Swan song for a would-be rock star,
Studio Grace: The Making of a Record By Eric Siblin House of Anansi Press 304 pp; $30
Songwriting seems to me a species of wizardry, like conjuring something out of nothing. Those who make a success of it have trafficked for a lucky moment with the gods. That the Montreal journalist Eric Siblin has determined to record an album consisting entirely of his original songs — and to chronicle the results in his memoir Studio Grace — is a wholly admirable enterprise.
It is a risky one, too. Bad songwriting can set the nerves on edge. “There are ho-hum painters, unexciting filmmakers, and derivative writers, but the lousy musician is in a special category because a fourminute song so thoroughly assaults its listeners’ environment,” Siblin writes. He quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
The economics of the music business is not auspicious. Songwriters still dream of hits, but meanwhile they have had to find new ways of making money — methods mostly involving the Internet.
One requires a special kind of ambition, then, to become a singer-songwriter. “For a long time songs had been percolating in me,” Siblin writes — almost since he was a youngster watching the Monkees and the Partridge Family on television. Inspired by these artists, he bought a $79 electric guitar from Eaton’s, took some lessons, graduated to non-television fare such as the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Who, et cetera, and formed a band. Along the way, he wrote his first song at the age of 13.
“University and journalism took over my life,” he writes, “while songwriting remained a hobby.” A chance encounter with a former classmate and music producer named Morey Richman helped to renew a serious interest in the art. Richman’s life reflects the ups and downs of the music industry — he was a member of a rock band for several years and then became a buyer for Discus, at that time the country’s largest record store chain. Soon, Richman formed his own record company, packaging dumbed-down versions of musical genres — Classical Music from the Movies — and selling in places like Walmart. “The old-school record company execs couldn’t be bothered to market unconventional products in these unconventional places,” Richman told Siblin.
This was around the year 2000, when the market for CDs was at its peak. Then came Napster and file-sharing. Richman sold his company for a handsome sum, and retired to do what he was born to do. “I wanted to bring songs to life,” he told Siblin. This was also what Siblin wanted to hear: “Now a few decades into the songwriting process, I felt ready to make a truly professional recording.”
Another of Siblin’s “advisors,” Howard Bilerman, was a music producer who came to the Siblin enterprise with an opposite approach from Richman’s, a difference reflecting a historic divide between two camps. “Starting with Thomas Edison, there have been two philosophies about high fidelity,” Siblin writes. “To capture sound as it truly exists, as if the listener were right there in the same room as the musicians, or to shape sound with no loyalty to the reality of performance.”
Bilerman stood with the former group, advocating honesty and freedom from artifice. Richman’s approach to song production, on the other hand, was to “go big, mix as many of the elements as possible in the test tubes of his laptop studio, and remix till he was satisfied.” Between these two valid approaches Siblin stood — knowing only that he had to do something with a given song. He could not just leave it. “Without fleshed-out instrumentation, without bass or drums or perhaps other instruments, it would never come into its own as a song anyone would want to listen to,” Siblin writes. But this process of instrumentation and expansion was equally risky. “Clichés lie in wait,” Siblin writes. “Resemblances to famous songs threaten your every move.”
There were a couple of recurring difficulties Siblin had to deal with. One was “too much acoustic guitar strumming” in his songs. At one point, he complained to Richman, “I’d like to get away from the fact that all my songs thus far feature relentless, folkified strumming.” At another point, he referred to his songs as “relentlessly guitar-driven, hopelessly old fashioned, static material.”
A much worse problem was that Siblin hated the sound of his own voice. And there wasn’t much he could do about that.
Studio Grace is an exhaustive account of Siblin’s attempt, with the assistance of paid musicians, to get exactly the kind of sound he wanted. Much of it is technical and boring. The following is a characteristic paragraph, involving a rhythm and blues singer named Shahara and a sound engineer and producer named Krantzberg. “We ran into a wall in the third verse,” Siblin writes. “I suggested she hit some higher notes. We proceeded slowly. She stopped every once in a while to ponder what to do next, putting a forefinger to her chin and looking into space, talented teacher and star principal in one person. But it was not easy. Krantzberg lent a helping hand — he’s good with vocals — plinking some notes on his nearby keyboard to remind her of the possibilities of B-flat major.”
Interludes of weather, especially Montreal snowstorms, do not help enliven such accounts of musical brainstorming. Biographical sketches of a few of the musicians, on the other hand, are of some interest: The reader may be curious, for example, about the attitudes of Krantzberg. It turns out that he makes most of his money with his band that plays at weddings. Siblin is afraid that, in his work with Siblin’s songs, he will subtly lean toward a more mechanical, wedding band type of style. In the end, however, he seems satisfied with what he paid for.
Only one problem remains — those pesky vocals. Siblin seems to feel that he cannot write a genuine song unless he, its creator, can actually sing it. But his voice, he writes, seemed to be “held together with duct tape and Popsicle sticks. … It was painfully clear to me that my voice was a drag on the songs.”
Yet he kept trying and, his album complete, eventually came up with at least one song he could sing and still live with. “And the singing voice,” Siblin writes, bringing his musical odyssey to a conclusion, “was the sound that all along had been in his head.”
‘Hell is full of musical amateurs’