You can listen to me read this post on Soundcloud here, or as Bliss and Drumming wherever you get your podcasts.
Today begins the first post of looking back at early musical endeavors, re-releasing songs created in the first few years of my songwriting journey.
I imagine most artists are this way except the lucky few: when I revisit early work, it’s hard to get past hearing all of the problems with the track. For someone like me who has battled a harsh internal critic, it can be kind of excruciating to listen to the first songs I was putting into the world as a singer and songwriter. At first listen, I wade through the issues I have been telling myself the songs have for all the years since creating them.
However, I guess enough time has passed and I’ve done enough work to strangle that critic, or at least make some kind of peace with her, to be able to listen and appreciate these early endeavors. I see where I was and I see where I have been going, and now it is rather sweet to listen. I hear some pure impulses, and appreciate the bravery and creative output. I remember how it felt to be her, and to recognize how far along I’ve moved.
It’s been a few days of mulling over what song I wanted to release first. I knew it should be off my first album, “Conversation with Francis Bakin” from 2008. The version I’m sharing is the remix from 2014’s “The Collection,” an album that featured remixes of songs from my first two albums.
“The Collection” came from a desire to re-record some of the vocals on the older songs.
My relationship with my voice has been such a telling part of my journey. I sang in choir throughout elementary school, and then when I was first in New York it occurred to me to take voice lessons and start to develop as a singer. I had a wonderful voice teacher in the West Village who lived in a ground floor apartment. She had long black hair, long extravagantly painted nails that clicked on the piano keys, and wore spectacular velour running suits with high heels. Once, I got to my lesson and she had bought a rifle, because the pigeons on her ledge were driving her crazy. Luckily, her husband talked her out of using the gun in the narrow air shaft. I loved her and her nuttiness, and she believed that I could actually sing. Then, I studied with a kind of big deal voice teacher for a number of years still. I was still never where I wanted to be.
When I started writing songs in San Francisco years later and discovered that lyric writing was a great passion of mine, I figured that I had to start working out the singing thing again.
Part of the process was to do some contemplative work around my voice, tracing back to the ways I had been thwarted in its development. First of all, I knew that I was born with the umbilical chord wrapped around my neck, which without going too far into it was the introduction of a pattern of being silenced I was to work through in this life. (That’s some great shamanic work insight right there.)
Then, through the help of the book The Artist’s Way, I visited all of the places in the past where I carried pain around my voice. I saw all the “no backtalk” moments with my father. I saw this little jerky girl who told me she hated my voice when I was about seven years old. I visited all the ways I had said the wrong thing, blurted out something that had hurt people, the things that made me turn inside and tied my tongue.
I know this is all very touchy-feely, hippie-dippie stuff, but hey, that’s the process. I told a friend one time that when I smoked pot I obsessed about my internal organs. He said, “you know what we call people who do that, don’t you? Artists.” That made me laugh. I do love to look at all the inner workings of Clem.
So here we are in San Francisco. I’m working as a temp in a law firm between tours and every night I’m going to my practice studio and trying to figure out how to be a songwriter, how to be a singer. I’m taking voice lessons, I’m working hard, and feeling so sad that I was not born with Aretha’s pipes, Barbra’s instrument. Beating myself up, singing songs thousands of times, over and over, trying to figure out how to make this instrument into what it will never be. Trying to figure out what it is.
Then, I got ticked off. I decided to just tell the stories of the lyrics. I felt myself embodying the speakers of the songs, putting on personas, and just letting all the angst go and doing the best I could to convey the meaning.
Now when I hear the songs, I hear the “fuck it” attitude in my voice, and I love that girl for that attitude. My voice will never be what I want it to be, but it does convey a feeling, a story, a moment in time. I am okay with that, even though I will always trade what I have for Aretha’s.
Marathon Runner
This is the very first song that Gretchen Menn and I worked on together for the album. It was a joy to work with her, her generosity, her deep knowledge and ear and musical gifts. I forced her to get the slide out, since slide guitar kills me, and because she is so humble she couldn’t see how naturally musical everything she plays is. She started bouncing that slide around on the guitar and creating these incredible sounds. When she left I took two of her guitar takes and laid them on top of each other, and it was like some sort of cosmic synchronicity that created true magic. I will always remember that feeling of having her guitar sing out like that and completely transform the track. How lucky am I to have had her guitar in my ear for so many years. I’ll never be able to believe my great fortune in the ringside seat I’ve had to her deep development in such artistry.
Around this time, I was recovering from a kind of mental crisis. Issues in my life I had been ignoring or managing seemed to amplify, rise to the forefront, and I had one of those experiences where it becomes apparent we must figure our shit out or things are going to get really bad. All the issues I’d danced around seemed, at this point in my life, to rise up and demand to be confronted.
Sometime later, here I was I was writing songs, and that experience is the first thing I wrote about. “Marathon Runner” is about when I realized, oh boy, I guess I’m going to be around long enough to have to deal with all my stuff. When I was young, living as I had, in rather nihilistic ways, I had a sense that this life would be short somehow, that I wouldn’t make it to a time when I would have to reckon with the stuff I’d been running away from. Lucky for me, I got to live long enough to experience that dark bewilderment, through it and out of it.
I do indeed love this song for all of those many, many reasons.
The remix was done by my Old Man, Tim Moss. I’m always trying to get him to work with me but we’re both such control freaks he is wise to decline my offers for the sake of our sparkling and happy healthy marriage. But I just admire his ear so much, and I loved how he elevated the song in the remix.
Thank you for reading and listening, for going on this journey of looking back at the creation of these songs, and me. You can listen to these blog posts on Soundcloud here, or as Bliss and Drumming wherever you get your podcasts.
Zepparella will be in the Bay Area and Tahoe next week, join us!
xo Clem
