Category: Recordings

This is a blog category with posts about some records I have helped make over the years. Hope you enjoy!

Orwell said there might be trouble

My songs definitely turn out to be a sort of journal, for me. I imagine they mean different things to anyone who hears them, like any song; The final product is in the mind of the listener, and no two people hear a thing quite the same way, I think.

1983, I wrote one morning with a laugh since as the song says, I live in 1983. To a certain extent it’s true. My musical tastes and songwriting vocabulary were pretty complete by the time I was 18, and I haven’t changed much, fundamentally, since then. I heard many years ago that most people spend the rest of their lives listening to the records they liked in their youth, and I thought, oh that’s awful, I don’t want to be that guy! Joke’s on me, I’m that guy. Somewhat. I mean, I hear a lot of new music in my creative and professional lives, but what comes out of me, the music I spontaneously create sometimes, seems largely rooted in my teenage brain.

“Juliet in black jeans” is an actual person, Juliet Harris, high school classmate, fellow rocker and one of the most original and stunning rock star individuals I ever had the pleasure to know. She died earlier this year, and I attended a memorial for her in Live Oak Park, organized in part by our mutual dear friend Peter Montgomery. I’m playing a short acoustic set at a birthday party for Peter this January 11, I’ll share the flier below, and I figure I’ll include 1983 in my caterwaulings.

“Never going one more year, Orwell said there might be trouble” cracked me up when I wrote it, and wow, what does it mean now? Too much, I think, I can’t quite fathom it. What have people done? They know not, methinks.

I have abandoned mainstream news sources (if mainstream even means anything anymore), I just don’t need to follow the play-by-play at this time. I know the big headlines and that’s enough. I had this sense, a few weeks ago, an idea, that the smallest pieces of local news are just as significant if not more so, than the hideous firehose of idiot shit we are asked to consume. A cat, napping blissfully in the sun of a bookstore window, matters more to me. Imagining the cat’s experience, or that of a dog gleefully playing as they do, gives me joy. I read Heather Cox Richardson every few days, and occasionally Dan Rather and a few others. The comedic satire of Jon Stewart and friends doesn’t connect with me at the moment, much as I love them, for reality has become satire again. People, a great many people, chose absurdity in its ugliest form, whereas I reject it. To some degree the world is as one sees it, and we do choose what we look at and listen to. I value my minutes in this life and will selfishly curate them. Somehow wrestling with these principles led me to write and record this:

And then somehow, without any wrestling at all, this song Donkeyfish emerged, and it turns out to be one of my own favorites of my work from this year, or maybe ever. It just burst forth, I had the idea and recorded each part once and bam, it was done before I knew it. I do labor hard on some songs, sometimes, and in some funny way I think my inner muse rewards me for those efforts by just handing me one, sometimes.

After this jaunt, I googled “Donkeyfish,” of course, and lo and behold, there is a Donkey Fish! Dermatolepis inermis. Also called the marbled grouper, mutton hamlet, rockhind, or sicklefish grouper. That’s a lot of names for a fish, or a donkey.

This many-splendored planet. I am glad to visit.

A Journal Entry Of Sorts

I do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Some have called this the definition of insanity but I prefer to see it as dedication.

Now then, making records. Berkeley Cat Records has a slogan – a tag line, if you will –

We’re from Berkeley. We are cats. We make records.

And it’s… TRUE!!

By gosh we do this.

I have some webby updatings to do, on this and a few other webbysites.  To bring my archive up-to-date. Been rather prolific, this year, and I’m pleased with my output. Each track is unique and different, so in this regard I guess I lied earlier. I do the same thing, that is, I get up (early, wow, very early these days) and make Peet’s coffee (various blends, current fave is Big Bang, no they don’t pay me to say that, it’s a Berkeley thing), and some days, some mornings, the light bulb over me head says, hey, here’s a track or a song idea! And I go there. Expecting what? Why, Petunia, I just don’t know.

Trying times, trying times, what a cliché that becomes. 2024, what the FUCK?! OK damn, my great friend and confidante, my career counselor and living Buddha Garden rock star beautiful human being Luke Kreinberg, died by suicide earlier in the year. It hardly feels real and if I start in talking about it I’ll write a novel, so let’s call that a headline. Grief sets in long and slow as comprehension of this slowly forms in my dumbfounded and stunned heart and mind.

Politics, another headline, shall we?   Biden, the drama, then Kamala, the campaign! The energy, the enthusiasm, the embrace of good values, decency and the rule of law, the rejection of all that is horrible, and then.. The most staggering debacle. It tests my optimism.

Optimism. I have lived most of my life with an intentional, deliberate optimism. Even in difficult times, in my personal life or career or through difficult events in the world around me I have chosen through and through to be optimistic. Part of it is calculated. I’ve found that pessimism can lead to the expected (bad) results and optimism can seem to help to lead to good outcomes. You get the result you imagine, to some degree. It’s not magic or hocus pocus, I think the current popular word for it is intention, setting your intention.

This year, yeah, it’s been tested a bit, this willful optimism of mine.  And becoming aware of that, becoming conscious of this inner struggle, certainly informed some of my songwriting and creative efforts.

A month after Luke’s passing, I went to see a psychotherapist. Private, expensive, several sessions, somewhat helpful. Smart fellow, wise and doubtlessly expert in his field. Younger than me, by at least ten years. After the 3rd visit I thanked him and canceled. You know, making records costs a bit, too. And I found, that the process involved in telling this gentleman, this professional, my stories and trying to understand myself a little better, is not wholly different from my process in writing and recording my own songs. Things are revealed, things I like and sometimes things that surprise or even disappoint me. In short it helps me work on myself, to hopefully become a better person. Well, funny thing – I even at one point some months ago said I was done making records for a while. Ha! That didn’t fly, so, well, I decided I can afford one or the other – record-making or therapy.

To become a better person. Now that is a worthy goal. And it’s one worth saying out loud at this time in our world, I believe.  Because there seems to be, among our fellow man, an embrace of values which are indecent. And I chose every word in that sentence. Our fellow man. Yes, also in women and in humankind more generally, but in men, I speak of men, men who have lost their sense of honor. Who have somehow been influenced, or brainwashed, if you prefer, to celebrate and reward simply the worst possible traits men can have. That is a mistake, and a dire one, and I doubt any good will come of it.

Meanwhile nature bats last, and she’s at bat. Instead of focusing our considerable human genius on dealing with the climate crisis intelligently, with the sort of organized focus which landed men on the moon, the human race is instead fighting wars over territory, power, religion, oil, water and vengeance, dumping more carbon into the atmosphere than ever before.

So how’s my willful optimism doing? Well, surprisingly ok. Because after all, it is willful.  What am I doing, with my time? Well, continuing to make art, for one thing. NOT making “art” with generative AI (I laugh out loud as I write this), and striving to be the best version I can imagine of myself. And I know, I know without doubt, that my friends and colleagues, and untold millions of good people whom I don’t know personally, are similarly striving. And THAT realization changes my optimism from willful, to easy and natural.

Our capacity for self-invention is considerable. And that’s some good news.

Busy Busy Having Fun

Hey, I’m doing a solo set opening for Psycotic Pineapple! Deets:

I released a Schlager! It’s here:

And I’ve been keeping up somewhat on my mewsletter, which I invite you to follow here: https://berkeleycatrecords.substack.com/

I bought the postcard stamps for my 200 get out the vote postcards via TurnoutPac, yesterday, and that was rather thrilling, actually 🙂 What are you doing to ensure a Blue Wave?  Let’s get it, y’all!  That’s all, I gots work to do, Happy Caturday <3

Nerd-posting about my Rebottle of Baby (x23) I Love You

I make records that I want to hear. Or at least, that’s the ambition. As things go, sometimes I do revisit a track and remix (rebottle!) it. This one came up recently a few different ways, and I decided to spend a little time fine-tuning the mix and remastering it.

Nerdly notes!

The basic track was done “live” in Mike Stevens’ Lost Monkey Studio, during the October 2017 firestorms.  Many of my friends and fam had to evacuate, and some of them lost their homes.  In the midst of that, I composed and recorded this song. There was a third verse, but it seemed unnecessary on reflection, so I cut it before including the song on my CONTENT album.  Just last week I remixed it, and bounced an instrumental mix.

We didn’t use a click-track (metronome) when we tracked the basics.  Just me and Mikey, him on a drum kit, me on acoustic guitar.  I don’t sniff snobbishly at click-tracks, in fact I use them often. But when it’s possible to make a recording without one, I opt for that. Because it’s cool to let the tempo breathe, for some songs.  This one’s pretty steady (Mike is a GREAT drummer), and the tempo does shift subtly in places.  As intended. It’s rock n’ roll, baby.

The first overdub, Mikey did right after we cut the basic. He played tambourine, and he nailed it, so beautifully.  Thing is, a tambourine part is hard to do. Then it’s hard to place the tambo in the mix. Tambourines notoriously sound either too loud or too quiet, in a mix. Now I got it right where I want it.

Next, I played a guitar solo.  8 bars.  I have nerded often about my FAVORITE 8-bar rock guitar solo, Mick Ronson in the original Ian Hunter recording of Once Bitten, Twice Shy.  I don’t pretend to have reached such heights.   But my solo in this track is one of my favorite 8-bar pentatonic scale outbursts.   I played my trusty “Oates” Tele-beast, which I use on pretty much all of my recordings. We tossed it through Mike’s vintage Fender Champ, dimed out. “Dimed” means everything’s on 10.  Not that there are a lot of knobs, on an old Champ.  Volume and tone controls on 10.  Everything the amp can put out.  It sounds, to use the appropriate term, Gnarly. We wanted gnarls. Oh did we get them.  I added some tape-echo and light compression to finish.

Thankfully, MOST of my releases don’t call me to remix/rebottle. I’ll probably never touch I Can See It Now again, or Am I Not Alien?, or most of the others I’ve made since I started this solo adventure. But I’ll do it when I feel inspired to.

Last nerd-note – I’m confident in mastering my own tracks, now. This is new. For many of my songs, I have turned to some great mastering engineers.  They did great work.  You can find their names in the credits for my releases in Bandcamp, if you are curious. I learned much from each of them, and finally figured out a way to do this step myself.

Mastering is funny.  Anyone who has made records probably knows, it can take your track and finalize it gorgeously, so you go “Wow! It sounds like a record now!” Or, alternately, it can wreck the whole thing, leaving you sad and howling, “Whaaaat happened to our record?!”  So you learn by doing.

I wanted to learn this final step, and I did. THANKS to all the aforementioned mastering engineers and producers whom I have had the privilege to work with. I’m NOT going to master other folks’ records. I don’t want that responsibility, and I have no ambition to be in that field, which is populated with geniuses.  But I DO know what I want my records to sound like. Each one different; Each song follows its own rules. And I’m glad to have finally demystified this step, for myself.  Baby 🙂

Live in Bandcamp now, goes live in all the streaming services July 31. Pre-save in Spotify or Apple Music if you do that sort of thing.

All love,

Eric

Artwork by Shannon Wheeler

A Tail Of Two Kitties

Berkeley, and Panda.

I decided during the Covidopalypse that I must find a new pair of kittens. After some research and tips from friends, I met a marvelous foster-kitten-fosterer who was herself pregnant with a hooman baby. She had two bonded pairs of catboys – a stripey tiger and a sleek noir panther, plus a rambunctious somersaulting holstein-kitten  and  a subtle grey silvery feline of mystery. Instantly I loved them all, of course, as one does. Sat myself down in their kitty-rumpus-room right on the floor to get amongst them, on their level.  The tiny panther, just six weeks old or so, saunters over, climbs onto my outstretched legs and.. falls asleep. I had been chosen, clearly, and I was about to ask – which of the others is in this bonded pair? The tiger answered by investigating and scrutinizing me, as his brother snoozed utterly unconcerned and blissful in the way kittens do.  Promptly I committed and signed adoption papers (these do exist for kittens). The lads were too young to take home yet, and they hadn’t been neutered yet, and I had travel plans, so off I went and four weeks later, gleefully collected the now larger and more bouncy felines.

Playful doesn’t begin to describe the ball of energy that is a happy young kitten or puppy. One is reminded of this when confronted by such a whirlwind of enthusiasm and curtain-climbing.  The lads roughhouse roughly in the house, occasionally to the point where we think they’re fighting – only to stop abruptly and groom each other and themselves ever so gracefully, and spontaneously nap intertwined in that kittenly way.

They needed names.  I as their hooman needed to name them, for their vet records and kitty-chips, as one does. I didn’t think long. Berkeley, and Panda. The tiger is Berkeley, the panther is Panda.  Berkeley being my hometown and Berkeley Cat Records being my record label, naturally the tiger is Berkeley.  Panda, this also came to me quickly, as I work for Pandora Radio and SiriusXM, and my esteemed Pandora music-head colleagues refer to themselves and each other as Pandas.  This nickname had been established well before I started at Pandora as a contractor in 2017, and when I was eventually hired full-time, I embraced my Panda-ness and of course, named Berkeley tiger’s panther-brother, Panda.  He’s also just sort of a panda.  I mean, he’s ridiculously cute and playful and cuddly as one hopes a kitten or a panda would be.

So it came to pass, Berkeley and Panda are the executive leadership team of Berkeley Cat Records.  Here’s an earlier photo of them in discussions about creative direction:

Note the antiquated 1980s stereo gear. We at Berkeley Cat Records kick it old school. There’s even a song in which we claim 1983 as our permanent residence. Cameo appearances here by Berkeley Cat himself and yours truly:

New Single and EP – I Changed My Mind

So many pieces converged here. I’d love to tell the story of how this one came about but it’s too soon for me to tell it well. I myself didn’t do any jumping off of things – that’s all metaphorical, save for some friends close to me who did some leaping indeed. Thanks Shannon for the awesome artwork on this. Thanks Damon for clueing me in about Logic Pro Mastering Assistant – wow. I have tried Ozone and a couple of other mastering thingies but couldn’t get anywhere useful. Now, lo and behold I can master my own records at home. Cycle complete. I can create drum tracks, all the way thru to mastering.. A victory of sorts, true solo record-making. But enough nerding. This one rocks and I hope y’all enjoy. Definitely a big nod to early Beserkley Records stuff here, especially Modern Lovers, and the underground velvety wonders they adored.

Another Truckload Of Animals And Prizes

I recently purchased a little scanner, an Epson ES-50. It’s quite tiny, unlike the giant hulking scanning machines of yore. Remember how they emitted bright white light as the works crawled the page, placed face-down on glass? You’d cover the thing and it would do its mysterious work, whirring and clanking. Now this little tiny machine makes almost no sound, emits no light, and efficiently passes a page through producing.. voila!

I was delighted to find that page recently – I had forgotten I had it. The drawings Jesse Michaels sent us when we recorded our Skankin’ Foolz Unite album. The doggie on upper left won the audition, and landed thusly:

This ^ is also a scan, using said spy-scanner. I fancy it a spy-scanner because it’s like some James Bond shit that Q gave him to scan secret documents but I digress. I have not secret documents, nay, but plenty of pages of handwritten lyrics and assorted photos and drawings from friends and sooooo, I like my new scanner spy thingy.

Speaking of exciting top secrets, Shannon Wheeler is drawing a cover for my EP release of I Changed My Mind. I like my homespun cover art for the single – in fact I purchased said spy-scanner precisely for the purpose of making this. I simply printed out the Berkeley Cat Records logo, wrote on it with a Sharpie, and then scanned it.  Voila indeed.

What ever shall we scan next?  I love a new toy.

So, as evidenced by evidence, my attempts at NOT making records have utterly failed.  I’ll accept this about myself and continue.

A long time ago, a post-UpTones band I had with Ben and Paul and drummer Tom Pope, did a lot of touring on the west coast of these Untidy States.  The band was called HOBO, which mystifies me somewhat, but it made sense at the time.  We had a lot of fun gigging and recording an album and.. well, we were going to call our second album Another Truckload Of Animals And Prizes. I mean, I wanted to, but the idea never took flight, and the band turned into something else and didn’t make a second album and.. Well, now I am going to make Another Truckload of Animals and Prizes. I think the words were lifted from a circus truck we saw on the road somewhere, but googling around I can’t seem to find it. Maybe we made this phrase up?  Anyway, who wouldn’t want another truckload of animals and prizes? I must have it. I must make it. I must and I shall make and have it.

Good morning.

Musing about Songwriting about Deciding and Dancing about Blogging

Made a song. Published said song. Below is a scan of the lyrics as originally scribbled while composing and arranging the track. Once the songwriting was done, I typed the lyrics out in ALL CAPS and printed them out large, so they’d be easy to read.. Taped that to my wall, set up a mic and captured the lead vocal in one pass. It was smooth, efficient; In ways that jumping back onto a plane or bridge may not be, one presumes.

…all of which ends up being:

Notes and Ponderings about Brilliance and Barf

I have completed my Bandcamp collection.  Here’s a partial screenshot.

The collection contains 4 full albums, a few EPs and a bevy of singles.

The last song on the last album I published there, is Barf.  I improvised it in one pass, while recording it on an iPhone 4, in about 2015 I think. The production value matches the subject matter perfectly in that it is Barf.

One of the more finely produced numbers is I Can See It Now. Unlike Barf, this took a lot of work, trial and error, rewriting and reimagining, several recording and mixing sessions in 2018, with significant contributions from the brilliants Matt Jaffe (on 12-string Rickenbacker), Michael Rosen (at the controls) and Michael Urbano (on a Ludwig drum set that happened to be made the year I was born).

My journey toward producing my own records started on 4-Track cassette recorders in the mid ’80s. I could never get them to sound quite the way I wanted, but the banging away at it helped me hone some skills. Along comes digital and ProTools and all of the funtoys we have now, and I can actually create just about any kind of audio track that I can imagine, now.

A recent highlight was Rabbitus Maximus. This one I did entirely by myself,  in a pretty short stretch of time at the very beginning of 2024.  It was a case of following an idea from start to finish, and there was really no rewriting or rethinking of anything –  I tracked each instrument once and moved on, dialing in the mix as I went. The end result is delightful, a personal favorite. One dear old friend said it was my best yet, while another told me it was too silly and that I should lean in on my darker material. All of which reinforces what I have learned about my works or really any piece of art – IT AIN’T FOR EVERYONE!

It took me a while to gain the confidence, or perhaps the gall, to release some of my wilder material. A flashpoint for me was the track Content, Content, Content from (of course) my CONTENT album. That little outburst had been brewing in me since I first heard the word “content” in its Internet-era context, back in the early 2000s. Everything – your FB comments, your cat pics, my albums, news items, clickbait headlines, the greatest most beautiful art and the most irrelevant and insipid SPAM, is all CONTENT, now. The weird neutrality of it fascinates me.

In a spasm of nostalgia last year, I composed and recorded 1983, definitely in my power-pop zone, with an ample nod to Ska. Called in the big guns for that one – no less than three Michaels! Urbano, Rosen and Valladares (on ’80s synth-bliss) at East Bay Recorders, with Paul Jackson joining me on the vocal chorus – and then I mixed it at home. Soon afterward, I performed it live on just acoustic guitar at Down Home Music, in my first ever solo performance. That whole set is now my Caterwaul! album, and there’s an uncut video of it on archive.org.

Oh!  The video thing!

I started to get my toes wet in Premiere Pro about a year ago, and managed to create some pretty cool homespun vids for Charlotte in the Garden of the New Futility and a few other songs. Most recently I started a more elaborate one, for Rabbitus Maximus, but I put that project on hold simply because it was proving too time-consuming. Learnings: I CAN make my own records, it’s fun and sometimes actually pretty easy now that I know the ropes, AND! The same can not be said about making movies. Maybe someday!

The aforementioned “Charlotte” represents a lifelong epic within me, that started the first time the UpTones visited Los Angeles, in 1984. Coming from the Bay Area, where we had become something of a sensation, LA was a different world and I felt in every way an outsider there. The lines “No one talks anymore, no one walks in this town, hardly notice myself when I take a look ’round,” haunted me for decades, and on numerous occasions I tried to frame them in a completed song.  Finally, in mid-2023 the rest of it came to me in a rush, oddly spurred by the Barbie movie, of which I am an avid fan. I produced and released the song, along with an instrumental mix, and if my math is correct, that was 40 years in the making!

Through many of these endeavors, Shannon Wheeler‘s pen and imagination gave my records cover art which so often surprised and delighted me. The last one is a sort of magnum opus – I just couldn’t believe my eyes at first when he sent me this.  I had absolutely no idea what sort of image we should use for On Top Of The World. The song is a celebration of stardom, sort of narrated by an adoring fan, in an imagined world where there’s no downside, at least in the moment, and everything is grand.  I was clear that I didn’t want the artwork to be a picture of that. There had to be a twist. But what could it be? Shannon admitted at first that he too was stumped. A week later he sends me this.

cover art for On Top Of The World

!!!

More learnings –

Every song has its own rules, its own soul, if you will.  The production styles for mine vary greatly, as I’ve discovered. One that I wrestled with a bit was I Liked Their Early Stuff.  Like any great cliché it is born of truth. We’ve all said it, right? I can name a bunch, but one will do: The Police. I LOVED their early stuff! And I’ll leave the rest of that “as read.” So, I had that recording in pocket, for a couple of years, after blurting it one day, and I vaguely intended to re-record it until recently I listened again and laughed aloud and realized that’s it, that’s the only recording of that song that I need. It sounds like a “demo” and, as such, it’s like a prop in its own play.

Yesterday I enabled the purchase-all option for my Bandcamp collection, so if you like you can download the whole kaboodle at 50% off. That works out to $33.50 for 4 albums, my singles and EPs, Charles’s dub mixes, the works.

I hope you enjoy my (ahem..) CONTENT!!

Sensible Comments Lurcheth Toward Babylon To Be Borne

Due to appalling lunacy I have completed my Sensible Comments album, and it will be foisted onto the unsuspecting streaming services on April Fool’s Day, because of course it will.  You may view the titles and (in theory) hear some audio snippets here -> ericdin.hearnow.com

As part of Berkeley Cat Records International Science Labs’ ongoing adventures and research, I distributed this release through CD Baby, instead of my usual Distrokid.  I was surprised to discover how different their artist-facing interfaces are.  Both excellent in their own ways, but rather than get into that here, I will instead quote myself from the album:

Tomorrow is a day
Yesterday was one also
There have been some before
Presumably there will be more

-from Derogatory Matrons, track 2 on Sensible Comments – a 14-track album of what I have the temerity to call songs.  I confess it’s one of my favorites.  Definitely not a pop album.  More in my experimental vein, you might say. Existential rants of bafflement and madness. Or as we call it here, Tuesday.

Already live in Bandcamp, per tradition, and on April the 1st I’ll update the release date there. All perfectly sane, don’t you think? Enjoy responsibly.