’d spend a few days mastering the album, burn it, then take it out in the world to see how it sounded on various systems in various settings. Then we would inevitably come back with a list of things we didn’t like – usually relating to stuff on the lower end of the frequency spectrum, or certain instruments sounding too harsh or muddy. We went through this process four times before ending up with a version we were happy with.

The final version doesn’t have much compression on it, so it’s fairly dynamic, i.e. the quiet bits are quiet and the loud bits are loud. That being said, you’ll probably have to turn the volume up a tad more than some other records (including Cornfed Humans.) We think it sounds pretty good…
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Back in 2009, we released two different versions of Cornfed Humans. The CD version and the digital version on our website has the songs kind of flow into one another as one continuous piece of music. This is the ‘real’ version as far as I’m concerned. Most of the other digital versions (iTunes, etc) have “stand-alone” tracks with proper endings since a lot of people buy just one or two songs. (If anyone one is curious, Gran Torino is apparently our ‘hit’ – it outsells all the other songs on the album.) This is the ‘lame’ version.

I’ve always been an ‘album person’. Scroll through the music on my iPod and you will find nothing but complete albums. I know it’s old fashioned at this point, but that’s how I’ve always viewed recorded music. So when we heard how well the new track sequence flowed, somehow managing to bring together this myriad of songs into one cohesive statement, we said “Screw it, all those single-track people can suck it.” So, we’re releasing only one version of Love Songs for Giants – all the songs flow together, and if you buy only one track, or listen to it on shuffle or as part of a playlist, it will end abruptly. We’re okay with that now. This business of music is silly anyway, so there’s no point it trying to play by the rules…
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