The President And His Accumulated Burden of Sucking Can’t Be Put Right By The Sun And Leaves Of An Autumn Afternoon In October

Just stepping out onto our front stoop this afternoon, stopping to sit on the steps and give my shoes a heartier tying while Cathy finished up a conversation she was having with Emily on the cell-phone, was enough to astound me into a better mood.

It was around 4:15 this afternoon. I had spent a better part of the day in the studio enjoying vocal compression work for like-the-first-time-ever! I was determinedly building dense vocal beds- using sound processors to create simple digital replications of acoustic environments and greedily dropping my voice into the presets of small churches and large concert halls. And I was sucking. Really sucking.

So what happens in these suck situations is I either walk away freely, readily acknowledging that I’m not feeling it- that vocals today aren’t going to come by way of curiosity or play (the best way) but rather from a sense of obligation (the worst way)- or I fight it and this causes a heavy burden of accumulated sucking.

Eventually a bass line came along, out of nowhere, and while it wasn’t perfect it was just enough a tonic to propel my ass out of the studio and upstairs and onto the front stoop where everything was ablaze with sunlight and effulgent leaves just days away from their most rustic moments of barn reds and flaxen yellows. This was enough to lift the accumulated burden of sucking.