Feedback (2010)
Word
Association: Hyper-abstract.
Thoughts: Feedback is more of a boutique record. I saw it as more of a stop-gap. Meaning, I wasn’t ready to make a new record yet, but I had this idea of something I wanted to do and wanted to try. I never saw it as a “major” release. It was almost like The House Show was or something like that.
Inspirations/Influences: Feedback is a super abstract piece of
work. It’s instrumental, classically composed, electronic and it’s based on The
Lord’s Prayer. I’m really glad I did it. I learned a tremendous amount doing
it.
Feedback was the first record that was
kind of the product of a new creative process that I had come up with for
myself. Everything before that was imagining the thing I wanted to make,
imagining it almost finished and then trying to plot my way there. I would
start with the end product and the record was the journey of me trying to get
to the thing I had imagined back on day one. But you never quite get there. So the
album winds up being the results of all the compromises you made on your way to
trying to get somewhere. Somewhere a little after Stockholm Syndrome, I decided that I was going to stop coming up
with the final product first. I decided to not even think about the final
product and have no consideration for what I’m making while I’m making it. I
decided to just make choices about what I could control… who I want to hang out
with, what I want to learn, how I want to spend my time in these five or six
months of my life spent making this record.
By the time
we were done, I wasn’t sure if the thing we had made was anything anyone would
want to listen to. I don’t know if it’s marketable or commercial on any level.
I don’t know if it’ll be interesting to anybody other than the few of us who
made it. Sandra helped me compose some of the songs and Josh mixed it, but
maybe it was just for me. I was okay with that. If I was that engaged with it
and enjoyed making it so much, then the thing I wind up making is kind of
secondary. Because the product is the thing I’m going to spend the least amount
of time with. I spent all of my time making it and the process was
amazing.
Production
Notes: I knew I
wanted to work with Josh again, making this my second record with him. I knew I
wanted to collaborate with my wife because we always have a good time doing
that. I knew I wanted to learn about instrumental music and how to be
intentional about content in complete abstraction. I knew I wanted to make
something that was purely electronic and work out my programming chops.
I knew I
wanted to study The Lord’s Prayer. It’s a fundamental part of my spirituality
that I didn’t know a lot about. There was a point at which Jesus gave us a
model for how to pray. Prayer is mystical and it’s a part of the way I look at
the world and it’s a part of my practice as a Christian person. So it seems
important when Jesus says "here is the structure by which you can know how to
talk to God." It’s a huge thing and I wanted to study that. So I spent six
months before I ever recorded a note just studying The Lord’s Prayer. Then I
started to study instrumental music and I started working on some new
instruments.
By then, I
was fully in my new studio space. I had pages and pages of notes on every single
line of The Lord’s Prayer and I decided to write a song for every line. I
wanted to represent the content of each line with only melodic and rhythmic
elements. In the first two weeks of the recording process, I remember just
coming out to the studio and staring at the speakers thinking today is “Thy
will be done” and I’ve got three pages of notes on just this line and how do I
make that come out of the speakers with no words. I just can’t tell you what a
brain trip that whole thing was. It was some of the hardest creative work I
have ever done in my life.
I
commissioned my buddy Jeremy Cowart to take some abstract photos and my buddy
Scott Erickson to do some paintings. I had them listen to the music, meditate
on the particular lines and make a piece of art for me for each line. We
included the pictures and the artwork in the packaging and I envisioned
listeners spreading them all out in front of them while they listened. I feel
like everything is so rigid and structured in a lot of churches. There are not
a lot of abstract moments in our big, corporate, collective worship services
where someone says “I’m going to give you a little bit of intention in terms of
what to meditate on and then I’m just going to let the Spirit do whatever He’s
going to do.” So for me it was like, all you’ve got to think about for the next
four minutes is “Hallowed be Thy name.” Here’s an image, here’s an abstraction,
but none of this is going to tell you what it means or what you’re supposed to
think about it. We infused the music with a lot of
symbolism, even down to the BPMs of those tracks and the rhythm of the
melodies. You can actually sing the line to the primary melody of every one of
those songs. There’s numerology in the intervals between the notes. I was
looking for anything non-lyrical I could use to get it across. But you don’t
need to know any of that while you’re just thinking about that one line and
clearing your head. When do we ever get to do that in the church? We need those
mystical, abstract moments where the Spirit can do what He wants do. I think we
need more instrumental, unstructured music to provide those moments and that’s
what I was trying to make. It was just a big, super abstract art project for
me.
Mixtape: I
think “Your Kingdom Come” is a good stand-alone. It gives you the feel of the
album and the energy of it.
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