I’ve been extraordinarily busy. I have been busying myself with being busy. It’s a terrible way to live. I’ve gotten into a wonderful habit of imagining a problem and then obsessing about the solution. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon, if you hate yourself passionately. Never do that. I’ve been overwhelmed by the things I alone have decided that I must do. Sometimes there is so much to be done that the completion of one single activity could never represent any measureable progress, so it’s hard to get started. Absolutely pathological. I must break the habit.

In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that I took my own advice for once and delegated. I’ve written previously about how web site design is a great way to procrastinate. It’s always a great way for me not to do what I’m more ideally suited to. However, I was growing tired of the previous look of my site and I wanted to change it. It started out very well. I had a few ideas. I had some breakthroughs in understanding and those ideas became achievable. In realizing those, I got a few more. It was very promising for a few days. Then, the days turned into weeks. Suddenly, I was working on a web site and not music, again. I needed to get out of it, but I’d invested so much time that the only way out was forward, not back. So I made a list of what I still needed done and headed to Elance.com. I posted a job and had four bids in about 20 minutes. I hired someone qualified and this headache was off my plate. Now I can just write, which is what I wanted to be doing in the first place. What a great thing! I highly recommend delegating. Could I have finished the site myself? Maybe. Should I have? Definitely not. I must learn to live this way all the time.

The sad irony of designing a great blog theme is that if your readers subscribe to your feed to get regular updates, chances are they’ll never see your theme. Wild.

This month I began obsessing about how I might stage the musical extravaganza that is my next album. After all, I have to gig on this stuff or there’s no point. I thought I had it figured out, but then I lost a key musician, already. I’m regrouping and trying to solve that problem. At least I’ve lined up a drummer on whom I can depend. He also sings backup, which makes him a damn unicorn where I come from.

In his book about excuses, Wayne Dyer had an answer to an excuse I could very easily warm my hands over. I can’t achieve my goal because I don’t have anyone to help me. To re-center, I often meditate on his affirmation. “The people you need to help you are already here, and are on their way.” That feels so much better to me than complaining about the pool of New York area musicians. Wayne’s right on, I think.

Being an independent musician means coping with countless unknowns, innumerable situations in which the outcome cannot be guaranteed. It’s a challenge for musicians like me, who are in control of most everything about their music, from conception to recording to management and so on. As soon as others are factored into the plan, things always get unpredictable. The key is to re-center constantly and resist the urge to control when control is impossible.

So, today I have a single task to accomplish. Love the music.

Recently, I had a very sick person in my household. It is a situation from which we have yet to emerge completely, though things are better than they were. This episode featured doctors who disagreed, medication that would not stay down and symptoms that fluctuated literally by the hour. This week, I learned that our fever reducer of choice has been recalled. Had I known that at this time last week, I’d have felt even worse, as if that were possible.

I rarely left the house except for trips to the doctor. I slept fitfully and in the back of my mind suspected that the strain would surely visit some of the same symptoms on me. This week, I’m left with a persistent and violent cough. While I did everything I could, I didn’t seem to be helping. There were times of utter frustration and overwhelming anxiety. I could not control the situation. I could scarcely influence it. There were times when any influence at all would have been a blessing. A loved one’s wellness isn’t something I ever want to bargain with and it never leaves room for compromise. Despite a checklist of far more severe trials that we had endured, I felt as if we were in serious trouble.

When under duress, I often retreat into relaxation and breathing exercises that are mildly akin to meditation. I’ve been using these techniques for about ten years, whenever I’m backed into a psycho-emotional corner. They came in handy last month as fevers rose and days passed without improvement. In most all of the adversity that I encounter, meditative techniques are quite satisfactory, as they enable me to look within, to find strength, peace, and sometimes, resolution. This is the first time since I can remember that I felt as if the techniques were not enough. It was then that I resorted to prayer.

I’ve long claimed that meditation and prayer were no different. Whether you called it the Universe, the higher power or God mattered very little. I maintained that we were all talking about the same thing. Interesting that when I was at my weakest, I suddenly called what I was doing “prayer” and from a cognitive standpoint was placing power outside of myself. Normally though meditation, I felt that I could draw whatever I desired to myself, but in this situation, I just could not seem to visualize a universal oneness. I was too weakened, too flustered. As I looked to God for an answer, change began to occur. Ice cracked. Fevers broke. Immune systems finally took hold.

I have a much deeper understanding of the connection between meditation and prayer now. Perhaps what I viewed as a weakness, an inability to overcome feelings of helpless isolation, was just the unconscious subverting of the ego that I required. In a way, there was an acceptance of a situation that was far outside of my abilities to control. Placing power in God’s hands was a sort of meditative shortcut to the sense of oneness that eluded me. Acceptance and peace can be goals of meditation. Instead of meditating simply to draw something to myself, by means of my own energy, I let go my problem to the universe with the profound message that I could only solve it with help. I surrendered to the flow. Help arrived because I declared that my energy alone was not enough. So, despite my internal semantic sleight of hand, I was projecting the same energy I always do, talking about the same thing, as it were. I had simply been lacking a key ingredient: cognizance of the truth that energy doesn’t just come from me. It is within and without, everyone’s to share in as needed, and there is an inexhaustible supply. In prayer, I called it God.

I thought of the idea of a higher power used by recovering addicts. I talked to an addictions specialist I know, who explained the reasoning to me. The recovering addict admits that left to his own devices, he will make a bad decision. To head off that event, he places the situation in the hands of his higher power. At first, I believed placing power outside of the self to be a weakness, but if you believe in the universal connection between all things, there truly is no way to place power outside of yourself. Placing something “in God’s hands” is only a semantic variation. This practice is acceptance while simultaneously availing yourself of the limitless energy that belongs to all of us. You’re not saying, “I can’t do this.” You’re saying, “I can do this, with help. I choose to open myself to the help I need, to the energy in all things, to God.”

If you send your message, what you desire comes to you. I’ve learned that in sending your message, you must also submit to the universe, energy, or God, within and without. In connection to what is freely given but never controllable, meditation will bear fruit. It must. It’s the law.

If your message is that you can’t do something, or that there is no hope, or that you are alone, these untruths may be “heard” as your desire. Regardless of whether we pray or meditate or whatever it is we do, we must choose to experience life as if we can do anything, that hope is real and that we are connected to all things and never alone.

That’s the way I want to live.

Since I spend a lot of time making them, I listen to records obsessively. It’s what I do. I love to seek out patterns and similarities as I pore through my record library. Many of them involve what I know to be artifacts of the actual recording process. They show up in my recordings too. It’s also fascinating how regardless of the genre, making records can bring out the same fallibilities in even the best musicians. The act of attempting to capture the definitive version of a particular composition in a recording is about judgment, environment, ability and unfortunately sometimes, compromise. Many mistakes are made and parts done over. Technology allows all kinds of magic, especially now. In fact, part of producing a great recording now is about knowing when not to make the work surgically perfect, when to let the humanness of the performance shine through in all of its flawed glory. I heard Todd Rundgren say in an interview once that he sometimes leaves the flaws in a recording, because allowing a flaw to be expressed can be a form of catharsis. Hmm…

Nevertheless, sometimes a recorded performance goes sour almost immediately, in the first measures of the piece. Most of the time, the engineer or producer would just call the take a false start and tell the musicians to start again. For some reason, and probably for one of those I mentioned earlier, sometimes those flubs make the record. I always wonder why, having not ventured very far into a take, they didn’t just try again. Here are some of my favorite examples of “Didn’t that deserve another take?”

Majestic Dance by Return to Forever – I actually just heard this cut again for the first time in years. It has always been my favorite track from the Romantic Warrior album. It featured the most notable line-up of the band, with Al DiMeola on guitar. As early as I can remember, being a musician in grade school, I was hearing my guitarist friends rave about what a monster player Al was and how they hoped they would play as well as Al one day. (To my knowledge, few, if any, ever did.) An experienced guitarist, I can hear a typical guitar flub in measure one of “Majestic Dance.” He plays the chord on beat three, but I know what it sounds like when you just don’t grab it perfectly. Al barely got this one out and, like when I discover such a flaw in one of my own recordings, the weirdness gets louder every time I hear it. It would have been so easy to hit it again. I wonder why they didn’t. The piece is so badass.

Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out by Bruce Springsteen – This was the first Bruce album on which Max Weinberg appeared. Fresh off a run in the pit orchestra for the Broadway musical Godspell, Max got his break with the E Street Band because he didn’t play like Ginger Baker. This track begins with a nice little soul fanfare. Then, it’s a solo buzz roll by Max leading into the main groove of the tune. They’d only played 3 measures and Max muffs the buzz roll! I’m sure Max had played a million buzz rolls, but this one, for posterity, sucked! Poor Max. I heard him say once in a talk he gave at my college in the 90s about his experiences with the band that the muffed buzz roll always bothered him. Me too. He’s still one of my favorite drummers. I only wish they didn’t allow him to be so horribly misrepresented. Even if the horn section had gone home, it wouldn’t have been impossible to punch in that buzz roll. It’s amazing what you can decide to live with when you’ve been in the studio too long.

Why Can’t We Be Friends? by War – This was a big single from a very interesting 70s band from East LA off an album of the same name. This track’s even got that feel-good off-mic chatter like a 60s party record. I managed to locate an original vinyl pressing of this album, still in the shrinkwrap, back in the 90s. It even had the poster in it! I love the sound of this it. It was the soundtrack for my summer barbecues for ages. In this single, there’s a high keyboard riff at the beginning that forms the foundation of the groove when the entire band enters. This record was a major hit, but in the very first measure, Lonnie Jordan just totally butter fingers the chord change! Happens to the best of us, but that’s a false start if I ever heard one! Hey barely even makes it through the second pass! Geez… To misquote a rap that appears earlier in the album, “Lonnie gonna make it real sloppy for you…”

Ventura Highway by America – This one is hard to hear. Maybe that’s what they thought too. With all of that wonderful California acoustic sweetness, your brain might be candied to numbness and never notice. I have a friend who’s a radio producer. He introduced me to the concept of the “post.” The post is that part of a record when the vocal starts. When DJs were important on the radio, it was always fun to hear the good ones talk up a record. A good DJ could run his yap during the intro of a hit record and sound completely effortless, finishing his sentence just in time for the post. It requires a good bit of musical feel and pacing to get it right. I think it works the same mental process involved in merging onto a highway without inconveniencing anyone. Sometimes, a lame DJ wouldn’t make it and he’d step on the post. (My buddy also told me about the unwritten rule of “Hotel California” and its exception to the post convention. Never talk up a record with an intro as long as that one. ) Anyway, listen to the wrong chord at the post of “Ventura Highway.” If the DJ was good, you would never have heard it.

Too High by Stevie Wonder – This one may or may not have been a candidate for another take. It depends on what instrument Stevie recorded first. He played everything on this. After one measure, the tempo takes a dive. It sounds like a burst of the musician’s energy that quickly got a hold of itself and settled. That’s not interpretation folks. That’s just what happens when you play all of the instruments yourself (I know something about this) without a timing reference. Any mistakes you make in the first track will always be there, no matter how many instruments you layer on top. If you try to overdub with a flawed first track, you’ll be a slave to that track’s idiosyncrasies on every pass and with every new part until you mix. Sounds on tape won’t breathe. They are on the tape, as is, for eternity. I’ve saved timing problems with a tambourine in my day, but no tambourine would have fixed this one. You just gotta follow it. If the rest of the tune was in the can by the time ol’ Stevland did the drums, I can see where they might’ve have wanted to live with it. However, if he did the drums first, they might have tried again, or at least cut the tape to include a more tempo-matched intro.

To be truthful, I kind of dig this one. To hear that even Stevie Wonder can be noticeably flawed makes me feel better about my own tracks. I felt the same way the first time I heard a tape edit on a Nat Cole record. Even Nat Cole’s takes weren’t all perfect. Now that I consider it, I listen to the tempo change on “Too High” for enjoyment.

Photo: Michael Ochs Archive/Getty