There You Are

I’ve been trying to replace a bass line I love, and the more I think about that sentence, the stranger it gets.

The bass line already exists. It works beautifully in the song. When it comes in, something in me goes, Yep. There you are. And yet I’ve been treating it as temporary, as though finding the thing I wanted were merely an intermediate step on the way to finding the thing I wanted... in-a-more-acceptable-way.

I should explain what “finding the thing I wanted” means here, because I don’t usually write songs by hearing an entire finished record in my head. I know the song because I write the lyrics and melody. I sing it. Then comes the adventure of discovering what kind of musical world might grow around it.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved working with other musicians and producers. I bring the song, they bring their ears and skills and ideas, and something happens between us that neither of us necessarily knew to request in advance. Somebody puts the emphasis somewhere I didn’t know I wanted it. An instrument answers the vocal in a way I never would have thought to describe. A song that already existed suddenly sounds more like itself.

I love that moment.

There you are.

More recently, I’ve been exploring some of those possibilities with generative music tools. I can bring in a song I’ve already written, including its lyrics and melody, and listen to different possibilities for what might surround it. Most aren’t right. Some show me something interesting. And every once in a while, after enough iteration, something happens that makes my heart answer before my brain has assembled a critique.

There you are.

Except then I do something kind of ridiculous.

I take the thing I just recognized as working and start trying to replace it.

I’ve spent an insane amount of time learning how to digitally paint drums because I wanted to recreate the generated drums I already fell in love with. I’ve tried to make other pads and MIDI pianos do the work of the piano stem I was already really digging. Sometimes the recreation leads somewhere new and wonderful, and sometimes another musician brings something to the song that I never would have found without them. None of that exploration feels wasted to me. It has taught me an enormous amount about production, about rhythm, about how records are built, and about my own ears.

But still.

There’s this bass line.

I love it.

Why am I replacing it?

Dear God, is it because I want a physical instrument on the recording?

I mean, maybe. I did grow up listening to jazz with my grandfather. My dad’s folk music taught me how to be a singer and songwriter, for crying out loud! And some of my favorite memories with my uncle are all wrapped up in bluegrass. I freaking love real instruments. I love fingers on strings and breath through horns and all the tiny soulful variations that happen when somebody physically plays something into the air.

Except some of the music I already release is digital. So clearly I don’t need someone physically playing an instrument for the music to feel real to me.

A producer can program a bass with MIDI and I don’t sit there wondering whether they actually hugged a bass guitar before allowing myself to love what I hear. Digital drums have never sent me into an existential crisis. A computer can be involved all over the place and I still call the result music.

Okay.

So maybe it’s the person.

Maybe what matters to me is that there’s a human being making those choices.

Except…

I’m a person.

Well, shit.

Because I wrote the song. I sang the melody into the tool. I asked for something around it. I listened to what came back. I asked again. I rejected things. I followed things. I changed direction. Eventually I heard a bass line and thought, There you are.

So why doesn’t it feel finished to me yet?

Is it consciousness? Is there something important to me about another person hearing my song and responding to it? Maybe. I do love that exchange. Some of my favorite things in my music exist because another person heard something I couldn’t hear yet.

Is it effort?

Huh.

Is it time?

Oh.

Now that opens another door.

I’ve thought about time and magic before. I once wrote about how Cinderella’s fairy godmother can wave a wand and transform her instantly, and we recognize it as magic, while a human body can perform its own astonishing transformation over weeks and we give it the much more mundane name of "healing." Maybe the difference between magic and process is sometimes just a matter of timeline.

And now I’m wondering whether I’ve managed to reverse the equation when it comes to making music...

If another person spends hours building an arrangement, sending it to me, getting notes, revising it and sending it back, I can see the process. I can feel the effort. Time passes. Work happens. The song moves gradually from one state into another, and I have no trouble understanding that transformation as making a record.

Then along comes the musical equivalent of a fairy godmother.

I bring her a song.

Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.

Suddenly there’s a dress.

And instead of saying, Holy shit, magic, apparently I’m standing there squinting at the gown like, “I don’t know. Nobody suffered enough for this.”

Which is hilarious.

Especially because this fairy godmother doesn’t even require me to accept the first giant blue ball gown she hands me.

I can say, “Oh, I like where you’re going, but can we pull this in here? What if that ribbon contrasted? The skirt from eleven versions ago moved better. Can I hear that with this? No. Absolutely not. Back up. Wait. Do that again.”

And eventually:

There you are.

What exactly am I doing in that exchange?

I’m not playing every instrument. I’m not programming every note. I’m also not sitting passively while a finished record gets dropped into my lap. I’m listening. Directing. Selecting. Rejecting. Following. Recognizing.

How much of making is contained in those verbs? Listen. Direct. Select. Reject. Follow. Recognize. Know.

Well, I don’t actually know. And now I really want to.

Because maybe some part of me has been using time and difficulty as evidence that something counts. But what if mastery of the creative process can include mastery of tools, taste, direction, iteration, and discernment, without requiring mastery of every instrument?

I just looked up from my desk at the artwork above me. There’s a sun sitting right on the horizon, with all these rays meeting in one bright spot before heading off in different directions.

Oh.

That’s what this question feels like.

I thought I was asking why I wanted to replace a bass line. Instead I’ve landed at this weird little intersection where questions about being human and making things keep crossing: how much intention matters, what effort tells me, what time changes, where authorship lives, what collaboration gives me, and whatever else I haven’t noticed yet.

I’ve found myself a glowing roundabout.

And there’s another strange thing about working this way that I’m noticing too:

I can stay here as long as I want.

With another person, iteration belongs to both of us. They have ears and ideas and enthusiasm and schedules and fatigue. That humanity is part of what makes collaboration so wonderful. Another person can knock a song sideways in exactly the direction it needed to go. They can also spend four hours on something I eventually decide I don’t want, and because I care about them, I care that they spent four hours on it.

A generative tool changes that part of the experience. Maybe that's part of the magic, too: the fairy godmother never gets tired of waving the wand. I can ask again. And again. And again. I can follow something stupid because I’m curious. I can abandon it. I can change my mind twenty-three times and discover on the twenty-fourth that my first instinct was better. I can obsess over one tiny detail until I’m sick of me.

There is no social cost to the iteration.

That doesn’t make it better than collaborating with another person. It does make it different, though. And right now I’m fascinated by what that difference might allow me to hear.

I’m not standing at the beginning of a song with a complete arrangement locked inside my head, looking for someone to reproduce what I already hear. I’m discovering the musical world around the song as I go. My music has always happened in conversation with something outside me. Another musician. A producer. An instrument. A sound. An accident. A reference. Something I dream or hear that makes another possibility occur to me.

Maybe a generative tool can be part of that conversation too.

I don’t know yet what that means for the way I make records. I don’t know how much of what feels strange is about authorship, effort, perception, or simply the speed at which something can now appear. I don’t even know how I’ll feel about all of this tomorrow.

Which is kind of the point.

This morning, I thought I had a bass line I needed to replace.

Now I have a bass line I love and a new question to ask.

Why is my instinct to replace it at all?

There you are. ♡