Many of the upper management of The Mountain are now gone as of about 8 months ago, and the organization has a new purpose and drive. And there was something in me that wanted to be supportive of that. I had contacted the Board of Trustees and expressed my support of their decision and recognized their courage. To express my support, Thea and I agreed to discount our normal fee for concerts for there first annual membership weekend since the transition in October 2010. Since leaving The Mountain 16 years ago, standing and playing music in a space that I had remembered for all the different emotions that I had felt there, there was a feeling of coming full circle, back to a place that I had loved and felt its potential to change lives. It certainly had changed mine! I felt I had come back home, but I was a totally different person than when I had first arrived here 17 years ago. It felt fresh and alive again to be performing in that same space, meeting people that I had known back then and how they welcomed me back to The Mountain with open arms! What a healing experience as our concert was very well received!
The next day, we were due in the recording studio, Sound Temple Studios, to lay down rhythm beds to 7 or 8 songs of our new CD, Serve Love. It has taken Thea and I a long time to get to this point. So it was very exciting to finally be laying down some real "keeper" tracks with some great musicians. River Guerguerian laid drum and percussion tracks while Michael Hynes laid down the bass tracks. These guys are real pros and it was an pleasure and an honor to work with them!
But to back up a bit, the process goes something like this. After the songs were written, we took about 16 or 18 songs into Robert George's Sound Temple Studios to evaluate all the songs and select songs for this CD project. Several songs were already in various stages of production. After breaking the songs down, changing lyrics, chord progressions, melodies, structure and just plain polishing, we then proceeded with selecting songs for the project.
This can be a very humbling process, because others are taking a close critical look at your creation. I struggled at times to get my ego out of the way in order to do what was best for the songs and the project. It was a huge lesson in letting go and trusting in the creative process of others as well as myself. Lots of deep cleansing breaths were necessary in this endeavor.
After songs were broken down and selected down to the 12 that were going on the CD, Thea and I had to get busy and record scratch tracks of guitar and voice, as close to the metronome as possible, in our own studio and then give them to the bass player and drummer, so they could be prepared to track when they arrived at Sound Temple Studios. At that point, I thought it was going to be fairly easy to go into the studio and just sit back and listen to River and Michael cut their tracks to our scratch recordings. <Buzzer sounds> Wrong! I was told by our producer, Robert George, that we had to come prepared and rehearsed to play along with them live the same as the arrangements put on the scratch tracks they were given. This put me into a bit of a panic. Why? In all my years doing music, I had never rehearsed or played to a metronome (click track) except when tracking in our own studio. Now I was going to be playing along with these monster musicians in another studio and I felt I wasn't good enough to do that. So here come all my feelings of not being good enough or inadequacy. I expressed my concern to Thea and our producer, Robert, that I felt it would be better for them to record to the scratch tracks we had already prepared, due to my apprehension that I wouldn't be able to play it as well live as what we had already recorded. Robert and Thea were able to set my mind at ease and say that they were only going to use my live studio performance as a reference and that River and Michael would strictly follow the click and not me. This method also allows us to further craft the song and the arrangement without being locked into our original scratch recordings. This leaves an opening for the creative process to kick into high gear. Taking some deep breaths, I gave into the process and let go again. This was getting to my control and ego issues big time! I like to know what I'm getting into before I step into anything that is foreign to my realm of experience.
After some rehearsing along with the click track for a couple weeks, I felt that I was up for the challenge but still had some apprehension about playing live in the studio. Being prepared helped to disperse my fears, so I went in with more confidence than I thought I would have originally. It didn't seem to take me long to settle in to a relaxed, but excited feeling of finally getting songs tracked that I had written over the course of 16 years. Oddly enough, one of the songs I had written shortly after arriving at The Mountain! We ended up changing some aspects of that song that had been embedded in me since my time there. Wow, talk about letting go! But I was surprised as to how easily I had let go of the form of the song in order to bring the song to a whole new level. That magic happened all the time throughout our 2 days of recording.
So it has amazed me what can happen when I or anyone opens themselves up to the creative process, even as the feelings of fear, apprehension, not being good enough, being out of control and other emotions rise to the surface. I say, if I was able to push through all of that this weekend to make magic happen, than anyone can!
