The reason that I became obsessed with progressive rock, including defending it and defining it, was because, in the course of recording thirty albums, I realized that, while not entirely in any one genre, I fell more into prog and fusion than anything else. My aesthetic of doing something different on every song yet trying to tie the whole album together under one concept or theme. My attempt to make every album and every recording session grow upon the previous ones, getting better and sometimes bigger. My constant attempts to make my sonic palate expand.
Developing an aesthetic isn't something you do consciously. You start making a bunch of music, mostly flailing about in the dark, trying something different on each track. It's natural to gravitate towards the songs that work, to shy away from the failures. Also, give yourself a handicap at the beginning; you don't really know what you're doing. A great concept can be sunk by a faulty presentation. That's why I went back and did so many retreads later, when my skill sets in planning and arranging were at a higher level.
In the beginning, back between 2006 and 2010, it was enough to play around with sound. Creating effective arrangements, with introductions, middle eights and conclusions, was often accidental. I was hearing for the first time what I was capable of doing, slowing moving towards both the naturally easy, such as blues and rock, and well as the challenging, such as jazz and prog. I never fall into just one category; instead, I learned to focus on a genre while trying to explore both the fundamental aspects of it while pushing the boundaries.
The above video was one of my first pieces; I'm not playing anything, just assembling musical segments in layers. I'm not a classical musician and can barely read music, but the software enabled me to get very fancy within the confines of a genre that is not overly familiar. This was typical of my early soundtrack work, trying to develop something that might be a personal statement while having a piece that I could use at work behind a video. While I did eventually use between 12 and 15 pieces in that way, if you figure 337 total songs, it turns out of be a very low percentage that were ever utilized.
On 'Miles Tones', I was specifically going for a vibe; John McLaughlin playing with Miles Davis around 1969. There are two layers of guitar that I am supplying, but the horn as well as the rhythm section are loops. It works well for what it is, a simple exploration of certain tonalities on the guitar, a darker texture, with interesting counterpoints in the drumming. The video was also done early, probably around 2012, and is elementary playing around with moving textures.
Not all my wildest experimentation were failures; as I added more instruments to my arsenal, I could get a better handle on pushing to the end of a sound yet not losing the thread. It is entirely possible to create a piece of music, including composing it and playing most of the instruments, and really not know what key it is in. It happens nearly every time that I have a recording session. Again, it can be more about the sonic textures playing against each other than about a melody, necessarily.
'Planetrise' is a perfect example; I'm probably playing two keys against each other, and the synth pads in the background help make the piece seem grounded, but the guitar and bass are not in harmonic sync. That is the element that makes the song sound celestial. Doing this video, there was a large collection of various video loops of an interstellar nature. This was the perfect place to use some of those, and it works, very experimental and very prog.
Textures can be used in an overloaded fashion as well, such as piling them on in excess or removing some element that are normally present. Using three bass guitars over a very strange and shifting drum piece, full of effects, makes 'Big Jig', above, a very interesting construction. Each bass line has to have a function, and in fact there is a low, middle and high bass part, since to unclutter sound, you need to pick frequency levels for each instrument. Since this instrumental was also rather far out, I created a video that used some of the strangest clips that I had gathered.
It's not all about being harsh and atonal; being progressive can also mean being very tonal, but in a more pastoral or balladic fashion. 'Susan's Other Song' is my second attempt at this, from 2012. The first version, for 2008, was okay, but it was one of fifteen songs on a album, and I hadn't learned yet to reduce the amount of material in a presentation. Being the next to last piece, the listener was exhausted by the time it came up. Plus it wasn't a great performance, but it had potential. Hence, I later took another swipe at it.
The germ of the idea was going through my outtakes folder and finding an alternative version that did have a piano on it but was undeveloped. Om the released version, I went for a slow guitar-only ballad. Frankly, the album had too much guitar heroics on it, and the slower song simply became lost. I felt the melody and chord pattern were worth trying again, so I worked out a much better keyboard part and based the arrangement around it. There is still plenty of guitar solos here, but it is a more balanced piece. Even the bass gets a chance to soar relentlessly; it may be one of my best performances on the bottom end.
The video was done as a series of very slow dissolves. It may be the first time that vacation video from Antigua made it into one of my music videos, something that would happen frequently after. Footage was shot as an experiment, the idea of using the textures of sea, sand and foam somewhere, and 'Susan's Other Song seemed the perfect match. Add some dance sequences, stuff that had harsh stage lighting causing too deep shadows, and the video turned out particularly well.
'Gazebo Logic' was an important song, done in 2011 for the 'Jazzadelic' album. There was a nice guitar chord sequence that I made a demo of, then added a bass. I had only been playing drums since 2008, and many of my early efforts became the majority of the songs that were later retreaded due to my early limitations. I knew that this song would be a challenge to play, so I kept hammering away at it with less and less success. It looked like another case of a song that was more sophisticated than my ability to actualize.
It was the middle of summer, at least 90 outside, both in heat and humidity as happens in the South, so I went out and mowed the grass. That took nearly two hours, and I came back in, only in shorts, covered in sweat. Heading to the shower, I passed the drums and decided, despite my exhaustion, to give it one more try. I was tired and pissed off, and I flailed on the drums with complete abandon. That was the moment that I first got the drumming absolutely right in one take, no overdubs, no splitting the snare/kick and cymbals/toms into two passes. For whatever reason, largely due to my frame of mind, I beat the song into submission.
To the outside listener it may not be much, but to me it was a pivotal moment. Playing an instrument, including the human voice, can be more about attitude than skill, even in progressive music. I added layers of soaring lead and later, during the 'Big Addendum' in 2016, remixed an underscore of just my scratch track guitar, as a reminder of the moment. The video used outtakes from work, footage that wasn't used, what is called 'b-roll' in the business. The combination of marshy bay areas and Manhattan make for an interesting visual treat.
You can't wallow in progressive rock without doing some Floydian Float. It may have taken many albums to realize that I was nearly always flirting with prog unless I was doing the blues (and there is overlap there as well), but 2011 I knew where things were heading. 'The Crux' was an attempt to balance electric piano with guitar and definitely shows heavy Pink Floyd influence. It is much harder to play the drums slowly than it is to play them fast.
Again, it is as much about the textures coming out of the instruments as it is about the notes. There is a great deal of bouncing around from type of playing - use of volume swells - to a different style - harder guitar soloing. Essentially, this is a song that wants to stew in its own juices for a good while, a meditation on a genre as much as a piece going somewhere specific. It overstays its welcome at the end, but for 2011, this was about as good as I could make it.
The video is another hodge podge of work outtakes and vacation footage from San Francisco, smeared over with random graphics. It may be the most typical of my videos, with every cliché that I have adopted over the years, while at the same time being completely non-linear. You have to develop a visual style in your music videos as much as you have to develop a musical style, and this shows me floundering a bit to make no point at all. Yet it still is an enjoyable ride, and worth looking back at from this vantage point in time.
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