We’ll keep everyone updated.

You can visit the recording studio and take a look around here:

august hour recording studio

But last night, while we listened to President Barack Hussein Obama give his speech to a new nation I cried again, but not because he won. Not because our country elected a black man to be president. No, I cried because the woman I love most in this world turned to me and said “He makes me want to be a better person.”

At that moment, as the open chords rang from this open-hearted man to the city of Chicago it occurred to me my country has taken a step towards it’s promise of perfectibility.

My generation has gone its entire life waiting for a leader who could call us to something greater than ourselves. Nick Lowe asked “My spirit gets so down-hearted sometimes, so where are the strong and who are the trusted? Where is the harmony?”

The last phrases from his speech last night answer Nick Lowe’s question:

“This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we cant, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can.”

Well, Nick, I truly believe we’ve found that man.

As I walk through
This wicked world
Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity.
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?

And each time I feel like this inside,
There’s one thing I wanna know:
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?

And as I walked on
Through troubled times
My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes
So where are the strong
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?

So where are the strong?
And who are the trusted?
And where is the harmony?
Sweet harmony.

‘Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry.
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh
What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding?

– Nick Lowe

Around here we’re fortunate enough to call Alejandro Escovedo a friend. If you know Al, or his story, you know he’s had a rough patch — if you can call nearly dying a “rough patch.”

Recently Al performed his new song from his upcoming album with Bruce Springstein live in Houston. Yeah, it’s really cool to see Al playing with the Boss and Steven Vansandt. But what’s really stunning is seeing my friend having such a great time. Listening to the unmastered mixes of his upcoming album one thing is clear; that sense of enjoying music again is alive in Al’s music as much as Al is.

“Every once in a while let your love show
Every once in a while, honey let your love go

Nobody gets hurt”

When you get beyond 30 - hopefully - you get beyond those to bigger dreams; moving people with your music, saving a life with your words, imparting some bit of life’s lessons, or even just bringing a smile.

But at some point, a songwriter matures and starts thinking about what their songs could sound like through the bellows of a different performer. You start to wonder about what someone else could do bringing a new context to your words. Watch the video below through to the end, you’ll see what I mean.

In the business of art we get tightly wound up in the perils of thinking that youth is a metal stronger than wisdom. Maybe what we truly should remember is that feeling is a scion more precious than ambition.

Nothing illustrates this better than the Young at Heart Chorus. Watch this video and see what I mean. Watch it all the way through; if you still have dry eyes maybe you should re-evaluate your approach to your craft, if not your future.

Not that it’s a stretch - if ever there was a company who needed to be associated with arm fuzzies it’s the coffee bohemoth. But even in my home town the Starbucks that opened next door to the local coffee house is closing.

But this ad is good. It’s simple, it’s human, it’s touching and it even made this cynical guy smile and feel good.

I should also add that Starbucks gets props from us for being environmentally conscious and a good stewart for their suppliers’ future.

So, thumbs up to the agency and the client. Thes ads are a win/win.

Friend and songwriter, Matt Wilson (a Minneapolis treasure) once wrote “the sun is coming to cold places.”

I love that phrase. It holds hope in a time of cold and desperation. It reassures. Perfectly suited to a kind man from the cold confines of the northern tier. But they can get you through a cold mid-western winter too.

In trying to bring musical and visual reference to Matt’s words I wrote “tenzing”.

In addition to the joy, hope and giving, there’s a lot of despair around the holidays. It’s the beginning of the winter solstice - an unsettling time for many. It’s also a time of great, and often self-induced, stress about the holidays. This one seems all the more desperate given all our current socio-political tumult. Oh, and let’s not forget the war; no, not the one in Iraq, but the one that’s supposedly being waged against Christmas (do we REALLY need people to invent another war around this time of year?).

The point of tenzing is not just to build a song around a guitar riff, but to bring Matt’s sense of hope to what is starting out to be a very cold and solemn winter; especially considering it’s still fall.

Anyway, without giving it all away. Just enjoy the music and images. It’s a gift, and remember the sun is coming to cold places.

Here are a couple of links to the video:

For High-quality Quicktime Video (36meg) click here.
For a slightly lesser quality, FLASH video (18meg) click here.

To the inevitable questions:

What’s it all about?
Often in this business of creative work, people will overlook quality for expense. And by that I don’t mean they’ll take lower quality for less money. Quite the contrary; people will often settle for lower quality as long as it costs more. I used to say, “yeah, they don’t really do good work, but they have a really expensive coffee maker in the lobby.”

Well, the coffee maker doesn’t shoot in HD, it doesn’t score your film, it doesn’t design your brochure, and while a San Marco in the hands of a competent barista may spit out wonderful crema, it sure isn’t going to spit out great ideas.

We’ve always had this little coffee maker around the studio. You see them a lot in vietnamese restaurants. They make really good coffee and they only cost about five bucks. But they only work if you are patient and if you expect something different than you get with the million-dollar coffee maker.

Who did that amazing drawing?
The drawing was done by the lead actress, juj. Our chief designer and associate configuration coordinator.

Do you really use coffee for paint?
All the time. And barbecue sauce, and berries, and mushrooms, and actual paints too.

Who did the music?
I (John) wrote and performed the score. It was recorded here in the studio.

Why is it in 6/8? (IS it in 6/8?)
The music is composed and played for 6/8 because the coffee drops fall into the glass in 6/8. Some have said the song is in 3/4 or a classic waltz. It’s actually a slow 6/8. It’s not just about the beat and tempo as some might think. The time signature is also about the bar phrasing of the melody. And isn’t the point that there are no rules?

So far there are only a few MP3 samples, but we’ll keep uploading songs as we dig them out and get them formatted into MP3.

So far the page features music from The Silver Shore, The Daybirds and myself. It’s mostly there to give you an idea of our music production chops and to introduce you to some music you might not have heard before.

It’s always nice to revisit your first love — and music is definitely mine. Being a recording engineer/producer is a lot like being something between a midwife and a high-school guidance counselor. Midwifery is the term commonly used to describe the art of helping a woman give birth. And a high-school guidance counselor is there to help kids turn into adults. As a parent you do the best job you can at strengthening and perfecting your kids and then you release them into the world where you know others will project themselves onto them. For any real songwriter or composer songs are children and music production and engineering is all about helping the songwriter parent their babies. Because sometimes people can be unfair in their projections — or downright rude — you hope you’ve done the best job possible of preparing the songs for this state of vitality and exposure.

So yeah, it’s fulfilling work. And it can be rewarding. Sometimes I hear songs I’ve worked on and think “you know, there’s some real genius in there” and I am just thankful to have had the chance to help with them.

It all sounds good anyway.

enjoy.

http://www.changethemargins.com

One day last summer I was invited to one a advertising luncheon. It was for small businesses who use postcard decks and direct mail advertising. There was an advertising expert there, we’ll call him Bob. Bob asked the audience to critique a piece of a participants print advertising, no one really offered anything. So, he called on me. I told Bob that I thought the design was a little confusing and there were a lot of competing ideas. The headline wasn’t really clear and it might be more clear if there was a little less going on visually. Bob, wearing his blue gabardine blazer with gold buttons, tossled loafers, and pleated khaki pants said, “You’re one of those ‘white space guys’ aren’t you?” I said, “I guess it depends. I definitely like clean design. When it works our clients do well by white space.” He said, “Well, I’ll get to why you’re wrong in a minute.”

Bob explained that white space isn’t interesting to people. That if businesses want to succeed and generate lots of leads from direct mail they need designs with pictures and lots of visual stimulation to stand out. “Okay,” I thought. “That or maybe they just need this six-pound sack of crap stuffed into his three-pound blazer telling them how things are supposed to look.”

Today, I wonder, if maybe Bob wasn’t on to something.

Tamara Krinsky has perhaps the most elegant idea to help reduce your consumption of natural resources: set your word document’s margin settings as narrow as possible before you send it to the printer. The goal here is to save the planet we all live on.

According to Tamara’s site, the mission of Change the Margins is pretty simple: encourage adoption of wider printing margins on a grand scale. To accomplish this, the campaign currently has three goals:

1. Convince Microsoft to change the default margin settings in Microsoft Word to .75 on all sides. The more convenient it is for people to change their habits, the better chance there is that they will actually do so.

2. Persuade five corporations to officially sanction wider margins for all company documents. In this way, people will get used to seeing documents with this formatting as the standard, as opposed to the exception. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.

3. Challenge five universities to adopt wider margin settings as the standard for their students and faculty, and include this information in their course guidelines.

At Penn State University’s Park campus the “Mueller Policy Paper #1: Reduce Standard Margin Settings” showed how PSU could save 72 acres of forest and over $120,000/year by reducing the default margin settings campus wide.

On a national scale, that’s estimated to be about $400,000,000 per year.

You’re probably looking at this page and wondering, “what the hell are these guys doing advocating for less white space and narrower margins?”

First, you’re not reading a printed document, these virtual margins don’t waste paper. Second, we’re huge fans of saving our clients money, and we’re even bigger fans of elegance. A designer should be able to create an effective design in the pursuit of creating he most economical and efficient outcome possible.

There are some clients who convey a sense of affluence through abundant use of whitespace. How else can you as a designer convey that idea without being wasteful? Elegance is defined as nothing missing and nothing extraneous. Can’t too much whitespace be just as extraneous as too much type?

Also, isn’t this idea that prestige is found in massive amounts of whitespace becoming trite? Can’t we as designers find inventive ways to communicate our clients’ ideology? Can’t we do it and use less paper?

Maybe I’m not such a “white space guy” where the planet is concerned. Either way, it’s time to narrow the margins . . . and definitely avoid advertising experts.

I’m reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Powers is arguably the greatest writer living in America today. The Echo Maker is gorgeous. Not just the plot or the characters or the arcs, etc.. But, what really sets Powers apart, as always, is his ability to convey just the right thought with just the right words.

But, this post isn’t meant to be a book review. The point is that Powers knows exactly how to make his words click. This idea of the click is expressed perfectly in the book Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik.

The point of the click is that the language perfectly reflects the thought the writer’s trying to convey. It’s not so much that there have to be few words as possible. However, the words exactly reflect the thought and the thought clicks.

There are all kinds of examples of this, from Shakespeare:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
– MacBeth

to Shandra:

When Radha returned from the grocery store where three white youths calling themselves Dot Busters, ridiculed her kumkum, Dev said, “We must simply tolerate such misunderstandings.”
from Sari of the Gods

With one sentence, or a simple turn of phrase, we know exactly what the author is thinking - and we’re thinking exactly what the author wants us to be thinking.

This click exists in music, lyrics, films, design. Any place there’s a vocabulary there exists the possibility of a click. It ties back to Thackara’s idea of lightness of design. It’s in Rand’s idea of elegance - nothing missing, nothing extraneous.

The Echo Maker is about a man who has a car accident and forgets who his sister is. He forgets how he feels about his sister. Meanwhile, his sister tends to him while he recuperates. The entire time he thinks she is an impostor playing his sister. His injury makes him unable to remember love. The book follows their progression through trying to overcome his injuries.

Throughout Powers is at the same time powerful and efficient, expressive and elegant. He inhabits the areas he writes about - the geography, the science, the culture. He shows the signs of being an anthropologist as much as a writer. Every page contains a phrase you’ll write down to remember. And you’ll learn something new about yourself and the world you’ve (hopefully) never seen.

Go get it. This is a book to own.