the year of making do

this is the year of making do

with what's right in front of you, within your grasp
and i no longer have the audacity to ask

for things i don't think i deserve

cause i've already exhausted my reserve

of miracles and gifts

surely they've run out

and i don't wanna push my luck

i'm just looking for some rain

after a long drought

***

I wrote those lines a little more than two years ago, sometime in November/December 2021. Life was barreling towards Crazytown. We had been poking the bear for a while and finally decided to rattle the cage for real.  We got a case of the by gods, called a local realtor, and told her that we were considering putting our house on the market. We'd been dragging our heels on it for so long, weighing the pros and cons and making umpteen thousand lists, but finally it seems like enough forces were conspiring to move us in the sell direction, so we decided to ride that wave. 

***

But in true Camp Rowan fashion, we weren't just considering selling our house and half of our worldly possessions and relocating across the world; we were also diving into a making a new record. We'd been studying the calendar for a while, trying to find the right time to organize it with our band, and we realized that if we moved forward with selling the house, this would be our last chance to record in our studio in Dallas. Rip had built Electrofonic less than 10 years prior, expecting that it would probably outlast either of our desire's to make records, but life is what happens when you're making plans, and for reasons both tangible and not, we were ready to move on. 

***

We started making plans to have the band come to Dallas. We had some Delta credits leftover from the canceled Modern Age sessions in Texas, and they were expiring in 2022. We decided to go for it, Omicron be damned (naturally we had no sooner bought the tickets than case numbers started rocketing into the stratosphere worldwide -- both in Texas and in Italy).  We tapped our friend John Dufilho to help us make the record, only to have him come over and tell us about his very scary health battles (which helped inspire the song "how long" from the new album) and we realized that we couldn't have him in the studio with us on this project. Luckily our good buddy Joe Reyes was available, and we threw a lateral.

***

I had a bunch of half-finished songs on my hands that didn't sound anything like Modern Age. That wasn't really a huge problem for me, but I did wonder what direction this record would take, whether or not we were rushing into the recording sessions, whether or not we were making a mistake in selling the house, whether or not I had any good songs left in me. I was pretty much swimming in a sea of doubt, and you can hear that pretty clearly on a lot of these songs -- loud and clear on "Blind Curves," where I sing "so many paths that I could take, but lately all I see are possible mistakes staring back at me when I confront the day; sometimes it's so hard to get out of my own way."

***

Which isn't to say that these songs are dark or heavy, though if you've listened to my music at all over the last 20 years (!), you will have noticed by now the thin thread of ... let's call it introspection... that ties most of it together. I'm not a melancholy person by nature -- I just think I face a lot of life's uncertainty by throwing songs at it. It helps me work through whatever I'm wrestling with, and there was a lot to wrestle with in 2022. Pandemic exhaustion and nervousness. Guilt at further uprooting myself from my US family and friends. Anxiety for loved ones who were struggling, anxiety for the world at large. Practical matters, like selling cars and figuring out the paperwork involved in getting your dog across the ocean. And finishing at least 12 songs to the 85% mark, far enough along to be able to hammer out arrangements and hope that the lyrics came later (which is totally not how I normally work).

***

There were times in 2023 when I forgot entirely about the album, and times when I was afraid it might be the first record that I ever straight up binned.  Not because I didn't want to finish, but because I couldn't figure how to get started again. Losing momentum can be absolutely deadly to any project, no matter how beloved at the outset, and we were completely wiped out by the end of 2022 and well into 2023. It was just hard to see which way to turn. We didn't have a studio to work in, didn't have most of our best gear (whatever we hadn't sold was in storage in Texas), and in some cases I still didn't have finished lyrics. Everything was buffering at 93%.

***

"Pinball Heart" (the most fun song on the record) was the last domino to fall. Once we hammered out the harmonies and a put few more stray words into their place, we looked at each other and said -- it's done. And of course it's never done -- there's mixing, mastering, artwork, album release, etc... a million details are waiting to be addressed just on the other side of the finish line. But putting a bow on this album felt like a quiet but gigantic achievement. We could finally stop rolling up the stone. Our labors were done... and best of all, we were so proud of the record we had made. It's soft in the right spots, and a little pointy where it needs to be. There's plenty of grit in there, tucked into a barbed aside and nestled under a warm piano solo or shuffling train beat.

***

The album was almost called "The Year of Making Do." I'm glad we went with "Flying on Instruments," but I still love that phrase. That's the phrase that got us through many many days where we asked ourselves -- what in the hell are we doing, what in the hell have we done, what the hell should we do next? That phrase kicks off the album as the first line in "Beauty or Grace," and I can't think of a better way for this particular batch of songs to push off from shore.  T-minus 10 days until the album is out!

xoxo

v