The more Greekly sophisticated among you may be familiar with Zeno’s paradox, which amounts to arguing that you can never quite get anywhere, because, well, there are an infinite number of tiny, tiny bits of progress you have to make, and since you can’t do an infinite number of things in a finite amount of time, you might as well lie down on the sofa and binge “Stranger Things” until you melt into the fabric. OK, that can’t exactly be Zeno’s paradox, because Netflix wasn’t around back then (I’m pretty sure the ancient Greeks only had Paramount+), but you get the idea.
Coincidentally, I’m finishing my album.
Last month, I reported that it was entirely mixed and I had the first master. Now, I have all the masters, and it continues to sound fantastic – but in order to confirm that it will sound fantastic for everybody, I have to listen to it, over and over again, on every device I can locate. This does not intimidate me – given the house-sized volume of my ego, I can listen to this album until I die – but it sure as @&#$#$ takes a lot of time.
First, I subjected it to the dreaded “car stereo” test. My car stereo is pretty middling, and I was hurtling down the highway at top speed on my way home from a rehearsal with my drummer. And it sounded – pretty damn good. Next, I deployed my high-end headphones, and that, too, sounded pretty damn good. So far, so pretty damn good, apparently.
Last night was supposed to be the final hurdle. My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I listened to the whole album on the stereo. And she loved it – but there were a couple tiny tweaks she suggested, and her suggestion made me think that I needed to go back and check, once more, whether the issue she raised was going to lead to a bunch of other tiny tweaks, and so on and so forth until, apparently, the end of time, at least according to Zeno.
But eventually I will run out of patience, or time, or money, or my producer’s attention, and we will be done – and, seriously, I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be in the next week or so. It really is the best thing I’ve ever caused to be created. My brother, Josh Bayer, did a killer job on bass; my percussionist, David Troen-Krasnow, rocked the kit; Adam Rothberg and Walter Crockett absolutely shredded on their acoustic guitars; Jake Bush’s accordion made my sea shanty seaworthy; and Doug Kwartler, producer and engineer extraordinaire, put up with me for more than two years, which may have been the greatest gift of all. You’ll hear it soon, I promise you. And then I’m off to find the next thing that will take forever to finish.