The Road of Trials — Recording the Hero’s Journey, Part 2
(See Part 1 here)
Sun through sunset cross the sky and then back to set once more
The far horizon to my eye seems no closer than before
- Beth Kinderman, The Road of Trials
In the next three days, I have three separate recording sessions for the Hero’s Journey album. On Friday evening, Kelly and Sarah from Candles Enough are coming to record the “Threshold” vocals and anything else we can get down. On Saturday, Lizzie from Cheshire Moon is driving up from Iowa to record her “Goddess” vocals. And on Sunday, my bandmate Dennis from Gernsback Continuum will lay down bass for Belly of the Whale and Master of Two Worlds. And there will be more sessions with Kelly and Sarah and Dennis in the future, filling out their additional tracks. There’s a lot to do.
After years of delays, we are making steady progress on completing Hero’s Journey, a concept album about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth theory. And by “steady progress”, I mean the seemingly endless schlep of recording tracks, getting rough mixes out, coordinating schedules, preparing for a Kickstarter to raise enough funds for production, and a zillion other tasks (like writing this promotional blog!) that add up to the largest artist project either I or my bandmate Beth Kinderman have ever done.
The last time I wrote about this project was two years ago. The Belly of the Whale. It was a dark and scary time. We were wounded and suffering, and had no idea what we were even up against. We poked and prodded, but couldn’t make real headway. Until now.
One of the things that was holding us back was the chaos of the sheer scope of this record. Beth and I are both organized people, and we’ve made plenty of records together before, but not like this. Finally, I made a big spreadsheet of the project, with a column for each song, and a row for each instrument/voice, each cell marked red/yellow/green for missing, needing redone, or finished. Do at least we got our heads around the tracking.
Part of the reason the spreadsheet made sense is because instruments and voices are reused in specific, structured ways. Many of them are like characters in a play, that come back in different scenes as the plot evolves. The deep moaning of the Whale (from Belly of the Whale) appears again in Magic Flight, when our hero is fleeing the monstrous dangers of the magical world and returning to the “real world”. The Goddess appears as a vision in Meeting with the Goddess, and then appears again as a blessing in Master of Two Worlds. It happens in circles…
Slip and fall and rise and climb, after each hill another one behind
But right now, it’s just the schlep of tracking all this stuff. Slip and fall and rise and climb, after each hill another one behind. So much work. So much work. And it all needs mixed, and those mixes all need to sound not only good, but consistent and coherent across the entire album.
As a producer, this is kind of a fascinating problem. How do I make it all hang together? This is a concept album. It’s meant to be listened to as a complete work, although I’m sure that in this modern world, people will just pull out their favorite singles for playlists anyway. But it’s a complete story… the call to adventure and refusal of the call, the belly of the whale and the road of trials, the goddess, the ultimate boon, rescue from without, and eventually, the freedom to live.
Which gets back to thinking of the instruments as characters in a story… “my weapons and my friends”, as the song puts it. Beth’s voice is the storyteller. Beth’s guitar is the campfire we’re sitting at, listening to her tale. And Elizabeth’s violin is the spirit of the Hero, whether anxious, or fearful, or bold, or resentful, or triumphant, or just finally home again. Justin’s drums, and my guitars and synths (and now, Dennis’ bass), create a picture for the stories Beth is telling, stories of courage and magic and awe.
As a musician responsible for many of these sounds, this is very exciting. How do I represent these characters, these settings? When our hero is in the belly of the whale, what does the whale sound like? But when I hear that low, rumbling sound kicking off Belly of the Whale, when I hear Elizabeth’s violin playing small, timid sounds in that echoing basso darkness, then the story is real. Our hero is terrified and nearly hopeless.
And what of our hero being oppressed and intimidated? What does the voice of her tormentor sound like? Can I make a guitar sound like that? And when our hero finds the Ultimate Boon — the elixir of life, the holy grail, perfect love and perfect knowledge — what does that sound like? It’s fascinating, trying to make the sound of pure magic and terrible monsters and castles in the sky.
Don’t know when they joined the quest, but I’ve since become aware
Of the presence that surrounds us all on the endless road we share
We are targeting October for a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to cover production and manufacturing costs. There’s this promo video I need to edit, sigh. And then there’s the drive to Ohio in mid-October, to perform a concert of Hero’s Journey material at the Ohio Valley Filk Festival. The road of trials. But the presence surrounds us all. I believe there’s an audience out there, people who need to hear this record, people who don’t yet know how much they need it. We just need to find them. I dream that someday, somewhere, someone will love this record as much as Beth and I do.
