How To Make An Album No One Will Hear

Step One - Take Piano Lessons Because Your Mom Says So

You’re sitting at the piano. To your right are about twenty-five or thirty expectant faces. Bored fathers, calm mothers, fidgety siblings. Your own mother and brother are in the front row, smiling encouragingly. Your brother’s already had his turn. He’ll come away with second place this year for his rendition of a much-simplified Can-can by Offenbach.

It’s a dark and stuffy room on the ground floor of a local hotel, whatever the Canadian version of Hilton is. Or maybe just a Hilton. After the recital, you get to go out for dinner.

Like all kids, the things your parents set up for you, you leave entirely unquestioned. This is because you trust, unquestioningly, your mother’s judgement. So unquestioningly that you don’t even think of it as trust.

You sit on the piano bench, not thinking about the silence of the audience, not thinking about your piano teacher Mr Goering (aka Mr Boring) in the front row beside Mom, not thinking about how well you’ll do. You're thinking only of the notes in your head.

You are so tuned into the notes that you put the sheet music in front of you without thinking—thereby, according to the recital rules, disqualifying yourself from competition. To place, you have to memorize. It doesn’t matter if, clear as day to everyone in the small room, you’re looking only at your fingers on the keyboard. You’ve got the sheet music open, and that’s all the judges see.

You play the piece perfectly. If you hadn’t put the sheet music up, you’d have gotten first place easily.

Driving home, you’ll wring your hands and lament, “Why didn’t you guys say anything? Why didn’t you tell me to take the music down?” Mom will quietly return, “We thought you did it on purpose. We didn’t want to push you or embarrass you.”

At your very first piano recital, your trust will get you two things: a perfect performance, and disqualification. It will take you two decades to realize which is more meaningful.

If you donate $1 per week, I will grant you unlimited access to home movies of my piano recitals.

Step Two - Immigrate to the USA

You pack up a lot of things, but the piano isn’t one of them.

America will be filled with sounds you’ve never heard before: the light drone of fireflies in evening; the jingle of picturesque ice-cream trucks that would be redundant in the snowy north but are quite necessary in hot North Carolina; the musical twang of Southern accents; the vapid arena-country that monopolizes the Southern radios.

People don’t really talk about this, but countries sound different from each other. America sounds like the rustling of paper money; Canada still resounds with the jingle of coins. America is the squeak of Nikes on hardwood; Canada is the slice of skates on ice.

You’re going through the musical awakening that any twelve or thirteen year old goes through. You and your friends trade CDs, name-drop bands and concerts you’ve been to. Social acceptance rides on these things. You aren’t cool enough to set the trends yourself, and as a fresh arrival, right off the proverbial boat, you have to trust your new friends’ musical suggestions. The White Stripes reign. British Invasion is still the apotheosis of music. But Arcade Fire’s new album is going to change everything.

You want to start learning guitar. Bass guitar. You buy one from Walmart. As crazy as it may sound, your hometown in Canada didn’t have a Walmart. Lord! What a backwater!

The bass guitar comes in the mail. Walmart gives you two by accident. You sell the other to a friend and make your money back.

If you donate $5 per week, I’ll give you personal financial advice on how to sell used instruments for the maximum return. I’ll also make you a teen angst playlist that contains too much British Invasion.

Step Three - Buy Your Guitar Teacher Sausage Rolls

Skip ahead three years.

Your family has relocated once more, this time to Arizona. It’s even hotter and even more different from Canada. Where North Carolina sounded like fireflies and ice-cream trucks, Arizona sounds like horse hooves and highways. Phoenix is a sprawl. The public high schools atrocious. In NC you’d built a community of music lovers and friends but never got around to playing that bass. At Barry Goldwater High School in Glendale, you take the opposite approach: start guitar lessons, and talk with no one.

Well, there is one person. Your guitar teacher.

Before this your parents buy you a cheap but not too cheap blue Ibanez acoustic and a Beatles songbook. The first notes you play after figuring out the tablature system are a G and a B—tonic, and major third. The opening of Blackbird.

You’re sitting in your bedroom, playing this simple double-stop over and over again, basking in the consonance. The idea that you could reproduce the same sound as Paul McCartney’s guitar makes in the privacy of your own bedroom, by yourself, is… magical.

Guitar lessons follow quickly. Your teacher helps you develop good habits, and tries to provide you with songs to learn and principals to understand, but truth be told, you are not very teachable. Unlike piano lessons, in which you sat in front of a page of actual notes, learning by reading, guitar lessons are more ad hoc. No musical notation. Just tabs, chords, scales, and modes.

Your dad drives you every Wednesday. And every time, you stop at the Circle K around the corner from the guitar teacher’s house to buy a sausage roll, which you take to the teacher as a kind of improvised additional payment for him to peaceably consent to the fact that he’s no longer really there to teach you guitar, which you have been easily teaching yourself—he’s there for you to bounce songwriting ideas off of.

If you donate $10 per week, I’ll grant you access to my old lyric sheets, which will provide you with endless cringing entertainment.

Step Four - Sing “Get Back” in a coffee shop.

Your first songs are so utterly bad it pains you to recollect them. Yeah, sure, everybody’s first songs are bad. But yours are really bad.

But slowly, with your guitar teacher as a sounding board, they’re getting less bad.

But one thing that you’ve been struggling with that may be easier to work on is your signing voice. Singing doesn’t come naturally to you or anyone in your family. You have a well-enough trained ear to hit the notes, but your range is limited, your tone nasally. There is one cringe-worthy performance at which you covered the entirety of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” with your quiet, flat, nasally voice, at a student function put on by your guitar teacher. Eek. You try to block this out of your memory.

Some time maybe a year later, you’re sitting in a coffee shop, at the weekly jam session your guitar teacher has been trying to get you to come to for a while. You haven’t really talked about music with anyone but your teacher since North Carolina, and you’ve never really played with anyone else, so this jam session has been a hard sell. But you finally get there with your guitar.

Turns out it’s easy and fun to strum along to songs everyone knows. Low-pressure. No one’s asking you to solo. No one’s trying to teach the room complicate chord progressions or songs people don’t know. Someone starts playing “Get Back.” By a happy accident, the key they’re playing it in fits the top range of your voice perfectly. No one’s singing yet; you’re all looking around the room, waiting for someone to start a verse. Bursting through your shyness in a moment of abandon, you start, “Jojo was a man who thought he was a loner, but he knew it wouldn’t last…” For the first time, you aren’t nasally or quiet: you’re projecting, enunciating, and singing clearly. Everyone’s smiling and enjoying it. Wow! Revelation! You can please people with your singing. It just takes the small bit of discernment to choose the right song. Or stumble upon it. Or trust the moment, and the people you’re playing with. Yes, that’s it: trust. You’re starting to see a trend here.

For the rest of your life, this will be the musical high point: that accidental moment of trust, in yourself and your fellow musicians, when you started singing, without meaning to, in a coffee shop you’d never visit again, the song “Get Back” by the Beatles.

If you donate $20 per week, I’ll send you personalized covers of Beatles songs. I won’t even sarcastically flub them. Pick your favorite and I’ll do it.

Step Five - Learn to Trust Others In Your First Band

You’re seventeen, going on eighteen, and starting college in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Your parents have just finished helping you unload and unpack and have hit the highway back down to Phoenix, leaving you alone in your half of a small dorm room in a dorm in a city where you know no one. Despite your shyness, you think—and you remember this now as a very deliberate thought—I need to go and meet new people right now. So you get up off your tiny new bed, and meander down to the common area. In the music room, there are three guys hanging out and playing music. You introduce yourself. There’s a piano in the room, but none of these guys can play it. Time to dust off the old piano skills. No sheet music required this time.

Soon, you’re playing gigs and writing original songs. Duties are spread very evenly between the four people in the band. Everyone helps write, and you trade off instruments every few songs. This isn’t by design; it’s a natural function of equal trust. Not perfect trust. I mean, you aren’t going to let the lead singer touch the piano or attempt to write out violin parts, and you yourself canNOT play drums to save your life, and it’s probably best that the violin player just sticks to violin. But this only strengthens trust, because it indicates that the four of you know not only each other’s possibilities, but your own limitations.

And when there is disagreement, there is argument. Drum sticks are thrown. Tears are shed. Words are had. This means that nothing festers, and discord burns itself out nearly as soon as it manifests.

You play gigs throughout undergrad and the band naturally dissolves when you and your bandmates graduate and go your separate ways.

You’ve learned the first rule of success for any creator’s medium: in order to trust the people around you, you have to trust yourself.

If you donate $25 per week, I’ll help you move, or drive you to the airport, or make you a mixtape to listen to while on a road trip.

Step Six - Be Bad at Trusting Others In Your Second Band

You’ve graduated. About half your friends have moved away, but the other half remains. Now begins what you will someday call the “Golden Age of Youth,” your early twenties, the time when you no longer face the responsibilities of school, of student loans, of parental expectation. The time when you strike out, however modestly, on your own, making do with the place you are and the resources you have because all your friends are making do with as little too.

You get a job at a Bookstore that pays eight bucks an hour. This is barely enough to live on, but you don’t need much. You spend your weeks going to work, getting beers with friends, watching weird and bad movies together.

You start a new band by accident. You had a few new songs that you wanted to perform, and you’ve gathered a small handful of friends to help you do it. One of them is a songwriter himself, and a pretty good one, and after handful of performances you start to feel a little guilty that he’s got to play only your songs. So you invite him to teach the group some of his.

Well, there you go. You’re a band now. You start cowriting songs with this guy, and performing more often. You build a small local following with your folk rock tunes, and soon you’re gigging about once a week.

Even the small amount of pressure of weekly gigs and writing new material is starting to become too much for you. You start to get annoyed at having to listen to other people’s ideas, which aren’t always great. A part of you longs for the days when it was just you and the sheet music in front of you.

There is component to your personality that makes this all more difficult: this is the component of the end-goal. You are a relentlessly end-goal oriented person. If some particular endeavor doesn’t at least hypothetically lead to some hazy notion of success, however far down the road, you’re unlikely to want to do it.

During undergrad, everything was oriented toward the end goal of the degree. Even a peripheral activity like being in your first band was still in the context of that degree, so you were able to let loose then and have fun. But no longer. These days, you’ve got your retail job, and the band. With nowhere else to put them, your unreasonable expectations must be on the band.

Oh, you mostly have fun. But there is a dark caul that spreads over everything, over the fun times, the tedious times, the successes and the failures: the caul of self-expectation.

If you donate $30 to my Memberful account, I will send you a book with a note written on the inside cover in which I reveal something of an overwhelmingly personal nature.

Step Seven - Start to Lose Your Hearing

This flaw (if it’s a flaw) that keeps you from surrendering to the fun of things finds an objective correlative midway through your tenure with Band #2.

You wake up one typical morning to find that you can’t move. Your ears are in severe pain. The slightest motion of your head feels like the entire globe around you is shaking like a magic eight-ball. Vertigo.

The first thing to figure out is what you can hear. No low tones. Mid tones are muted. A small bit of the higher registers seem to be okay. You learn this when your roommate’s cat comes slinking into the room. It meows; the warbling sound enters your right ear at its true pitch, and filters through the fluid filling your left ear a few microtones lower. The sounds of your roommates making breakfast downstairs have the same bitonal effect: like the world has been turned into a Charles Ives piece.

Then your roommates leave for work, and it’s you and the cat.

All that day, you’ve got little to do but think. What do you think about? Do you think about recovery, and how much of your hearing you expect to heal? Do you wonder where you picked up the ear infection? Do you attempt to find some kind of ironic justice in the event? Or do you just wonder how long it will be before you’re able to move your head a little bit? Because your neck is getting stiff, but turning it is not an option. The tiniest motion feels unbearable. A vertigo episode basically means that your inner ear, the part of you that establishes upness and downness, isn’t working. The sky and the floor might as well be left and right. No different from being in the international space station.

It’s pretty unpleasant.

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Step Eight - Read About Beethoven

Beethoven’s hearing lingered for a long time, and it wasn’t until the final years of his life that he approached what you would call “stone deafness.” He had a lot of time to think about what he was in the process of losing, and could see the deleterious effects of hearing loss in painful slow-motion.

Once prescribed antibiotics for the ear infection, you quickly recover most of your hearing. But being able to “mostly” hear is a far cry from being able to hear. The left ear is at about 70%, the right at 90%. Nowhere close to Beethoven, who by your age had trouble holding a conversation. But the comparison is inevitable, if megalomaniacal.

Probably standing next to a drum-set for years doesn’t help.

If you donate $40 to my Memberful account, I will post a video to YouTube in which I shave some part of my body. To be continued until I am immaculately hairless.

Step Nine - Zen Ambition

The word “zen” is often thrown around in Western conversation as more or less a synonym for “chill.” As in, “that dude is so Zen, he didn’t even mind that I ate all his Cheetos.” Then there is the trope you see in a lot of book titles, “The Zen of [insert non-sequitur].” Basically all the books that copy The Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance.

But what actually is the Zen school of Buddhism? Well, any summary of a +1,000 year spiritual movement is going to leave a lot out, but one flagship tenet of Zen Buddhism is that one attains enlightenment by not trying to attain enlightenment. If you’re trying to attain it, it’ll slip through your fingers. There’s a compelling paradox here: a range of highly-disciplined practices are necessary to bring oneself to a place where one is no longer trying.

You achieve your goals after you give up trying to achieve your goals, but the giving-up part is an essential step in your pursuit of the goal, which has never ceased in your heart of hearts. Not trying is very difficult, in other words.

So in order to create your album, all meaningfulness of the idea of the album must have faded with the memory of your past musical efforts. The more you tried as a younger musician to make some kind of permanent impact on your community and the people who listened to you, the more tightly-wound you became, and the more impossible the project became. But now that persistent failure has rendered the pursuit ironic, and life has sobered you up enough to know that nothing really rides on your success, you attain a Zen-like state.

Almost without meaning to, you book a few sessions at the local recording studio to see what happens. Then quarantine happens. It removes the temptation to perform live, thus taking away the teleological anxiety that this new recording project might have entailed. The recording becomes the end-in-itself.

In two days, you’ve recorded backing tracks for over a dozen songs old and new. Some of them feel good. Some are trash. But who cares? No one is going to listen to it anyways. You aren’t going to perform it. It’s purely for yourself. Your most ambitious music project exists to allow you to no longer care about music.

This is the realization you’re coming to: this whole time you’ve been trying to free yourself from music. You’re trying to murder your ambition, trying become liberated, free to reenter a world where music exists for its own sake, where the tune hums itself, the song listens to itself, and the fact of the notes is good enough.

The only way to create an album you care about is for you to not care about it. Until the very second it is released to the world.

If you donate $50 per week, I will start recording a new album and I’ll put your name on the cover. I’ll send you a postcard from a tropical island. I will print out a picture of your face and glue it to the bumper of my tour van.

Step Ten - Go Live

Recording is complete. You don’t have enough money to have the project mixed and mastered, so after a fair attempt at doing this yourself which you have to abandon early because it sends your ears into spirals of pain, you leave it mostly unmixed and unmastered. You call it, Put A Purple Flower On Your Baby Pics.

You put the album up on Bandcamp.com, and it goes live on December 31st, 2020. We’re still in lockdown, remember, so no album-opening performance except for one live-streamed event from your living room, in your pajamas, which several dozen of your closest friends attend. This same several dozen are the ones who give your Bandcamp profile its several dozen listens. The listens quickly taper off, and soon maybe one or two people per day are listening to the tracks on Bandcamp. This will dissolve to no one by the end of January. And just like that, your project sinks back into the ether, like so many Bandcamp albums before it.

No reviews, no live performances, no mixing or mastering, and yet, precisely because you invested very little of your self-worth into the project, because you truly weren’t worried about how it went down, it is your favorite creative accomplishment of your life.

Sitting in front of the computer screen on December 31st, waiting to press “publish” on your album draft, you think of that little boy sitting on the piano bench, with the music in front of him and the audience to his right, both ears in perfect working order, playing the notes without a thought in his spotless, sunny mind.

Here’s to hoping that the next project, whatever it might be, is as sunny as being disqualified for your first piano recital.

If you donate nothing to my Memberful account, I will write you a personal email of thanks for faith in my endeavors.