America is an atomized and disconnected space. I’ve felt that disconnection in a visceral way since January 21, 2017. That’s the night my wife and I learned that our only son had been killed: walking along an isolated stretch of highway in Florida. Mark had just turned 33.

In my case, loneliness feels exacerbated by social media. To be truthful, there are moments when it seems like it might be part of sinister plan concocted by our overlords to keep us as divided and disconnected as never before. Why even make the effort to remain connected when you can push a button on your screen?

I don’t know a lot about Ben Sasse, senator from Nebraska. I’ve heard him speak on news shows and I know he has a book called Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How To Heal. Personally, I have little hope that we’ll stop hating each other—that’s not my point, here. But in reading something over the weekend about Sasse and his book, I was reminded again about my opening point: our isolation (and how I cope daily with my own).

Sasse’s book addresses elements like an “evaporation of social capital,” which is the “glue that binds us together,” as I’ve written about before. This one item struck me just like someone had slapped me in the face. “Loneliness—not obesity, cancer or heart disease—is the nation’s number one health crisis.” Sasse writes that “persistent loneliness reduces average longevity more than twice as much as does heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity, which often is a consequence of loneliness.” Or, you could be so fucking lonely that you just end it for good and kill yourself. To feel isolated day after day takes a toll.

But let’s put that aside and return to music, this post’s main point. Hang with me if you can. I think it will make some sense if you can do something other than scroll to the end, or close your browser. But feel free to tune out at any time. It’s how we live today when we feel dissonance and discomfort.

Music means different things to people. For some, it’s simply background noise. Those people are not who this blog post is intended for.

Mary my wife is one of those people. For her to be married to a music nut like me seems like a total mismatch. But that’s probably part of the old “opposites attract” meme or whatever that’s supposed to be about. At the very least, she’s amazingly supportive of my ongoing musical adventures, which is all I can ask for. And she even ventures out to see me play (back before COVID shut us down) and is a good sport about my “racketeering” below her in The Bunker.

There are others: music for them is something more. Some of these people live for music—whether playing it, or, listening to it. Music frames their existence. To resort to a cliché: it’s the soundtrack of their lives. I’d fall into that latter category.

Even though music aficionados share a mutual love of music, one’s choices are very subjective affairs. I get that everyone’s taste in who they listen to varies. Not everyone likes the same beer, wine, or rock and roll band.

I’ve written a lot about music over the course of several blogs I’ve maintained since I hit the ground running as a writer back in 2001. This year is my 20^th anniversary as a published writer. Hurray for me!! Whatever.

How I came to music (or I could say, came back to it) in the summer of 2018 is something I’ve written about numerous times, since. This would be a good blog post for getting up-to-speed on my musical journey, if you’re sitting there reading this blog post and your thought is, “I didn’t know Jim played music—I thought he was a writer.” I’m finding that I can do more than one thing, creatively.

In 1991, I bought a Yamaha acoustic at Buckdancer’s Choice in Portland. I took a few lessons, learned a few songs and then, for some reason, let my guitar-playing languish. There was one brief period in the mid-1990s, however, when—inspired by a legion of indie rock bands and artists—I got the notion that I could become one of those home recording auteurs.

For most people—even the most passionate of rock and roll fans—the music you grew up with and have continued listening to relies on production to make it sound good on whatever you play it on. Granted, nothing sounds good on stupid phone with a thimble-sized speakers. I’m talking about high-fidelity equipment, or at least a car stereo or even a small Bose speaker that you use to stream from your digital devices. Headphones will suffice, too.

I don’t want this to devolve into a expository essay on sound systems. My point is that whoever you listen to: Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner, Taylor Swift, AC/DC, Fifty Cent, Celine Dion—their music has been recorded in a professional studio and then, mixed down by people who do this for a living. Then, there are guys like Bob Ludwig in little ole’ Portland, Maine, who make magic by mastering the final product for pop music stars. Look on nearly any record and see if Ludwig isn’t listed as mastering it.

There have always been people pushing back against music that’s “over-produced” and “slick.” Punk was one genre of rock where rawness and DIY sensibilities permeated recordings. Garage bands would be another element of artists “staying true” to the raw sound of rock.

For me and those who gravitated to lo-fi, however, we’re into something even more authentically homespun than those outliers.

Many of the artists I found captivating, like Guided by Voices, weren’t necessarily aiming for a lo-fi aesthetic. No, they were limited by choice mainly—they didn’t have access to high-priced recording studios with hourly rates costing more than most made in a week. So they started recording on things like tape recorders and some used four-track machines and a few had 8-track Tascam decks. All of these artists branded “lo-fi” put out recordings characterized by similar things, though: room and background noise, tape hiss, recording levels bleeding into the red and clipping (causing distortion) and other sounds that would be easily removed by a recording engineer at mixdown.

I actually learned from this article that the inspiration for lo-fi actually comes from the field recordings done by Harry Smith and Alan Lomax, utilizing “portable” equipment that “now seems prehistoric and cumbersome,” not to mention, not great at sound-capture. But Smith and Lomax were committed to documenting native folksinger and other musicians on location. Think old blues recordings of someone like Robert Johnson.

One of the artists I was captivated by the very first time I heard one of his recordings was F.M. Cornog, who used the moniker East River Pipe to release his music. I’d say he’s a good touchstone to get what I’m aiming for in what I’m laying down and producing (basically on my laptop and equipment that’s minimalist, at best).

During a period of time in the late 1980s, he ended up homeless due to drug abuse, alcoholism, and probably, mental illness. This was when he first met Barbara Powers who was running the small, indie label, Hell Gate. Powers released a batch of his home-recorded cassettes and 7” singles. These singles garnered attention from the UK-based Sarah Records, and they signed him. Finally, in 1994, Ajax Records brought out his first full-length, Shining Hours In A Can. He’s since put out a bunch of stuff for Merge Records, the label run by Superchunk bandmates, Mac McCaughan and Laura Balance.

Cornog and similar artists were popular with many of my fellow WBOR DJs back in the mid-1990s. I bought a Tascam 4-track and tried making my own recordings with no success. My biggest fault at the time is that I simply couldn’t play guitar worth shit—not even well enough to get through a few songs without totally fucking them up. I tried to be a “noise” artist, but eventually, I put all this away.

So here we are in 2021, during a historic pandemic. Over the past 16 months, I’ve written 20 songs. The first one was “Walking Down the Road,” a paean to my son. The songs I’ve written are good, a few really good. How do I know? I’m a writer and I’ve been listening to great songwriters since I was seven or eight-years-old. In the batch, there are a few throwaways. So what? With that ever-growing list, I realize that I’m now at a point where it makes sense to be posting many of them on Bandcamp,

I began blogging as an enticement to “ship” my stuff and get it out to a few readers. Bandcamp feels similar from the music side—a place to post songs and longer works either as a way station to something bigger, or a place to make music available to fans.

Last weekend, I decided that six of these songs that I’d written and had watched evolve through playing them seemed to have a common thread. Each one of them have become much more than they were when I scratched them out longhand, on a legal pad. My songwriting method often finds a genesis in a basic chord progression or melody. Then I work on the words. A couple actually came from times spent scribbling out rhyming couplets during a lunch break at work.

The short of it: my music doesn’t sound like the over-produced fodder served to the masses by our corporate overseers as “art.” Okay—my ego speaking. But, Taylor Swift is definitely not someone I’m trying to sound like. Better perhaps given that he’s a male vocalist, a more apt crosshair could be Frankie Ocean.

A couple of times someone mentioned listening to something I’d posted at Soundcloud or Bandcamp and complained that they couldn’t “hear the words.” Newsflash—I’m not aiming for a vocal-forward recording, even if I had Ludwig doing my final master. Can I boost my vocals a bit in the mix? Yes—my goal has been to do this as I learn on the fly, gleaning new things during my Recording 101 phase of the music production.

Cornog wasn’t fixated on his production. He wanted to get ideas down and then try to capture them on something. His choice was a tape recorder. Today, it’s more likely to be our phones. I’ve gotten some decent tracks down on my phone before.

I understand that you don’t know who F.M. Cornog is. But you probably have heard of Beck. The guy who did “Loser”? He came to the attention of the bigwigs back in the days of record labels trolling for talent. You probably have seen him perform at the Grammys or somewhere else (he’s got one, too).

Are you still wondering about the John Prine subject line?

Over the summer, I decided the only way to get better at playing and performing was to begin hitting open mics. Back to Seth Godin and shipping and the whole success, fail, fail, succeed, fail, succeed, and on and on it goes…

No matter how many times you play a song in the confines of your basement, something happens when that perfected song gets dumped on a stage in front of a hostile, or maybe better, indifferent audience. You’re apt to forget the riff, opening chord, lyrics (your name?). Nerves and stage fright does that to you. But, each time, you get a little better. At least that’s how it’s been working (or was working—thanks Janet Mills!!) for me.

I played Bentley’s in Arundel several times. Jimmy the Greek’s in OOB. I’d hit the Wolves Club the prior January before COVID shut everything down. I began going all the way to Mechanic Falls and even Brunswick to play. A few people came out. Most did not. Instead, they’d send me a note to “let them know the next time” I played. Okay. Let me find the perfect time for you—not!!

One open mic in Gray became a favorite. A bit different in that I usually wasn’t playing three or four songs and then onto the next guy format. This one was more a jam session. The two hosts were great. I learned to play a bunch of new songs and jam with other musicians. I had fun.

This club was just down the road from people we knew well from Mark’s baseball days. I don’t know why, but when the wife was posting about the death of John Prine, it pissed me off. Someone she only knew because of records—she’d never met him or interacted with him, personally. But God forbid—drive five minutes and support some guy who raised a fine young man and who’s been reeling for months—oh, no—can’t do that. There have been others. I wonder how John Prine would have felt if he’d spent the majority of his music life with a system that allowed people to play his music for free and then move on. But back when he got his start, if you wanted to hear his music, you bought a record.

Then, there’s the reality that many people as they get older stop going out to see live music. I’m not sure why. Maybe that’s what makes you seem like a geezer at some point. I’m doing my best not to be “one of those people.”

Save for a handful of people—like the old high school classmate who caught my set at The Millhouse Pub in Mechanic Falls after seeing my Facebook post—familiar faces in the audience at any of the open mics I played in 2020 were few (my friend, Paul, has been an exception). One co-worker, who time-and-time again said “let me know when you’re playing in Brunswick.” When I was playing in Brunswick on a Sunday and I texted her, she gave me the “I’ll take a rain check.” Baby, no rain checks will be coming!

This post has become a long way of saying—how about you buy my new EP? Take a chance on some lo-fi music, written from the personal experience of a dad who is still reeling (four years later) from the death of his son. And the only thing that seems to mitigate a fraction of the pain from the loss seems is making music and writing songs. Some of you owe me a beer. Buy my EP instead. Five bucks is a bargain in my mind. And since I’ve had a history of supporting other artists that exist outside the mainstream, it seems I’m due for some karmic reciprocation.

But even if I never get many more than three followers and those okay with listening and not “dropping any change into my case,” I plan to keep plodding along.