Strange Cocktails of Rhythm and Reason
In 1996 I was recording a 5 song EP with a band called Furious Styles. There was a moment during one of the sessions when it became clear to me what I really loved about music…..the act of creating a vehicle of melodic expression and thought that can be shared with others. I was standing there in the vocal booth at Exocet Recording Studios in Atlanta looking at the carpeted floor in silence, thinking to myself…this is me…this is what I love…this is what I want to do with my life.
The band wasn’t the reason I was there in that studio. Playing in a band was never my focus, but it did give me the opportunity to write and record my songs on a larger scale than I could have afforded to do on my own. My focus was crafting ideas and melodies into strange cocktails of rhythm and reason. I was there to realize the ideas that had only lived in my head up until that point. In the studio, I could do that. I could create something from nothing. Something that other people could take into their minds and make their own…free to interpret any way they chose. For me, this is true beauty of music and songwriting.
Everyone I know can think of a song that takes them back to a special time in their life. A well written song is a multi-faceted communicated human expression that can become a part of the listener forever. In this way, I believe songwriting and recording stand out from other forms of art. There are obviously emotional elements to all art forms, but music has the ability to shift the listener through time. For example, when I hear Out Spaced by the Super Furry Animals, I’m immediately transported to the winter of 1999 in the Oude Haven, Rotterdam NL. I spent a great deal of time listening to that record in Locus Publicus and Cambrinus under Piet Bloom’s yellow cubes drinking the best Trappist Ales I’ve ever put to my lips. I guess that recording made an indelible impression on my mind. I can still feel the warmth of the fireplace at Locus Publicus when I hear “Pam V” on that recording. Music shifts me in ways that other art forms have never been able to do.