Category: Slide Deck (front page)

Picking through the archives, I noticed that it was 14 years ago, almost to the day, that I started playing around with podcasting (“The Isaac Dust MySpace Broadcast”) and about 13 years since I uploaded my first sad song to YouTube (below). Funny how everything and nothing has changed. 13 years on and this song is still in the “unfinished” file, along with hundreds of other song snippets and 150 pages of a novel. Surely with 3 weeks off from work I can tie up the loose ends.

Skimming through the journal entries for the month of February, I’m amazed at how quickly the various things I attend to in a given month fade from mind and memory. I listen to podcast after podcast throughout the week, but however interesting an episode might be, I just follow up the next day with more information, and then more. There’s just no attentional bandwidth left with which to consider something in depth. Case in point, I heard somewhere today, on some podcast, that it’s better to “get to the bottom of things” than to “stay on top of things.” The Tim Ferriss Show. That was it. I was barely able to recall even that detail, and that’s from a two-hour podcast I listened to just today, while I was running some errands. I just keep listening, keep scrolling, keep staying on top of things. But never any real depth is plumbed. And it’s all self-imposed. All done from a stance of willful ignorance. I’m giving up the ghost, which is the dreadful, shameful thing I swore I would never do. But I’m doing it. All the recent focus on aging, on disease, on decline. I’ve listened and scrolled and thought myself into a rut, a bad groove. Time to bounce out, to break free. But first, sleep.

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Up at 1:oo am. Did some mindful movement (my version of yoga) in bed and it felt great. Drifting back to sleep I was thinking about how regular writing and creative output might be just the tonic I need right now. I love the idea of regular public output, but I’ve never found the requisite motivation to stick with it. I know it shouldn’t matter – the public output vs. private journaling – but there’s something about the perceived accountability, however imagined, that can galvanize my creative eye to pop open. Seeing my life and the world through that eye is intrinsically awesome, and I need some awesome right now.

There are a number of great songs that first entered my ears as cover versions, and those cover versions were so damned good that they biased my ears to forever favor them over the original. When I go on to cover the song myself, as I often do with songs I love, I am then in the position of covering the cover. I’m pretty sure I’ve even covered a cover of a cover. It’s all to the good, as far as I’m concerned. I enjoying playing and singing songs that move me, and for me that experience admits no thoughts of authorship or credit. “Everything is free” by Gillian Welch was introduced to me my Madison Cunningham, who hits all her covers out of the park. When I went to search for the original, I was pleasantly surprised that I liked it every bit as much as the cover, maybe even a bit more.

Another thing I’ve discovered recently is that when I go a long stretch without using my recording equipment, I forget how to use it, and so it is that I continually find myself in a one step forward, two steps back situation with respect to my recording skills. Getting back on the recording horse, for me, almost always involves recording a live version of whatever cover song I’ve most recently learned. Can you guess what song I recorded this weekend?

There are so many, too many, ways to lay down a live acoustic recording using various configurations of the toys I happen to have in my home studio. Since I’ve forgotten which ways I like best, I chose a completely different configuration (different mic, interface, effects) on live cover song #2 of this weekend, “Josephine” by Chris Cornell.

Although both were hastily recorded one-take wonders transposed into keys more suitable to my relatively weak vocals, I kinda like ’em, and I’m reminded – for the gazillionth time – how much I enjoy noodling around in my studio. I’ll forgo any declarations about how I’m going to start doing this “on the reg,” as the kids say. Next summer is a long way off, and I’ve yet to summon the resolve to be consistently creatively productive in the throes of the work-a-day routine. Then again, who knows. I may yet surprise myself.