Some Notes On Wilderness Amen

As I've probably already mentioned elsewhere, all the writing, recording and production of all the music I've made since 2017 started with "Running."

It's not a particularly interesting story, to be honest. There's nothing mystical or special about the song itself, for that matter. I mean, I like it a lot: it's fun to play, it's got a few of my favorite lyrics that I've written in it, and it recounts a few experiences from my past (indirectly) that are great memories. But otherwise, it's a pretty straightforward folk song. There was something about the process of writing it, though, quickly and satisfyingly, that convinced me that I should spend the following twelve months or so writing more songs whenever possible. So I did.

It's no accident, then, that "Running" is the first song on the first album of a loose cycle of four albums: Wilderness Amen, Ride, Maps, and Fire and Rain. As the beginning of the cycle, this album is meant to serve as an awakening, a spring, and an amen.

To the "big three" monotheistic religions, "amen" serves as a confirmation, an affirmation, and in a way I guess this album could be those things. But I'm also a big fan of the apocryphal theory that "amen" derives from the name of the Egyptian god Amun, who was the god of air and breath. In this admittedly heretical derivation (because a word in the Bible couldn't come from Egypt, I guess), "amen" is also a word for, or perhaps the sound of, an exhalation. The moment before action. The peace before a storm. The deep breath before the plunge, to paraphrase another lower-"g" god.

Considering where the album cycle ends up (the apocalyptic cacophony of "Fire and Rain" > "(Rise)"), this album is meant to be the "fun" one. It's meant to capture a bit of that feeling of late spring and early summer, when it feels like anything is possible and every moment is on the cusp of blossoming into something new and exciting. Of the four albums, Wilderness Amen is the one that I think sounds the most like my pre-Asphalt Ghosts recordings, the ones influenced most heavily by 60s-era Dylan and modern folk singers like Mason Jennings. I kept the song structures and the arrangements fairly simple. The lyrics (I hope!) skew toward the uplifting, and are mostly about the transcendent joy of satisfying your wanderlust, and, ultimately, still getting home in time for dinner. Those themes turn a bit darker and more complex as the album cycle progresses, sure, but this album intentionally ends with "Amen," an instrumental meant to serve as a thematic coda and a reminder that, for now at least, all you need to do is breathe, and maybe keep an eye to the horizon to catch the appearance of the first star of the night.

As a proponent of the whole "death of the author" idea, I don't want to tell you what to think about each and every aspect of the album, because that would ruin the fun, but a few things you might find fun to know about Wilderness Amen, in closing...

Technically, the stolen shoes were stolen, but I didn't actually directly take them from anyone. And in my defense, I was literally about to die from heatstroke at the time, so I wasn't exactly thinking clearly.

"Better To Have Loved" -> "Cassie's Song" > "Millie" is one of my oldest song sequences, but I'd never recorded the entire suite in a way I actually liked until this album.

"Millie" is close to my heart for a lot of reasons, but one is because it's the only song I've ever been asked by an audience member to play again immediately after finishing. The encore of that show was literally just "Millie" and then "Millie" again. I did change the quoted verse from "Shelter From the Storm" the second time through, though, because why not?

"Idyll" was written about Donald Trump's Presidency and conversations I had with friends at the time about what did and didn't justify physical resistance to an oppressive regime. It was originally titled "Idyll #22," but I decided that was ridiculous.

Josh Ritter is one of my favorite songwriters, for his rapid-fire lyrics and his many references to other great works of art in his songs. "Jezebel" was my attempt to write a Josh Ritter song.

"Neal, Joan, and Me" is a more autobiographical song than most of my songs. Only the names were changed to protect the innocent. "Neal" ends up being a recurring character in a lot of the album cycle songs, and he's still a good friend in real life to this day. "Joan" and I went our separate ways eventually, but for good reasons.

"Machine of the Universe" combines a few of the most sublime, awe-inspiring experiences I've had in the wilderness into one song about alpine climbing in the middle of the night, which is an absolute blast if you've never done it.

"Sleep Well, Beast" is an instrumental eulogy for my dog Charley, who died during the album sessions.

In "Montana," the line is "as she reached out for the sunlight in a pink Ohio shirt." I've had a bunch of people ask me about that one already, so there it is.

Amen.

The End Is The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning Is

So. All the music I’ve been working on since 2017 is out now.

It’s up on my website, Bandcamp, and YouTube. It’s all free for streaming and download, but you can throw me a tip on my website or on Bandcamp if you feel so inclined. I’ll be writing a bit more about the various albums in the coming weeks, and I’m working on getting a sound and video setup going so I can do some livestreams, but for now I wrote a thing about the whole project below in case you’re interested in Deeper Thoughts (TM).

theghostpines.com/music

theghostpines.bandcamp.com

bit.ly/theghostpinesYT

At this point, I feel like I’ve spent more time talking about releasing this pile of music than I spent making it. And now I’ve decided to call it done.

To be clear, I haven’t actually spent more time talking about releasing it than working on it. I’ve been writing, demoing, recording, mixing, or mastering some part of this project since early 2017. It just...started as something small and then, umm, got a little out of hand.

I put out Asphalt Ghosts in 2016, and it was my first album of new songs in almost ten years at that point. I’d kept up with playing guitar and singing from 2007 to 2016, and even played a decent amount of live shows during that time, but for some reason new songs just weren’t coming the way they had back in The Way Old Times when I used to sit in my stuffy upstairs loft with a four-track and a $150 guitar. Then, one day in 2015, “The Light” just sort of came out all at once, and I wrote the rest of the album from there, and recorded it pretty quickly after.

Asphalt Ghosts is a sprawling, potentially dumb album that is nonetheless close to my heart, and I knew as soon as I finished that I wanted to write more songs: I didn’t want to lose the momentum I’d built up. I imagined the next album as being something smaller, something more folksy, akin to those early Bob Dylan and Mason Jennings records that had gotten me to pick up a guitar in the first place. I wrote the first song, “Running,” shortly after I finished Asphalt Ghosts with this direction in mind. I really liked it, and decided I’d try to be a bit more selective with this new project. Rather than recording the first ten songs I wrote and calling it an album, as I’d done in the past, I would write a lot of new songs, then be honest with myself about what was good, what was crap, and self-edit accordingly.

I ended up not doing that. Whoops.

After “Running,” I spent a few months pouring over old half-finished demos, old half-finished lyrics, and the ever-present pile of song skeletons I keep recorded on my phone, and ended up with songs and/or lyrics for over fifty songs. Then, I spent a few months writing words for the songs that didn’t have words yet, music for the words that didn’t have music to go with them, and mashing together bits and pieces of what was left like five year-old me making Transformers fight each other.

Ultimately, I demoed something like fifty-five songs, which in and of itself took most of a year, thanks to me having lots of other things going on in my life, including a real job that I have to work at so I can continue to feed myself. Then, like an absolute goof, I decided to keep almost all of these songs rather than just ten of them. See, it turned out that I actually liked nearly all of these songs.

So, the next step in the process turned out to be figuring out what to do with four times more new songs than I’d originally imagined having. As a few of you know, I referred to this project as “Triptych” for a long time. At that point, the idea was to record and release the music as three albums, each part of a thematic triptych, roughly comprising a cyclical year: Wilderness Amen for spring and summer, Maps for fall, and Fire and Rain for winter. But because I love writing and playing music, I kept making and recording more. Eventually Maps became a double album, then I spent five months just randomly jamming along with my looper and totally forgot how to play half of the songs I’d written the previous year in the process. Then COVID hit and I forgot who I was or how to do anything but sleep and eat and record lecture videos for awhile.

I came out of a months-long funk, learned a completely new way of playing melody guitar, relearned all my songs and actually collected them into a goddamn book with chords and keys and such so I couldn’t forget them again, and then set out to write and record the final missing piece in the project: the title track for Fire and Rain, which I had intimidated myself out of writing a year before by imagining it as a massive, ten-minute story song in the tradition of something like “Desolation Row.” Against the background of COVID and everything about my life that it had upended, I wrote it instead as part of a twenty-nine minute, apocalyptic combination of folk and noise rock that culminates with a sonic callback to the beginning of the album cycle’s first album, Wilderness Amen. It frankly feels ridiculous and indulgent now, but it’s a perfect distillation of my headspace last April or May, and so I kept it all on the album as a sort of sonic and lyrical monument.

So, in the end, there are actually six new albums:

The Amen Demos is a curated collection of a few of the fifty-five demos I recorded in 2017 and 2018 (along with a few covers, if you listen on my website or YouTube).

What Comes Around is a weird collection of instrumental, improvised jams I recorded to take a break from the “real” recording process. I might be the only person in the world who enjoys listening to these, but they were free for me to put out, and free for you to listen to, so why not? I like to think they make good ambient background music.

Wilderness Amen is the first album in the “main” four-album cycle. It’s meant to be the “spring” album, and is a mostly acoustic, mostly folk-y set of songs about, well, the wilderness.

Ride is the second album in the cycle, meant to have a more “summer-y” sound and subject matter. A lot of the more complex, jam-influenced songs are on this album, and it has a lot more electric guitars than Amen.

Maps is the third album in the cycle. It’s the “fall” album, and it’s a sort of companion to Ride. They’re both about travel and the road, but Maps is a bit less electric, its songs are a bit simpler, and I would say it is really autobiographical and personal, whereasRide is more expansive, but also more abstract.

Fire and Rain is the fourth and final album in the cycle. Here’s where all the darkest, saddest songs went, and I think they hang together well, though I think this album is also the hardest listen, in a number of ways. I mean, it opens with a ten minute ghost story song and ends with the aforementioned twenty-nine minutes of end-times folk-rock. I’ve always wanted to write an album of songs without worrying about what anyone else would think of the lyrics, or the music, or the length of the songs, and this is the closest I’ve gotten so far.

So that’s it. Are there some songs here that, given more time, I would record again, but differently? Sure. Do I wish I had a producer who actually knew how to make the records sound good? Of course! I have no idea what I’m doing on the recording end.

But I really like these songs. I liked writing them. I liked recording them. I like playing them and singing them. I wish it was 2003 again, so I could put a band together and spend all day playing them and trying to sell CDs out of my guitar case instead of squeezing in an hour of practice after a long day at the office. I’m super happy to put them out there, though, and if you take any time to listen, I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed putting this whole thing together. Thanks for reading.

3/3/21

Been daydreaming about Gearhart Wilderness today, for some reason.

Must be spring.