“Tell me what you love, and I will tell you who you are.” –Arsène Houssaye
I was interested in trying something different from an ordinary blog. Rather than little old me randomly opining on the state of the world (it’s a mess), the latest book I read (M Train by Patti Smith –excellent), or celery (aka Satan’s dental floss), I wanted to set up a sort of confession album, a 19th-Century practice in which friends asked each other questions, the most famous one being the Proust Questionnaire. For this confession album, I figured what better way to get to know people than to ask them to talk about something they love. And so, here are the questions, with the hopes of learning more about some interesting people and the things that move and shape them. This week, we are talking to Michael about his love of making music.
What is one thing (object, idea, practice, etc.) that you love?
There are many things I love and they’re often seemingly unrelated (except by the fact that I love them), but if I had to choose one, it would be music making.
How did you first come to discover making music? Do you remember?
Vividly. My dad made music, with a band. Seeing them rehearse in our garage is what really lit the fire. That and listening to Les Paul records. I needed to know how Les made those sounds. They were sounds you didn’t encounter in nature. Who wouldn’t want to know how to make music that nobody had ever heard before?
Do you feel like anyone mentored you when you first discovered or in developing your love of music besides your dad and Les Paul? If so, who and under what circumstances?
Every musician that ever showed me how to make a sound. There were so many. My cousin’s husband showed me a lot.
What do you love about making music?
The best thing is if you can imagine a sound or a song in your head, you can bring it out of your imagination and into the real world. You never get bored with music because if you can’t find something you like, you can make your own, almost exactly as you’d like it to be. You move from being a consumer of music, with the limits to choice that that implies, to being a producer of music. The better you get at music production, as a craft, the better you like the music you make.
How do you express your love for making music?
I have spent a lot of the money I ever earned on music making tools. I spend a lot of time on it, too. What interests me a lot, lately, is refining my music making process so that I get results I like much faster, without loss of quality or integrity. The slow way can be painstaking, so discouraging. Developing a good process for music making gives me more satisfaction. I like what I make a lot more.
How do you feel making music makes your life better?
Someone (maybe McCartney) said you can tell your guitar things that you otherwise couldn’t talk about. Music making is cathartic. I find I can talk about the deepest things, through music. There’s another dimension, too. Music allows you to express feelings almost directly from your emotions straight to sound waves. There are few things better than knowing you can share feelings so powerfully.
If someone were interested in discovering more about making music, where would you direct them? Where would they start?
These days, there are infinite resources online, but for me, the best route was getting a cheap instrument, pressing my ear directly against it, then making a sound. Any sound. Learn to dig how that makes you feel. Let it carry your consciousness away to some other place, for a while. Fall in love with the sounds you make.