We had a short break, change of shirts, my partner and I had lunch, a power-bar and cold drinks, then we took a Lyft to the recording studio in the City. We rode thru sultry streets, windows rolled down. The news came on the radio station, an FM station playing the hits, Sinead O'Connor had died at the tender age of 56. The news walloped us both. Crushing to hear. So sad and shocking, and then the DJ played her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U." We both melted, tears flowed. What a voice, what a powerful force, a woman who as the rock writer Bill Flanagan once wrote, was very much like another of our great inspirations, John Lennon, both extraordinary artists and people who "wore their hearts on the their sleeves." No matter what they did, they did with style, passion and total commitment.
"I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got," (1990) is truly a masterpiece record, a bold, fiery, indelible, beautiful artistic statement. Sinead's enemies totally deserved her passionate wrath: the child-abusing Catholic Church, the authoritarian Margaret Thatcher, misogynistic men, and abusive partners who tried to dominate & own her. The record is totally one of my all-time favorites. My partner and I believe that our creative work is the "best of us," I believe that is the case with all the artists I admire. Troubled, sometimes flawed (aren't we all?), Human Beings, fully human souls giving their absolute best to their artistic pursuits. Certainly Sinead and Lennon are prime examples. Humans doing the good work, fearlessly.
Every death is shocking. The loss incalculable. The passing of Sinead hit home, deeply.
We made it to the recording studio. All the pressure was on my shoulders. I was there to re-do a vocal and also to redo and "punch in," a tricky, delicate finger-picking, acoustic guitar part. The vocal re-do was fairly easy. I sang with passion, a part that I have sung many times live at shows. I was there to just give it my own natural best. We got a good take in two tries. The guitar part was a bit more difficult; playing along with a fully recorded track, I listened to the original part, and tried my best to match the tempo and timing, (we didn't originally record with a click-track, so the timing was sort of free-form and nebulous), and also to somehow recreate the original feel and touch. A couple of false starts. I lost the thread when the strings (a violin & double bass) came in, a bit disorienting. There was a moment where we all, my partner, the engineer, and I, thought maybe we should abort, and live with the original track. The engineer was of the opinion that the original guitar track was fine, I heard his voice in my headphones ask: "What's the point?" Ha. Maybe I was trying to recreate something that didn't need to be recreated? Maybe I was chasing a unicorn, a flashing mirage?
That thought-train actually straightened me up. We re-ran the track and I played my part and finished it in one take. I knew that the original track was ok, maybe in some ways it was totally fine, but to my ears, and maybe only to my ears, I knew I could play it a bit better. When I listened to the earlier version I heard a bit of hesitation, a tentativeness in my playing. That's why we were there. Anyway, everything clicked, I laid down a nicely-played track. To my ears the guitar part now was bold, confident, easy and fluid, beautifully-recorded with one well-placed microphone. To my ears, the track now sounds finished, and so much better.
We reviewed a handful of other mixes, made a few minor revisions, ran the new mixes, and then packed up our gear and headed home. It was an eventful day of music, passion, struggle, loss, storms, doing the thing that you love to do with all your might and passion, with the reminder that death comes to us all. Any time. So always be busy doing what you think is worth doing with heart, love, deep passion and total commitment. That's the Human Way.
