The Original Idea

I believe I’ve mentioned this before somewhere on these pages: My favorite recordings are of my friends and family laughing. There’s an incredible thing that happens when suddenly Drew Patty or Laura Houlette or Noah Poole comes through the speakers laughing. Each person you know has a distinct and endearing laugh that you may not even remember until you hear it again years later.

The ambitious idea behind the Live Album Project was to roll the joy of making an album into the joy of traveling into the joy of visiting old friends and relations. It was going to be a tour to Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Indianapolis, Portland, San Francisco, and Austin. I’d write two to three songs while traveling, teach them to whatever musician(s) lived in that city and then hit an open mic and record a show with them.

Time, work, budget … well there are many reasons that this didn’t happen. Mainly, I didn’t plan ahead nearly enough. But I always said I wanted to do a live album during the Album of the Months Project and since this is the ninth year, it seemed like it had to happen now or it wouldn’t. Life is a series of compromises and I had to scramble to come up with the Live Album Experiment.

The New Concept

I decided to play two shows a week at open mics in New York. I could vary the type of music played by getting friends out to play with me on stage and by switching up instruments. Instead of it just being the boring dude with a guitar and harmonica, I was looking at potentially all of the following:

• Play a keyboard set by feeding it through my computer and playing on top of preset tracks. Maybe I could finally roll out something from La Casa Di Omicidio.
• A singer/songwriter set with storytelling in between.
• Play a set with a second guitarist with me on guitar, keyboards, accordion and clarinet.
• A band set with bass, violin, and piano.
• A set using a looper app I downloaded onto my iPad.

While this didn’t fill my desire to visit old musician friends and play music with them, it would at least make a lot of new music and maybe do something different.

The Stark Reality

Most of these ideas weren’t possible.

• The update to Garageband and iOS broke the driver for my 61-key keyboard. Synth music was out.
• Scheduling the other musicians I knew in town didn’t happen. I was left to play by myself.
• The looper app was fun, but didn’t really seem to work live. I needed something with a petal although I’m not sure I could have done that live either.
• My guitar doesn’t plug in and wouldn’t pick up on a microphone.  I could only find one open mic a week that had a community guitar to play on. I was down to only four shows for the month. Fortunately I liked the place. It had a little stage up a half-flight of stairs and a nice feel to it.

So I recalibrated. I was now stuck with the singer/songwriter/storytelling thing. I wanted it to be better than just strumming, but the problem is, well, I’m not very good at guitar. I had to rethink the way that I play it a bit. In order words, I had to simplify and then simplify the simplification just so I could maybe be sure that I could actually play and sing at the same time.

I practiced by recording an album of demos. Mostly these are unmixed and are simple run throughs. Sometimes I tried singing really low and sometimes higher just to see if it sounded better. It was rare to have a second take and I only double-tracked a couple of solos in fun.

For the performances, I wrote five new songs and one time-filling instrumental, repurposed one old song, practiced one of the first songs I ever memorized, and wrote a weird beginning to a cover. I figured if I had to I’d do some older, simpler songs: Adieu (I Do), Husk, Moon, and The Restaurant with No Name. Tours are supposed to have greatest hits, right?

Overall, I was pretty happy when I played these. I could do this.

I didn’t originally intend on making these a part of this month’s album, but …

Download the Demos

The Performances

I only got on stage twice the entire month – a far cry from the twice a week or the multi-city tour I’d originally imagined. I went three times total, but on the 15th, I simply never got picked to play. I’ll let you listen to the results below. Then I’ll make some comments on what this was like.

Download the Live Album

• There’s something more existentially vacant about being on stage alone with no one listening. I felt a creative claustrophobia. On the other hand, this also meant that I could restart songs whenever I wanted.
• Perhaps it was the winter but on stage the dark and dry humor wasn’t come through. Man, I wrote a lot of spiteful songs this year. I thought the songs were funny and ridiculous, but with no one listening, they felt like off-hand depressing comments and desperate. I suppose that’s a predictable outcome when you write something called “The Sick of People Grumpy Asshole Misanthropic Blues.”
• The audience during the first performance was much kinder with applause.
• I was a lot more comfortable on stage the second time. The first time was basically an extended panic attack. The guitar felt like an obstacle I was trying to get around.
• The songs I wrote had too many words to be well remembered. When you are telling a story, there’s an ebb and flow to the audience reaction. You kind of know where they are in the story and you can work from that. A song has a place where the lyrics fit. If you miss the place that the lyrics fit, you aren’t going to be able to fake fit them in later.
• Speaking of the stories, they were even worse and fell flat because it wasn’t a venue for talking really. People were trying to eat their meals. Also since I didn’t prepare anything really to say, it’s just meaningless rambling.
• The entire project immediately felt more like a vanity project than any other moment in the last eight years. Previously this was just a fun hobby. Something to do at the darkest point of winter with friends. This year it felt like public masturbation.
• Every song came in about a minute shorter than in practice. I guess it was harder to really know if it was worth picking through a random “instrumental” part when I wasn’t really feeling the song I was playing.
• When I was asked to play more songs, I completely felt uncomfortable with almost everything I’d practiced and went for a random song written years ago in Chicago about the movie “Deathrace 2000.” Not sure why.
• “Hello Everybody” was actually an improvised song that was written on stage during a chord issue, I rerecorded it as a demo because why not?
• I wish I’d had one more live performance to choose from so I could cut and mix the album down and maybe remove the flubbed John Hartford cover. Whatever, not all albums of the month can be listenable.
• I felt humiliated in general when getting off-stage. Sub-mediocrity was a lot harder for me to handle than I thought it would be. The rest of the open mic regulars were very friendly and I felt like an infiltrator, like a journalist that had gone undercover. I guess I couldn’t have been that bad. I was asked to attend to a songwriter series in March by a much better musician that said I sounded like Bill Callahan. Another musician, also much better than me, told me that he liked my Weezer cover. Flattery, however undeserved it is, will always be accepted immediately after time on stage.

Conclusion

During the last show I realized that I’d been to the place once, years ago, with a girlfriend. It was actually during my first visit to New York City. We’d sat on the patio, ate lunch, and met up with an old college friend named Aline Mendelsohn. The girlfriend has long been an ex now. And it was the last time I saw Aline, I think. I wonder what happened to her? I’ll bet I have recordings of both of them laughing somewhere.

I’d do it again. Maybe even next week. Maybe twice a week for the next ten years.  Hopefully every once in awhile, I’ll have someone on stage with me to smile with when a guitar part goes a little astray or a forgotten lyric gets a mumbled rewrite.

Thanks for listening everybody. We’re nine years in. Only next year to go.