1.
Swan Lake is a musical project that I am a part of. It’s not quite a “band”—we have no drummer, no bass player, no help. There are only songwriters. There are three songwriters: me and my good friends Spencer Krug and Dan Bejar.
Dan dubbed the project Swan Lake, further cementing his position in the skate-punk Mecca that is EAST VAN/STRATHCONA as a lunatic, a pompous member of the bourgeoisie, a man too obsessed with the immutable worth of his own cantos to even crack a WILDCAT ©or a DUDE ©. Before he christened our association, I jokingly and self-effacingly called the project MODERN SONGWRITERS, a name so cringe-inducing that I thought “surely no one will think we actually would call ourselves MODERN SONGWRITERS”. I was wrong, sarcasm sucks.
One day we were in the studio, and we were sitting in what studios call “the lobby”, which is a front-window-secretary-space with couches and a coffee maker and usually a Nintendo machine. We were sitting on these leather couches when the most tortured, un-listenable sounds started floating out of the mixing room. This was the sound of our first record: I think Dan or Spencer said “it sounds like a boar dying in a tar pit.”
I am an excellent synthesizer: I have very little creativity, very little spark, and I only possess a knack at fusing things together and making causal connections. Immediately the image of a wild and frenzied boar in a tar-pit passed through my mind: it was gasping, bleating, gnashing, and death-moaning in the tar-pit, the ugliest sound on earth and in earth. I said “Let’s call our record Beast Moans”. We were laughing a lot—it was nice. I miss those guys even now.
Beast Moans was recorded through a DIGI 001, a piece of shit that looks like a dolphin. I remember a week before we started our project, waking up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, thinking ‘Oh my God all we have is a DIGI 001 and it looks like a fucking dolphin.’ I was really scared.
We had a bit of money and I thought about buying an APOGEE ENSEMBLE, until I turned one on. Every light starts blinking at once, and all the lights are barney-coloured and cotton-candy coloured, and any hope of conjuring up some “Morrison-like plunge into the darkness with me baby mojo fest” is eliminated by this gaudy and pukey light show.
I am speaking about analog to digital converters here: The microphone captures the sound, the pre-amp gives the sound its shape and its tone, but this sound or signal is still in an analog format. After the pre-amp, the sound can go to either an additional shaping device, like EQ or Compression, or straight to the recorder. If the recorder is digital, like a computer, the analog signal needs to be transmogrified into a digital code, represented as “zeroes and ones”. Some boxes do this really well. Other boxes are shitty—the DIGI 001 is famously shitty.
So the record ended up sounding pretty shitty!
There are some pretty interesting ideas on Beast Moans though, and at least shitty is a sound.
2.
I've had an idea, a concept, for my music for some time. This idea is best represented as a gigantic bowl of vibrant, pulsating, intersecting wet spaghetti noodles that wrap themselves around two or three monolithic meatballs. So in a song like “City Calls”, the umpteen snaking vocal lines and mimetic organ and guitar lines wrap around the only slightly-saucy meatball of a floor tom, or a meatball of a Dan Bejar singing “and the ill-milk in your bones…”, and this song might be thought of as flying towards you in space, and as it grows closer you realize that it gets bigger and fills more of your vision, that is to say that the negative space is being continually blocked out, continually being eaten up by this spherical mass. At the same time you realize that the plate is getting bigger, you also realize that your vision does not become more acute, you do not notice any new detail about the surface of the meatballs or about the make-up or consistency of the vibrant noodles—the image eats up more space, but you don’t ever get any more information about what is eating up more space. So in the end you feel angry and like puking, but you also can’t really look away. I hope.
Except that I do not feel that I have ever represented this idea in my music successfully.
3.
We laid down our bare-bones parts in a small barn on top of a mountain range. We used RCA 77dx mics, and great river pre-amps, and a blackface 1176 compressor, thanks for asking. The bare-bones tracks sounded pretty cool. We should have just left it at that, but I wanted spaghetti and meatballs. So I fucked it all up or whatever. It’s no big deal: I fuck a lot of things up.
I can’t remember if this essay had a point. I started it a month ago and remembered to try and finish it today.
4.
One of the funny things about Enemy Mine was that, for all this talk about collaboration, there wasn’t too many times that we were all in front of a microphone or a monitor together.
Allow me to digress, and through digression I will come to a point.
Melanie and I: we live a soft, domestic life. We go to the same video store everyday. We have a relationship with the woman at the beer store. We know the cashiers at the grocery store.
The recording of Enemy Mine, due to everyone’s schedules, was kind of weird and intense and I did not get to see Melanie as much as I usually like, which is of course every waking second. In fact, I hardly saw her at all.
And I never saw Spencer for the first two weeks because he was tangled up in his life in Montreal.
So for the first stretch of Enemy Mine recording in February 2008, I spent every waking second with someone whose soul I am slightly less mystically connected to: Dan Bejar.
The clerks and cashiers who, for years, have seen Melanie and I cuddling in line to buy our carrots or arguing over Terms of Endearment (my choice) or Krull (her choice) or canoodling while we wait for our Africanos, now saw me with a new constant companion: Daniel, with his trimmed beard, and his scarf, and his tan jacket, and his city-guy loafers, and his eccentric hair and his distant, superior, European sensibility.
Every day at the video store, and the beer store (buying Strongbows no less), we would giggle over something, and he would buy his Spanish wine and me my Strongbows.
Important: all of the “Recording” money was in Dan’s account, so he was always paying for everything. This act occurred many times, and the act procured more than a six-pack: he bought Toilet-paper and coffee. The kind I always get. And a toothbrush.
I think these are things couples buy.
I started to sense this palpable anguish from the younger members of our cashier-community. This anguish was not strictly homophobic, but more a question of TRUE LOVE: where was Mel? We seemed so in love!
And who is this bearded guy who is buying everything? What are you two giggling about? What are you doing, man! You’re throwing your life away! This guy: what’s his story! And shouldn’t I have waited a respectable month before I introduced this new companion to my community?
Lines were drawn, and though Melanie and I did not know it, the community sided with Mel. It’s funny to think: she was just working away at her nursing job, totally oblivious to the immense community outpouring of sympathy that was being psychically channeled against me (and this decrepit urban usurper), and in favor of her.
We had no idea.
This went on for two weeks: by the end of our time together, I fully expected some life counseling: a cashier intervention.
And then one day Spencer showed up, and the very next day Dan left. And the whole sordid, or seemingly sordid, ritual of video-renting and Strongbow-purchasing and toothpaste/toiletries buying started up again, but now with my new friend. This ritualistic living began anew, but now with my new young-looking handsome cherubic friend. And still: no sign of Melanie.
As if I had ditched Melanie, burned through Dan, and had now settled on this latest untarnished prize.
Succubus with a blonde beard.
So now they were like “Well, we were just starting to get used to that old dude, that guy with the beard, and now you’re bringing this new little guy in? With his soft voice and his canvas shoes and his gentle mannerisms? What’s next? Who the fuck is next? Where’s Melanie? Where’s old guy? Who’s this young guy?” and so on and so on, a vicious and dizzying cycle of serial mono-ga-tude and homophobia-lite chorusing out of their judgmental gaze.
And then, as if the torrid clouds of my new “experimental lifestyle” had passed over our island and headed out to the open ocean, Melanie returned to my side.
The first part of the tracking of Enemy Mine was done!
We had our gentle life back. I made all kinds of triumphant appearances at our local haunts, my arm wrapped proudly around Mel: Even the nihilistic stock-boy who doesn’t believe in love and who makes puking sounds when we smooch by the canned peas, even he was openly sobbing tears of relief. The universe had righted itself. Old poet and young page/squire were phantoms of mist. Melanie and I laughed and joked in the aisles.
The old guy at the video store who loves his rye and cokes looked me in the eye again.
5.
We did a second round of singing and plinking in Vancouver, at JC/DC studio, in April 2008.
I felt comfortable there. I had one great experience at JC/DC.
Let me write it down if I can.
Dan was off reading Paul Reiser’s Fatherhood, or grabbing a pizza, and Spencer was in the singing room. JC and DC were out of town. So, on this day, I was without qualification the master of the control room.
I was rolling around the floor, rolling in freedom, rolling because the control chair has wheels. I had my feet up on the computer like Spider-man’s boss. I was in charge.
We were working on one of Dan’s songs—I think it’s called “Ballad of a Swan Lake”. The last two minutes of the song is chiefly Spencer and I wailing “I sat down / and took a number / at the table where / death resides”
What a beautiful line. It’s courageous, and noir, and of course very funny. I walked around for months softly singing this song, this one line: it puts a lilt in my step. I felt lucky.
As I’ve said, for the last half of this song, there’s one track of me wailing this line, over and over again. And then Spencer said “let me try wailing!”
And of course he did his wailing. And then he said, into the microphone, “Let me try doing another track of wailing!”
And I was like “Fucking A”!
So I panned his first wail to his left headphone. This means you only hear it in your left headphone or speaker. This is the difference between “Stereo” and “Mono”: the ability to assign or weight specific tracks to one speaker. It supposedly creates more space.
I kept my wail “in the middle”, meaning it went to both headphones equally in volume. And I put his soon to be recorded second wail on the right side.
Think: Three horsemen galloping down a narrow and short stone canyon, two of them identical twins, all three riders screeching a litany about death. Each horse has an identical human face, a classic mix of Spaniard and Sephardic Jew. The face of the horse bears a well-manicured beard.
I had a kind of platonic vision of music when he was recording his second wail. I saw beams and streams of yellow light emanating from the tweeters, and I saw condensed tendrils of purple oozing from the woofers. I spun around and around on my control chair. I lost my mind in the righteousness of it all. I flew into the birth milk of the cosmos and I smelt a star, I fell onto the top of Mt. Olympus and I picked a yellow flower out of Zeus’ sandal. I did, I did: all of this, I swear. But this is personal, and I am not sure if anyone else will have a similar reaction if anyone else ever comes to hear the song.
And then Spencer asked “How was that?”
And I pushed the speak button and said “Pretty good, bud.”
And that is all I have to say about Enemy Mine.
