11. "The Way Out Is In"...

How we live our lives depends on our perspective of things.

How we make art is dependent on what is inside of us, and what we allow to move through us.

If we create a wall to block out the light, it will remain dark. And if we remove the wall, we will be exposed, perhaps, at times, to excessive light, which might burn or blind us, too.

Balance.

The interplay between light and dark. The ancient Chinese referred to it as "yin" and "yang."

Since "going solo" in around late 2016/early 2017, when asked what my "theme" is in terms of my music -- sound and vision, so to speak -- I have always answered "yin and yang," or "light and dark." In Japanese this is pronounced "in" and "yo." The characters look like this: 陰 and 陽...

Everything is an interplay of two equal and opposite forces, is it not?

Happiness and sadness

Male and female

Pleasure and pain

Life and death

How to find the light?

Where to look for it?

The answer is inside...

My first LP of 2022 was entitled "The Way Out Is In."

This phrase was often used by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn. I had read many of his books, translated into English, in my late teens.

I did not realize that this was a phrase he had used when I was in the midst of recording the LP. It is possible that subconsciously I did, or that I had remembered it (also subconsciously) from a talk by the Indian teacher Sadhguru, who also frequently uses the phrase. In any case, it wasn't until after I did the recording, which was an improvisation, and the phrase slipped out, that I realized it was commonly used by both of these teachers, Thich Nhat Hahn and Sadhguru.

Something very strange occurred while recording the second of two long, improvisatory pieces. The second was not planned as an improvisation in the first place, and ended up as one of only five tracks on the LP; it also became the second-longest track on the LP at 15 minutes, after a slightly longer electronic soundscape called "Omicron." Let me start, though, with the recording of the first piece, which eventually became the title track of the album, "The Way Out Is In."

This track was recorded one night when I was drinking a beer at my apartment and suddenly decided to do an improvisation (without singing) on my Ibanez acoustic guitar. I had been doing more improvisatory-style things at the end of 2021 (you can hear this style, as it was beginning to develop, on two tracks that landed on the final two LPs of the Tetralogy, the first being "The Answer Is Inside," from the LP of the same title, and the second "Hope, Regained," which can be found on the "Moment" LP), and I wanted to try "just playing" the acoustic, without any chords or choruses or anything in mind. I set up LOGIC and the recording mic and just riffed, with no particular images in my head, for about seven or eight minutes, and generally liked what had spontaneously emerged. Afterwards, I decided to try improvising some vocals on top of what I had mixed (or perhaps I ought instead to say alongside it), so I again set up the mic and improvised, in one take without breaks, a half-spoken, half-sung vocal with the guitar playing in my headphones. I ended up using both versions on the LP as "bookends," with the vocal rendition coming first and the instrumental version closing the LP. The vocal version opens with me intoning the phrase "The only way out is in..." I thought this too long for the title, so I elided it to"The Way Out Is In."

Let me back up again, for a moment now, to discuss the second improvisation.

The 15 minute-long improvisation was recorded with a completely different intention from the title track. 

As mentioned above, this track was not planned as an improv, but I had instead intended to do a recording -- or a rerecording, you might say -- of a much older, arpeggio ballad I'd written back in 2016, shortly after my reptilian band had dis-attached itself from me, and I started learning how to do fingerplucked arpeggios on the acoustic, a technique the bassist from my three-week "HOM" side-project with my ex-drummer had taught me in late ‘16 (he'd encouraged my practicing arpeggios with a song we co-wrote called "Forest," a song that, in 2021, I would rearrange for the acoustic and rerecord as "What Had You Done?" for my LP "The Sun Is Coming"). The song I had hoped to rerecord for "The Way Out Is In" LP, a song entitled "One Touch," did not end up as "One Touch" here, but, instead, it turned into a sprawling improv with lyrics (almost a rant, at times) dealing with attempting to leave the painful memories of the past behind, the hurt and the bitterness and sadness, and to forget about one's psychological "wounds." 

As with the track "The Way Out Is In," the acoustic guitar section was not only completely improvised, but it was recorded first, sans vocals, and the vocals were added later, as a separate "layer," so that they could be more easily mixed, effectorized, and so forth. The opening is in fact "One Touch," but it soon morphs into something quite different, something completely loose and improvised and somehow perturbed, perhaps even a bit desperate at times. Toward the end, it comes back to the "One Touch" refrain, then a refrain from "Chaos," another arpeggio song I had arranged for the acoustic around the time I’d written “One Touch,” but much darker, comes in as well. I was still at that time using a pick (I stopped using one completely after purchasing my Guild acoustic, but that was some months later), and so I rapped the pick against the strings and the neck of the guitar; I also began knocking the body with my knuckles, fingers, even the palm of my open-fisted hand... Thus, a new style of playing the guitar for me had already begun to somewhat spontaneously start to develop during the recording of these two pieces.

During the recording of the vocal section, which as mentioned was also completely improvised, apart from the lines that came from "One Touch," about midway through recording the 15 minute piece, I recalled a quote from William Faulkner, where he says that "the past is never past," i.e. since we keep it alive inside our minds and our hearts (emotions). Immediately after this slipped out out my mouth, and by association, I quickly followed it with a saying from Thich Nhat Hahn I suddenly recalled, as, in contrast, this gentle Buddhist monk had always emphasized that all we in fact have is the "now," the "present," and that this very moment is itself beautiful (one of his book titles, the one I always recall, is "Present Moment, Wonderful Moment"), that we can make it beautiful, or wonderful, by focusing on it and not on whatever painful or terrible things may have happened to us in our past, that we can stop playing back the film in our heads again and again and just focus on the reality of this moment. This idea, of course, is not original to Thich Nhat Hahn -- it is an idea often emphasized by many Buddhist teachers and teachings, as well as in other spiritual and philosophical traditions -- but Thich Nhat Hahn and his words are what came into my head at that moment while improvising the vocals.

After I finished the recording of this, later adding two additional tracks to round out the LP -- a piano ballad I had started working on the previous month, which was a rather slow and dark reinterpretation of a song originally by the artist IAMX (Chris Corner) entitled "Tear Garden," and "Omicron," a 17-minute dark ambient instrumental, one I considered/consider the sequel to 2020's "Covid" -- I looked up Thich Nhat Hahn on the internet to see what I might find, and learned, much to my surprise, that he had very recently passed away, just days prior to when I had recorded the long improvisation that had become the track "Forget the Past."

Coincidence, right?

Coincidence...

Hmm. Right.

"Tear Garden" (excerpt)

After learning of his passing, I decided to make a video for the 15 minute-long "Forget the Past," including an introduction with the late Thich Nhat Hahn talking about just that -- "forgetting the past" -- and about doing one's best to live fully in the present moment, as well as a slide-show of some quotes and images that had inspired me on my journey toward recovery. 

I also created a self-shot video for "The Way Out Is In." The night of the day I filmed the video I'd use to create the latter, self-shot on the iPhone during a walk through my neighborhood, and having not been feeling very well since waking up that morning, I spiked a fever (I had chills, a sore throat, etc.) and later received confirmation that I was almost definitely Covid-positive, since the people I'd essentially randomly hung out with at a bar in a neighboring town a couple of nights prior -- something very rare for me, especially during the pandemic, and perhaps a bit foolish, too, though I was by then twice-vaccinated and the news was reporting that the new "Omicron" strain was less serious than previous strains, plus I was craving some sort of human interaction -- had been positive, too. And so the track "Omicron," which I'd recently recorded for this LP, itself became a sort of coincidence to my mind as well. 

Coincidence, perhaps.

Yes, perhaps...

After my fever broke, only three days later, and nothing too serious, I "successfully" recorded a new version of "One Touch" in my room, filming it from two different angles simultaneously and then later editing it together. This time around, I'd decided to use my classical nylon string acoustic for it, instead of the Ibanez. This would go on the follow-up LP, which I will discuss in the next section.

Read the review of the LP by Dave Franklin here.

Read the review of the LP by Alex Faulkner here.