I don't listen to the radio much anymore. Partly because I'm focusing more and more on unearthing and discovering the original music inside of ME and I have to limit what saturates my ears and head, even my heart. But mostly because it's harder and harder to find incredible, magical, soul-stirring music if it's not in my carefully cultivated garden of tunes in my personal library of my favorite music. Radio doesn't help. TV doesn't help. Movies don't help. There are the flukes that occasionally come along, but by and large, the "entertainment industry" is producing Miley Cyrus and Reality TV and the next horror movie or bachelor party flick. Not exactly what comes through my filter as "art".
But because I'm an optimist, I have to occasionally scan through the airwaves to see if there is any sign of life. Because it really encourages me if there is. As much as I don't generally listen to the radio, it's even more rare that I listen to COUNTRY radio. It's not that I think it's a bad artform... I actually think the storytelling is generally better than any other current genre of music except folk... it's just that it's been "Miley-ized" with incessant references to cutoff jeans, 12 packs of beer, pickup trucks, getting drunk at the lake and it being time to open that 12 pack. You can almost predict the next lyric before you hear it. But as my friend Jonathan Wiggins has taught me in the last year, you cannot judge a book by its cover, and you never know what container is going to have the things of Heaven in it. You can miss a lot when you reject the substance because of the package it comes in.
But that's what my radio found when I turned it on and hit "seek". The tune I heard really grabbed me when it got to the chorus, and I had an explosion of thoughts about what I was hearing. There were some cliches in the lyric, predictably, and it wasn't the most innovative song I'd ever heard. But there was that intangible "Vitamin D" that came through the radio. That magic. That sense of urgency and hope and beauty and joy and spirit. Do you know what I mean? Have you felt that while listening to music? If not, it could be that the music you're listening to doesn't HAVE that component and you need to search out some better music... or it could be that you don't know how to open your ears, your mind, your heart to hear something that is there. There's hope for you because you can get there if you want to. And trust me, there is no drug in the world you need for complete euphoria when you do have that doorway open to your soul. A pair of headphones can turn you into a junkie more obsessed than a crack addict. Ask my friend Mark Downie.
So there were two "layers" intertwined in this song. There was the tangible, physical, concrete level of frequencies and sonic personalities. And there was the intangible spirit layer of magic. You could FEEL the sunshine and the splashes of crisp, cool ocean waves. And ironically the lyric was centered around those things. So they did the incredible and actually put the ocean and the sand the sunlight INTO the music. Did you know that was possible? It takes the gift and experience of a real musical master, or a team of them, to do this. A great producer or artist or studio musician or mixing engineer or even mastering engineer can do this when the magic is already there in the song itself. It has to be a pretty darn good song, even if it has a few cliches or predictable aspects to it. But to put the things of heaven into a song.... is there a higher aspiration in this life?
By the time the song was over, I'd pulled over and downloaded the single to my iPhone so I could hear it in proper resolution... and I'd put on my noise canceling Bose headphones, the best wedding gift I could have ever received. They get about 2 hours of use every day for the last 12 years of marital bliss. And no, I don't use them to avoid hearing my wife - just the undesirable sounds around me when I'm needing to creatively focus.
The intro and verse were ok... but something very special happened when it got to the chorus. The hook transported me to Old Orchard Beach in Maine where we used to visit EVERY WEEK for entire summers. My passionate love affair with the Atlantic Ocean can not be overstated. I have been feeling physical pain because I wasn't able to get to the east coast beaches this year during the summer. The chill in the air announcing the arrival of my favorite season, Autumn, has felt, this year, like the lid of a coffin sealing above me and taking all light and hope with it. I'll have to wait 9 months for my next chance. 9 long months. Well, that might be a SLIGHT exaggeration but not by much. And this song brought me TANGIBLY back to my lost love.
There were tangible, technical things that made it get through my filters and into my heart. From the first second, you feel a kick drum that shakes the ground - soft and pillowy but as firm as a concrete foundation. Some real girth to the low frequencies around 30hz. When it gets to the chorus, though.... there is an explosion of sound so beautiful it's like a cold spray of salt water on your face, and refracted light ricocheting off of water and sunglass rims and little sparkles in the sand and drops of water lingering on a beautiful smile. But in the real, tangible world, it's the sound of an expertly mixed group of 30-50 tracks being summed together through an Alan Smart C2 compressor or SSL G Series compressor, I'm sure, and possibly mastered by Adam Ayan at Gateway Mastering, Bob Ludwig's mastering lab. Or something that produces that feeling, that magic. Hang in there with me if you don't know what I'm talking about.
You see, there are tools that musicians use that leave a certain signature behind. They are recognizable to musicians and engineers that study the creation and manipulation of SOUND. A microphone captures the energy and music and frequencies of a voice or a guitar or a snare drum in a certain way that COLORS the sound in a way that is recognizable. It has a personality just like the singer does. If you were blindfolded you could recognize the voice of James Earl Jones or Ian McKellan or Sarah Michelle Gellar or Chris Farley without seeing them with your eyes, right? Well, musicians can hear the sound of an SM57 microphone on a snare drum or a Fender Deluxe Reverb with a black "face" from the 60's amplifying that Les Paul (guitar) with the volume on 9 and the bass knob on 6. We can hear the sonic signature of an AKG C-12 microphone and how that's different from a Neumann U-67. We can hear the difference between music that was summed together (mixed) inside a computer vs. in the components of an analog mixing console that has voltage running through it. People with better ears than I can tell the difference between a 12AX7 vacuum tube (in a guitar amplifier, not a Hoover vacuum) and a 12AT7 tube in the preamp of a tube amplifier. Or they can tell the difference between an Energizer battery and a Duracell battery inside one of those pedals guitar players step on during a show. There is a signature they can recognize.
I can't swear to you that the equipment used on this radio song was an SSL console with their buss compressor, but I used to own an SSL buss compressor and I know what it does to a drum set. The Alan Smart C2 does the same thing with a slight bump in fidelity and crispness. I mixed my "All the While" record through the SSL buss compressor and it's very special how it compresses (evens out the volume of) a drum set - especially when hi-hat cymbals are ringing like on this chorus. And there is something that Adam Ayan does with "rock" - (this country song has a healthy dose of rock tones in it during the chorus) as a mastering engineer - I was there in this laboratory when he mastered Shane Butler's "1107" record that I mixed and produced with Pete Nelson. I hear some of Adam's magic in this track. Sadly, there are no credits I can find to check my ear. But I would not be surprised if Adam and SSL and Les Pauls and a subharmonic expander (on the kick drum) were involved in this song. And it's very possible that my buddy and collaborator Tim Pierce played that guitar solo. If not, the guitar player has a lot of the same technique and tone and ideas that Tim has in that brilliant mind of his.
I mention these things not because I want to be a nerd but because these sounds CONNECT with a legacy, a history of the evolution of recorded music that I have studied in my lifetime. It's like seeing a dear old friend. That's what I feel when Dave Beegle plugs his old strat into a Vox AC-30 and gets THAT sound from the neck pickup. It's a sound that has a long, beautiful history in music, in the history of putting salt air and sunshine into a song. There are roots that go down deep here. There is a sense in which musicians are paying tribute to the sounds and signatures and personalities of songs past. And I believe that this familiarity connects with something in the heart, a sense of "I have been here before!". A sense of Deja Vu. A certain credibility that comes from knowing where things come from. A lot of modern music kind of sounds to me like the story of the stork bringing babies to front doorsteps as a way of explain where children come from. But when you know where they come from.... you can revel in reliving that beautiful story and you know something that the stork folk don't know. I know where that strat (slang for "Fender Stratocaster Guitar") through Vox AC-30 comes from. I recently had a young genius build me a Vox AC-15 from scratch to exact vintage specifications so I could get THAT sound from the neck pickup of MY strat. It took the better part of a year and it was well worth the wait. This amplifier allows me to put sand and salt and water droplets on a beautiful smile into songs. Trust me on this.
This blog would be 10,000 pages if I got into all the subtleties that were evident on this one listen of this one song. I encourage you, I dare you, to listen to music with new ears. Invest in good equipment to listen on. A great pair of headphones like Grado or Bose will reveal things you NEVER heard with your Apple Earbuds. Open your heart. See if you can catch some of that sea spray. Bring a towel and some sunscreen. You just might need it.
Oh, and here's that country song. See if you can hear what I'm talking about. Please download the actual song or buy the CD... but since the whole world listens to music on YouTube now...
