Part 2

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

I think it's a necessary step and put it aside and re-evaluate later, but I struggle with letting a piece lie. Even if I'm not working on it, I want to keep listening to it. Which is why I like to have more than one piece in progress--one can distract me so that another can be forgotten for a while.

What I don't struggle with is fiddling with a piece endlessly. I'm a satisficer, not an optimizer, which has its advantages and disadvantages. In creating and producing music, I have had to learn to suppress my inclination to say "meh, this will do". This is not the place to settle for "good enough". In truth, I know when a piece is finished and when it is not finished, and when I want to stop working on an unfinished piece, it's just laziness or fear.

But the flip side of that is that when a piece is "great enough", which is when I can listen without any disappointment, I am happy to let it go. I know things are going to change anyway when parts are distributed to other musicians.

When you're in the studio to record a piece, how important is the actual performance and the moment of performing the song still in an age where so much can be “done and fixed in post?“

Very important. I have come to loathe cleaning up audio. I’d rather rehearse a difficult passage for a week and nail the take, than spend an hour editing out string noise or warping away timing errors.

This was a real concern when recording Ascension. There was a period of a month or two when I couldn’t record good takes on the touch guitar--they weren’t meeting the high standards that were being set by the featured artists. I thought I wasn’t good enough to play on my own album, which is an awful feeling. I could have edited those takes to hell, but I would have known they weren’t up to par, and they would have sounded uncanny.

Fortunately, it was a simple fix: I just practiced. "Throw Open the Windows of Your Soul“ has me playing lead guitar, at least until the end section. It’s not a complicated part, but it’s played honestly and expressively, with good tone and timing, and edited as lightly as possible.

Even recording a solo song is usually a collaborative process. Tell me about the importance of trust between the participants, personal relationships between musicians and engineers and the freedom to perform and try things – rather than gear, technique or “chops” - for creating a great song.

The level of trust varies depending on the person and my past relationship with them, if any.

I have learned that it is not enough for me to tell someone "feel free to make the part your own, you're a better instrumentalist than me, and I don't know how to play your instrument anyway" or "don't be afraid to get creative with the mix".

They have to know that I'm not kidding, and that I love being surprised by a performance, but they also have to have a sense of what my boundaries are--we both know that even if I say they are free, they are not infinitely free, because it's a composition after all, and I'm not even sure where the boundaries are. We have to discover that together, it takes time, and that is the process of building trust.

This is why I summoned all the contributors to Amor Fati in order to record Ascension. I wanted to leverage any trust that had already been established.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? In terms of what they contribute to a song, what is the balance between the composition and the arrangement (performance)?

Here's my naive take after four albums.

An engineer is like a chef. You want to give them a solid recipe--the composition and arrangement--and the best ingredients--the performances. If the chef is lousy, they will ruin all that; the result might be edible, but a disappointment. If they adhere to the recipe and prepare the food with skill, the result will be as good as the ingredients. If they tweak the recipe and add a few elements of their own, it can be magic. So when the engineer says "do you mind if I try something...?", I get excited.

Mastering is more like adjusting the seasoning. It is less critical, especially if the mix is already good, and less of a creative role, but it demands one's full attention, the same as the other stages of production.

Regarding composition and arrangement, I aim to make the composition as good as I can. That means knowing the difference between what is needed to realize my artistic vision, and what should be left to the performer, because I do not know all that they are capable of, and I do not know as well as they do what their instrument is capable of.

So there are always elements of the composition that should be left unspecified, and I need to make sure that, first of all, I'm not pushing responsibility onto the performer that I should retain, and second, that I'm not taking responsibility for something that the performer is better-equipped to handle.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

Yes, I had such an episode this week! But what I experienced really had nothing to do with creativity. I just have unreasonable expectations of potential listeners.

When I release an album, I am so excited to share it with people who might love it like I do. But people have, like, lives of their own. They have limited time and attention. I do too. Most of them aren't going to buy my CD the day it comes out and then devour it, even if they're fans. They'll get around to it.

Until then, I have to be patient, and remember that growing an audience can't be the goal. It's what the Stoics call a "preferred indifferent", not comparable to, not even in the same league as, creating the work itself.

I can understand those who feel a sense of emptiness when the work is complete, but I don't really get that myself. I'm happy when it's complete, and more often than not, I'm already working on something else. I haven't yet needed a break to refill my well. The imp says "what well? Let's screw around and not worry about wells. Hey, how about a piece using a bodhran but also a CR-78?!".

Music is a language, but like any language, it can lead to misunderstandings. In which way has your own work – or perhaps the work of artists you like or admire - been misunderstood? How do you deal with this?

This touches on the reasons that I write instrumentals. I listen mostly to songs with lyrics, to be fair. But as a composer it kind of feels like a cheat to use lyrics to evoke emotional responses, and I don’t want the temptation of falling back on lyrics when the music is perhaps weak. They’d be terrible anyway!

A consequence is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to misunderstand my work. Or at least I hope so. The closest I have been to being misunderstood was a reviewer who thought Amor Fati was sort of new age music, and at least one reviewer who compared The Laconic to Gordian Knot. But these weren't critical statements. I admired Sean Malone and I like some new age music. I just don't hear the similarities. But I'm not going to tell people that they listened wrong. It's a benign kind of misunderstanding.

The first time I heard "Five Miles Out“, which was not long ago, I thought it was weird as hell. I didn’t understand it. But I liked it enough, or was intrigued enough, to listen to it regularly. And one day I realized "oh! It’s opera!“ and suddenly it made sense to me. Now it’s one of my favorite Mike Oldfield pieces.



Why did that conceptual shift make such a difference? Why was it necessary to understand it that way, or at all?

There is a lesson in there for me somewhere. Maybe I’m not entirely immune to misunderstanding after all. But so far, while I’m frequently misunderstood in real life, music is a refuge from that, if anything.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I avoid using the word "express". It never feels applicable to what I do. But then I used the word "expressive" without flinching, so there's a puzzle.

I'm not expressing anything through music and I'm not communicating anything in the strict sense. I prefer the word "evoke". If someone shares enough of the same context with me, in life and listening, then I can leverage musical elements that create a certain emotional effect in me to evoke a similar emotional effect in them. It's analogous to sympathetic resonance.

Maybe it's possible to do that by making a great cup of coffee, but that is a very limited palette to work with, and you can't make a hundred great cups of coffee in the way that you can make a hundred copies of a great album or perform for a hundred people. Not to mention that taste and smell are not our greatest senses.

I'm surprised to conclude that no, it's not inherently different, but it is practically very different.