Good Record 007 (Now On Substack)

Hey Friends, 

Welcome to my little corner of Substack!  I hope the switch hasn’t complicated anything on your end.  This seemed like a better platform for this particular output, so I said what the hell.   

We’re in it now, folks.  As I sit in a little coffee shop and write this, the mercury (even its top hat) sits comfortably below zero degrees Fahrenheit.  The holidays are done and what may be considered a kind of annual doldrums has set in for those of us that live a good distance north of the equator.  I just looked up the word doldrums.  Webster’s takes the stance that it means: “a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or depression”.   That may be a bit of a dramatic word for what amounts to regular life for a good amount of our year up here, but I like the word and if I, at times, happen to feel inactive or stagnant, I definitely lean towards the dramatic.  That being said, I love January.  I relish seeing the twinkly lights, the garbage bags of wrapping paper, and the never-ending rotation of Christmas music fade into my rear-view mirror as I attempt to move forward into what usually amounts to my most productive time of the year.  There seems to be a general mania pervading all public spaces in December.  Everyone is running behind, broke, stressed, and miserable.  There’s nowhere to park and all the city woods are full of people using up their vacation time from work.  Because we created a mandatory gift giving season, all romance is sucked out of the gift giving process.  It’s not, “I was walking through the streets of Paris, and I came across this little shop and I saw this book and it fully reminded me of you!”  Instead, it’s “I wonder if they have an air fryer? What do they even like?  Didn’t I hear they went camping once?  Maybe something for that?”   According to a recent poll taken by the American Psychological Association, 89% of respondents stated that concerns such as impending family conflict and not having enough money significantly increase their stress levels during the traditional American holiday season.  Some holiday! 

Anyway, back to January.  Everyone’s gone back to work.  The lakes are frozen.  The days are technically getting longer, but it will be another few weeks before any of us notices that.  The wind whorls snow around like a dervish and there is a clouded longing behind the eyes of everyone you see.  If you can come up with a better environment in which to write songs, I’d love to hear about it.  For instance, I was just near Cancun playing a festival with TBT.  It was paradise.  Bright sun, warm air, blue water.  I could’ve stayed there forever.  I brought a notebook, as I always do.  I didn’t write a single goddam word.  I drank margheritas on the beach and I dressed up for dinner and I spent hours just staring at the oceanic horizon.  I was seriously considering finding a way to send for our kids and dogs.  Now, I’m sure if I lived there, eventually the glow would wear off (and not to mention I’d run out of money with all my days spent staring at the water drinking tequila).  I’m sure I’d settle into a working routine at some point.  But I’m not talking about hypotheticals here.  This is real life and in my version of real life, the real work begins in January.   
 
The rest of Trampled and I recently spent a week in our favorite recording studio, Pachyderm.  We recorded a few of my newest songs and we had a good time doing so.  Recording is my favorite part of making music.  Sure, playing live is great, but it comes with a lot of baggage.  20-some years of playing shows and I still pace the floor like I’m at rehab before getting on stage each night.  Live shows are a brain chemical roller coaster; the peaks and valleys of which can really wear you out over time.  The anxiety before getting on stage, the ecstasy of having a great show, the exhaustion of coming down afterwards, the, um, doldrums of the afternoon.  Up and down, up and down.  Recording, for me, is much more even and calm.  In the studio we take time and craft songs the way we want to hear them and the way we want you to hear them.  We do not seek perfection, for perfection in a song is infinitely relative.  We work together to arrange songs, each knowing each other’s strengths in that area.  Recording is our band at our most creative and collaborative.   

I can’t wait to share with you whatever this recording becomes.  There’s nothing quite like release day.  Release day is what Christmas should feel like.  During the entire process of writing the songs, making demos, sharing them with the guys, going to the studio, recording the songs, mixing the songs, mastering the songs, etc. etc. etc., these songs have only been ours.  Upon release day they become everyone’s.  This is the only part of the recording process in which I feel an anxiety similar to playing live.  I love to pretend that I don’t care what anyone thinks of our songs, but that is a plain lie.  Nobody shares their work with the world and then is immune to their response, and today’s world is full of response.  There is also a unique excitement in a band and its surrounding organization when releasing new music that is not matched at really any other time.   

At some point we will let these new songs out of our inner world and into the outer.  For me, that is the last step of the cycle.  For all the time I spend listening to these songs now, tweaking and suggesting, getting used to them in my head, once the songs are released I will rarely, if ever, listen to them again.  For me the artistic cycle is complete once the music is released.  If you are reading this, odds are you’ve listened to some of those finished products.  For that I am eternally grateful.  There’s a real tree-falling-in-the-forest metaphor for music that goes unlistened, so in some theoretical way, these songs may not even exist if you didn’t try em on.  I hope some of you take some valuable time out of a day in the near future and listen to our new songs as well.  See? I’m not even pretending I don’t care.  That’s how close we’ve become.   

Thank you for reading my little update and for continuing to be out there listening.  The music business is a weird and wild place, and we feel very lucky to be able to continue to make the music we want in the way we want to make it.  Thank you for your trust in this and, of course, for your support.  Till next time. 

Sincerely, 

Dave Simonett