Project One
PRODUCER
When I first read this word I didn’t realize how wide open it was for interpretation. As the credits rolled after a movie once I asked my dad what a producer is. He told me a producer’s job is essentially to bankroll a project. While not untrue, age taught me that being a producer can mean a great deal more. Later in life when I decided that this was what I was going to be the variety of roles and skill sets required of a such a title hit me like a wave and I became obsessively focused.
I wanted to be in charge of everything I created artistically — that much I knew. I had no preconceptions of how I would support myself financially, nor did I know what that kind of self-empowerment looked like from a professional perspective. All I knew were the things I didn’t want anyone else to be a in charge of and the skill sets required to make that happen. When I first started, it struck me as odd that I didn’t really know anyone else who was doing what I was doing or pursuing what I had in mind, and certainly not any women (granted this was over 10 years ago). To my knowledge, what I wanted was relatively rare, and I couldn’t honestly understand why. Now I do — so much of what you do is behind the scenes, it’s alarmingly isolating. Perfect for my ego, not so perfect for a swift path to success. Somehow this made my drive for success even stronger.
I wanted to be in charge of everything. From first lyric to mastering I wanted to be *capable* of taking responsibility for every creative decision. As a hyper-perfectionist with hermit-like tendencies and a gargantuan fear of performance (yes, in spite of that deeply rooted phobia I forced myself through five years of trauma and humiliation for a piece of paper that would profess the exact opposite so I didn’t have to say it out loud) it wasn’t hard to be motivated. I didn’t just want to create alone, I needed to.
That much was made abundantly clear when I couldn’t vocally reproduce a fraction of what I was capable of in isolation with so much as an iPhone recording nearby, let alone with an entire audience in front of me while singing in five foreign languages wearing clothes that made me feel like I didn’t recognize my own thoughts. Nothing was going to stop me though, and once I have decided I want something trying to talk me out of it is a bit like trying to disprove infinity. Trust me. They tried.
I was always in charge. I practiced in closets, empty bathrooms, deserted buildings, you name it. I woke up at 3am to get on the bus so I could make it to class on time. I worked two eight hour shifts a day in different kitchens to make sure I could afford to be in school, and for the entirety of my time earning a bachelor’s degree I never had fewer than two jobs. A “day off” was a private inside joke. I wanted this.
People questioned my methods. The fact that I substituted real human connection with Netflix didn’t phase them. The fact that I was so emotionally damaged and physically exhausted, I couldn’t speak without my voice breaking didn’t phase them. The fact that at certain times it was so difficult to manage the bodily holding of emotion I would digress from practice in favor of making bad habits worse, they never knew.
The challenges I faced lived in a gridlock of inaccessibility deep within my mind. So deep in fact that I myself lived largely in ignorance until a gifted professor saved me and changed everything. Like me, she would not give up and I can honestly say I owe her my life. She had to physically shake my larynx for the reaper in my mind to lose control. What came out was a shrill cry unlike anything I had heard before or have heard since. Today, I absolutely understand that moment as the first when I understood why my gut so unwaveringly believed.
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PRODUCTION
Money. How was I going to make it and still stay in control of my life? That in and of itself is a very long and complicated journey that I don’t feel needs further explanation. More important is the music I have to show for it, and the profound sense of gratitude I have for everyone who has helped me make it possible. I feel the art I create speaks for itself, and as many of my exceptional professors would say, “that isn’t by accident.”
When I started piecing together my first project it felt like all I had was a collection of feelings. Vague ramblings that I knew needed Michael Angelo-esque work if they were to be shaped into comprehensive songs. The skill sets were hibernating in various far-reaching corners of my mind and for the first time I was about wake them up — all at once. They all came with their own agendas and personalities and — let me tell you — finding a way of making them get along was it’s own work of art. It felt like I had a raging kingdom of jokers and clowns rambling about, all of whom needed civilizing. Desperately.
Ind the end, the fact that there was so much inner conflict and debate ultimately worked in my favor. Since no one got along I had a variety of critical perspectives to shape and inform my daily happenings. They all had a very specific role and eventually the process unfolded itself. Rearranging, cutting, re-writing — I can’t tell you how many times I scrapped everything except one key phrase or melody and built everything else around it from scratch — only to discover at the end of it all that the one thing I kept originally was nowhere in the final product. Those tended to be the best ones. The feeling is what had to be right. If something didn’t feel right it was cut without hesitation. I learned to recognize I had gotten it right when I was doing something else entirely and suddenly found myself wanting to hear my own track; a distinct feeling from wanting to further develop it.
The poet handled raw emotion and communicated with the lyricist who further hacked away until the songwriter took over and wove melodies. The pianist stepped in and shaped depth with harmonies until the sound design engineer found inspiration to bring the whole thing to life in my favorite “in the box” world of digitized sounds design and composition. The mixing engineer managed these handoffs and stayed true to the original intent of each contributor while the executive producer oversaw everything and doled out harsh criticisms at every opportunity. It seems so obvious now though at the time it was never quite this linear. It helped that they all had a genuine interest in one another’s contribution to the process.
Unsurprisingly, the mastering engineer commanded final say. The rest of me had a track in the final stages of secondary mixdown, and she quite suddenly demanded that everything but the vocals be scrapped & recreated; sounds, instrumentation, arrangement — everything. It was too dense and poorly arranged to lend itself well to the clarity she needed in order to place the song in context with the rest of the album. Interestingly enough this simple yet vague piece of guidance made much of the decision-making that followed straightforward. I put the song together in three days, the project was released according to schedule and now it’s my favorite track. #LiveInLegend
So here I am. Project One with a fat checkmark next to it, listening to my own songs hundreds of times (literally) and somehow never growing tired of them. I understand the word producer a little better now than I did when I was kid. I hope my Dad is proud.