The Argument in the New York Times

We’re not going to lie. Holy shit! This was an early song we recorded together in 2011 (mostly through a Blue Yeti USB microphone) when The Argument was just getting started. It’s so cool to see this song rediscovered 7 years later (by the NYT none-the-less).

From the story by Kirk Johnson:

Seattle has long been ambivalent about change and growth, especially its own, and so nostalgia for the viaduct is already flowing. A husband-and-wife team of composers who call themselves “The Argument” and record in their Seattle basement have even released a song about it.

“O, Viaduct, you’re outta luck, we put you up and we let you down,” the song goes. “They said you’d fall and kill us all, but you were tried and true.”

Album 2 Underway

We released the first album by The Argument in the fall of 2016 as a musical magazine of sorts—one song a week (for 11 weeks) with an accompanying essay.

We’re about 10 songs into a second album—much work remains (important stuff, like lyrics and melodies) but the basic song structures are emerging. Daniel is busy writing, recording and playing the instruments (with the exception of drums). Here is Conrad Real playing drums on one of our tunes in development …

Sneak Peek ...

The Argument’s soundtrack for All Summer In A Day (wherein we muted the original music and wrote an alternate soundtrack) is nearly complete. A few final surround sound touches remain, but you can strap on a set of headphones and listen to our take on this 28-minute sci-fi classic from 1982 (more background here). We’ll have a lot more to say about the movie and our motivations soon. Stay tuned …

Sci-Fidelity

About a year ago, The Argument released our first album—by way of one song a week, each with an accompanying essay. That was a big move for us. With 11 songs written about various thoughts rattling around our 48-year old brains, we brought our harmonies out of the basement and onto the internet.

Well, we’re back, now on the verge of 50, and excited to release new music in the form of a movie soundtrack inspired by a much-loved short science fiction film from our youth, “All Summer in a Day,” based on a short story by Ray Bradbury.  

In 1982, this little gem of a 28-minute film was distributed on PBS and wheeled into American classrooms on squeaky A/V carts. As a kid, Brangien was incredibly moved by the film, its message and the setting on a planet where it rains for 9 years straight (this was many years before she moved to Seattle). She repeatedly referenced it with me, recounting details of the story, and scenes that had stuck with her all these years. Then, about 18 months ago, she ordered a copy of the film on DVD and suggested we make up some songs based on the film. And so this project was born.

There were (are?) a few (many?) catches to work through, the first being who has the rights to the film. The original production company, The Learning Corp, has long been dead, and the film has bounced around to different owners ever since (at one point, in a series of odd ownership swaps, being batch-purchased by Mobil Oil Corporation). But instead of being paralyzed by this ownership ambiguity, we decided to continue writing songs, and worry about the fine print after we’d finished.

We can report that the music—25 songs, a mix of instrumental and lyrical—is now complete, and in the process of being mixed by our good friend Michael Cozzi (who mixed our first album too). This is probably a good time to qualify the word “soundtrack.” It’s more like a 28-minute soundtrack/music video/musical? As always, we’ll have plenty to say (in the form of an essay) before the music is released. Later this year we hope to show the film with The Argument’s new soundtrack, along with the cool backstory of the movie. More to transmit soon ...

A photo from Michael’s studio where the soundtrack is now being mixed.

Reverse Engineering the Album

When we originally released the album online, we posted one song/essay a week for 11 weeks, which means they appear in reverse order on our site. For a more direct route to a particular song/essay (and to view the "official" track listing), use the list below:

1. Emphasis
2. Stringlyjack
3. Ogallala
4. Meltdown
5. Halibut Cove
6. Super Blood Moon
7. Song for Brangien
8. Snake Poem
9. Invisible Baby
10. The Last Day
11. Time Lapse Photography

Time Lapse Photography: The Story Behind The Song

This essay is the backstory for our song “Time Lapse Photography,” which you can listen to below or over here.

When my cousin Avi was preparing to relocate from California to Seattle a few years ago, he told me he was streamlining his possessions and getting rid of ballast—which included a big box of loose photos he’d hauled along on every previous move. An engineer, he’d come up with a more efficient memory preservation system: he purchased a high-speed, high-volume Fujitsu scanner, fed his hundreds of photos through, saved the digital copies online and then… he shredded the hard copies.

I was stricken. I envisioned all those photos, from all those years, all those people and memories—shredded like pulled pork. Avi assured me he had saved a few “important” ones. But he was about to have a baby (and all the accompanying accoutrements) and he felt the weight of his new life looming. He didn’t need another box of things, or “the burden of totems,” as he put it. Plus, he said, he didn’t shred all of his photos—some went into the recycling! The rest he could gaze at any time he wanted, up in the cloud, where memory is endless.

Avi’s approach made sense logically, but to me it seemed like a space-saving tip Spock might’ve devised. I approach photos more like the replicants in Blade Runner, who cling to the small clutches of (fake) pictures they’ve been given to bolster their sense of self. For these humanoids, photos serve as back up for their memory implants—they are proof that they exist, and had a past.

I keep my analog photos in a couple oversized plastic tubs in the basement. There is no chronological order, no system except that if I find one Fotomat packet of prints from that high school trip to Spain, I have some hope that the other three are nearby. Baby photos fraternize with college party pics, my third-grade class photo curls around a stack of roadside shots from a cross-country trip. For a long time I held onto the doomed aspiration of organizing my photos into clearly marked, year-by-year subsections. But then some sane person told me I could abandon that idea because that’s not how the brain stores or retrieves memories anyway. This gave me such a thrill of validation. And it’s true—my memories are all crashing around in my head, bleeding into each other like a mixed load of laundry.

Why is it so entrancing to look at photos of one’s own life, over and over? The hairstyles are pretty funny, for one thing. But there’s also the pleasantly weird time-warp sensation of being a person, here and now, while simultaneously remembering being that similar yet entirely different person, there and then—the one with the perm or the parachute pants. It feels like a million years ago and also yesterday.

Daniel’s physical photo tub is much smaller than mine, but his online collection is massive, stretching back to the advent of digital cameras. He used to have his monitor set up so that the screen saver pulled randomly from his digital photos—which had the same effect of me closing my eyes and reaching into the tub and seeing what’s pulled up. He frequently marveled at the images swimming up out of the black background—his now teenage nephew covered in cake for his first birthday, his mom riding on the back of his Honda scooter, me with my flip phone on an early date. “It’s going so fast,” he would say. He still says that, and it makes me tear up every time.

During one of these reveries he asked, “What about this for a song lyric: Time lapse photography is happening to me.” I liked it very much. He had already been working on an instrumental piece of music—a rich collage of instruments that increased in number and slid all over each other, hurly burly. But you could pick out any one and it would tell a different part of the same story.

Daniel and I kept working on the song, building on the feeling of nostalgia—the sense that we are very young and very old all at once. It’s not just a theory of relativity, there’s photographic evidence. My grandmother was alive, and still is, in this image. My mother holds my toddler-sized hand at a river’s edge. My sister and I are laughing arm-in-arm with our boy cousins, little Avi and dearly departed Bren. I was there. I wore that! We were together. Cosmic postcards that prove: you are here.

—Brangien

time lapse photography
is happening to me

boxes full of photos
fast forward in slow mo
blink of an eye

on my father’s shoulders
now it’s me that’s older
wrinkles in time

once I was a grandchild
once I had that hairstyle
wave goodbye

time lapse photography
is happening to me

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The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #11). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

The Last Day: The Story Behind The Song

This week we welcome a special guest essayist, dear friend and writer Charles H. Fischer, who was with us during the events that inspired this song.

We were driving on Highway 153, as it snakes west up the Methow River valley from Pateros. It was New Year’s Eve. A cold winter fog had set in, and it was hard to see more than a car length ahead of us. Still, our spirits were high. The prospect of champagne cocktails, along with a warm fire in a wood-burning stove, awaited us at the cabin. Brangien was driving the Eurovan, while Daniel was in the passenger seat. My wife, Lisa, and I sat in back, along with our dog Renzo, who slept fitfully on a blanket between us.

Low mountains rose on either side of the road. The river burbled under a new coat of ice. There was at least two feet of snow on the ground. It is always a shock to travel from the gray rains of December in Seattle to the crisp, cold snow of the Methow. It feels like a longer journey than it is—to a new, big country where there is little cell reception, where nights are absolute in their darkness, and where silence is possible again.

We had stopped along the way to hike the snow-covered Dusty Lake in the Columbia Basin. Our dog Renzo was 12, and I remember the day as one of the last big hikes he finished with ease and gusto. It was a bright day, too. We trekked among the basalt cliffs in the sun, happy to reach the van as shadows lengthened, hinting at the night’s bitter promise.

After a brisk hike, it felt good to be back in the van, drinking water and eating chips. Brangien navigated the road in the gathering dark with precision. Brangien’s a good driver. Brangien’s good at a lot of things. She can write and sing. She makes an excellent Manhattan. She does a dead-on imitation of Ethel Merman. And she’s a really good driver. She has that quality that all good drivers have: she knows how to drive. She’s confident when she has to pass another car on a mountain pass, and she can parallel park the van like butter.

For my part, I’m not a good passenger. I’m nervous. I clutch at the window grip when a semi-truck barrels by in the other lane. I close my eyes when an oncoming car turns on its bright lights. I cross my fingers as we hurtle down steep grades. In fact, when I’m a passenger in a car, I perform all of the superstitious and ritualized acts I perform when I fly.  It probably goes without saying that I’m a nervous flyer. I think about death a lot when I fly. I also think about death a lot when someone else drives. I think a lot about death a lot of the time. I am thinking about death right now. But I wasn’t thinking about death on the road to Mazama that New Year’s night. That’s how good a driver Brangien is.

It is not just darkness or fog that plague drivers during a Methow winter. White tail and mule deer linger along the highways like visitors from an alternative universe. They stand on the side of the road and stare silently at the cars filled with humans passing by in the night. It is easy to imagine menace in their heads. More than 17,000 mule deer live in the valley; on this stretch of road, drivers kill a few hundred every year. When a deer is killed in the Methow, it is taken to a butcher in Winthrop where it is dressed and packaged for sale.  

Near Carlton, we started to talk about food and drink. We’d been on the road for about six hours, when a deer leapt out and skittered along the side of the van—never coming into full view. Brangien slammed the brakes, and the van skidded for a few feet. Renzo flew out of the seat and into the empty bag of potato chips. Brangien pulled over to the side of the road. A car behind us stopped, its headlights illuminated the dark. Daniel and I got out. In the middle of the road, and between the beams of the headlights, a young deer was laid flat on the pavement. His breath steamed out of his nose.

But then he got up. He stood on wobbly legs and took two or three hesitant steps. That seemed promising. Suddenly he vanished into the fog. Brangien got out of the car. “He’s gone. Run off,” someone said. She saw some dents in the door. “He’s probably okay,” I said. There was nothing to be done. Daniel thanked the other driver and then walked Brangien to the passenger’s seat. He’d cover the last 20 miles. And we talked over what happened through many of them. The deer looked fine. Probably in shock. We didn’t hit him straight on. And his sprinting off seemed like a good thing. But the deer took our surety with him, as he silently leapt—on the last day of the year—over the snow bank.

—Charlie

well the road was dappled with yellow diamonds
and the Carlton burn shone black
the river sparkled with icy patches
and the valley wore snowpack

it was the last day of the year
it was the last day of the deer
I saw those big brown eyes frozen in the brights
on the last day of the year

on the road they posted the deer-kill tally
the annual car-struck sum
just hours away from the final countdown
and the number raised by one

blindsided
hindsighted

I saw the signs
I could see the future but I could not stop in time

we two have run about the slopes,
and picked the daisies fine,
but we’ve wandered many a weary foot,
since auld lang syne

it was the last day of the year
it was the last day of the deer
I saw those big brown eyes frozen in the brights
on the last day of the year

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The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #9). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

Invisible Baby: The Story Behind The Song

This essay is the backstory for our song “Invisible Baby,” which you can listen to below or over here.

Our last trip to Los Angeles included a jaunt to the suburbs to stay the night with old friends at their new home. They had just moved out of the city for the same carefully considered reason many urban parents do—they wanted their two children to enjoy the spoils of a kid-friendly neighborhood. We headed out after a stop in Hollywood and drove east to La Cañada Flintridge, at the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. The house was on a pretty street and we parked in front, next to a garden filled with native cacti and succulents. Before we’d even rung the bell, their 6-year-old son threw open the door and yelled, “Why don’t you have kids?”

His mother rolled her eyes and said, “He was really hoping to have someone to play with tonight.” But Daniel and I were paralyzed at the threshold for a moment, gripping the handles of our carry-on bags.

We’ve fielded this question, or variants thereof, countless times over our seven-year marriage. It’s easy to laugh off when it comes from a cute, tow-headed kid, but feels significantly more pointed when asked by casual friends, family and people we met at a party five minutes before. Sometimes the ask is as blatant as the boy’s, and sometimes it’s merely implied, with phrases like, “You don’t have kids so this won’t make any sense to you, but...” An exception: childless adults never ask.

I should say that Daniel and I both like children. When you don’t have kids people often assume otherwise, but we love hanging out with our nieces and nephews and catching up with the neighborhood kids. But neither of us felt driven to have spawn of our own. If one of us had been gung-ho on the idea, we probably would’ve talked the other one into it. We both had happy childhoods and I know we would have made great parents. But every time we’d raise the subject, our lengthy discussions always ended in, “If it happens, it happens.” 

When you start dating at age 39, however, it rarely just happens. I thought maybe getting married at age 41 would mean we’d hear the question less often. But no, thanks to the miracle of modern science our reproductive status was queried more intensely, as people felt the need to inform us we’d better hurry. (Alternately, don’t worry because they know someone who had a baby at age 48 and it was fine.) We’ve internalized the same societal norms that prompt the questioners to ask, so we’d ask ourselves: Shouldn’t we want to have kids? If not, shouldn’t we more actively not want them?

The positioning for older marrieds seems restricted to loaded binaries. Either we should be those people who will go to any expense to have a kid, or those people who knew from an early age that they were never interested in reproducing. It’s reflected in the parlance—in that hideous euphemism, “Are you trying?” Trying has two outcomes: success or failure, both of which are highly visible in this case, a physical presence or absence. And if you don’t have kids you’re either “childless,” which sounds mournful and lacking, or “childless by choice,” which sounds like a political movement (or, more recently, “childfree” which sounds like a restaurant trying too hard). What about the childneutral? We could hold a protest march but I guess we’re too ambivalent to organize it. 

During the hurry years my ambivalence was vexing to me. Why couldn’t I just decide whether I was up for it or not? In Meghan Daum’s excellent essay collection Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, Jeanne Safer writes that she didn’t so much want to have a baby as she wanted to want to have a baby. “I longed to feel like everyone else,” she says, because otherwise she had to “work through the implications of being radically different from other women in a fundamental way.” She calls this reckoning excruciating. I experienced it as a deep burn of embarrassment—something I wanted to hide from people so as not to have to talk about it. But my flat belly stuck out like a sore thumb.

In Spanish, the word for pregnant is embarazada, which shares an etymological root with embarrassed that means “to hamper movement.” Despite how many times it happened, Daniel and I often froze up upon hearing the question. At some point we decided we needed to work on a better answer. We strategized a response that would satisfy people, something friendly and not defensive, forthright while maintaining our privacy, respectful of kids and parenting, witty and wise. We never came up with a winner. We just kept freezing and floundering until we reached an age when the rush of questions reduced to a trickle. Turns out steadfast ambiguity is a form of decision-making.

One sunny Saturday a year or so ago, Daniel and I walked up to our local coffee spot, ordered, and waited in the crowded cafe among several other couples, all of who had babies and toddlers in tow. Our favorite barista emerged from the back and said, “Hey guys! Did you bring your invisible baby?” Her question was out of nowhere, appealingly weird and definitely funny. It felt like a relief. That’s the answer, we thought: We have a baby, it’s just invisible. Ta da! We left, amused, and drove west across the city to Discovery Park. Once there we walked down to the shore of the Puget Sound, where a small crowd had gathered in a wide circle around a sleeping baby seal. We marveled and cooed and imagined what it might be dreaming about, just like everyone else.

—Brangien

on a saturday morning we rise
to the sun and another surprise
we walk up the street to get a coffee

our barista comes out from the bar  
gives us hugs and asks how we are
did you bring your invisible baby?

here we are with our invisible baby
who never makes a fuss
but the thing about invisible babies
they’re so obvious
 
on the way to Discovery Park
is a bridge over railroad cars
all just waiting for a locomotive

on our hike we walk down to the beach
the sewer stench always in reach
and a baby seal sleeps as the crowd goes wild

here we are with our invisible baby
who never makes a fuss
but the thing about invisible babies
they’re so obvious

peekaboo with our invisible baby
is always hard to play
but the thing about invisible babies
they’re just born that way

oh baby, oh baby
peekaboo

here we are with our invisible baby
who never makes a fuss
but the thing about invisible babies
they’re so obvious

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The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #9). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

Snake Poem: The Story Behind The Song

This essay is the backstory for our song “Snake Poem,” which you can listen to below or over here.

The first poem I ever encountered was likely a classic English nursery rhyme — one of many that my mother recited aloud while bouncing me on her knees. I have a physical memory of being jostled playfully as my mom repeated, “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man.” This progressed to following along as she read from an illustrated book of Mother Goose poems, such as “Hey Diddle Diddle,” “Humpty Dumpty” and “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” — rhymes have been delighting babies for centuries, thanks to the singsong form that’s both captivating and calming. The words themselves seem hardly the point, which is why we don’t notice if they’re nonsensical or mystifying or outright creepy until we rediscover them as adults.

Soon after college, I stumbled on a particular book of Mother Goose poems at my mom’s house. I was flipping through it, enjoying the buzz of nostalgia, when I noticed a thickened section where a couple pages were stuck together — deliberately. I asked Mom about it and she said, “Oh, those pages scared you so I glued them together.” The terrifying poem at issue was “What Are Little Boys Made Of,” with its refrain, “snips and snails and puppy dog tails.” I instantly recalled the gruesome drawing accompanying the line: an airborne swirl of snails and scissors and what appeared to be snipped off puppy dog tails. That image — even the anticipation of it — caused a freak-out upon every reading until Mom applied Elmer’s Glue-All as a salve.

Could this really have been a children’s book illustration? Severed dog tails? Even the Brothers Grimm might find that a bit dark. Might those pale, disembodied curls have been something else? I feared Googling “snipped off puppy dog tails” (glue those web pages together, Mom!), but using careful search terms I did learn that this nursery rhyme’s many variants include one in which snips is replaced with “snigs,” meaning small eels. In another popular version, snips become “snakes.” While this eliminates the act of shearing, I’m not sure adding snakes to the mix would’ve done much to quell my fears.

My mother told me the reason she chose to alter the book, rather than dispose of it, was because I so enjoyed the rest of the poems. She knew my chubby hands would seek out the book on the shelf, and didn’t want those snips to sneak up on me. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Sweet is the swamp with its secrets,/ Until we meet a snake.”

Maybe the old nursery rhyme only meant to imply that little boys are irresistibly drawn to snakes because of their form (hello, phallus!), in the same way that humans are drawn to poems — the form is just so evocative for us. Harrowing illustrations aside, I remained drawn to poems, studied the form and wrote quite a lot of them in college.

More recently, I found myself taken by both snakes and poems at a Seattle event called NEPO 5K Don’t Run, an outdoor urban art walk that occurred every summer from 2011–2015. I loved the NEPO walk because it put surprising art in surprising places around the city. It inspired many discussions about what “counts” as art, especially when Daniel and I brought our young nephew Sal along. Pointing at an intriguingly duct-taped electrical transformer along the route, he asked, “Is that art?” NEPO always sparked new connections. In 2013, the event featured a series of “fake fliers” by Indianapolis-based artist Nathaniel Russell. Using plain sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper posted on telephone poles (a medium usually reserved for lost pets), Russell flipped the form on its head by posting funny, absurd messages that also inspired creative thought. Here’s the one that jumped out at me:

Of course the premise is hilarious, but I also thought, why shouldn’t I write a snake poem? Shouldn’t we all write snake poems, even if we only “meet back” in a collective consciousness sense? Kind of like the way generations have been imprinting the same nursery rhymes on infant synapses for centuries? A few days after seeing the flier, I wrote a short poem called “Snake Poem.” I emailed it to Daniel and asked, “Is this a song?”

Nursery rhymes often sound more like chants than songs, but nonetheless they are classified in the Roud Folk Song Index, which tracks all manner of Anglo-American oral traditions. The lines are called lyrics — even if there never was an accompanying tune, or no one living can remember it. For the index, it’s not so much about the tune as the form, and the social repetition of it. Part of what I connected with on Russell’s fake flier was the implication that “snake poems” is an established American genre, which, judging once again by Google, it basically is.

So when I approached my own snake poem I wanted to embody not just the snake, but the form — the physical feeling we used to get from nursery rhymes, and are sometimes lucky enough to experience as adults with a poem or a song. Once inside, we can take on a radically different shape. As Theodore Roethke puts it in his poem, “Snake,” “I longed to be that thing./ The pure, sensuous form.”

— Brangien

a snake poem curls
round and round
no beginning, no end
it sheds dead skin
no breaks, all bend
it comes unwound
like a snake poem

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The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #8). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

The Story Behind “Song for Brangien”

This essay is the backstory for our song “Song for Brangien,” which you can listen to below or over here.

This week we welcome a special guest essayist: Daniel Spils!

The trumpet was my first instrument. I chose it in grade school because it seemed cool and appropriate for a guy (for the same reason, my default “favorite color” at the time was blue). The mouthpiece was as close to a kiss as I would get for a few years, but the trumpet was never my passion. I liked it but never loved it. It was like going “as friends” to the Sadie Hawkins dance.

But I continued playing trumpet through junior high because I loved being in band — making music with a bunch of kids who didn’t necessarily hang out together, but for that hour were all striving toward the same goal. There’s nothing like the camaraderie and power of a diverse group agreeing to play small musical roles that, together, add up to a huge sound.

Lately, when people ask me what bands I’m listening to, I often start with the Seattle Symphony. I haven’t listened to a ton of symphonic music in my life, but under the direction of Ludovic Morlot, the symphony has captured my attention again. I’ve attended some surprising and expansive performances with Brangien. During the “Untitled” series, held in the symphony lobby, we have laid on pillows on the floor at the feet of musicians playing rarely performed avant-garde material, each instrument straining toward sublime sounds. Something Ludo said resonated with me as we made the final tweaks to our album:

“My feeling is that playing music with a flute or a violin or a trumpet is that you’re just trying to recreate — with a piece of wood or metal — what the human voice does very naturally. We all know that vocabulary, we all know that language enough to link it to some emotions that we’ve lived through.”

I was in high school when I found my own voice, my true love, the piano. I fell hard and fast. There were years when I played daily for hours on end, making up music and losing myself in the visceral pounding of keys and the athletics of scales and runs. That youthful obsession faded over the years until the piano became more of an old friend — one I could rely on for close conversation. This left room to explore other instruments I had previously courted.

In 2013 I posted to Facebook that I wanted to buy a trumpet for $50. Within a few hours I owned a cornet — the smaller, mellower-toned cousin of the trumpet. I immediately went into our basement studio to see what sounds I could make, some 35 years after my last trumpet note rang out in Mr. Pasch’s band class. To my surprise, I was able to hold a convincing note. After a couple hours of recording with my atrophied embouchure, I had pieced together a melody. Next, I layered on the two other instruments of my youth: acoustic piano and the Roland JX-3P synthesizer that, against all odds, is with me today, 34 years after I purchased it at Down Home Guitar in Anchorage.

That recording happened without much thought and with no intention of creating a song I would release to anyone other than Brangien. (In fact, beyond mixing and mastering, no one else has heard it until today.) It was simply a conversation with old friends. I clicked “save as” in the Logic session file menu and named it “Song for Brangien.” This was a placeholder — I knew I would eventually change the title.

But I didn’t.

As I mixed and listened many times over throughout the day, I began to think the tune was appropriately named. “Song for Brangien” is only a minute long but has three movements: a romantic melody (boy meets girl), followed by a bubbling whole-tone middle section (boy marries girl), and ending with a contemplative minor note and tinkling piano (boy and girl stepping forward to face the unknown together). Three instruments, two people, one minute. A love story.

— Daniel

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The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #3). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

Super Blood Moon: The Story Behind The Song

This essay is the backstory for our song “Super Blood Moon,” which you can listen to below or over here.

Most of what I know about the solar system came from my Grandpa Archie, a sweet and self-educated man who took great joy in explaining world history and earth science to his grandchildren, of which I was the first. He would hold up a few spheres he had on hand—a softball, an orange, a golf ball—and show me how the sun, earth and moon were gravitationally bound to each other, moving around and around and occasionally falling in line, causing an eclipse. He would then recall the time he experienced a total solar eclipse as a young boy; though it was daytime when the moon passed in front of the sun, the yard chickens went to roost, thinking it was night. This story always got him laughing in the slow, raspy chuckle that made me feel calm and grounded, even as my parents’ marriage was losing hold, my mother and father spinning out of orbit and into the unknown.

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I spent two happy afternoons with my mother, stepfather, father and stepmother, all together in reconfigured alignments, and also paid a visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships. Opened this past summer, the museum stands as a serene respite from the garish cult of celebrity and selfies that is Hollywood Boulevard. The building is a spare, high-ceilinged space within a block of the Hollywood Wax Museum and on the same corner as the Walk of Fame star awarded to Charlie Chaplin (who married four times). The logo is a circular path, broken in two places.

Inside, the exhibits consist of more than 100 objects on the walls or in simple display boxes, donated to the museum from people all over the world who had been hanging onto these talismans of failed connection until now. The rotating collection includes an iron used to press a wedding suit, an engraved spoon, a jar of pickles, a set of silicon implants suggested by a boyfriend and removed after his departure, and a small pile of dried contact lenses collected from a bedside table—clear, hemispheric symbols of how differently an ex saw the world.

Small typed cards relate the anonymous stories behind the objects, how the relationship began (whether childhood friends or star-crossed lovers) and how it fell out of synchronous rotation. The tales range from heartbreaking to funny to infuriating, but share that familiar moment of realization that things aren’t going to turn out like you always thought. The earth isn’t flat. Ptolemy was wrong. While it’s perhaps not a romantic museum (Daniel and I went together but found ourselves taking separate routes around the exhibits), it’s not depressing. En masse, the objects and personal stories evoke a feeling of human connectedness—not unlike the sense you get when, on a starry night, you realize your own smallness in the face of constellations and comets, meteor showers and moon shadows.

Last year, when I learned there was going to be a rare type of total lunar eclipse, I thought about how excited Grandpa Archie would’ve been to see it. It was guaranteed to be a marvel—happening during a supermoon, when the moon is closest to the earth in its ellipse, and fully visible to our part of the globe. The last time this convergence happened was in 1982, but I had no idea then, ensconced as I was in a whole new universe: navigating the friendships and romances of high school.

The night of the lunar eclipse, the skies in Seattle were clear. Daniel and I walked down to Madrona Beach on Lake Washington, where we discovered that scores of people had set up lawn chairs as if at an outdoor movie. Nothing seemed to happen for a long time. And then the moon started to turn orange-red. It seemed huge and close in those moments, and tangible as a golf ball. An object you could pluck from the sky and keep in a drawer for years.

The song “Super Blood Moon” was born that chilly night by the lake, as I imagined the moon’s take on the evening, given her longstanding entanglement with the earth. Was she happy? Resigned to the arrangement? I looked around at the strangers gathered on the shore, humans engaged in various states of relationships, all staring out over the water and upward. It seemed like we were searching the skies for a sign—a shooting star, maybe, or a discreet placard explaining how we’d arrived here.

—Brangien

i have never felt this close to you
i have never seen that shade of blue
but i’m waxing full of doubt
i’m just trying to figure out
why everything revolves around you  
only you

super blood moon lunar eclipse
astronomical apocalypse
super blood moon lunar eclipse
of the heart

overshadowed
you’re the one
in front of the sun

super blood moon lunar eclipse
astronomical apocalypse

i have never felt so far from you
i was blushing, but now you’ve got me feeling blue

super blood moon lunar eclipse
caught up in your celestial grip

I can’t seem to pull away
so I’ll circle for another day
and when the tide has turned
is when you’ll see
you need me

---

The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #5). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

Paradise Cost: The Story Behind "Meltdown"

This essay is the backstory for our song "Meltdown," which you can listen to below or over here

Queen Ka’ahumanu was born in a cave on Maui, circa 1768. Her name means “the feathered mantle,” but as she came to power she proved to be more of a firebrand. One of the Hawaiian kingdom’s most influential regents, she is credited with abolishing the ancient kapu or taboos that, among other restrictions, forbade women from eating with men, and from eating certain foods considered sacred, including banana, pork and coconut. Legend has it that when Ka’ahumanu’s stepson witnessed her eating a meal with his brother — without suffering the wrath of the gods — her power was confirmed.

Queen Ka’ahumanu mall, near the airport in Kahalui, celebrated its grand opening in 1974. It didn’t yet have a food court but its 48 stores, including anchor tenants Sears and Liberty House, were immediately well attended. That same year, Daniel’s parents, Marge and Dick Spils, bought a two-bedroom, ground level unit in the Maui Parkshore — then the only condominium in Kihei — on the opposite, sleepier, side of the island. Each winter, the Anchorage-based family of seven would pack onto a plane, trading long nights and cold temperatures for sun and surf, stocking caps for snorkel masks.

Marge still owns the condo, and still makes the annual pilgrimage from Alaska. Her children still vacation there, with lucky spouses (like me) and grandchildren in tow. Every time we visit, during the drive from the airport to the condo, Daniel and Marge reminisce about how the heavily trafficked multi-lane highway used to be a lonely dirt road that seemed headed straight into tropical oblivion. Now, of course, Kihei is bustling with condos and tourists and shops feeding the voracious hunger for a truly Hawaiian experience.

Tourists ourselves, we must also make sure the Maui Parkshore unit is in shipshape for other tourists — namely, the people who rent the condo when Spils relations aren’t using it. It was this familial duty that during a recent visit prompted a trip to Ka’ahumanu mall, a search for local abundance in the form of new bed linens.

The mall has had several upgrades since it opened, including a major remodel in the early 1990s, which, according to the firm responsible, gave it “a contemporary identity that embraces the island’s unique climate and character.” This was achieved in part via the roof canopy whose Teflon-coated fiberglass panels “swing open and closed like the billowing sails of trade ships powered by the Kona winds.”

A few years after the culturally tinted update, Honolulu-based tenant Liberty House weighed anchor and was replaced by a Macy’s. That’s where we were headed, on a perfectly sunny day, hoping the Kona winds had delivered some sheet sets. The linen department was a fecund frenzy of hibiscus blooms and palm fronds — all the flora non-natives expect to see in paradise. But even in Hawaii, family tensions can burble up, and out of nowhere Daniel and Marge were in a heated argument over comforters, prices and thread count. I was taken aback, as I’d never seen them snap at each other before. In fact they get along better than any mother and son I’ve ever known.

While they were dueling over duvets, I edged over to the washcloth and hand towel display. The stacked acrylic cubes proffered a wealth of tidy cotton rectangles embossed with pineapples and colorful fish. As I was feigning intense interest, I noticed the top of the case was covered in a gritty black powder, some kind of ash that appeared to have spewed forth from a fissure in the acoustic ceiling tile. Perhaps Haleakala was having a bit of a flare-up too.

Maui’s volcano is due for an outburst any day — at least, any day in volcanic terms. Geologists say that while Haleakala is currently dormant, we are in the 200–500 year window for the next eruption. Despite the exoticized notion that such destruction might return the island to a more pure, original state, the only clear benefactor of an eruption would be the Haleakala Silversword, a succulent that grows in the volcano’s moonlike rubble and nowhere else in the world. It spends most of its 10–90 year life as a tuffet of upturned, sword-like leaves, covered in feathery silver hairs, but just once, before it dies, the native plant shoots up a spectacular plume to spread its seed. It’s currently listed as a “vulnerable” species due to climate change.

If she were she still around, would Ka’ahumanu use her powers to save it? The queen was hardly sentimental about preserving Hawaiian legacies. During her reign, she challenged priests, temples and the gods themselves. She ordered the destruction of sacred sites and idols, ushered out Hawaiian taboos and helped missionaries spread Christian morality. Her campaign unquestionably led to a loss of culture. Did the 1970s developers know this history when they christened Ka’ahumanu mall?

The Macy’s meltdown burned out swiftly and upon returning to the condo that day, we unpacked our shopping bags and began arranging the new sheet set — lemon yellow with pink flowers and coordinated accent pillows, straight out of a vacation brochure. Daniel and Marge and I all agreed that visitors were going to love it.

Queen Ka’ahumanu died in 1832, passing into whichever afterlife proved to be the right bet. She spoke her last words to the missionaries who were standing by at her deathbed: “I’m going where the mansions are ready.”

— Brangien

Haleakala was standing her ground
landing gear was touching down
rental car, on our way to
Ka’ahumanu mall: queen for a day

meltdown at the Maui Macys
tempers gonna blow the AC

sheet shoppin’ when the shit hit the fan
family feud in comforter land
thread count creating a panic
vacation … volcanic

deep under the ocean floor
lava waits like the silversword
for the day it finally flowers
erupts like a super power

meltdown at the Maui Macys
tempers gonna blow the AC

Haleakala, Haleakala, Haleakala

---

The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #5). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

Halibut Cove: The Story Behind the Song

This essay is the backstory for our song "Halibut Cove," which you can listen to below or over here

The Homer Spit has a spindly reach, stretching thinly into Alaska’s Kachemak Bay and growing slightly bulbous at the tip, like ET’s finger. The 4.5-mile span seems naturally designed to point attention across the bay, toward the hamlet of Halibut Cove. There are only about 20 permanent residents in Halibut Cove, artists and fisherpeople. No roads lead there, no cars exist there, the post office floats. There is one destination restaurant, The Saltry, which is locavore by necessity and only open in the summer. People get around via kayaks and boardwalks. It’s as quiet and lovely as a lullaby.

Today Halibut Cove beckons with its serene beauty, but in the early 1900s it was an unusually plentiful fish stock that hooked visitors. Just after the Klondike Gold Rush began to run dry, Halibut Cove experienced a massive herring rush. European fisherman made the waterborne journey and about 1,000 of them settled in the wild territory, building a fishery and 36 saltries for salting and drying fish intended for export. Of course that much enthusiastic fish processing in one tiny lagoon led to the fouling of local waters, and by 1928 the herring had chosen to rush elsewhere. Halibut Cove became a ghost town, save for six Scandinavian bachelors who decided they liked living in the cold, wet, solitude, in a place that was hard for most people to get to.

Daniel and I have made the crossing from Homer to Halibut Cove twice, once on a friend’s small, open motorboat, and a couple years later on the 29-passenger ferry, the Danny J (a small thrill for Daniel, whose middle name is Joseph). The first time it was sunny, allowing for stunning views of the snow-capped Kenai Mountains in the distance. The second time it was atmospherically gloomy, which made us feel like weathered old salts, squinting into gray at an uncertain future. Both times we experienced the alien sensation of arriving at a place you can only get to by water. There’s something about traversing water that feels completely different than arriving by land—something about moving through the earth’s surface, rather than on or above it. Waves rock you gently at the dock or the shore, before you step up onto old familiar ground.

How do you get to a song? “Halibut Cove” was the first song Daniel and I recorded together, and the way we got there established a route for subsequent songs. Daniel had just gotten a new piano (a hand-me-down Melodigrand spinet from his friend and former bandmate Thaddeus Turner) and wanted to record it. He started improvising an arpeggio, then layered on other instruments—all in solitude, bunkered in our underground studio. At some point he wanted a melody, and a voice, and I happened to be standing there, so he asked me to make something up. “Just sing anything,” he said. “The words don’t matter.” As a devout and constant editor, this sounded both alarming and impossible to me. I didn’t see how I could make the crossing from no song to sudden song. I told him I would sing la-la-la-la for the moment, and we could add carefully considered words later. But in the end the search for complexity proved (dare I say it?) a red herring. The lilt of swimming syllables felt like plenty.

—Brangien

The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #4). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

Water World: The Story Behind “Ogallala”

This essay is the backstory for our song "Ogallala," which you can listen to below or over here

As with many children of the 1970s, my first awareness of “the environment” as a thing that humans had royally screwed up was sparked by the “Crying Indian” commercial. The public service announcement for the Keep America Beautiful anti-litter campaign featured Iron Eyes Cody, in nonspecific Native American garb, paddling his canoe through a polluted river and into a city plagued with car exhaust, belching factories, and loose garbage. It felt like a stinging rebuke (apparently to a lot of people—litter was soon reduced by 88 percent across the country) and upon re-watching, still packs a punch. Even though I now know that Iron Eyes Cody was an Italian American actor, and that his single tear was a glycerine trick—I still experience an uncontrollable grip in my throat when he turns those sad eyes to the camera, fast-food wrappers piled at his feet.

Putting garbage in waste bins seemed like an achievable goal. It felt like we could all “Pitch In,” as another ’70s anti-litter campaign urged us. (Not to mention, “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute.”) Throw away the trash, and the earth looks cleaner—instant gratification! But now, even though I dutifully sort my castoffs into garbage, compost and recycling, I have very little faith that it’s helping polar bears as the ice melts out from under their paws. In the face of our current global environmental quagmire, pitching in feels like a drop in the bucket.

A couple years ago, I experienced the same shameful feeling I got from Iron Eyes Cody—that Americans had soiled themselves—when a bout of aimless channel surfing landed me on The Dust Bowl, a Ken Burns documentary. Since all I really knew about that historic period came from a high school reading of The Grapes of Wrath, I kept watching. In this case, overzealous wheat cultivation and other shortsighted agricultural methods, combined with shifting weather patterns, led to environmental disaster. The black-and-white photos of towering storms of topsoil encroaching on farmhouses seemed unreal. They looked like a special effect created for a dystopian sci-fi flick.

I have a penchant for exactly this sort of film—Blade Runner is perhaps my favorite movie of all time (and one Daniel and I bonded over in the earliest days of our relationship). The atmosphere, with its overpopulated streets, extinct animals, wealthiest people living in “off-world” colonies, omnipresent advertisements and relentless acid rain, seemed, when it came out in 1982, like exactly the direction we were headed. Sometimes it still does (maybe minus the replicants, but maybe not?). I think Blade Runner and other eco-dystopian movies (Mad Max, Children of Men, Wall-E, and yes, even bloated Water World) are so titillating in part because they feel like a warning received just in time.

Will we listen? The most disturbing thing about watching The Dust Bowl was discovering that even after our forebears learned their agricultural lesson, they didn’t (couldn’t) dispose of the American notion of endless bounty, all for the taking. With the next agricultural boom in the 1950s came heavy reliance on the Ogallala aquifer, the underground natural reservoir stretching 174,000 square miles from South Dakota to Texas. “We’ll never run out!” the citizenry seemed to exclaim, like doomed characters in an Aesop’s fable. But oops, we did it again.

Due to over-pumping for massive irrigation and contamination from agricultural runoff, the Ogallala aquifer is shrinking at a dangerous pace. As it is depleted, the countless species (many undiscovered) living in the underground ecosystem are likely to go the way of the passenger pigeon. If the Ogallala goes dry, the American breadbasket goes empty. Scientists say it would take thousands of years to refill naturally—at which point our own species had better hope we’ve found a way to live off-world.

After The Dust Bowl credits rolled, I told Daniel I had an idea for a song about the Ogallala aquifer. (As is often the case, he had been working on a piece of music and was in search of lyrics.) He said, “All those vowels—that’s a great singing word,” and asked what it meant. I learned it was taken from a Native American tribe, the Oglala Lakota, and means “to scatter one’s own.” White settlers ensured the Oglala weren’t permitted to scatter too far. Now they live mostly on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a subdivision of the Great Sioux Reservation, which also includes the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. You have heard of the Standing Rock Reservation—where thousands of tribal members and supporters have gathered to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, which endangers the Standing Rock burial grounds and water supply. You can see them on TV, or the internet, fighting to keep America beautiful.

—Brangien

hey, look what we found
down underground
a secret sea in waiting

pump it up, have a drink
the glasses clink
a liquid celebration

used to be deep and wide
Ogallala
now it seems cut and dried
Ogallala
no way to turn the tide
Ogallala
all of the fish are fried

survey says almost out
prepare for drought
a bowl of dust for breakfast

thought it was all for free
but the giving tree
has given up the ghost

used to be deep and wide
Ogallala
now it seems cut and dried
Ogallala
no way to turn the tide
Ogallala
all of the fish are fried

oh no, Ogallala
don’t go, Ogallala

---

The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #3). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

Stringlyjack: The Story Behind the Song

This essay is the backstory for our song "Stringlyjack," which you can listen to below or over here.

In 2007 I read an article in The New Yorker titled “An Error in the Code,” by Richard Preston, about a rare inherited disease called Lesch-Nyhan syndrome that causes the people who have it to self-mutilate. At first glance, this genetic condition looks like cerebral palsy (a common misdiagnosis), but the telltale sign is a patient’s compulsion to bite his own hands.

If unrestrained, patients will bite their fingers and lips ferociously, sometimes entirely off. Their fingers are similarly hell-bent on self-harm; they may grab a fork and plunge it into their nose. They don’t want to hurt themselves—they can feel pain, and are terrorized by their actions—but can’t stop the impulse, which becomes more pronounced when they are nervous. People with Lesch-Nyhan, Preston explains, “feel as if their hands and mouth don’t belong to them and are under the control of something else.”

One of the neurologists Preston interviews, H.A. Jinnah, explains the disorder like this: “Lesch-Nyhan is at the far end of a spectrum of self-injurious behavior…. Many people bite their fingernails,” he says. “They’ll tell you it’s gross and that they don’t want to do it…. Now let’s turn up the volume a little… some people bite their cuticles until they bleed. Now let’s turn the volume way up. Now you have someone biting off tissue and bone.... Where, in this spectrum of behavior, is free will?”

I didn’t realize I too exhibited self-injurious behavior until a pivotal manicure many years ago. I rarely get my nails done, but some special occasion inspired me. I told the nail technician she could just ignore my lumpy thumbnails, which are ridged like a washboard, from base to top, with some ruts so deep the nail plate is drastically warped. My uncle once told me, not unkindly, that my thumbnails looked like the outsides of abalone shells. They have appeared this way since young adulthood and were always somewhat of a mystery to me.

“Nervous habit,” the manicurist said. “No,” I said, as a proud non-fingernail-biter, “It’s hereditary.” I explained that my dad’s nails are the same way, and that his grandmother’s nails were ridged too. “That means you all have the same nervous habit,” she said, clipping my other nails. Noting that the ridges were only on my thumbnails, she explained that I was using my index fingers to pick at the skin surrounding them, and pushing the cuticle back, over and over. She said the repeated assault damages the matrix, where the nail emerges, so it comes out in fits and spurts—charging ahead when it has a moment of freedom, holding back when the pointer finger is on the attack.

I had no idea I had been doing this, though at that point I must’ve been doing so for more than a decade. You can read my thumbnails like tree rings—identifying times of high anxiety by the deeper gulches. I later learned it’s called a “habit-tic deformity.” An article in the industry magazine Nails explains that for nail techs, the hardest thing about the deformity is convincing people they have done it to themselves. “It’s important to understand that though the condition is self-inflicted,” the advice column says, “the client often is not aware of the nervous habit.”

Enlightened, I decided that since no one else had ever commented on my habit tic, it was likely undetectable, and could remain my secret shame. Sometimes I attempted to thwart the bullying impulse of my index fingers by wrapping my thumbs in Band-Aids or tape, but nothing got my fingers working faster—they seemed to love a good challenge. It’s not that painful, more like a constant dull soreness. It stings to squeeze lemons. And it seems to bring some measure of psychological soothing, like worry beads might. If a photo catches my fingers doing their busy work it looks like I’m holding a yogic hand pose, a mudra.

But when I started dating Daniel, he picked up on my compulsive picking right away. “Why are you torturing your thumbs?” he asked, worriedly. I had no answer, because I had no awareness when it was happening. I wasn’t doing it on purpose. It seemed like something that occurred entirely separately from me—carried out by an unknowable part of me with a different agenda. Two months later I read Preston’s article.

Doctors Lesch and Nyhan discovered the syndrome in the 1960s, when they encountered Matthew, a young boy with neurological disabilities, who had bitten off parts of his own fingers. His grandmother and mother took his self-harm as a matter of course, wrapping his fingers in bandages and mittens. “The women had devised a contraption to keep him from biting his hands,” Preston explains, “a padded broomstick that they placed across his shoulders, and they tied his arms to it like a scarecrow. The family called it the ‘stringlyjack.’ Matthew often asked to wear it.”

I stopped reading for a moment. Stringlyjack. I said the word aloud—I wanted to feel it move across my mouth. It sounded like a Brothers Grimm tale, as produced by Tim Burton. It seemed like the device would be uncomfortable and embarrassing. But it made perfect sense—a liberating confinement. Although my compulsion is significantly less severe, I could imagine sinking into that sweet relief. I still think about the stringlyjack, and that young boy propelled by a genetic glitch. I think about how he begged to be strapped in, especially when my own fingers have gone too far, and drawn blood.

—Brangien

they say my love is uncivil
the urge to bite, the need to nibble
so when I feel the invitation
I check into my reservation

my sweet, sweet stringlyjack
lock me down and hold me back

at arms length my fingers tease me
this sort of heaven is uneasy
but if I’m free it ends in heartache
‘cause I’m my own Donner Party

my sweet, sweet stringlyjack
lock me down and hold me back

if you unhand me I will be all by myself
if you unhand me I just might unhand myself

so if your taste runs toward the digital
you find your hunger inhospitable
don’t be consumed by little vices
just leave it to your own devices

my sweet, sweet stringlyjack
lock me down and hold me back
sweet sweet sweet stringlyjack

---

The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #1). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Stringlyjack was written and performed live in 2009 at Seattle’s Canoe Social Club for Jennifer Borges Foster’s poetry party.

Thank you for listening.

Inside Out: The Story Behind "Emphasis"

This essay is the backstory for our song “Emphasis,” which you can listen to below or over here.

I was waiting in an exam room at the emergency veterinary clinic when I found out my cousin had succumbed to the vodka he would not, could not stop drinking. I hadn’t been thinking about him at all — not the blond boy who used to ask me to feather his hair, not the star fashion student at Parsons School of Design, not the young man who’d lost several coveted jobs and his apartment in New York City. I was thinking about my 18-year-old cat, who had kidney issues and an unsettling nighttime wheeze. Recently, there’d been moments when his hind legs went out, rendering him temporarily unable to stand. I had composed my face to display calm concern. Underneath, every artery pulsed, please, please, please.

The main waiting room had offered soft couches, glossy magazines, an aquarium and several people holding hope about pets that had gotten into a scrape. But this secondary vestibule was a sort of isolation booth, windowless, with doors at both ends and beige floor to ceiling. It served as a purgatory where visitors were forced to release any blind optimism harbored in the initial waiting room, and face the judgment handed down by a wise vet.

Mine had a gentle bearing and black caterpillar eyebrows. He was sweetly apologetic when he picked up my cat to take him from this room to one deeper inside the bowels of the building for an ultrasound. He asked if I wanted to return to the main waiting room, as it could be a while. I said no, wanting to feel somewhat geographically closer to my cat in this confounding warren of oddly shaped waiting spaces.

The exam room contained a wooden bench, a small chrome table and one poster. But unlike the whimsical animal posters of the main waiting area, this one was an academic illustration, titled Chelonian Anatomy. It showed a turtle, stomach side up, his bottom shell removed to reveal different cutaways of bodily systems: skeletal, muscles, gastrointestinal, respiratory, circulatory. I took notes on the functions in an attempt to distract myself from how long the ultrasound was taking. But I kept wondering: Where exactly was the ultrasound room? The clinic was so chopped up, with so many doors leading to unseen places — I felt disoriented and a little seasick, as in a dream when you are stumbling through an unfamiliar building, unsure and afraid of what’s around the next corner.

My phone rang and it was my mother, calling from her home in Virginia. She asked if it was an okay time to talk. I said I was at the vet, waiting for some tests on Pepe. She said she hoped he was okay, and then her voice choked as she said, “Bren died.” My cousin, her sister’s son, had been found dead in his apartment. Not yet 40, he had been an alcoholic for years, in and out of rehab. He had moved back to Kansas and was working occasionally for a small shop, doing window displays and making pretty bracelets. He would call me sometimes wanting to chat, entirely unaware that it was 3 a.m. in Seattle. I could never get a grip on where he was calling from, picturing him in a hallway or a lobby, some transitory place.

Though we never lived in the same town, the cousins were close. As we grew up, our little group fondly teased each other about the different fads and philosophies we embraced. I kept hoping the drinking was another phase he’d grow out of, like frosted hair tips. On the phone he always told me he was doing better, that he was thinking of moving back to New York. But he had recently been brought to an emergency room after a stranger found him lying on a public walkway late at night, unresponsive. The doctors did a head scan and discovered that prolonged heavy drinking had caused his brain to shrink. They said his system couldn’t withstand much more. If he didn’t stop he was going to die.

Still, I was naive. When I heard my cousin had said, “I can’t live like this,” I took heart. I thought that meant he was going to turn himself around and get back to being a creatively gifted guy with an infectious, gasping laugh. But the alcoholic storyline has two possible endings.

It seemed like all of a sudden when the vet finally returned to the exam room with Pepe curled into his arm. He said the ultrasound didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. I don’t know what I looked like in that moment but the vet’s eyebrows registered alarm. I’m sure my face was wrong, given his benign news. I hadn’t had time to put the pieces back in the right order.

— Brangien

I was waiting for you to snap out of it
I think I thought you’d come back out of it
but when I saw your hands were shaking
oh my god it was so heartbreaking
even then I did not get it
I can’t believe how I misread it

when you said, “I can’t live like this”
I thought you meant like this
I thought you were gonna change like this
but it’s all in the emphasis

I was waiting in a waiting room
when I found out that the waiting was through
on the phone my mother’s voice was shaking
oh my god it was so heartbreaking
and on the wall was a turtle poster
on his back he could not turn over

when you said, “I can’t live like this”
I thought you meant like this
I thought you were gonna change like this
but it’s all in the emphasis

it’s all in the emphasis

---

The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks (this is song #1). This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Thank you for listening.

1 of my 43 Things

In 2004, I co-founded a company (with Josh Petersen and Buster Benson) that conceived of and built the social networking site 43 Things. The purpose of the site was to ask the question, “What do you want to do with your life?” With this prompt, users created a list of up to 43 life goals (43 was a somewhat random number we felt was doable — less than 50 things, and conveniently a prime number). The idea was pretty simple: state your goals publicly, get support from a community of like-minded users and thus increase the odds of accomplishing said goals. It was an empowering tool and philosophy. I forget the exact stats, but I believe the site rose to 3 million users with an exponentially higher number of goals. 43 Things won a Webby in 2005 for Best Social Networking Site, edging out MySpace (this was before Facebook was open to users who weren’t currently in college).

During this time, my Seattle Central District house was the epicenter of several confluent activities. My band Maktub rehearsed and recorded there. It was the birthplace of The Robots (aka the 43 Things staff). I began building an office space there to house The Robots, right next to Maktub’s rehearsal space. David Heinemeier Hansson visited there over a weekend to show Buster, Josh and me the beauty of Ruby on Rails (43 Things would soon become the largest Ruby on Rails site in world). It was where my comedian/musician friend Reggie Watts lived for a time. Producer Bob Power (the record producer whose roster includes De La Soul, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo, A Tribe Called Quest, Meshell Ndegeocello, and India Ari) shacked up with me for 3 months there while producing a Maktub record. It was where Printz Board of the Black Eyed Peas crashed while recording demos with Maktub. Jason Fried of 37 Signals visited to help The Robots with the design of 43 Things. That house was the center of my then seemingly ever-expanding universe.

Back to goals. I probably completed more than 500 goals during my 43 Things lifespan — everything from “eat a banana” to “start a company that survives two years” to “get married.” But after I moved on from 43 Things, my life became less expansive in scope, more focused and (in many ways) more reflective. Eventually, I stopped thinking about the things lingering on my list and formed a new life with Brangien in a new house, with cats, a small vegetable garden and a basement piano. 43 Things faded away.

But the recent death of my former Robot co-worker, Laurel Fan, got me to thinking about 43 Things, the fleeting nature of our human connections and the things we aim to achieve. The best homage to Laurel was written by fellow Robot, Todd Gehman. Suffice it to say, Laurel was always one to quietly do what she wanted and not make a fuss. It was only upon her death that it became clear to so many of us how much Laurel had done in her short life. What goals had I left on the table?

Starting at age 14, I had always flirted with recording my own music. My earliest experiments were using a digital delay to layer guitar on top of guitar on top of more guitar. Today that’s called looping or sampling, but as a young kid in Alaska in the ’80s this was pretty expansive tinkering. I soon graduated to cassette and 4-track recorders. I sequenced and recorded analog synthesizers. When I moved to Seattle to pursue music, I recorded with countless bands, but was never at the helm of the mixing console. Other people turned the knobs and changed the 2” tape reels. One of the longest standing (but never accomplished) goals on my 43 Things list was “record an album in my basement.” When I left 43 Things, that goal remained on my list. When 43 Things shut down on New Years Day 2015, it took with it “record an album in my basement.”

But today, I can finally check that goal off my 43 Things list. It took me until my 47th year. It took getting married to Brangien, buying a house with a suitable basement, soundproofing, acquiring and learning how to use the software and outboard gear needed to record a decent-sounding album. Now I’m pretty good at using Logic and not horrible at finding my way around ProTools. I know how to position a mic.

Writing and recording in our basement, Brangien and I have completed 11 songs we’re releasing under the band name The Argument. For the next 11 weeks, we’ll release a song a week. You can read about it here on Medium, and get the backstory on our website, www.theargument.us. Completing this goal resulted in creating a new goal: get 100 people (yes, friends and family count) to listen to what we’ve been up to. In the meantime, the remaining zucchini and tomatoes need to be picked. The basement piano needs a tuning. And, as I often say, the cats aren’t going to pet themselves.

See you tomorrow with our first of 11 songs.

— Daniel

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The Argument is releasing 11 songs in 11 weeks. This essay was originally posted on Medium.

Master Of One

Exciting news: Last week Chris Athens (in Austin, Texas) mastered the album. Mastering is hard to describe, but it's what makes a recording truly sing. Like porn, you might say "I know it when I see it," or more accurately, you know it when you don't hear it. You can tell when music hasn't been mastered, because it sounds different depending on which audio system you're listening to (car stereo, laptop, fancy headphones). Maybe you only hear the treble on your laptop, but in the car it's all booming bass. So once Michael finished mixing, he handed the songs off to Chris, who unified the volume and EQ of each track. And with that—a mere three years later—we now have 35 minutes of mixed and mastered songs. (We're part of the glacial music movement.) Now we have no excuse for delaying the release of this album any longer. Our goal is for 100 people to take it for a spin, and with any luck this will happen in 2016....or before the next ice age.

P.S. Here's a good description of mastering from Landr's What Is Mastering?:

Mastering is the final step of audio post-production. The purpose of mastering is to balance sonic elements of a stereo mix and optimize playback across all systems and media formats. Traditionally, mastering is done using tools like equalization, compression, limiting and stereo enhancement.

The Last Day

It's been a long time coming, but we finished the final song (aptly titled "The Last Day") and turned the Pro Tools session over to Cozzi to be mixed on Tuesday June 7, 2016. Daniel worked with Michael to get the drums in order (thanks to D'Vonne Lewis for playing drums on the final track).

It's weird. We started this project in Garageband, quickly moved to Logic ... and now Daniel has learned Pro Tools in order to prepare sessions for mixing. Lots of learning of software to get this far, but also plenty of arranging physical space in our basement to make the album happen. We started out with a Melodigrand piano (a gift from Thaddeus) and eventually upgraded to a 1949 Steinway console piano. Inspired by a D'Angelo interview in the Village Voice that described D'Angelo's recording tent, Daniel designed and installed a vocal tent to improve the sound of our recorded vocals in the concrete basement bunker that is our studio. We also recently added a 4' x 6' sound panel above the drums and a sound panel in front of the vocal mic to subdue the concrete wall. These nips and tucks happened over time as efficiencies were discovered—it feels more like the slow pace of gardening. If you work hard enough, you eventually you get a decent crop of tomatoes.

Back to this week—once the The Last Day is mixed, we'll listen to all the songs, make a few rounds of final mix adjustments, find the song order for the album and prepare it for mastering. Mastering. That's a hard concept to describe but we'll try to break it down as we approach that final stage of releasing a recorded album.

Boom Bap

With all the instruments recorded, lyrics written and sung, and sessions mostly mixed, there remains one song in need of drums. Most recording sessions begin with drums. Drums and bass (aka "the rhythm section") are traditionally the foundation of any pop music recording. The way we write music often has us using placeholder drums (in the form of pre-made drum loops or a drum machine) upon which we pile guitar, bass, piano, horns, synth and vocals. In the end it's like those house remodels where they add a floor to an older home by jacking it up and stacking enormous timbers under the precariously raised home. We're a song stacked on Jenga blocks until we pull in a drummer to pour the new foundation.

Our drummer of choice for this album has been Davis Martin. He's either the foundation company that pours the concrete, or (to expand analogies) the CSI forensic pathologist who arrives at the crime scene to interpret what happened to the chalk-outlined body laying before him.

We're hoping to have Davis over here this week to play drums on our the final song (spoiler: it's about hitting a deer in our van this past New Year's Eve). In anticipation, Daniel has installed a new 4'x6' sound panel above the drums and sound curtains to minimize the boxy sound of our concrete bunker basement recording studio. Here are a couple photos of the drums in waiting ...