Riding a Solid Line
Riding a Solid Line
Washed Memoir Episode V: Turn Turn Turnt...
Riding a Solid Line This is the call of light, turning from ever-bright. Turing to reasons why. Don’t fret, alright- I’ll write tonight. Don’t say goodbye or goodnight, don’t try. Find those who fight, find those who write. They’ll hold you like I like, they’ll sigh. You’ll feel the sides of summer in winter. You’ll reach the heights of costumes, don’t try. They’ll leave you high in deserts. Feel those realize the water’s run dry. Unfortunately, for you. I’m the one who has to do this; to submit. Unfortunately, for you. I’m the one who has to do this to submit.
Hit play…
Art Corner
This song was written during the turning of the season: winter to spring, 2023—a change that is still underway as I write. In Colorado, there can be sharp weather variations in the liminal time from one season to the next. Especially, in the time between winter and spring. It feels like it has always been this way. I remember it often snowing near my birthday, in early to late spring—April, May…sometimes June. It makes planning difficult.
I don’t mind a spring snow. It snowed today and I attempted catching snowflakes on my tongue. I hadn’t put much thought into catching snowflakes in this manner until today. You have to angle yourself correctly and judge against the wind, and then look higher up than you would think to track the snowflake all the way down onto your tongue. Quite the journey for that one unique precious little snowflake. The level of difficulty is also a function of the amount of snow, wind and the size of the snowflakes. If the snow is heavy and frequent, you simply open your mouth and it inevitably falls in. However, this isn’t the optimal time to catch a snowflake. In this case, you’ll likely want to be out of the snow and inside. The best type of snow to catch is medium to large flakes falling gently without much wind. I’m no weather-talkin’ guy (meteorologist) but this seems more likely to occur in the spring.
Seasonal change is both a metaphor and an empirical reality. It’s an observable transition from one phase to the next and evidence for the cyclical nature of our existence. It’s an inevitable transition to which we must submit. This is the general idea of the song.
These lyrics underwent substantial editing between writing and recording, which is often the case with how I write. It’s useful to note that the editing process that occurs between writing and recording sometimes helps the final written product, especially if you are making cuts. I typically write a number of lines that fit with the idea and melody and edit them down as things progress. Here, I wasn’t sure about when and where the different sections would fit or what’s a verse or a chorus—which is often the case with my songs. If possible, I want to create music that resembles western folk/blues/pop/rock/roll songwriting but with enough influence of other genres or weirdness to make it interesting. There is only one lyric from the original draft that I left in the written version that isn’t in the song:
They’ll leave you high in deserts. Feel those realize the water’s run dry.
The above makes more grammatical and poetic sense, but I couldn’t fit it in the right spot given the phrasing of the song…so it turned into: They’ll leave you high in deserts, run dry. The meaning—from my perspective—is about feeling left out as change occurs.
Oscillating circumstances create economic and social advantages for different individuals and groups that shift from one group to the next over time. This happens in both the short-run—maybe 5-10 years and the long-run—hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The “they” in the lyrics are the circumstantial winners with the belief that their own cunning accounts for their advantage. This makes it easy to leave others behind with the conviction that the circumstantial losers should have made better decisions. TL;DR: they’ll leave you high and dry.
Perhaps the most powerful part of the lyrics are the last two stanzas. Unfortunately, for you. I’m the one who has to do this; to submit. This is repeated without the semicolon in the next stanza.
Side note: Should I change my alias to Tony Stanza? Ah darn, of course it is already taken.
The lyric attempts to hold two ideas: 1. I have to submit vs. 2. I have something to submit. “To Submit” can be read as submitting to power or submitting some thing—for example, turning in your homework. The lyrics touch on the cyclical nature of power. It can be read as: unfortunately for those in power, the ones who have to submit are the ones who actually hold power. They choose to submit—or they do not. Patti Smith said it better and more succinctly.
The lyric can also be read on a more personal level. For a person to change, they need to submit or accept change. Part-in-parcel with personal acceptance is spiritual acceptance. Regardless of individual religious convictions, we all submit to death and no one has hard evidence of another realm or state of being beyond this life. This can be an argument in favor of—or against—religious spirituality.
This song is about fighting against submission and accepting submission to that which we cannot comprehend.
Gear Corner
The primary instrumentation on this song comes from the 2600, the Deepmind 6, guitars and samples. My main instrumental experiment on this song is using drum samples for the primary drum tracks. First, heck yeah, sampling is awesome and Landr.com is a great resource for accessing cleared samples. On the first Miter record, I mainly played and recorded live drums—which I still want to do more of in the future. Not being a great drummer and not being a great engineer made for some mixed results. Recording, playing and mixing live drums, in my estimation, is the most difficult aspect of being a recording engineer. Drum machines and samples make this much easier. So much so, that it is hard to justify recording live drums in my fully self-sufficient work flow. Besides the fact that playing acoustic drums is fun, recording them isn’t very efficient (for me). Drum machines have their own charm, but samples provide some of the liveliness of recording acoustic drums without having to actually record drums. And you get a cut of sound from a good drummer in styles that you probably don’t know how to play. Sampling is part of the reason why anyone can produce music and a likely reason why AI creators can piece together music so fluently. There are some complex implications around sampling, however, it is a technique that I enjoy and respect—especially related to golden era 90s hip-hop production and many of my favorite electronic artists, i.e. Caribou and Boards of Canada. So, I plan to do more sampling. I could see a situation where you describe a sample to an AI which then automatically finds or creates a sample to your specifications. The AI would need a database of cleared samples or it could create its own ripped-off versions. I hope someone makes this in a responsible way.
One other production note related to software and AI tools…I tried out a new plug-in that was available to me from Landr Studio (apologies for the promotional coupon): Baby Audio TAIP. Basically, my mix sounded bad, then I put this plug-in on a number of things (master bus, vocals, synths, guitars) and it sounded much better. I have no idea how it works other than it applies tape saturation based on some sort of algorithm. Is that really AI? More like machine learning, dude. Regardless, I like it.
All for now, I hope you enjoy reading and listening to this publication. I appreciate any feedback or comments. I hope to get more of you writing and interacting on Substack. I think this is a good place—at least relative to the other social-media-dopamine-fix-hellholes. I’m looking forward to connecting with you more on Substack and I have a diabolical plan to make this happen.
NEXT UP! Along with the aforementioned diabolical plan, I’ll send a heads-up when “Riding a Solid Line” is available for streaming. Sorry, the song title is a little obtuse, but some things should remain a mystery.