Album Progress: the things we must learn to love.

"More frequent summer blogging," I wrote in our last blog post.  In June.  So much for that.  I suppose it's still technically summer, but my school year has started, so it's hard to feel that way!  But I thought about blogging, with warm fuzzy feelings and all, a whole bunch of times.  So, there's that. 

We have returned from a week of recording vocals in Florida!  We tracked at The Prayer Closet Studios with Geoff Douglas of Equilateral Services (and a musician in his own right).  Our good friend JD Lenick is triple-threat-ing our album with drums, percussion, and some killer backing tracks to fill out the depth and sounds on these tunes.  We arrived in Port St. Lucie on a Sunday and got to catch the tail end of the drum tracks being recorded.  Beginning Monday afternoon, we traded off the vocal booth all week long, fighting to complete a long list of things in one tiny week.

 

 VICTORY!  Major AND minor vocal parts finished = brief Sabbath rest on the beach!

 

We have musician friends who seem to record all the time.  Every time we talk to them, they're making a new EP or a new single.  Most of them also have connections that help them do this... but regardless, recording this album, for us, just does not feel like whistling and skipping into a studio to gaily throw down our song as rainbows and butterflies appear.  It feels like hard labor.  It is a labor of love, but definitely labor.  We love to play together, and we love connecting with people at our shows.  We do not always love getting really particular about our craft. 

A while back, I saw this Proverb posted by a fellow musician (Mathai - she was on The Voice a few seasons ago, and I've enjoyed learning more about her) on Twitter:

Boyyyyyyyyyyyy it stopped me in my tracks.  She said it was "God slapping me in the face - no better wake up call."  Me too.  The road to recording this album has felt like one big training course in this very thing. 

I grew up as, so I was told, a really smart kid.  They tested me in third grade and put me in the gifted and talented program at my school.  I remained in it all the way through high school.  I experienced a lot of literature, projects, and problem-based learning that I would not have otherwise.  It gave me a bit of an identity, and gave me some peers I could commiserate with (or compete with, depending on the day).  So, then I went to college and was in the honors program there.  Again, I was made to think and use my brain.  All of these were valuable experiences, and I would not go back and undo any of them.  But at the end of the day, here are some things I think I really learned in those 12-ish, formative years:

::enter the voices inside Jenna's head, circa 2006, some known, most subconscious and unrealized...::

-Things come easily to me for the most part.  This is how people recognize me.  This is where my identity lies.
-If something doesn't come easily, it doesn't feel natural or fit with my identity.  People will look at me strangely.  I will avoid those things when possible.
-Criticizing me suggests that my smart kid, capable, quick to learn identity is no longer true.  Which means I don't know who I am.  So I crumble.  (it also all sounds like yelling to me, which terrifies me, but that's another story...)
-My dad, and many of my peers, define my intelligence by my grades. Anything below a 97 is going to raise an eyebrow.  Gifted kids aren't supposed to get less than that.   (this was helpfully dismantled a bit in college)
-...luckily, I can get really good grades by cramming the night before a test/paper/evaluation.  I probably won't remember the information later or be able to use or apply what I learned, but I got my grade.  No questions asked.
-I am labeled as "gifted," so I can get special privileges, like leaving other classes to work on projects and extensions on papers because I "need them."  So I can make up excuses when I procrastinate and people will generally make an exception for me.  I usually make 'last minute' work out pretty well.

::end the parade of half-truths::

Now... apply all of that to being an adult musician.  People tell me I am good at singing.  I have been singing forever, so I can do it - to a point - without thinking.  So, focused, technical practice is not first thing on my mind.  My mom does not live with me, and so does not force me to practice like she did with my clarinet.  I do not have tests to pass.  So, there are not deadlines for me to achieve certain levels of mastery with my craft.  I have a limited amount of piano, glockenspiel, and ukulele skill.  Trying to do certain things with them does not feel natural to me.  So, when they get hard, I push them away and do something else. 

What's missing is a healthy dose of work ethic.  Weird, since I worked my butt off to make sure I kept the grades and the appearances I felt I needed to...  but somewhere at the end of college, I crashed, and all desire to work at things was gone.  (Maybe it was that being good at things was what my whole identity was based on and I couldn't keep up anymore?  ..nah.....)

Somewhere in the sifting of education and cultivation, I missed the boat of intrinsic motivation and the constant pursuit of excellence.  Instead of seeing whatever abilities I had as a tool to be used, I saw them as the point of it all.  So being smart was the end goal, not being able to use my mind to accomplish great things.  So, here I sit, a closer-to-30-than-seems-possible adult, who loves music and feels a convicting calling to pursue it and use it for God's glory, who also instinctually runs away the second it gets hard.  Who bristles when her husband bandmate corrects her.  Who balls up on the couch and shuts down when she feels incompetent.  Who avoids even starting practicing because she has a sneaking suspicion she might actually be bad at it, and she never learned how to deal with being bad at things.

"To learn, you must love discipline.  It is stupid to hate correction." 

Ouch. 

This grown-up is having to slowly, painfully learn what many of her elementary students have already grasped - that learning is not always about a brief pat on the back, but about the development itself.  That it's supposed to feel awkward and uncomfortable for a while.  That having your inefficiencies pointed out is desirable, because it gives you a chance to seize them with determined joy and grow.  That doing something well "effortlessly" is a facade, because true skill is backed by a ton of discipline.  And learning to love that discipline can result in art that is beautiful and solid, not threatened by a lack of work or too much criticism.

To read more about the history of whom this quote is attributed to, go here.

To read the disturbing but memorable cartoon of what made me remember to say "whom" instead of "who," go here.

The original version of this quote, when I first read it, said "...miss two days, my friends know it."  Which, to me, is much more accountability-inspiring than thinking about critics.  The point is the same - and this is a kind of personal drive I have not known in my past, but I see it in friends of mine, and I aspire to honor the gifts God has given me with the same kind of zeal. 

...I started this post meaning to tell you specific details of what recording has been like so far.  I didn't quite know it would go this direction.  But, here it is.  The good news is I am writing to you in a reflective place: not the first realization of my faults, but standing in the middle of a massive project that has SO much potential, looking at the growth in these past months of willingness to listen, to refine, to practice, to struggle.  This album is indeed a labor of love, and I am so grateful for it.  I am grateful for the chance to learn to be a laborer, who puts the kind of work in that will make the harvest worth it. 

Much love,
Jenna