I've been getting our Subvert artist page up to speed, which has entailed a lot of the hidden, unglamorous, nonmusical work of music: tracking down WAV files and images and UPC codes and publishing info from seven years ago, downloading from this archive, uploading to that site, trying to find the graphics that are stuck on the ancient laptop with the swollen lithium battery, refreshing, reordering, entering endless 2FA codes.

This is the stuff people don't really talk about in the world of DIY. Very little of it is fun or fulfilling. It feels like your day job, only you probably won't ever get paid for it. (I might be a little salty because WBEZ just published the Chicago Arts Census finding about how little artists typically earn here, and of course the comments included an internet dude positing that artists could totally earn a living if they just made art that people actually like.) And it all becomes even harder on today's internet, where AI opportunists are ready to prey on anything you upload. 

I suppose I'm also thinking about it because I was just listening to the episode of In Our Time about Handel's Messiah. Handel, lucky man, did not have to deal with tech bros. But he did have to deal with a host of other obstacles: self-producing whole seasons of his work; risking bankruptcy; finding his own venues and singers despite a war; navigating shifting public opinions about Christianity itself. You don't need to know the details of the struggle to appreciate the art, but they're oddly reassuring, in the same way that it's reassuring to see studio footage of the Beatles tripping over cables. 

I think the point is to remember that when anyone puts their art into the world, they have gone through this kind of resistance to do it. It takes madness, folly, stubbornness, and wild amounts of love. 

I like to pair the Notebook Thursday posts with images of the notebook pages in question, but today's song started about four years ago, and I just don't have it in me to go digging that much. One of the lines was from not long after Arthur died, and I don't remember how it joined with the other ideas. Maybe just proximity in the notebook? Anyway, it's a love song now, or at least a heartache song, called "The Comeback Kid."

The thing is, for the longest time, it didn't quite work. I had lyrics I liked, chords I liked, a chorus I loved, and it just didn't feel right. I ran it by my buddy Chris. He suggested some alternative chord voicings, and they added nice nuance, but they didn't change enough.

There was other music to work on, and a lot of other life to get through, so I shelved that one. I put the chart in our master Google doc (archives matter!). I never shared the demo with the band.

Last weekend we recorded a handful of songs, and I filled in more cells in the Posthistoric/Backroads spreadsheet (it's so close! we've done so much!). "The Comeback Kid" was one of two songs remaining. Both were shaded green, which means "needs songwriting work." Since we're getting into do-or-die time, I messaged the band that I'd send them the demo and see if anyone had any ideas for fixing it. 

Then, because nothing will awaken your inner critic like running your work past a jury of your peers, I listened to the demo. Still liked the lyrics. Still loved the final chorus. An early harmony suggested itself. It wasn't enough, but it was nice. 

The problem was the verse melody. With the perspective of a couple of years, it was obvious. Too much of the same, both in rhythm and in range. The melody sat high, so I needed to look low. The chords suggested a descending motif I hadn't noticed before. Too low for voice, but maybe piano or baritone guitar? I plugged in my new (used) keyboard and tried it out.

This was how I discovered that the keyboard had for some reason shipped with its tuning set to A433. The collision with the demo guitar was brutal. For a second I wondered if, uncharacteristically, I hadn't tuned before recording the demo; it was from a distracting period of my life. Brief interludes of flailing, testing pitches, wondering if I needed to learn how to shift pitch in Logic for a stupid acoustic demo, then—finally—finding the keyboard's tuning function. This kind of thing can be enough to derail a song, especially if you're already frustrated with it. You have to be very, very stubborn.

When I got it working, the keyboard did change things up rather nicely. The low countermelody shook up the repetition of the chords. It still wasn't enough, but it was something.

I had to do it, in true kill-your-darlings fashion: I had to mute the existing melody track. (I should note that the stakes of this are rather low in a digital audio platform; the track doesn't go anywhere.) What if the verse line started here instead? What if it were lower here? What if I drew out a couple of these notes, so that the rhythm would vary without any changes to the lyrics? It took another day of experimenting before I arrived at something that worked. I sent it to the band and got an approving message from Charlie, of the sort that I will probably revisit as an antidepressant in years to come. 

That all this has been for something called "The Comeback Kid" adds an extra layer of hilarity. The songs can't all take four years, and thank goodness they usually don't. Perhaps an Oblique Strategy or two could have nudged it along faster. It's hard to know what's going to be worth revisiting, what's going to grab you, what you're just going to forget. Things come alive or they fall flat, as Dylan sings. He's talking about love, but after all so am I.

First, some news: Last year was rough on drummers, from the Foo Fighters on down to us tiny indie acts. Charlie called it a drummerpocalypse, and I have no better term. The two acts I play with the most both had their drummers go on indefinite hiatus. Zach will still be contributing to Baguettes work as he is able, and he'll appear on the new record on both drums and mandolin, but for our upcoming live shows, Molly Walburn will be behind the kit. Any such transition is inevitably bittersweet; a creative ensemble is more than the sum of its parts. Considering that a global pandemic intervened, we were pretty damn lucky to get twelve years with the founding band members.

As we discussed set lists in one of the first rehearsals with Molly, someone (Charlie? probably Charlie) came up with the idea of a sadness index, plotting a song's lyrical content against its musical content. I attempted a rough graph. It's hard. Minor/slow and major/uptempo often correlate, but they don't always, and as it turns out, a lot of my minor songs are on the fast side. I also don't tend to write purely happy yay-for-love, it's-a-sunny-day lyrics. So I had to consider whether the words are sad but funny (a favorite landing spot), or whether the song describes something tragic but responds with catharsis or constructive anger (another one). 

These things are subjective, of course, so rendering them as quantitative data is a little silly. But it's interesting as a songwriting and set-building exercise. I don't think it's a coincidence that the bottom left quadrant (slow/minor/sad) contains the most songs we've never performed; we've played "White Flag," "Ghostlight" (once), "Teflon" (once), and a swamped-up version of "Negative," but that's it.  The main thing I learned (and I sort of knew it anyway) was that I lean into paradoxes—songs whose music suggests some meaning beyond the lyrics, perhaps operating against them.

I managed to set off the smoke alarm while cooking the traditional black-eyed peas this morning. It wasn't a true disaster; I just got caught up in a band chat and a little social scrolling, and the next thing I knew, a bit of pork fat had scorched and the cat was hiding while I fanned the balcony door back and forth in the cold. But if there is meaning in the tradition—and why else would we do it?—then there must be meaning in the bungling as well. It was as though life was saying, "Oh, you want luck? Well then, fucking pay attention." This is always how luck works. But it's easy to forget.

At my first-ever NYE music gig, in a mixed-arts warehouse space of the sort that has become endangered, there was a bonfire. People were invited to create a symbol of something they wanted to leave behind them in the new year, and then cast it on the fire to burn it away. Someone said it was a pagan tradition, but of course that label is so broad as to be almost meaningless. Nonetheless, I recreated that tradition for a number of years: in the fireplace, when I had one; on concrete doorsteps and balconies. Did it work? I don't know. I remember what I threw on the fire, that first year, and it is still with me more than I'd like. There are some things I've managed to leave behind. Most of the things one wants to burn, though, are too complicated to be purged by a single act. 

This winter, a friend introduced me to a variation on the fire ritual, one in which you write a number of intentions on scraps of paper and burn them at random, one a night, starting with the solstice and ending January 2 with a single intention, which you keep throughout the year. After a chaotic few years, in which rituals of destruction have felt redundant and explicit resolutions laughable, it's rather appealing to leave some intentions to chance. The mere act of writing desires as positive statements felt far more constructive than my previous approach. So, starting at the solstice, I dutifully burned a few scraps. Then I went to visit my family and left the bowl of paper here. And when I returned, Chicago was so desperately cold and windy that I couldn't bring myself to venture outside for the minute it would take to incinerate the nightly scrap. So now I have a backlog of papers to burn. One doesn't want to get too precious about a ritual from Instagram, of course, but the form does matter. If there is magic in the practice, I suspect I have consigned myself to a year in which nothing happens for a long time and then I get it done all at once. That is the opposite of healthy and sustainable. Whether it's art or intention—and for me, they're nearly synonymous—you're supposed to do a little bit every day. In returning to the practice, you remind yourself of what matters, you guide your attention, you build your own luck. 

I don't always get NYE gigs, but they're supposed to be lucky too. I've never been sure how much I believe in that superstition either. But last night's gig felt lucky, when I recognized the silhouettes of friends who'd come out to listen, when I got to meet the new booker at a venue I love, when I stayed later than I planned because the the closing act was burning up the stage with a series of songs I adore—a fire that felt communal, welcoming, not merely destructive. This, too, is the simple luck of paying attention. If you do that, it can be enough.

I have been wrestling madly with distraction lately, and it has been getting the upper hand, which usually means there's some big thing I need to do or write. (I'm fairly sure that in this case there are several such things, but I'm also genuinely overbooked and still grieving, so...those things will come when they come.) Stuff that has kept me going:

• Watching my neighbors mobilize to protect and support each other. I was able to put in some volunteer hours last week, and we collected tips for CyclingxSolidarity at last weekend's show at Gallery Cabaret. I love this city so much.
  
• Rediscovering Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series through the prequel books (which somehow I was unaware of until a couple of weeks ago?!). I'm enjoying them so far—particularly the way he explores the everyday structures and workings of his menacing authoritarian state, much as Andor did for the original Star Wars trilogy. I love a fantasy series that grapples with the very real banality of evil. And the flood in La Belle Sauvage so perfectly captures the surreal nature of a world-altering cataclysm.
  
• Speaking of floods: They Might Be Giants were live on KEXP, and of course it was delightful.
• I always enjoy Austin Kleon's thoughts on creativity, but this line, from his Tuesday newsletter, got me where I live: "Middle age is really the time, I think, that the tamped-down parts of yourself, anything you’ve ignored, any dreams you left behind, come first trickling then bursting back up out of the place you’ve put them in, and the foundation of the structure you’ve build to survive in the world and get to this point starts to get washed away."

There is plenty of other band news—a flood of it, you might say—but it merits a separate post, so we'll leave it at that. Take care of each other, friends.

Not that long after I moved here (Wikipedia informs me, rudely, that it must have been 2003) I saw the Chicago Opera Theater production of a pair of short operas, Brundibár and Comedy on the Bridge. Tony Kushner had recently given them new librettos. Maurice Sendak directed, as well as designing the sets. They were lovely. (It looks like the 2006 production had the same design, as far as I remember?)

Brundibár might best be known as the opera that was performed by children in a concentration camp. The composer, Hans Krása, was Jewish, and developed the opera with the Jewish orphanage in Prague; when the Nazis took over, Krása and nearly all of his artistic collaborators were sent to Theresienstadt. The Nazis used a performance as evidence that conditions in the camps were happy and humane. Somehow—for a while, anyway—they ignored what everyone in the audience knew: the titular villain was a stand-in for Hitler. Eventually, Krása, the children, the director, and most of the musicians and designers were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.

I have gone on making art as our country has enabled and perpetrated genocides: we need art. We need it as a respite, we need it as a source of connection and joy, we need it as a howl of outrage, we need it as a stubborn reminder of shared humanity. 

Mephisto is another Nazi-related story that has stayed with me over the years. It follows the German actor Henrik Hoefgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) as the Nazis rise to power. Hoefgen wants to make Brechtian shows on an underground black box stage; he doesn't like the Nazis. But he doesn't speak any language but German, and he doesn't think he can perform anywhere but Germany. In a decision familiar to every performer, he takes a high-profile role to pay the bills. Unfortunately, the Nazis see the performance and declare him exemplary: exactly what German theater and German actors ought to be. Suddenly his artistic career depends on his willingness to be a mascot for the Third Reich.

You have to know where you stand. You have to know what you'll do and what you won't. You have to know if you have a price.

I was in The Designated Mourner with the Right Brain Project in...oh, I guess 2006 or 2007. Wallace Shawn does not write easy work. To do it any justice, you must dig into the squirmier parts of yourself. (Roger Ebert's review of the film does a nice job of that.) Mourner is about a group of artists in an unnamed country where an unnamed totalitarian regime is coming to power. They're a familiar type of New Yorker bohemian, intellectual, arch, certain that their oblique sonnets count as political action. The regime tolerates them, until it doesn't.

You do have to go on making art. You also have to call, write, march if you can, donate if you can, triage when you must, blockade, inform yourself, inform others. And you have to know why. These three works are some of the ones that crystalized it for me.

There's a concentration camp in Florida. What are you doing about it?

This past weekend involved a productive band session based on an inefficient plan: start with the cake (another Yossy Arefi recipe), listen to recent recordings and demos, discuss ideas, and only then pick up instruments and start trying stuff. "Cake first" is the sort of idea that most management experts would probably dismiss out of hand, but it worked for us.

I've posted before about the usefulness of joking and messing around. The cake might have predisposed us to that, or that might just be what we do when we get together. Anyway, when it WAS time to play, we started by recording "Last Call" with a different feel than we'd tried in the previous session. (It's always felt like an Old 97s song, but the previous session settled into midtempo Merseybeat. Charlie said he always had Merseybeat in his brain. There were jokes about a Homer Simpson–style cutaway to reveal an old-timey animation, the Mersey Moose.) That evolved into a very fast punk version—which eventually collapsed under its own speed, but might serve as an entertaining outtake.

The point, I guess, is that messing with genre is an extremely effective way to challenge your assumptions about a piece of work. I think it might even be useful regardless of medium (change a romcom to a thriller! change a comic to a Victorian illustration! change a sonnet to a sestina!).

And if Herb makes an appearance in one of our videos, that's why. Now you know.

My sister gave me Snacking Bakes for Christmas, because she gets me, and the band tried out the Chewy Cocoa Brownies at yesterday's rehearsal for Aloft Sanctuary.

Duuuuude. These are so good. The recipe deviates from standard brownie prep in that you don't just melt the butter on the stove—you brown it before pouring it into the sugar. This recipe also uses cocoa rather than unsweetened baking chocolate (that cruelest of childhood lessons); I was afraid it would turn out too sweet, but nope—great.

Modifications: I added about a teaspoon of instant espresso powder with the cocoa. The recipe calls for half a cup of any kind of chocolate chips; I used Ghirardelli bittersweet, because I always have those around. (I would probably reduce the sugar in the batter if using a lighter chip.) Next time I want to try adding some warm spices (probably cinnamon, ginger, and cardamom), which I think would sing with the brown butter. This may become my new standard brownie.

The band gathered last night for a run-through of Friday's set at the Burlington (https://www.theburlingtonbar.com/). It was brutally cold out, and comfort was important. I tried Shilpa Uskokovic's gingerbread cake (https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/dark-chocolate-orange-gingerbread-cake, from the December 2024 Bon Appetit; no, I do not know why my browser is suddenly not allowing me to link words). Verdict: yes. Cook this and put it in your face.

I made the recipe more or less as written (with the addition of a little Chinese Five Spice, which is my default flavor enhancer on gingerbreads). Next time I will double the orange zest and add some finely chopped candied ginger, along with the grated ginger root. But I'm having a little leftover slice right now, and this cake rules.

A couple of weeks ago I started a new music notebook, which meant going through the old one to glean usable ideas for St. Jerome's. In the process I noticed a scrap in the Google doc, a chorus and most of a verse, at least a year old. The lyrical rhythm had always suggested an uptempo alt-country melody, which combined with the content to suggest a sort of cheerful nihilism I enjoyed. I thought of it as "Bottom of the Barrel" after the most recognizable line.

A few days later a couple of other lines arrived; they seemed to have their own melody, but once I thought about them in the context of "Bottom of the Barrel," everything slotted into place. A day or two after that, the bridge showed up in similar fashion. Hard to say if it counts as memory or new creation when it works like that.

Verses took a little longer (you can see at least one lousy first draft on the verso above). I asked the band for help. The exchange that followed yielded the final rhyme—Thomas's suggestion—as well as exposing an embarrassing gap in my education.

I retitled it "Last Call" and recorded a demo. Only after sending it to the band did I figure out how to strengthen a line in the second pre-chorus. So the final version is draft four, I think, depending on how we count the scraps? It's kind of fitting, for a song that's ultimately about finding meaning in a life that has unexpectedly fallen into bits and pieces.