A Clearing

In 2017 I put out a record and simultaneously decided to go back to school. I'd like to have promoted the record a bit more, but that's the way the timing worked out. I did a launch at SCALA at the Wheaty, it went well, I sold a few copies, and I felt good enough about it to pursue other things for a bit.

School took all of my non-day-job attention for five years, but I took that time to do some unstructured practice on guitar and drums. I learned my blues scales and got comfortable alternate picking. I learned all the rudiments I never bothered with when I was a young percussionist. I got a double bass pedal and some more rack toms, and started learning new tricks.

When I graduated, I had a backlog of songs. I started recording them, and things that used to be hard came quickly. I've always been hard on myself in that I want to write the songs, play all of the instruments, sing the songs, record, mix, and master everything myself, while using no pitch or timing correction. It's a lot, but the variety helps to keep me interested. If I get sick of one thing, I move on to another and come back to it later when it feels fresh again.

I do comp or edit together several performances, and usually I'll do eight takes in a row of a drum track, a rhythm guitar, or a lead vocal, literally, the whole song for whatever instrument I'm on, eight times in a row, and then edit it. If I don't hear what I want after cutting the best bits together, I do it again. I'd do this repeatedly until the song started to sound like an actual band.

There were a lot of times making the Reclamation record that I found myself struggling to get things to groove or sound the way I wanted and I recorded things many, many times. Between having a day job and living a life, it took several years to make that record happen. I'm still happy with the results, but it was hard and I had to compensate for various weak spots in my musical skillset that made it difficult to progress at times.

When I started up again a few years ago, that was no longer the case. All of the practicing I did between school and work made recording a breeze. I also got fairly comfortable with my micing, plug-ins, and mixing/mastering workflow, so things that I used to spend days on came together pretty quickly. It turns out that hard work eventually does pay off, and things that used to take effort and frustration now flow with relative ease.

I now have 95% of a new record recorded and very little of it felt forced in tracking. There was no slog. It was still work, but when I did something and listened back, by the end of eight takes of a given track, I generally had something I could use, with drums, bass, guitar, singing, whatever.

Before I went back to school, I was usually very nervous to perform in front of an audience. Growing up, playing drums in bands, I was never the focal point and someone else was generally doing the heavy lifting of exposing their heart and soul to an audience. Stepping out from behind the drums was very difficult for me. For years I would get deep, physically palpable anxiety and my fingers would shake to the point that I had to pick setlists that allowed me to strum. It was a drag and I used to spend a lot of mental energy trying to work around my weak spots and plan for scenarios of what could go wrong on stage.

At school I took a class in presentation, and I spent a great deal of time at my day job delivering software training to my colleagues. I had to deliver a twelve-minute speech to my class entirely from memory. I learned about phrasing and vocal warm-ups. Training in the office got me comfortable talking to all kinds of people and helped me to build my confidence.

Meanwhile, I got heavily into meditation during the pandemic and found a fairly consistent sense of inner peace which I make time for every day still. And the practice and easy recording made me feel better about my instrumental chops. In retrospect, things became much easier in general once I began meditating, and I attribute a lot of the progress I've made to experiencing stillness, being more present, and letting go of things I can't control.

When I finally came back to performing my songs in front of an audience, I was still a little nervous, but it was manageable, the kind of nervous energy that helps me to connect with people and be present in the moment, far from the kind of near panic attack sort of thing I used to experience. I could speak to the audience between songs like a pro. I could deliver my songs more or less the way I wanted. I didn't really make mistakes the way I might have before, but if something didn't go quite the way I planned, I could handle it and not let on. I've come a long way.

So here we are. I have a record I'll be finishing up as I can and eventually I'll put it out. I want to put together a band to help me bring this project to life for real, so I'm looking for a bass player and drummer to play these songs live the way they are intended. I'm looking forward to sharing new music, playing out more, and seeing what happens next.

Matt

20 March 2026