#4: Creative Administration, or The Trouble with Memos

(text, song, audio snippet)

A voice memo app means nothing is ever lost. This isn’t so much a true or false statement as it is a state of mind. Oblivion vanquished! No further action is required. Since I now have the thing that needed recording, there’s no need to remember it or see to its proper care and feeding. It’s a recipe for complacency made worse by my tendency to let the app assign names automatically. I’ll be out walking, trying to get in my 10,000 steps when a terribly good idea will occur to me while crossing the boulevard. With the light about to change, I decide that “voice memo 416” will do as a name. Problem is, I always seem to be crossing the boulevard with the light about to change.

Things have gotten out of hand. Right now the app is assigning names in the 1300 range, and that’s just on my current unit. Previous phones, tablets and computers have all reached similarly unmanageable levels. I have thousands. They fall into a few categories.

1. Spoken word, though that’s way too grand sounding for what these are: very short phrases or ideas which seemed wonderful at the time but in retrospect (if retrospection ever happens) are understood to be dreck not what we’re looking for at this time. Listening back to those is like revisiting last night’s mescaline-fueled epiphanies. “Holy shit! Birds are dinosaurs!”

2. Melodies, also recorded while walking. For some reason I tend to sing them in a very shaky falsetto. More like bleating than singing. The only way any of it might someday rise to the level of “material” is in the form of blackmail.

3. Me on the couch, playing the guitar while watching the news. These tend to be blues-inspired dirges. No surprise there, given the news.

4. Sustained development of a chord progression and melody. Even before listening back, I know I’m looking at one of these sessions when I see several files with date stamps all with minutes of each other. These are going to need their own folder. The folder and each of the files in it is going to need a name - in other words, creative administration.

5. Recordings made in error. Out there in the middle of the boulevard, I neglected to hit the red button again. The thing stayed on, recording the rest of my walk from inside my jacket pocket. 49 minutes of swishing.

6. Completed songs, or songs well on their way. It’s always good to get the thing recorded asap after completion. It’s usually got a vibe. By way of example, here’s the very first instance of the title track from my last record (it came out too long ago to say “most recent”), recorded straight into an iPad. It being 2 am, and not wanting to wake anyone, I decided to tap the chords (two fingers flat across the strings) rather than strum. That technique stuck. You might hear some crudely executed edits, made the following morning on the same machine. That ticking sound is the click track sneaking out of open-backed headphones. I had compression maxed out, so the built-in microphone was picking up everything. We spent way too much time and money trying to figure how to use this as the basic track for the studio version. Ironically, it was the click track that made it impossible.

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Careless (Voice Memo recording)

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Even if those thousands of voice memos do still exist on a hard drive, unless I give them names, that might as well be oblivion. Even a name like “banjo riff in 5/4” or “not terrible stompy thing” will confer some dignity onto an m4a file, lift it ever so slightly out of the undifferentiated digital muck, where it will have a fighting chance. Others don’t deserve one. I’m not going to bother changing “voice memo 803” to “indistinct falsetto bleating 72b”. But how am I going to know unless I listen?

For the past few months I’ve been going through them. Every last one. It’s work. Wading through all of that dreck unsuitable material will make a person go delete-crazy. But I’m careful. For example, even though I’m pretty much convinced that “not terrible stompy thing” is, precisely, terrible and should be sent away, I won’t. It has a name! “Banjo riff in 5/4” is also staying. It’s got potential, so I’m moving it up the chain here: