And I have a terrible memory for stuff.   I feel the chord changes, and know these songs cold on some subliminal level, but the fingerings become a mystery to me after six months or so.   After four years, or ten years, forget about it.  Unless I left accurate tablature, I can never play these songs exactly the same again.

But I can try.   And as I play through things tonight, I’m amazed at the little things I learn that I actually created.   It’s like the goldfish, who comes around the corner in his fish bowl, every single time, and says “Hey, look guys, cool Castle!”

Some of these old songs, songs that have never been released, are amazing.   Yeesh, why didn’t “Accomplishing, Believing” make the album cut for First Words.   And the bridge to “Great Mistake” makes my hair stand on end.

Oh well… maybe on the next album. 

My life, as you can imagine, is a little busy…  so I’m doing what I can to promote this record, enjoy the positives, and not dwell on what I can’t get done.   Did I mention baby #3 is a sweetheart..  prone to laughing incontrolably when she sees my face.

Sending the record out has led to some great reviews, and some not-so-great.  

American-UK loved the record.

… this is simple music for simple enjoyment. Nothing complicated or over done just a selection of fine songs that definitely reward repeated listens. It’s a little US college indie for sure, and no doubt there will be a few Converse wearing kids already claiming they found him first… Harmony and melody are cherished here, there is little room for abstraction or confrontation. Solid from start to finish treat these as individual little three minute nuggets and you may well fall under Garret’s charm too just as I have.

And from AbsolutePunk.net:

Tomorrow is Already Here makes songs that crib light feathering motions of strings, keyboards, horns, and guitars berth by cozy seaside bass rolls and drum beats. His blend of country folk textures and soft pop tempos is very relaxing. In a world that mostly stresses people out, Gengler’s product is a remedy for feeling burned out and weary

Nice… I’ll take that. 

The reviews by Delusions of Adequacy and Two Way Monologues… not so much.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about these words of wisdom from one of the all-time great audio engineers & producers, Terry Manning:

Once you write, perform, produce, or even engineer music for public release and consumption, you are opening yourself up to criticism. And the public is vast…the reactions will almost always vary from “great” to “abysmal” on the same piece of music. I learned long ago that you have to grow a thicker skin if you are going to read the reviews.Sometimes you will find one that touches your heart. “They actually got it!” Out there in that big wild world they understand what you’re trying to do or say. Then you will read a review that simply crushes you. You worked so hard, not to try to make something that will just sell, but something that is worthy of inclusion in the lexicon of modern music…something that came from your heart, from your soul, something on which you worked so very hard, with good intent. And someone out there disliked it so much that they went out of their way to let everyone know how bad you really were.This is all part and parcel of being in the public eye. You can’t really have one without the other.(Led Zeppelin 3) received many absolutely scathing, horrible reviews upon its release…the same for most LZ albums, by the way. Somehow, the bigger a thing you work on, the worse you can read about yourself.JUST ANOTHER DAY AT THE OFFICE…

Dave has been an improbably huge fan of mine for a few years now.    It’s an undeserved honor really, given how much incredible music he has been involved with in the industry.

Read the interview…

-G

Here’s are free MP3s of two songs:
First Words
Silver King

If you’d like a full listen before purchasing, please use the flash Music Player in the top-right corner. If you’re new to my music, I’d suggest you start with First Words, Northern Lights, Silver King, Where it Began, and This Night.

The record is up for sale all over the place, on CD and in various digital formats (including DRM-free mp3).   Genuine replicated CDs, with slick silk-screened art, are just $10, and that’s a bargain.

Buy at CDBABY.COM
Buy at the iTunes Store  
Buy at AmieStreet.com

I’m very happy with this record, and hope you enjoy it too.

Cheers!
-Garret

Mr. Lennon was asked once to give advice to aspiring songwriters.  His #1 piece of advice?  “Finish everything. Don’t dwell on things.” 

Go through your list of songs, and be brutal. Set aside anything that’s lost its magic for you. You’ll find some songs which had great potential, which you sadly have overworked while you learned to produce/record/mix. They’ve served you well, but they’re never going to be finished. So let them be.

A friend urged me to do that once, and spun it so nicely. “That stuff will be in your early years box set, “he said, “when you’re a star and have finished your 10th major release.”

Chin up though: whatever you set aside was not wasted work. It’s helped you to learn how to write and engineer, entertained you, and inspired you to keep writing… Remember, you can’t waste time writing. Whatever you create, good or bad, is all part of the process.

-G

I’m probably a few weeks away from finishing up the sequencing work (gotta cut some songs! 65 minutes is toooo long), then I’ll be working through mastering, cd artwork, replication, and promotion… one battle done, on to the next!

A few months back, blurry-eyed from trying to write eight (good) songs in a week, I found myself blindly searching google for, things.   Ideas, images, anything to get an inspiration for a lyric or twelve.  I’m a ‘reactive writer.’    For me, the hardest part of writing a song is writing the first few lines.   After I have something to sing, the rest just pours out… years of practice have taught me to guide the process, but I admit there’s a whole lot of “holding on for dear life” involved.

Trying something new, I started searching google for combinations of words I was interested in writing about, trying to steal a spark.  Somehow doing that, I  stumbled in to Project Gutenberg, and fell upon the writings of Charles S. Brooks.  I honestly could not tell you how I got there.    Serendipity, I guess…

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20095/20095-h/20095-h.htm

Somewhere in the middle of this essay, I started reading.   I don’t know how many people have read this since it was published in 1915.   I’m sure it’s tailed off significantly over the years.  It’s in the Public Domain now, which is good for a songwriter (yay theft!), and perhaps the ideal fate for something that should become immortal.

Honestly, this is genius work.  And it’s forgotten, or at least mostly forgotten.   As a creator of something that I think has lasting value, it’s humbling and grounding to think that there’s a very good chance that every piece of music I write will be lost to history.   Or maybe someone will stumble upon my music, late at night, decades from now, and raise a toast to my cleverness?!

At this minute there is a black book that looks down upon me like a crow. It is “Crime and Punishment.” I read it once when I was ill, and I nearly died of it. I confess that after a very little acquaintance with such books I am tempted to sequester them on a top shelf somewhere, beyond reach of tiptoe, where they may brood upon their banishment and rail against the world.
…
Right now, if I dared, I would climb to the roof again, and I would sit with my feet over the edge and crane forward and do crazy things just because I could. Then maybe my neighbors would mistake the point of my philosophy and lock me up; would sympathize with my fancies as did Sir Toby and Maria with Malvolio. If one is to escape bread and water in the basement, one’s opinions on such slight things as garters and roofs must be kept dark. Be a freethinker, if you will, on the devil, the deep sea, and the sunrise, but repress yourself in the trifles.
…
Reader, have you ever purchased a pair of pajamas in London? This is homely stuff I write, yet there’s pathos in it. That jaunty air betokens the beginning of your search before question and reiteration have dulled your spirits. Later, there will be less sparkle in your eye. What! Do not the English wear pajamas? … The Englishman does wear pajamas, but the word with him takes on an Icelandic meaning. They are built to the prescription of an Esquimo. They are woolly, fuzzy and the width of a finger thick. If I were a night-watchman, “doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,” I should insist on English pajamas to keep me awake.

These days, with in-the-box, DAW mixing engines, and all modern consoles, mono sources can be panned to any position in the stereo field.   But perhaps they shouldn’t.   We have a long history of great recorded music that features hard panning, and it sounds fantastic. It simplifies mixing, and renders obvious any arrangement problems that might be masked by mashing tracks together.

One of the secrets to making hard panning work is mic bleed. Just a bit of bleed makes it sound natural… wide, but natural.  I.e, if you record two guitars live, and hard pan them, you will get a bit of each guitar in the other’s mic.  That is “bleed.”

Unfortunately, you don’t always have bleed to make things sound natural. If you record two “paired” tracks separately that you want to hard pan, consider crossing their reverb sends. This works great for two acoustic guitars, for instance. Left guitar, send to a verb panned hard right. Right guitar, send to the same verb panned hard left. Balance levels to taste, then bask in your cleverness.

If you are mixing digitally/ITB, with no tape or console crosstalk, and everything you are mixing was tracked separately or is an arranged track (midi/samplers/etc.), the complete separation can sound painfully artificial. Since you’re going to hell anyway, you might as well make the best record you can… so cross pan your reverb sends, and create some fake bleed along with everything else.

Works for me at least.

I was too busy to post any details about the process, but after many long nights and more than a few days off work, I finished.    I wrote, recorded, and mixed a record in a month.   Well, it’s not really a record, but it’s 10 good songs.   I actually had three weeks, since I heard about the project late.. so I spotted myself three songs I had already written, but which I had never properly recorded.

You can hear the whole shebang, which has been titled (in a bleary-eyed haze) “And Then There Were Ten”, at the RPM headquarters.

Here’s a link where you can download the whole EP as a zip file… (for a limited time).

http://www.worksongs.net/2007/rpm2007

You can also hear the whole album at the RPM website, in their jukebox.

http://www.rpmchallenge.com/jukebox/

All the little tricks of pop/rock music theory are yours for the taking, in Alan Pollack’s analyses of every song in the Beatles canon.  What a piece of work.. 10 years or so of study.

I think I’ve learned more about songwriting, particularly harmonic and melodic development and arrangement techniques, from his work than any other reference. I go back to this again and again… if I could buy it in print, I would, in a second. 

But I can’t, and you can’t either.    You can only read it for free.

A few of my favorites…

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/aditl.shtml
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/dp.shtml

And the main index…

http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-alphabet.shtml