Attentive collectors of my recently remastered CDs, if there were any, would probably notice a conspicuous omission: my 1996 Christmas song, “Shut Up And Have A Merry Christmas.” It’s not on the remastered Sounds Like Music (the album that originally included it as a bonus track), nor on Leaving It Behind (which collected non-album tracks from that period).
Although I tend to regard the song as one of my lesser efforts, its disappearance from my catalog was not an attempt at revisionism. The fact is, I never considered “Shut Up” a proper part of Sounds Like Music, so it didn’t really belong on the remastered version. And while I considered including it on Leaving It Behind, I ultimately omitted it because, as a Christmas song, it seemed destined to be a “skip-over” track most of the time.
I decided instead that “Shut Up And Have A Merry Christmas” is best presented as a stand-alone entity: a single, if you will. In this modern age, that means making it available exclusively as a downloadable track, rather than putting it on any kind of CD.
I’m in the process of renovating my music site, which will include this and other tracks for download. But I thought I should go ahead and make this track available while the season is right. Here is “Shut Up And Have A Merry Christmas,” remixed and remastered in 2009.
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Well, it’s done. Yesterday I listened through the latest test copy of the remastered Sounds Like Music CD, and I decided to call it final. Yes, I could always keep tweaking it, but at some point I have to overcome my obsessive tendencies and let it go. There’s an extraordinarily small market for this CD — probably just a subset of the handful of people who owned the original release — but that’s not the point. The point was for me to finally be satisfied with the mixes and mastering of the songs on that album, so I can move on.
The real significance here is not the availability of the remastered SLM — it is rather that I have finally finished remastering, remixing, and repackaging all of my old music. This project has occupied one of my front burners, on and off, for just over seven years, far longer than I expected it to take; I started planning it just after I finished Unqualified.
So it is finally time to put up or shut up. Do I have any new music in me? Or, having put all the old stuff in order, am I done with this musical hobby? Stay tuned to find out the answer, just as soon as I do.
For some reason, today I was thinking about the dates of several events from my past, and I suddenly noticed something that I never noticed before. I don’t know why this is, but for some reason, important things have a tendency to happen to me during the month of May. (OK, I do know why it is: it’s a coincidence. But that’s not as much fun.)
In May 1965, I was born. It’s hard to top that one, as far as personal significance is concerned.
In May 1970, I moved with my family to South Carolina, a transition that marks the beginning of my conscious memory and profoundly affected the rest of my life.
In May 1977, Star Wars was released. Anyone who was around at the time will understand why I count that date as an important one.
In May 1984, I met a girl named Lynn while working at Carowinds.
In May 1990, I reported for my first-ever day of work at IBM.
In May 1992, Lynn and I officially became landowners, closing on five acres of land in Chatham County.
In May 1997, Lynn and I reached the decision to have a child.
There are exceptions, of course: plenty of Mays in which nothing of note happened, and plenty of important things that have happened to me in months other than May. Still, though, it seems to me that a disproportionate number of my life’s most important events and transitions have taken place during May: events whose repercussions continue to reverberate right up to the present. (I’m not even counting my three graduations, because that would seem like cheating.)
Now that I’ve discovered this, I’m not sure what to do about it. Other than be very, very careful during May.
During the last few weeks, I’ve started working on restoring and remixing my 1996 album Sounds Like Music, the last phase of my multiyear restoration project. At the moment, SLM exists only in the form of the so-called “Special Edition” CD I released in 1999, which was mixed on a four-track cassette deck and poorly mastered. The objective now is to produce a new CD version of SLM, digitally mixed and mastered and, hopefully, presenting the songs in a form that’s truer to what I originally had in mind.
Going into this project, I expected it to be very straightforward: the multitrack sessions were in good shape, so it would be a simple matter of recreating the original four-track mixes, tweaking them a bit, and doing a bit of mastering. But as I got started, I realized that I could do better than that. To explain, I need to describe the process I used to record most of the songs on the album.
My main instruments at the time were my Kurzweil K2000 keyboard (which I used for piano, bass, strings, brass, and various other sounds), and my Alesis SR-16 drum machine. Typically, I’d begin by recording all of these synthetic parts using the K2000’s built-in MIDI sequencer; then I would record that sequence, submixed on two tape tracks (preserving the stereo imaging). That left me with two tape tracks on which to overdub vocals and guitars.
The advantage of this approach was that it enabled me to build up complex arrangements entirely on the K2000 and record them using only two tracks. But the disadvantage was that once the K2000/SR-16 submix was captured on tape, I could no longer change it. If I later decided that the bass was too loud, or the stereo placement of the piano was wrong, there was nothing I could do about it.
I immediately ran into this limitation as I tried to remix the earliest SLM song, “I Can’t Believe My Eyes,” which I was never happy with. But then I realized: I still have the K2000 and the SR-16, and I still have the old diskette on which I saved the original sequences. Was it possible, I wondered, to go back to those sequences and build a new multitrack master that gave me more flexibility?
It seemed a worthwhile experiment, so I dug out the SR-16 and its power supply, reconnecting it to the K2000 with a MIDI cable. I found and loaded the original “I Can’t Believe My Eyes” sequence, confirming that it was still intact. I then set about recording the original sequenced parts to the computer, this time keeping each on a separate track. My audio interface has only two input channels, so I used multiple passes, recording the sequenced parts one at a time and then resynchronizing them on the computer. (Fortunately, that isn’t difficult to do; the K2000’s internal clock doesn’t drift like an analog tape deck’s playback motor, so as long as the tracks are lined up, they stay in sync.)
That left just the vocal and guitar tracks, which I had to bring in from the original 1995 analog recording. (Here, analog playback drift was an issue, so I had to use Adobe Audition’s digital effects to adjust the timing a bit.) The product of all of this was a new multitrack master of the song, this time using ten tracks instead of the original four. Better yet, except for the guitars and vocals, the tracks are all brand-new digital recordings. The song remains what it has always been, but I should now be able to create a new mix that overcomes at least some of the deficiencies of the original.
Having proved the technique, I’ve continued to reconstruct additional SLM recordings using the same approach. It’s really quite bizarre, because it means I’m not just restoring or remixing Sounds Like Music; I’m actually rerecording much of it, even though it’s still my 1990s performances that I’m recording.
The good news is that this ought to result in a version of SLM that sounds better than I thought possible. The bad news is that this means my “Sounds Like Music” restoration project is going to be much more complex than I anticipated.
I am aware that I am a champion procrastinator. (The dormancy of this blog for the last half-year is evidence of this, if any were needed.) But what is the net result of my procrastination?
Consider that, in simplified terms, my activities can be divided into two categories: Things I Have To Do, and Things I Want To Do. The former includes mowing the grass, going to work, and washing dishes; the latter includes writing, reading, recording music, and (yes!) blogging.
The Things I Have To Do will, by definition, be done eventually. I might put them off for a little while, but most such activities tend to enforce their own deadlines. I have to turn up for work every day, I have to mow the grass before it obscures the house, I have to wash the dishes so we can continue eating. I do these things because I must.
Which means that by procrastinating — by choosing idleness over activity — I am mainly denying myself only the opportunity to do the Things I Want To Do. I am guaranteeing that my life will be filled only with the Have-To-Dos. This is a stupid thing to choose.
Whether I have the wisdom, or the energy, to change this habit remains to be seen, but I thought I’d start with a modest blog post. Baby steps, you know.
This blog is currently dormant, but I’m trying not to let the same happen to my (apparently quarterly) podcast. Pointless #11 is a little different, and commemorates the release of Star Trek.
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My podcast Pointless has settled into a predictable schedule: the episodes are roughly quarterly, but only in odd-numbered years. So it’s about time for Pointless #10.
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We appear to have been near Ground Zero for today’s winter weather; according to the local TV news, most of the area got at most 4-6 inches of snow. Looking out the window this afternoon, it was obvious to me right away that we were on the high end of that range:
As it turned out, it was even better than that. Although the depth varied from one spot to another, in unobstructed open areas of the front and back yard we had nearly eight inches:
Just as amazing as the volume of snow was its quality. It was perfect, fluffy, powdery snow, and when we caught the flakes on our gloves we were amazed to see the crystalline structure of the snowflakes visible to the naked eye:
I’ve never before seen snowflakes that looked like that, except in cartoons.
A recent Popular Mechanics feature lists the Chevrolet Sprint as #2 on its list of “Retro Fuel-Efficient Cars.” Naturally I had to smile at this, because my first car was a 1986 Sprint.
I have to admit that its fuel efficiency wasn’t what led me to the Sprint. I didn’t know anything about cars, so when it became apparent that I needed one (I was moving to an off-campus apartment, so walking to class would no longer be an option), I just went where my dad took me: to the local Chevrolet dealer, where my sister had bought a Sprint months earlier. The Sprint’s main attraction was its low price, and I was confident that even my relatively meager pay from summers at Carowinds would be enough for me to keep up the payments.
We met with the same salesman who had sold Barbara her Sprint. There was no negotiation; the only decisions to make were the color (I chose silver), the accessories (air conditioning was a must), and the financing (my parents lent me the $800 down payment, and later forgave that loan as a graduation present).
When the deal was done, the salesman handed me the keys, and also a voucher I could use to top off the gas tank at a nearby station. This seemed a generous gesture at the time, but it was pocket change: the Sprint’s gas tank couldn’t have held more than six or seven gallons, and gas prices were under a dollar. During the years that followed, gas prices fell even further (dropping lower than seventy cents a gallon), and I found that at most — if I drove well beyond “E” on the gauge — I could maybe get five dollars into the thing.
By today’s standards, the Sprint was a deathtrap. Back then, airbags were unheard of in such a cheap car. And its gas mileage was so good partly because of its lightweight construction: the whole car weighed about 1500 pounds, which meant that it wouldn’t have fared well in a collision with anything heavier than a grocery cart.
But I never had a wreck in the Sprint, except for a low-speed fender bender in a parking lot in Columbia. And because the car was so light, its three-cylinder engine provided a surprising amount of power. I customized it with a cassette stereo and aftermarket speakers, added a headlights-on buzzer, and made it my own. It delivered pizzas with me in Columbia, drove me to Carowinds and back, took me to see Lynn, and even saw me through my first couple of years at IBM.
Sadly, I did not take care of it as well as I should have. After I started grad school at UNC, I tended to let the Sprint sit in the parking lot for months at a time, neglect from which its fuel system never recovered. After that, it never again ran as smoothly as it had before; sometimes it would die completely and refuse to restart until after I’d paid a mechanic to look at it and find nothing wrong. These problems gradually got worse, even after I took it to a guy in Raleigh who specialized in the dying art of rebuilding carburetors.
On top of that, all of the car’s nonessential parts started to fail. The cassette player and the rear speakers quit working, as did the cruise control and the dome light; the turn signal’s self-cancel became unreliable; and the upholstery began to split and disintegrate. I was losing all of the conveniences and comforts in a car that was never terribly comfortable to begin with.
When the car started consuming large quantities of oil, I realized that it was time to let it go. Past time, really: here I was, now a working professional, still driving my college-student car. And even though it was paid off, keeping it any longer was going to become a losing proposition.
It could have lasted longer: Barbara’s 1986 Sprint survived years longer than mine did, despite having taken her to California and back. She eventually replaced it with a Geo Metro — a later, rebranded edition of the same car, a version of which Popular Mechanics (rather unfairly) includes as #4 on its list.
But my Sprint had given its all, and in 1994 I finally replaced it with a pickup truck I remember far less fondly. The Sprint itself was so run-down that I didn’t even attempt to sell it or trade it in; I allowed a friend who owned a Metro to harvest its tires and any other parts he could use, and then had it towed unceremoniously to a junkyard, where parts of it may still rust today.
Sadly, I apparently never took any pictures of my Sprint while it was young and healthy. It wasn’t until the very end that, overcome by sentiment, I felt compelled to visit the Sprint one last time, reminisce about our years together, and snap a photograph to remember it by.
