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The Beginning of the End

It’s been a couple of months since my last post. I needed to shut down the engines for a minute and recharge. Also, I’ve been practicing like a crazy person, but I’ll get into that in a moment.

In August of 2009, I packed up the few boxes of possessions (mainly books and recordings), a table, 2 chairs, and a dresser and placed them in a storage unit for a whopping $150 for the year. A few days later I threw a suitcase with some clothes, a used laptop computer, my guitar, and a couple of notebooks onto a flight to Spain. I would live there for just under a year.

I was on a mission to discover everything I possibly could about one composer in particular: Vicente Asencio. So, I spent a number of months studying his works for the guitar and amassing a collection of Spanish musicology books (all of which made up the contents of my suitcase on the return flight). These books not only created insight into who he was as a composer but also contextualized how his work fitted within the musical times in which he lived. The more I researched him, the more I realized I couldn’t just limit my investigation to solely his pieces. I began to study his contemporaries learning just how this very specific musical landscape had influenced all of them.   As David Byrne explains in his book How Music Works, you have to have “a scene” and if you don’t have one, well, then you’d better build one. Asencio and his colleagues did just that in the 1950s and not much has changed sixty years later. We’re still building our own scenes….but that’s a story for another day.

So after living abroad, and with a memorable Spanish inflected Thanksgiving under my belt, I moved back to Baltimore. Upon my return, the next ten months of my life were divided between teaching the guitar, thinking about Asencio, writing about him and his contemporaries, practicing his music, taking my last couple of qualifying exams, and finishing my degree.   So easy being a student – right?! Ahh, not so much. My wife summed this time up brilliantly when she named it “the grumpy year” and she’s being generous!

After the dust settled, I just couldn’t start the engine back up to push the project forward. Ironically, I felt incredibly guilty about it as I had done all of this work yet could not motivate myself to share it. My research sat in a box in our apartment, and then in a box in our house until finally, in late May of 2014, I became motivated by two deceptively simple sentences: 1. Zane, we’re having a baby. 2. Finish this album. We booked the studio and in October of that same year I went to Berlin, Germany and began recording. The project had finally begun.

This evening, nearly two years later, I’m getting back on a plane to finish the project. Little did I know (or as they say in the film Stranger than Fiction: “Little did he know…”) that it would take me 7 years to reach the finish line.

How do I feel? –Oh, I’m nervous. I find recording to be difficult, and for me it’s a multi-layered challenge, one where I try not to second guess myself, my preparation, my abilities or my musical ideas. I should mention that this is before they’ve even turned on the microphones.

All this is to say—wish me luck. It’s exciting to have the chance to finish this project, and if you’re curious to see how it’s going, I’ll be posting daily to my Instagram account: @zaneforshee.  Stop by and say hello. In the interim, I’ll be thinking about this scene from the movie Almost Famous where Frances McDormand tells the lead guitarist from Stillwater: Be Bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.

Perhaps we could all use a little courage this week.