I cannot believe that it has already been five years since the greatest weekend of my life.
(Originally posted November 2001 in the "News" section of my old webpage, Mike Novak's Sad, Sad World)
Nashville!
Here we go! This weekend in Nashville, Friday 9 November to Monday 12 November, turned out to be one of the most powerful weekends of my life. The weak metaphor that I've kept using for people was that seeing my songs come alive in the hands of these musicians was like watching your children grow into adults over the space of a weekend.
We headed on down Friday morning, taking advantage of a day off from school since we'd had Parent-Teacher Conferences the night before. Those had turned out to be a blast, as usual, with a lot of good conversations with the people who really make the difference in my students' lives. P.J. and I grabbed our rental car, which we decided to upgrade to an SUV – an Envoy, to be precise – in order to accomodate our instrument cases and our desire to breathe. We headed on over to the Sacred Heart Parish Center, late after I picked up a prescription, to find Mark having given up waiting for us and in the middle of re-stringing his guitar. After another side trip to pick up some guitar pedals that Mark had left at a friend's, we finally hit the road some two hours late.
My nervousness at lost time resulted in me being pulled over some twenty miles south of the Bend for driving at 73 miles per hour. Writhing in embarrassment and tolerating the giggles of the lads, I was shown great mercy by the patrolman and let off with a warning. Resolved to drive as I ought, we rolled into Indianapolis a bit less than two hours behind, where an increasingly-pacing J.P. Hurt greeted us with relief. Having loaded him up, we hit the road south and enjoyed several hours of conversation. Kevin was having to drive separately due to his work schedule, so I kept an eye out for him in the rearview mirror, not doubting Joanna the Saab's willingness to go faster than I was.
We got into Nashville towards dinnertime and met at Mike McGlinn's place, having confirmed via cellphone that Kevin was not too far behind us. After some introductions and re-introductions and Kevin's arrival, Mike took us over to Underground Sound where we'd be recording so that we could unload our instruments. Apologizing for an unseemly amount of pornography shops along the way, Mike assured me that Nashville had more to offer. He also kept up a running monologue on a number of microphones that he'd been showing me, very little of which I actually understood, but which had the effect of assuring me that the production was in very capable hands.
After heading back over to the studio, we began to do some set up and some practice for tomorrow. Mike was hard at work trying to piece together the equipment that he wanted to use and we tried to stay out of his way. It was amazing to see the quality of what he had to work with: his descriptions to me became a tangled mess of the latest digitial recorders and Beatles-vintage tube pre-amps and instrument microphones used in L.A. in the 80's and who knows what else. We did take the time to enjoy a small feast together, though, and prayed for a miracle of music and friendship while operating under the constraints of a deadline.
The Renaissance Men are: J.P. Hurt, P.J. McCurry, Michael McGlinn, Mark Lang, and Kevin Fleming
So, we headed over to Underground Sound to begin the recording. We immediately hit our first snag: there was a buzz coming from somewhere that we couldn't track down. One little glitch lead to another and time began to pass....
Kevin and I went first, laying down the rhythm guitar part while singing our respective vocals. Mark then followed with the lead guitar part, which was a bit nerve-wracking for him as he was playing on Mike's nylon-stringed classical guitar. Mark usually just plays steel strings, but the solo came out as a flawless piece of interpretation. Kevin then added his percussion track, using a djembe that we'd acquired on location, and finally J.P. and P.J. added in shaker and tambourine. P.J. confessed later that it was a nice way to ease into his first recording session. After reviewing the tracks and being pleased with ourselves, Mike decided to add in some sticks for just a little more percussion flavour. The final result was gorgeous.
The summer that my grandpa died
I journeyed way out west
A time to think. A time to mourn.
For seeing what was best.
To see that my horizons
had yet to be discerned
To come to be comfortable
that I'd so much yet to learn.
The land was broken. The land was fenced.
Was it open or was it tamed?
The long Wyoming highways
are really a narrow range.
But the sky was vast and conquering
of every borderline:
life and death, time and space
and maybe yours and mine.
The old man at his rest now
This young man on his way
No set destination
I'm just here today....
Grandpa was a character
a stubborn, solid soul.
Up was down, blue was red
that's the way our talks would go.
The man could try the patience
of a stone, that much is true
But he built a family, he built a home,
hell, he even built a school.
The mountains stand together
yet each peak is alone
I rode on with my brother
and our thoughts were not our own:
Highway conversations
past and present scenes
Hopes fears jokes regrets
All that our lives might mean
The old man at his rest now
This young man on his way
No set destination
I'm just here today.
I'm just here today.
I sought my own emptiness
'cause a friend said that's what I fear
And the rhythms of the world
they brought that silence near
And here on bus near journey's end
I grope for words to cast
my feelings into sculpted thoughts
to make some wisdom last
Oh grant that leaves may comfort me
as I blow on my way
Oh clear from me this summer's haze
let me see the depth of day
And bring at last that pleasure's smile
that simple, subtle grace
of seeing in each moment
my God face to face
The old man at his rest now
This young man on his way
No set destination
I'm just here today.
I'm just here today.
Everything that I'd hoped for had happened. We had one track under our belts, it was high quality and had given us high energy. Looking to continue the wave of energy, I consulted my master plan sheet, which was on the back of an envelope, and decided to follow with St. Peter's Sunrise, a rockabilly three-chord rush of drunken giddiness about my first time in Rome, careening around the Vatican. I figured your average, three-chord rock song would be so simple that success would continue to flow.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
Good question. I was listening to P.J. playing a run that he'd written for the keyboard when suddenly I was struck with a bit of inspiration. What if we start out with the just the organ, I asked, playing the basic chords, but slowly, so that it has a church-organ sound – just to set the St. Peter's mood? Suddenly, the Renaissance Men burst with the creativity that I'd come to expect. "Yeah, and then what if...?" The questions flowed, the ideas swapped, and suddenly we had a plan. The only thing was, I no longer really understood the plan. In 15 or 20 minutes, the song had metamorphed from a rockabilly jamboree to a sort of world beat groove. The song was recorded with this new sound and I began to be frustrated as I was asked questions while we listened to it afterwards. In retrospect, I could see that in trying to trust the instincts of the guys, I had virtually abidicated any leadership roll: I wasn't adequately transmitting the "vision" of the song that I had, and when we later received the rough mix, I was disappointed by what seemed its lackluster quality. It was full of ideas, but lacked direction. Some careful editing or re-recording would be needed to save it.
After dinner, we returned to the studio and took up the work again. Maybe the time off was exactly what we needed. It may have been the food, but I prefer to think it was the friendship, yet whichever it was, we had been restored. I decided to try a song that was really happy in order to rescue us from the mixed emotions of our previous effort. What followed was something of a shock. In the space of the next 20 minutes, we learned, arranged, practiced and recorded in one take what we were sure was a hit: My Mom. A somewhat child-like sounding anthem to moms in general and mine in particular, it had a simple, upbeat rock-n-roll feeling, with some of my Beatles' influence showing through, and was punctuated with a scat line that reinforced its child-nature. P.J. had abandoned the keyboard for the guitar, having come up with a little riff that added a perfect, playful energy. We began recording the first take, with a bit of my usual tension in my mind, listening as I sang, wondering how it would turn out. As we got to the bridge (Mark's favorite part, as he'll always tell you)
It's not to sayI looked up as I was finishing this and suddenly realized that everything so far had been perfect. I met Kevin's eyes through the plastic shield of the sound wall we'd built around the drums and saw that he knew it, too. He began to beat on the ride with a look of joy on his face and I relaxed into repeating the first verse, scatting with a bit more looseness and abandon...
that she's perfect
It's not to say
that life's aways been kind
but to say that of all our moms
she's mine
Quietly, patiently
knotting my laces when I was three
teaching me the tricks of life:
how to ride a bike
how to choose a wife
la da dee, da dee da da...
I decided to follow this by jumping into the most similar-sounding song, and so we began to work on Begin To Be. Although this didn't come together in the same 20 minute miracle, it was nevertheless imbued with the same magic. Again, of the Beatles' school of bright rock, Begin To Be was an unusually-upbeat break-up,
We headed back to the hotel and tried to settle in, but the spirits were high and we were full of too-loud laughter and the kind of slap-happy humour that you get when you put five guys in a small room. Bizarre, unexpected comments and jokes were made, people roared, giggled, and the number "138" will never have the same meaning to me ever again.
And this doesn't even cover Sunday...
Making Music
The "project" was now facing a challenge. I had come down to Nashville with 12 songs in mind. Mike had been gently trying to tell me for weeks that I was insane without saying that I was insane; that this was just too much to do in two days of recording. Having decided that The Jamming Song – also known as Meta-Music – was just extra fun and that Adam and Eve was still too lodged in a major re-write stage, I had whittled down the list to ten songs that I really wanted to get in the can. This meant that we needed to do six songs today. As we'd done four the day before, despite having lost the entire morning, I thought it was possible, but I kept my intentions more or less to myself. In the meantime, Mike had put in ridiculous hours through the night to fix the problems he'd had with the board, stripping it down and relieving us of all the continued tech problems that we'd been having. The very picture of dedication.
We began recording. As far as its chord structure goes, Requiem is a simple piece, but we were giving it a more layered, careful arrangement. Following J.P.'s bass, Kevin slowly built up the percussion off of the high hat. P.J. entered in with minimal organ and Mark followed with the guitar. I began to sing, although that was more-or-less just a temporary measure.
Mike really shone here, taking care to direct P.J. into adding a number of layers to his part: organ, piano, and something I think he called "padding" which would end up giving the song so much depth with such minimal sound. Mark and I went back to take care of the vocals, Mark taking the first part of the lead and doubling himself on the chorus while I sang the "response" of the later verses.
It was then left to Mark to plug in the electric guitar for the first time in the sessions to lay down the central solo. I wasn't quite satisfied with the first few attempts no matter how good they sounded and how free of mistakes they were. The third take, however, was the charm: as he leapt into the bridge, the guitar turned triumphant in a way that it hadn't before, and as I watched through the window in the door between the rooms, I was screaming and whooping as Mark soared through the solo. As soon as he was clear, I ran into the back room to proclaim my joy even before he could disentangle himself from his cords.
The second song to record before Kevin had to leave was a number called Springtime of Tomorrow. This has the distinction of being the only lovesong I've ever written for a girl while in a monastery. I thought perhaps it might be unique, but during the Chrysogonus Fest in 1997 when I was introducing the piece, Chrysogonus assured us that the monastery, "is a great place for love songs: that's what it's all about!" So apparently this song is part of a particularly obscure Christian monastic tradition, perhaps obscure lest it be misunderstood. This was an "oldie" of mine, but one rather rarely played, perhaps owing to the more complex arrangement of it that J.P. had worked out back in '96 with me. It featured my one funky bit of theory: a key change from the relative minor to the relative major, allowing me to more-or-less stay on the same vocal line while the band "brightened" around me. It also is distinctive for being an extremely happy song despite being in D-minor; a fact of almost mystical fascination for J.P. for reasons far beyond my comprehension.
Regretably, this would be the second song to run into complications, although I wasn't aware of it at the time. Only when I heard the rough mix did I decide that we'd recorded it too slowly on the take that we kept. Not that it's a loss: there are a number of options open to us in bringing the song up to my satisfaction.
The tempo wasn't the only thing: Mark and I had come up with an introduction for the song that we liked, where we would enter into the tune with a contemplative, wistful slowness, perhaps akin to the beginning that we'd worked out long ago for his own The Search for Sophia. In retrospect, I'm not sure that it worked. As the song eventually needs to get up to a dancing rhythm, it might have been too plodding for what I wanted to get to. The lyrics invoke the image of dance right from the start, and a "slow dance" is not really what the song is about....
Dance with me
Laugh with me
Let these days
flow past with me
Let tomorrow
worry about itself
Listen for
the melody
That runs away
and hides from me
Let's find it
and make it all our own.
We got through it without noticing the problems at the time. I don't know how. In order to try to fill the space created by the slower tempo, I sang "wide." In other words, I over-sang and the result was enough to make me cringe. Ask me to play it for you sometime if you want a good shudder. And a good laugh.
What did turn out to be fabulous for this song was the ending. [This was eventually edited separately and appeared on the CD as the track Tomorrow.] The last song on Midnight Oil's gem of an album Blue Sky Mining has a blissful meandering piano exit. This popped into my head as we were discussing the finish of Springtime and I had P.J. do something similar. But this wasn't meandering; it was beautiful. In fact, it's my favorite part of the entire recording. Mark came in to play with him on an acoustic guitar and the soulful duo ended up creating variations on the theme that added levels of longing that I only dreamed of with the introduction Mark and I had originally worked out. Our idea for the transition from the last part of the main body of the song was to have Kevin do a roll on a cymbal. The problem was that Mike only had one mallet. What followed was perhaps the silliest part of the entire venture. We tried to make one out of a drumstick, a sock and some duct tape. We then must have spent twenty minutes trying to get the right roll sound. Nothing doing.
[In what became the drawn-out process of finishing the CD while I was in the middle of doctoral studies at Marquette, I began to re-conceive Springtime of Tomorrow as an electronica piece, which played to my options because getting the band back together in Nashville at the required time wasn't going to be possible. As an electronic piece, P.J. and I were able to re-arrange and execute Springtime by ourselves, this time at County Q Studios, with Michael McGlinn having set us up with his friend – the much in-demand Mike Purcell – engineering for us (just after finishing work on Jewel's new pop album). Telling us numerous stories from the engineer's perspective (particularly as he's a "secret" in the industry, called in to digitally correct artistic flaws) he just shook his head about how poor much of what is marketed musicaly was, paying us a great off-handed compliment in saying, "You guys are the real deal." So, with his help, we squeezed re-recording Springtime into a schedule already thick with mixing and mastering the set, which had, by its completion in 2004, gained the title Life and Other Impossibilities.]
Noon came along and time was up. Kevin left and we moved on to the remainder of the list. There were four songs that I still hoped to do and once again the lads graciously agreed to work through lunch. What to do next? For Simple Things, I had an idea that involved a fiddle, so Mike put in call to his friend Jerry who'd watched us the previous night. We began to work on What They Have.
Once Jerry had arrived, we began to work on Simple Things. This was the first full song that I ever wrote, back in the summer of '88. It's about walking down a gravel road. That's it. Nothing more. It is pure rockabilly joy, sacramental bliss. Jerry was out of practice on his fiddle and I was trying to simply dictate an entire entrance/solo to him; this did not work. But he jumped in to fill in for Kev on the drums and did some cool brushwork while Mark and I jammed and J.P. played the happiest stepwise bass that Dies Irae – my name for his new guitar – had ever heard.
But I take delight in the simple things I see
and the noises that surround
I find comfort in the blowing breeze
and the motion all around
me.
After burning through that, we started working on Tunisian Blue, another song that I'd written for Jen. This one was one that had taken an enormous amount of time for me. The chords had come and then several months later, the melody became apparent to me. Months after that, on a plane over the North Atlantic, all the sights that I'd seen with Erik G and Hugh Carter – sights that kept making me think "I wish Jen could see this" – burst out onto the back of an ATM slip from Rome and became a travelogue/love song. On a giddy romantic flush from that, as Erik looked over my shoulder and I occasionally softly sang lines to him to see if he thought they worked, I was hit on by a flight attendant: apparently the song made me radiate romance. But, of course, I was already involved and, honestly, he wasn't my type. Mike took his time with this, guiding us into laying down a rich percussion layer. J.P. gave us a steady conga groove and Jerry added a bit of texture with a shaker and another thingie whose name I disremember.
Allison By Moonlight has one of the odder origins of my tunes. I was strumming a fellow teacher's guitar one day in-between classes back in '99. As my sophomores came in for Church History, I continued to play. I did this a lot and they were used to it and made no notice, even as I continued to play after the bell rang and they chattered while I quietly took attendence up at my podium. As I finished up, I suddenly found myself playing a chord I'd never played before: an Eadd9, to be precise. I began to move around and found a progression that I loved. Squatting down next to the podium so that I could hear exactly what I was doing while the kids still took advantage of the delay to talk, I had an image in my head of a girl lost in thought, walking through moonlit trees.
Later when I began to work on it with Mark, I decided to keep the tune centered around the music, with only the most minimal lyric involved. We were listening to the great Wes Montgomery at the time, and the demo that we made was heavily influenced by his jazz guitar.
I then forgot about the song.
Only as I was preparing to record in Nashville did I trip across the tape that had both Allison and another instrumental that I'd done with Mark called only Ionian G, based off of its mode and key. This was subsequently incorporated into Metamusic.
We started brainstorming what to do on this one. Mark had carefully worked out the guitar tones that we wanted for this, still having a strong base in the Montgomery while also full of Lang. The real trick then became finding an organ sound to match the bellsy sound of the guitar. We went through an endless variety of soft organ sounds; we plugged in other keyboards; we switched, we compared, we experimented. Finally, J.P. gave me a "good enough" nod and lo! it was good enough.
We started playing and we ended with magic. I set out the rhythm on the twelve-string, J.P. having declined playing that on a separate track by saying that I could play the finger-numbing piece as well as he could. I nearly needed to have my heart started again. Could he have really said that? Wonders! I set out the pace, concentrating furiously on not putzing up and muffing the notes. In fact, I concentrated so hard that I forgot to count. Suddenly I wondered, "Have I done the progression eight times? Four? Six?" I looked over at J.P. wildly and saw him staring at me expectantly, his eyebrows raised as far as they would go. I shrugged and nodded into the change. He followed and then mercifully took over, telegraphing the changes to us all from then on, which is what I should have told him to do in the first place. And some magic happened. Warts and all, that first take turned into a blissful, slow lullaby of a jam that took all we'd done over the weekend and gave thanks for it.
Allison by moonlight
walking...
walking...
Allison by moonlight
she's walking ...
walking...
and all was complete. This was the band's song: my contribution was giving some form or some direction, but the bulk of the music of the piece was found in the conversation of their solos. And what a talk! We congratulated ourselves and began to clean up. This naturally took some time, but it was necessary, I think, for me to calm down from the wild ride of emotion that recording this had been. We shut down the lights and headed out for Mass.
This was just the right way to end things. We stood in the back of the Cathedral and gave thanks. J.P. met some fellow ACE-ers and proved that Notre Dame is really everyone's mother after all. We then headed back out to Mike's place, pausing only to allow him to deliever communion to a shut-in that he served. We gave ecstatic calls of victory to Kevin and to my Mom (in celebration of My Mom) and then retired to the McGlinn estate for pasta and a big jug of wine. Mike's wife, Beth, couldn't join us due to a catastophic headache, which was a disappointment, as she had managed a great deal of the enterprise from behind the scenes and deserved to be part of the celebration. We talked, I think we sang – I know I made Mike sing at least one tune from his forthcoming Virtues project – and then somewhere along the line, I apparently fell asleep. Like I said, there was a jug of wine. Somewhere farther along the line, Mike sat me down for a quick, but sobering, talk on my the deeper implications of what we had made over the weekend. "This isn't something you put on a tape and hand out to people and say 'this is my demo.' You have responsibilities to this music." This has given me plenty to think about, and seeing the reactions of people to the rough mix – particularly people who didn't know who or what it was – has convinced me to see just how far I can take these songs.
In time we headed back to the hotel. There the walking had woken me enough to join Mark and P.J. for some quiet talk in the lobby. It was a fine and proper ending to the experience: music segueing into the quiet talk of friends.

There was even room for experimental pictures of Mark, and you can't ask for more fun than that in this day and age.
When all was done, we checked out, saying good-bye to Beth and to Nicole. I ended up saying good-bye to Beth a few more times, as it happened that we completely screwed up our parking arrangements and now couldn't be let out without paying some forty dollars in cash that none of us had. I ran back into to talk to Beth a few more times before I finally understood the man outside (and made Beth understand inside) what it was that was needed for us to drive out. By the third time I dragged Beth out of her office, I had begun to feel rather an ass myself. But that was the worst of it.
We pulled out from Union Station, hit the road and spent the entire time back reliving, disecting and resurrecting the entire experience. Despite our late start, we managed to get J.P. back on schedule so that he could give his piano lesson on time and all was extremely well with the universe. The generosity of the McGlinns and of all my friends had made something happen that I'd never expected to happen on this level: a work of art had begun to be formed that truly reflected my hopes for it. It was a real work, not a sketch or a half-baked idea, but something much fuller. And it continues to give to me, which is all I could hope for in any art and in any gift of friendship.