Nothing is Sound

[3 pages, 123 lines, 1,808 words, written between 12:47 and 2:14am Tuesday morning, December 27th 2005]

This afternoon while Grandpa was napping in his darkened room I laid down on a couch in the oncology section lounge at the hospital and played some old-school U2 on my new video iPod. Koss foam ear buds drove the sound deep into my ears, and I lay with my eyes shut and ears open, totally disengaged from the world around me. I came away marveling at the complexity of U2’s studio work. At many points in simple, familiar songs I identified four separate guitar voices, from barebones world-renown riffs to a fuzzed-up, crazy-strumming mush buried deep in my left ear. Rich reverbs took The Edge’s guitar and spread it like gold sunlight across the entire soundscape. The minutely detailed, hushingly subtle work was astounding.

Tonight I shut out ESPN Sportscenter with the same isolating earphones, laid back on the couch, covered my feet with a blanket and my face with an oven mitt (found randomly on the couch), and disappeared into Nothing is Sound by Switchfoot. This album became dear to me this fall, rocking my body at the Switchfoot concert, traveling with me to Virginia, and making me stop, mosh, and melt into its songs many times. I played it tonight for the first time in nearly a month.

I tried my best to avoid this, but the same thing happened with “Lonely Nation” as happened with “Meant to Live”: The stunningly powerful song is getting deadened by repeated listening. What once stirred me deep down and quickened my pulse now passed easily through my ears, and I had to grasp at it and make myself remember the dynamics and tones that made it so arresting before.

I laid on the couch, and my limbs gradually faded into oblivion. To all intents and purposes I was sound asleep, but my mind’s eyes were wide open, peering into the music, delving into the sounds, submersed in my ears. “Happy is a Yuppie Word” brought a warmth to my heart, like all the first 5 songs used to, and “Golden” struck me once again as just plain a beautiful song. “Daisy,” even though it really seemed bland for a long time, has seeded and bloomed inside me, and my heart was tracking along with it far more than “Stars” or “The Blues”—both songs that stirred me deeply before.

Aside from the varying responses to the songs, which depend hugely on my emotional state at the time of listening, I was faced once again with the despair and crying frustration of modern music. What hits my ears is so PERFECT, I honestly cannot think of it as ever being physically recorded. Twice I can recall hearing something and thinking “Ah, that sounds real”: once at the very end of a song when random sounds were fading out, and once when Chad was hitting some tom in isolation. It sounded like what I get when I record my 16-inch tom. But as soon as the rest of the instruments came in it disappeared into the unreal perfection. Jon Foreman’s voice does NOT sound like a man standing in front of a microphone in a room somewhere singing. It sounds like Jon Foreman’s head inside my skull, singing directly into my aural nerves. The entire sound of the songs wrapped around my whole head and held it. It is not recorded music playing through earphones, it is the essence of the thought of music transmitted directly into my brain.

I hear this, and I curse the wind, because in one respect I want to say I honestly have no idea HOW they get those sounds so entirely removed from their organic sources, but in another respect I DO know how, and it sneers at me because it’s millions of dollars of equipment and hundreds of man-years of experience, operating at a level of expertise and knowledge that is absolutely impossible for me to achieve. How does Jon Foreman’s voice sing directly into my head, no booming bass but not high and tinny, crisp as a fresh apple but not thin and hissing, compressed like a tight balloon but not squashed or lifeless, utterly balanced in every frequency? Perhaps they used a ten thousand dollar planet-standard Neumann large-diaphragm condenser mic, but perhaps the producer knew they were looking for a very crisp, midsy, present sound and so he picked some OTHER mic from his expansive cabinet, perusing the selection of multi-thousand dollar microphones and drawing on days and weeks and months spend poring into the subtle shades of each one’s characteristics. And from there those fluctuating voltages are run though who knows how many signal processers, each one the best in its class, passing it through undegraded, undistorted, shaped in some way, smoothed in some way, controlled, groomed, sculpted in ways I don’t even know to think about, until at the end, after a year or more of tracking, editing and mixing, it is laid with faultless precision on the pits and plains of my CD’s shiny surface.

I listen to sound like dogs smell things. Daisy can scamper around the sidewalk and tell you where that squirrel was walking an hour ago. I can scan through a song and most likely tell you how many inches wide each of the drummer’s cymbals are, and maybe even what kind of drum heads he’s using. I can point you to the two places in “Politicians,” somewhere between the verse and the chorus, where in the frenzied cacophony of the song Chad hits the ride once, in the process of a fill of some sort. But I could not, strain though I did, fully decipher the inexorable plethora of sounds that filled my head as I listened through these songs. Every component was mixed and balanced so perfectly that I could not clearly discern much beyond the basic vocals, guitars and drums. What I thought was a harpsichord in “We Are One Tonight” is almost certainly just a steel-string acoustic guitar, but whether it’s separate from the guitar playing in the background of the RIGHT ear, or whether it’s some scintillating reverb or delayed duplicate of it panned to the LEFT ear I can’t say. I really don’t know if they used a warm, spreading synth pad in half the songs or not. Every chink in the soundscape was filled, but whether that was with perfect reverbs and indefinable guitar parts or from blanket synthesizers, I have no idea. I would listen and listen, and try to trace what sounds I could recognize, but no matter where I turned and what I accounted for, there were presences I could not identify. That frustrated me.

A couple cool notes: I don’t recall fully enough to say for sure, but there may well be NO strings in the entire album! Modern rock is obnoxiously full of strings, so I found this lack refreshing, and I respect Switchfoot all the more for getting their sounds from real guitars and straight-up synthesizers rather than defaulting to calling in a string quartet or a session cellist. The sound may be numbingly perfect like a smooth unbroken layer of butter drowning a piece of toast, but what constitutes that sound is a bewilderingly creative set of wonderfully tasteful guitar parts, free and careful vocals, complex and fitting bass, and skilled, syncopated, unrestingly varying drums. These guys are skilled. The songs on this album held their own with U2’s technical wizardry, and though I would like to see them back off from their Hallmark Card perfection to more of an emotionally raw hand-written note, Switchfoot still did this album with great taste and great care. Every song demonstrates this, but for starters, listen for the little back-beat, lightly distorted electric guitar chirping in the background of “The Blues,” from about halfway through on. For most of the song after it starts up I can barely imagine I hear it, but when it’s brought up at the transition into the second or third bridge, it becomes one of the most stirring and memorable parts of the album for me. I felt its presence several listens before I actually realized what it was. And when Jon goes up an octave the second time on that song? The little crack in his voice just hits me so deeply, it’s amazing.

There are musical riches to this album that are lasting, even though the excitement of many of its songs is fading. Interestingly, the last half of the album, which I honestly wished had been cut altogether when I first got the CD, is patiently unfolding into some personable and affecting music that hangs around in my mind like an old friend. Endurance is a sign of music that’s more than just the latest new sounds, and I’m still waiting to see how this album weathers the years. I hope it lasts, and I hope these songs continue to stir me like they have this summer and fall.

And I, I . . . I don’t know what to do about the recording stuff. I cry for the beauty of the sounds I cannot make, but I also shrink from the unreal blamelessness of those sounds. In a way they are the epitome of recording, where the media wholly disappears from the listener’s consciousness, but yet in that very acme they cease to be believable as real things played and sung by real people. Obviously I can do no other, but I hope that as I trudge along with sounds necessarily girded in their recording sources, I can embrace those characteristics and create music that communicates through its down-to-earthness.

It really saddens me to play my own songs after listening to a top-of-the-line album like Switchfoot’s, but I still do enjoy the music I’ve written, and if that’s good enough, people will still want to hear it. The importance and prominence of the recording process in modern music is another post for another day. For today, I’ll end by taking in my hands this whole recording business and lifting it up to God. You made my mind like this, You’ve brought me here, and You know exactly what You want me to do with it all. May I not buy any piece of equipment that I don’t need, and may I not lose sight of using music, music itself, to glorify You and make much of You. Without You, God, it’s an unending battle against time, money, and everybody who’s better than me. But before You, on my knees, it has purpose regardless of how good my reverbs are.

Thank you Lord for keeping me from the despair of living for myself.

--Clear Ambassador

(Which is a thin, single-ply Remo drum head that most likely sits on the bottom of half the drums you’ve ever heard recorded.)