This was something I wrote in response to one of those Facebook challenges. I just read it over and discovered that it’s a better piece than should be confined to Facebook. Well, I thought it was interesting anyway…

Todd Rundgren – Something/Anything?
Every Todd Rundgren album has changed my life, but he has more than 15. This record is the first one by Todd that I owned, because it had “I Saw The Light” and “Hello It’s Me” on it. I’d loved this sound since I was a kid, but like many people, never knew who it was. This record introduced me to the seductive idea of playing everything yourself on a record. Whenever I wonder whether a mistake on one of my own recordings is too heinous to leave, I listen to this record and its glorious tempo fluctuations and instrumental flubs.

Laura Nyro – Eli and the 13th Confession
This album was the source of Todd Rundgren’s chords. The way jazz and rock are intertwined on this record showed me more possibilities than the invention of the wheel. Laura’s voice is something you adore or abhor. I adore it. Since her death, this record is a reminder that Laura will be waiting for me in heaven. When I reach Saint Peter and he’s done with all of that “here’s what you did in your life and we’re still letting you in” jazz, I will say, “OK. Thank you. Now, where’s Laura?”

Yes – Yesshows
I was a Yes fanatic starting at about 12 years old. Though this album is an obscure one, the version of “Ritual” that appears on it is the reason why I’m a bass player today. Chris Squire’s sound always appealed to me, but there was something about the energy of the bass breaks in that recording that made my heart beat faster. They still do that.

Kiss- Destroyer
This was the first album I ever bought with my own money. I was 5. Kiss was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen. I’ve been a fan of theatre and the fantasy of rock and roll ever since. Not only did the sound of this album and the songs grab me, but they’ve grabbed me in new ways as I’ve grown older and my musical ears have matured. I’ve often told the story that when I bought this album, I almost got busted because I ran past the register without paying so I could look out the window of Two Guys and see a passing fire truck. Later as I listened to the album on my little phonograph, I stared at the album art for hours, smelling the ink on the jacket. Only Kiss albums had that smell. Maybe it was all that black ink. Nevertheless, I learned through this album what I wanted to do with my life.

The Police – Zenyatta Mondatta
I got this record when I was 10. I’d moved on from Kiss for a while. There were a couple of hits on this record that I knew, but it didn’t take long before I started to experience it as a gestalt. This was another record that I listened to for hours starting at the jacket art. This one came with a collage of photographs on the inner sleeve. At 10, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that Stewart’s hair color was different in every picture. Everyone kept telling me that because I liked The Police that I liked punk rock, but I was always put off by that. This wasn’t punk rock as I knew it in 1981, which was whatever the news and ignorant adults would tell me about it. I didn’t know if I knew what to call it at 10, but I loved the lush sound of the reverb and the guitars that hardly sounded like guitars. I was changing and I could recognize that these songs were grown-up, completely unlike Kiss songs. It redefined again what it meant to be a musician. The guys in the pictures on the sleeve made music that I loved, but they didn’t wear costumes. Instead, they were adults. They wore watches. Andy Summers was pictured with an umbrella. I was a kid. I never used an umbrella. My parents used umbrellas, not rock stars.

Stevie Wonder – Songs In The Key Of Life
Though this album is less focused than Talking Book or Innervisions, it represented to me what it means when an artist can be heard out for his complete statement. The underlying theme on this album is love. It captures a heart that I know is in me somewhere and that ever since I first heard it I’ve been trying to realize in my own music. I listen to this album every year when spring is just beginning to show itself in New York, when the air is becoming sweeter and a haze forms over the skyline in the afternoon. I listen to little else until the summer sets in.

The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
This album also shows a most sensitive heart and a magnificent vision for music that transcends genres. The textures on this record utilize the sound of the room and the way the arrangements work together. Before layering with MIDI, this record created new sounds with arrangement. Vibes with flute. Electric bass with organ pedals. The songs had a sensitive and vulnerable voice that I saw in myself. People always said Brian Wilson was a genius. This album challenged me to be a genius too.

Bruce Springsteen – The Wild The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle
Bruce showed me possibilities in music because he was from New Jersey like I was. I marveled at the way he told a story. I loved the sound of the band. Again, it was rock and roll, but expanded, ignoring the traditional definition and embracing romanticism. I listened to this album in my car in high school. It was the only Columbia cassette that never squealed on me. It was playing at all times when I was 17. It was playing when I had my first car accident, when I flipped my odometer, on the way to my first gigs, on my first trips to the shore and countless other times. Bruce said this was a “lazy, hanging out, summer album,” and that’s exactly what it sounds like to me. I wanted that guitar sound. When I was reaching the end of my senior year of high school, my mother was pressuring me to go to the prom, which I couldn’t care less about. She wanted so badly for me to normal. In a desperate attempt to convince me, she said “I’ll even pay for it!” That was when I struck. “What a waste of money. If you want to pay for something, get me a new guitar for graduation.” That year, I got that guitar sound with my first American Fender Telecaster. It was cream yellow, which was as close to Bruce’s wood grain as was available in 1989. I still have it and I can still get the E Street Shuffle sound on it.

Meat Loaf – Bat Out Of Hell
This album combines my love of theatre, rock and roll romanticism, Todd Rundgren and the E Street Band. It set a standard that I’m still chasing after and its unlikely success proved that I shouldn’t listen to what anyone says about the marketability of my music. From sleeve to groove, there isn’t anything about this album that I wouldn’t want to do myself.

Bob Dylan and The Band – The Basement Tapes
Though I’ve heard that this album was actually sweetened years later at Shangri-La, I still buy into the myth that it was recorded at a rented house in Saugerties. Just musicians playing together for the purpose of playing the greatest music they could. The recording is so primitive, but nothing about the music is lost. It’s a lesson that all recording artists should learn. It’s a miracle that we have these machines. You play your music into it and it can play back what you recorded. How wonderful!

The Band – Music From Big Pink/The Band
I always consider these albums one. As a guy who records everything himself all the time, these albums not only capture the rustic mythology of Woodstock, NY but moreover, what it means to have a band of true brothers all working toward the same goal. It’s all I ever really wanted.

Utopia – Oops! Wrong Planet
This the sound I want in a band. Four players, four voices. A super group. Just the right balance of rawness and slickness.

Bruce Springsteen – Born To Run
The only album I own that is so great and so important that sometimes I can’t listen to it. It creates its own universe. The experience transcends the music itself.

Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy
This is your brain on electric twelve string. The opening to this album is worth the price of admission. It’s like the sound of something just about ready to bubble over, and then it does. The variety of music on this album illustrates that music should not have a single dynamic. Like life itself, it cannot exist at one emotional level. The other key lesson that I learned from this album was that Led Zeppelin never wrote songs about girls. They wrote songs about women. The distinction was never lost on me.

Chris Preston – Mono Is King!
This was my first album. The culmination of a lifetime of planning. Completed at a time when I thought I knew everything, it was the project that officially made me a recording artist, which I still think is pretty special. I broke my ass on it and I think it shows. I became an even better guitarist and agonized over the fact that I didn’t have access to keyboard instruments. The feeling of walking through the streets of New York with my completed quarter inch master tapes on the way to the manufacturer was sublime. I felt like the most important person on Broadway. The next day, the day before Thanksgiving 1996, my body finally allowed itself to rest and I came down with the worst cold I’ve ever had in my life.

I think I might need to do “15 More Albums That Changed My Life” sometime.

If you’re hip to independent music, you know that CD Baby is a great place to find new stuff. It’s a site that artists like me use. It was founded by Derek Sivers, who started it simply as a means of selling his own CDs before the explosion of e-commerce. Some of his friends asked him if he could sell their CDs too, and before he knew it, it had become a wildly successful independent music Mecca online. It became profitable too. CD Baby has paid artists like me a total of more than $100 million. While media was running story after story about how CD sales were declining, independent CD sales at CD Baby were booming.

Derek had never created a web site before. Methodically, he taught himself how to do it. CD Baby was never all that flashy. Simple and utilitarian. Members could sign up for a fee and sell their CDs. CD Baby handled the credit card transactions and the shipping in turn for a commission on the sales. All the artists had to do was provide stock and promote themselves and their work. Over the years, Derek managed to negotiate deals for CD Baby members that enabled us to be available in popular mp3 download stores.

I don’t want to make it out to be perfect, because it wasn’t, but one thing that CD Baby always had was the right attitude. Derek didn’t set up the site to sell single song downloads, believing that CD Baby wasn’t selling hit singles but the artists’ full visions. If you bought something by download, you could always log in and download it again.

The best part about CD Baby was that it was personal. All of the e-mails from CD Baby were always from “CD Baby Loves You.” When you bought a CD, your confirmation was a text-only e-mail message that described this elaborate fantasy of how your purchase was being carried by hand at the head of a celebratory parade to the post office where it would reach you with great vibes and thanks. A week or two later, CD Baby would follow up with another message, asking you if everything arrived and if you enjoyed the music. It always encouraged you to post a review and contact the artists, because the artists really appreciated it. On a download purchase, my follow-up message asked, “Was everything perfect?”

That’s not even all. They always answered the phone and your e-mails. You always got the impression that CD Baby was on the side of the independent artist and willing to do almost anything to show that they appreciate their customers.

Then, Derek wanted to pursue other projects. He sold CD Baby to Disc Makers, a company a lot of independent artists use to manufacture their CDs. (With whom I have locked horns in the past…) They talked about how exciting it was and how Tony Van Veen, the Disc Makers honcho, was going to take CD Baby further than Derek ever could.

Cut to three weeks ago.

CD Baby started trumpeting how they were doing a re-design of the site and that it would include many new and helpful features for artists. I started to get nervous. They also explained how they would now sell single song downloads and because of that would have to take a bigger commission. They had lots of new legal stuff that they told you to read too.

Over a weekend, they were going to launch the new beast. That weekend brought a confusing mix of broken stuff, bugs and disorganization. They had fixed something that wasn’t broken and it hasn’t been right since. Just yesterday, Tony Van Veen himself was posting apologies to the CD Baby members on the artist forum, asking for another few weeks to get things straightened out.

CD Baby now functions like a plain ol’ e-commerce site out to fleece the independent artist community. Cluttered, money-grubbing, stupid stereotypical stock photos of “indie music types.” (They even took one down because the members hated the look of the guy so much.) Artists are being treated like numbers on hold now. They aren’t the most important thing anymore. CD Baby hasn’t reported digital sales figures since May. They haven’t answered my 4 e-mails. They don’t answer the phone.

CD Baby bitches constantly about being over-worked and understaffed trying to get their site back on its feet, when they’re the ones who blew it. The members are just slamming them with all the problems they created with their improvements.

A friend of mine released a new album and since it was available on CD Baby, I bought a copy of it. My confirmation message said, “Thank you for ordering from CD Baby.”

That was it. No parade. No marching band. No love.

What a let-down. They have graphics and HTML tables in their e-mails, but I’d trade formatting for text-only soul any day. They just ruined it.

I don’t know what to do about this yet, but I can tell you that I know longer feel that in CD Baby I’m part of something important. I feel like Charleton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes. God damn you all to hell.

I have a little studio that I do all of my recording in. It’s a single room away from everything and everyone else in the house. It’s comfortable and I enjoy working in it because I can make records and not watch the clock like I would in a studio I paid to use by the hour.

The downside of working in a small room is that small rooms, especially those in conventional living structures, can be the enemy of good recordings. A good recording is usually the result of a good performance captured by good equipment in a good sounding room. The good performance? Well, I must have one in me somewhere. No problem. Good equipment? Compared to what I made my first records on, my gear is excellent. I’ve got good mics and I know how to use them. What I own isn’t the best money can buy, but the best money can buy is never a necessity for me.

A good sounding room? (Insert buzzer or trombone dive here…) When you’re recording at home in a small space and you don’t have the budget or the inclination, you’re up a creek.

First, most rooms are rectangular. They’re boxes with parallel walls. Sound bounces off everything. Since my space is small, sound bounces quickly from surface to surface and then dies out. You get what’s called flutter echo. Without being too technical, it sounds awful and good mics capture the abomination quite well. 

Another by-product of the box-shaped room is the standing wave. These are particularly difficult with lower frequencies. You know why you sing so well in the shower? The shower reflects your voice additively from one wall to the other, causing a resonance that feels pretty powerful. The wavelength of your voice is about the width of your shower, so while one wave is bouncing, another cycle is coming. They get added together and you sound positively boomy. The boom masks all kinds of problems you might have with your vocal technique. The problem is that if you sing outside the shower, the problems will be exposed pretty clearly.

This same phenomenon is at work in a small room used as a recording studio. Only there, not only do you get the boom, but you get phase cancellations when one wave cycle bounces off a wall and then collides with another cycle traveling in the other direction. Then, that frequency disappears entirely! Since presumably you want your recordings to be played outside of your studio environment, the idiosyncrasies of your room make your results pretty unpredictable, which is not good. You can make it sound great in your lair, but instead of making the music sound good, you’re actually using all of your skills to overcome this stupid little room that’s working against you with physics. Then, when you play the CD in the car, a totally different acoustical environment, you have a complete mess that sounds nothing like what you heard in your little studio.

This home recording thing can be tough stuff.

The common solution for these types of problems is to deaden the room as much as possible. You can dampen flutter echo with foam on the walls and ceiling. I have carpet in my studio so the floor isn’t really an issue. (Foam won’t help the standing waves, but that’s a story for another time.) Soft, irregular surfaces don’t reflect sound well. I already have some foam up on my walls, but it isn’t enough. I want to stand back further from my vocal mic. If I don’t kill the room, I’m gonna hear it in with my vocal track, which is unacceptable. If I can deaden the room more and capture only my voice on the recording, I can add more pleasant-sounding ambience electronically.

So this is what I’m weighing now, since I’m on a budget. Do I go for the foam or use packing blankets? I’m leaning toward the foam, since it can be made in nice colors and shapes. I know how nasty the glue you use to mount it can be and taking it down can leave a very ugly mess of residue and ripped paint, but luckily, I own this place. What’s the good of owning your own place if you can’t make a few modifications?

The only reason I was considering blankets is that I could suspend them on something, so I could move them around the piano if I had to. (The same acoustical problems exist for recording that instrument.) The thing is that I’d have to find or build some structure upon which to suspend them, which sounds like a huge hassle to me for some reason. I want to make music, not build a fort in my basement.

And those blankets are so unsightly. They’re made to pad your furniture when you move. The look of them wouldn’t bother some people, but I know it would get to me. After you’re finished setting up your acoustic environment, you actually have to sit in it and get the definitive performance of whatever it is you’re recording. I can’t do anything definitive in an environment that looks like the back of a moving van. I simply can’t work if the room looks like a plane hit it. Without a good performance, there’s no point to any of this.