Why the Studio Became My Stage

The first thing I usually do before starting work on a song is change the lighting in the studio.

It depends on my mood and the music I’m about to work on. The instruments are around me, ready to go. If I’m starting something new, I’ll grab whatever feels like the main driver of the song (a bass, guitar or keyboards) and start playing what’s already in my head.

Once I get it out, even roughly, I start building from there.

Where songs start

A lot of my songs began that way. A hook, a bass line, a sound, a feeling, or sometimes an image that makes no sense until I’ve started playing it.

New Shoes, from my second album, began with a weird hook in my head. When I worked it out on bass, it evolved into the main bass line in the song. Once I had that down, I added drums, finished the bass, and the other instruments started finding their places.

The hook gave me a picture almost immediately. I saw something like a 1970s or 1980s cop show: an undercover cop walking down a dark New York street in shiny new shoes. That was enough.

The keys and guitar followed the same feeling as I played them. I wasn’t trying to write television music, although people have said New Shoes, along with a number of my other songs, sounds cinematic or like it could be a television theme. That just seems to happen naturally.

The part of playing live I loved

I’ve played live before, and I enjoyed it.

For a few years I had a band that did Christmas concerts. I loved the interaction on stage, the way people in a band listen and react to each other, and the adrenaline that comes with a show. When it’s going well, there’s nothing else quite like it.

At the same time, live performance scares the hell out of me.

It can feel like a train starting to roll downhill without brakes. Once it starts, you have to keep up until the end. There’s no stopping to try something again. You’re already in front of people, and whatever happens is part of the show.

The fear of making a mistake is there, but for me it has always been more about suddenly forgetting everything.

I remember practising one of our songs, a long guitar-driven instrumental, until I knew it inside and out. Then I got on stage and had no idea how it started or what I was supposed to play. Another time, I had a guitar solo coming up and completely forgot it as I went into it.

Somehow, about three-quarters of the way through, I found the right place on the fretboard and slid into the end of it just as the solo was finishing.

Apparently I was the only one who noticed.

Why the studio fits the way I work

My first recordings happened as Covid arrived, so recording instead of playing live largely took care of itself. But the studio turned out to fit the way I work.

Ideas don’t always show up at a convenient time. When I’m in a creative stream, I need to follow it right then. Waiting for rehearsal, shared availability, or a room full of people to agree on where a song should go wouldn’t work very well for me.

I’m also a perfectionist. That can create a few pressure points when other people are involved. Finding band members who can tolerate me is one issue. I’ve been told some of it rubbed off on people I played with and carried into their own projects, so maybe it isn’t entirely bad.

The studio gives me room to work that way. I can take as many passes as I need. I can experiment without worrying that someone is standing there waiting for me to get it right. I can make a mistake, hear something useful in it, and keep it. A lot of the best things in a song are happy accidents that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been trying to play everything perfectly the first time. I wrote more about that in Why I Don’t Chase Perfect Takes.

That doesn’t mean I can make music without pressure. Anyone who records knows you can play every note right until you press Record, or until someone else is in the room. But in the studio, the pressure is different. If a part isn’t there yet, I can leave it alone for a while and come back to it. If it needs another take, I can take another one. The song is allowed to take the time it needs.

There are more than 80 songs in my catalogue now. For the most part, you can hear my style or tone in them, but there’s a lot of different music in there.

Modern Retroism is probably the biggest exception. That was a concept album and a different thing altogether. Other songs might be a tribute to another artist or a story I want to tell. Sometimes I write from inside someone else’s story: their feelings or their situation, from their point of view, as if they’d written it themselves. That happens even with instrumentals. Some songs are simply something I feel like writing that’s a little more commercial. The studio lets each of them become what it needs to be.

Trying to make a live project out of all of it would be difficult. Not every player is going to enjoy every direction I go, and I can’t blame them for that. Forcing band members to work through every stylistic turn in my catalogue would probably be torture for them.

In the studio, I don’t have to force everything into one setlist or one sound. I can follow the idea and see where it goes.

The connection is still there

Most artists have CDs at shows because they can sell them after the set. They have ticket income, a merchandise table, and a chance to meet the people who came out to hear them. I don’t have any of that.

Any income or cost recovery from my music comes from streaming, CD sales, and other royalty opportunities. Streaming doesn’t return much for one play. A CD sale depends on somebody deciding they want a physical copy of the music.

My CDs are more for radio promotion, gifts, and general sales than for selling after a show. But a CD sale is huge to me. It means someone believes in what I’m doing and wants to participate in it.

That’s why I put a lot of effort into the covers and disc artwork. The artwork, the credits, the design and the disc itself are all part of the album.

CDs need to make a big comeback.

I do miss the rush of a live show and the interaction with other musicians. But when I see streams or radio airplay happening somewhere in the world, I get a different kind of satisfaction. Somebody found my music. Something I made in this room was worth listening to, or worth sharing on the radio.

If I was out playing my own music live, I’d never have time to record fresh material for release.

For now, this is my stage.