I just released an album called Wait with a band (The Middle) that I was in last year.
One of our members, Tabitha, created the album art using scenery from one of our favorite places in Vietnam:
Since it's the day of the release, I'm reminiscing on that time, and wanted to share some thoughts on the whole experience.
The album itself was a nostalgia project, the band isn't playing together anymore. We came together in Hanoi, Vietnam and in an undramatic ending for a rock band, two of the members moved back home to the US and Canada.
I felt compelled to get recordings to have as a kind of audio photo. A sonic snapshot of a moment in our lives.
Recently, I've been thinking more about the music I make like this; as moments captured in time and not so much the final/perfect version of a song.
A recorded track isn't the absolute, most perfect, or final version of that song. It's one representation, one stage in the life of that song. Even if the recorded version has dozens of instruments and comped takes, even if it is a compilation of the most perfect moments--it's still just one version.
In an abstract way, I'm finding it's a better framing for me. It takes a bit of the ambiguous pressure of "success" off.
So many of my memories of playing with this group center around the live shows. Before this band, I'd probably played music for an audience less than twenty times. When we arrived to Hanoi we were very fortunate to find a thriving original music scene. I can't vaunt enough about the creative spirit of the artists and venues we found ourselves surrounded by. Our friends showed up to our shows in full force, and playing with The Middle in the Hanoi scene gave us our sea legs.
When it came to be that two members would be leaving town in a few months, we decided to record the songs we'd written.
It was the first day of recording all together, and we got 2 out of 14 songs in the bag. Due to an abundance of tempo changes in our songs, we decided to forgo the click and record everything live.
Then, our bassist Andrew got thrown off his motorbike in the infamous Hanoi traffic and broke his arm. Fortunately, it wasn't anything more serious. Unfortunately, for the process of our album, another member would be leaving before Andrew healed. As a result, we ended up recording all the guitars and drums live, then added the bass later.
A couple lessons (for me) learned in the end:
- Be careful about how many songs you take on at once. I'm glad to have all 14 there as a complete collection... but it's a long road of recording/mixing/mastering when juggling that many tracks at the same time.
- With drum mics, less is more (sometimes). For this album, we had one mic on every piece. Because of this, when I was mixing, I kept falling into the trap of thinking I had each piece more or less isolated. I started thinking too much of the drums as individual pieces, and not as a whole. In reality there's a lot of each piece in each mic, you're just mostly hearing the snare/kick/tom etc... Now I like 3 to 5 mics (sometimes).
- The best show was our last. Our final show, at our favorite venue. I felt the most relaxed, loose and free at that show than any other. It's almost as if knowing that we may never play these songs together again was what made it so legendary. Thinking too much about where a project will end up and what it will all amount to might amount to you getting in your own way.
If you've made it this far... thanks for reading, as a new Hive member I'm trying to figure out what people are even interested in reading. Any well-intentioned thoughts/feedback on this or the music is welcomed 👍
Photos by: Jericho Leavitt