Hiya. Welcome to what may well end up being the most self-serving blog entry I’ve ever written.

As I’d stated before, I’m so happy with my last album, “Normal Bias”, that I’d be quite comfortable not releasing anything for quite sometime. We’ve got some plans for the year, but none of them really involve making an album of brand new material. That doesn’t mean that I’m not writing – I am – but unless I get a collection of 10 or 12 songs that jumps out at me and yells “ALBUM!”, I’m not gonna force it this year. Instead, we’ll focus on releasing the DVD (:::crosses my fingers:::), doing a few tour dates when applicable and putting the bulk of the Marc With a C catalog online for digital purchase. When we get around to rereleasing all of the pre-2007 albums, I’d like to include bonus tracks of unreleased and mostly unheard material from the era of the album it’s attached to. But I don’t know if anyone’s actually interested in that.

Anyways, since I’m taking a working break to write, reflect and take stock of what I’ve done, I figured this would be a good time to go through my entire catalog and figure out exactly what works for me and what doesn’t. See what’s aged well and also figure out what makes me cringe. I decided I’d let you see what I came up with. If this doesn’t sound interesting to you… move on, as this blog entry isn’t for you.

 

HUMAN SLUSHY – 2002: My first album as Marc With a C  (which many of you may know as the first twelve tracks on the “Early Stuff” compilation) isn’t nearly as bad as I’d remembered it recently. Oh sure, it still sounds just like producer Joe Panton’s album to me – as he played all of the bass, drums and keyboards on the record – but today I’d figured out exactly what was killing me about the album for so long. I’ll get to that in a minute. What I do like about it is the general arrangements, especially on “Left For Her”. I’m not crazy about the overusage of Moog keyboards on the tune, but I like the backing vocals and how we reference the opening synth line on guitar in the last verse. Alternately, the only thing I like about the version of “A Very Special Episode” is the drum machine and keyboards. I think my performance on that version is god awful, and I wouldn’t cry if the version was somehow erased from the pages of history. I wanted to do it acoustically in a different key, but… the producer got his way.  I dig “Mundane” as an opener, despite the fact that the production makes it sound like a Matchbox 20 outtake. I also think that I’ve unfairly neglected the song “Not There At All”. It’s a good little rock song, the guitar tone in the solo is actually my favorite part of the album (next to Jessica Frick’s backing vocals on “Groupie Sex”), and even though it’s a lyrical mess, it all works out really well in the end. If I thought there was some kind of demand for it, I think I’d play that song live a bit more often.

Speaking of “Groupie Sex”, I’ve often listed it as one of my least favorite songs that my name is attached to. Turns out that I don’t really dislike the song that much, but I pretty much detest the production on it. It was too garage-y, when it needed to be played a bit more like a twee song. Lots of bar chords and such. Just listen to the “na na na na” solo and tell me that there isn’t a good twee pop song hiding in there somewhere. As I mentioned before, Jessica Frick does the backing vocals on the song, and they’re shaky/nervous and exactly what I wanted them to sound like. Our voices blended together really well, and I’m sad that we don’t get to work together anymore. The problem with “Groupie Sex” – and also the bridge to “Victoria’s Girls” – is that I’m jokingly showing off my non-existent bravado/braggadocio. That didn’t work, as this was my first album, and people didn’t know that my attitude towards women, sex and female fans was the exact opposite of what I was singing about. How could they? I hadn’t set them up with any knowledge or mission statement yet. And when it all comes from one singular voice, this album is so damned schizophrenic. Jumps from the self-deprecating “Why Don’t Girls Like Me”, what Jessica called “the sweetest song I ever wrote” in “Melena” and back to the “yo chicks, don’t you want my chubby dick?” attitude of “Victoria’s Girls” and the “too many girls are beating down my door” sarcasm in “Human Slushy”. Doesn’t make any sense as a whole.

But here’s my big overall problem with “Slushy”, and surprisingly it isn’t so much Joe Panton’s misinterpretation of what I wanted the production to be like. Ready? This album plays to me like the first full record by my former band. I’d always been pushing my old band (Molokoplus/Childlike) to just get a fucking record together, but no one could ever agree on songs, a lineup or musical direction. I tried to exercise some control, considering I was writing 98% of the material – and said material was almost always uniformly awful – but that was taken by some members as dictatorship at times, or that’s the way it seemed to me. This was my first shot at making the record I really wanted my band to do. And… at the time, I wanted our old group to be a big, loud rock band. The songs didn’t fit that. My former longtime bassist Dewey tried explaining to me that my songs simply didn’t call for all of the accoutrements of a full band, and I just wouldn’t listen. I didn’t figure anyone would listen if I tried to be just another guy with an acoustic guitar and a story to tell. Turns out I was pretty wrong on that front, and Dewey was right. And when I speak of that band, I have to mention that I often wonder what became of our longest running drummer Kerry McInnes. The guy was like a baby Dave Grohl. He could seriously outplay anyone that ever walked into the attic we used as a rehearsal room without even trying. I hope he didn’t give up playing the drums, because he was on the right track.

Boiling it down to brass tacks, here’s what didn’t work on “Human Slushy”: the shrill, treble-heavy production; the lack of lyrical focus; the fact that Joe Panton appears musically on the album more than I do; my lack of assertiveness at the time, which led to me not fighting for songs to be done in the manner that I originally envisioned… hence the higher key that “Episode” and the title track was recorded in. I couldn’t sing it in the studio, so god only knows what made me think that I could sing those freakin’ songs live. What I’ve learned by revisiting “Human Slushy” as an album is that I should probably keep testing out songs live before I record them, and if someone working with me is dead set against certain songs making the album, I should probably fight them tooth and nail so we can at least try it. Otherwise, this album would have also included “Blowjob Queen”, “Nerdy Girls”, “Bounce Bounce Bounce”, “Stairway To Rudolph”  and “Mall Sluts With Cell Phones”, all of which were *major* crowd favorites at the time. I guess when I hear the album now, I just get sad thinking about what it could have been if I was able to get my way. But then again, Joe was producing the album for free, and I didn’t want to upset an already moody guy to the point of him giving up on the album and leaving it half-finished. I guess it is half-finished in a way. On a fun side note – there’s an outtake of “Mall Sluts With Cell Phones” from this album that sounds like a cross between Devo, The Talking Heads and some awful industrial band. It’ll be heard over my dead body.

2003 – One Planned Slip…Live!: I rush released this handmade live album to make my fanbase happy. Many people were upset by buying a souvenir of my live show (i.e. the “Human Slushy” album) and finding that it not only sounding absolutely nothing like the show they’d just witnessed, but also included little to none of the songs I was actually performing at the time. Chris Zabriskie masterfully recorded the two shows at the old Guinevere’s in downtown Orlando that make up this release. You may know it better as tracks 13-21 of the “Early Stuff” compilation. The actual original release was seventeen songs long, and it’s highly doubtful that I’ll ever re-release it in it’s original form. That’s due to the fact that there’s no less than nine songs that I don’t own the copyrights to on it. Three songs were written by Steve Poltz, one was written by Dan Bern, there was a Michael Jackson tune, and parodies of Pearl Jam and Led Zeppelin. And let’s not forget that Chris wrote “You & Me Should Go Away”.

This record is a pretty good example of what an average show was like for me at the time. I’d get really drunk, berate audience members, play whatever songs came to my head at the time, and be amazed that people liked it. It’s nowhere near as volatile as some shows got – ask me about the legend of the “teabag show” sometime – but there’s a nice spat with a stage crasher that spans like three tracks on this disc. If memory serves, I was tuning my guitar and he just sort of walked up and started telling the worst jokes I’ve ever heard. I was pissed at him getting onstage without permission, but also – and hey, at least I’m being honest here – for receiving a better reaction than I’d been getting that evening.

Other than that, there’s still just as much banter on this record as you’d normally get at a current Marc With a C show. Now it’s sort of expected from me, I guess, but at the time it was a major point of contention for more audiences than you’d ever believe. Many of them just wanted me to just shut up and play. And when I’d respond to them verbally and trade barbs with them, it was as if the television had just started talking back to them. Hell, one downtown venue was so upset at the way I was engaging an intensely small audience that the manager actually came up to me mid-song and told me if I uttered another word that wasn’t part of a song, he’d pull the plug on me. You at home might think that what I do in the Marc With a C act is everyday and run of the mill, but man… five years ago in Orlando, crowds simply weren’t getting it at all. The few that did were die-hards, but the people that hated it? Wow… they really, really hated it. Like to the point that I actually got beat up onstage once for taking the persona too far. As a result, I lost a good portion of my hearing in my left ear, but karma saw that a gator bit off like half of his face a few years down the line. It all works out.

 

I can’t talk about this album without bringing up what keeps it fresh in the minds of fans: the songs “Blowjob Queen” and “Monkeys Comin’ Outta Yo Ass”. Let’s talk about ‘em for a second.

1.       Yes, it’s true that I was threatened with a lawsuit over “Blowjob Queen”.

2.       I do strongly dislike “Monkeys”. I first heard it on a Steve Poltz bootleg. I couldn’t understand the lyrics on the short improv version that he did that night, so I made up my own. I had no idea it’d become such a popular thing. He’s since released a version that blows mine away, and is actually very similar to the way I’ve done it. Please ask him to play it, not me, as it’s pretty much his song anyways.

What did I learn from listening to this album? Mostly that the audience just came to be entertained by you. As long as what you’re doing is consistently good, the audience doesn’t mind hearing new material. It’s all in the way you sell it to them with your stage presence. Since I’ve now released so freaking many songs, I stress out over setlists like you wouldn’t believe. I know that even if I play for three hours at this point, I’m still going to leave out someone’s favorite song. Listening back to this old show, I’m noticing that it didn’t used to be such a factor. The shows were vastly more interesting when I was doing exactly what I wanted, and only occasionally dipping into the pool of crowd favorites for them. There’s a large chance that you’ll see a return to this mindset in the upcoming Marc With a C shows, especially after hearing “One Planned Slip” for the first time in years.

2003 – Hey Rape Girl Vol. 1: I could probably write a novel about this EP. Here’s the short version of the story:

I’d been slowly working on a song cycle since 1999 about a girl that sought out fantasy rape situations. Sometimes these were in controlled environments, sometimes not. Just about a woman that enjoyed not the actual sexual sensations, but more the satisfaction that came from experiencing things that most would consider taboo. I was deeply disturbed by meeting people in my personal life that fit the 100% fictional character in the story to the letter. Multiple people, actually. When I decided to narrow it down to the six songs that fit the bill best, I literally locked myself in my house for one week with Jessica Frick’s four-track, and sort of lost my mind in the process of recording what might seem like a noisy, strange and tossed off EP to some. During the last stretch of recording, I’d been obsessively reading about frequencies that reportedly induced nausea with the intention of using them on the album. I’d also been researching information about “bug chasers”, which are a subset of homosexual men that want to be “impregnated” with the HIV virus. The songs are alternately sung from the female leads perspective and the male that’s sharing the experience with her at the moment. I made no effort to separate the two voices, and one family member of mine refused to speak to me for months after hearing the album, as she was that deeply disturbed by the subject matter.

My biggest frustration with this EP was and always will be the fact that I was recovering from the aforementioned ear damage during the mixing process, making it impossible for me to mix the EP in stereo, which made my attempt at inducing nausea during the title track absolutely futile. I love the low fidelity heard on this recording. It’s got a low bassy rumble, with really clear highs that cut through the hiss better than I could have planned at the time, given the state of my hearing. My voice isn’t in great shape here, but… again, that was the hearing problems. Listening to it now in 2008, I’ll say that I dislike the choices I made to play with pitching my voice an octave up on “Every Inch Of You” and “Long Distance Dedication”. I expected to be embarrassed by some of the lines on the album by now, but knowing that I’m singing from the point of lead female role dulls that edge for me. Some of the silly cliché lines I said in the title track and at the end of “Long Distance Dedication” should bother me, but the girl in the story would have said the exact lines in the verses, even though she is highly intelligent, given how aware she is about the situations she’s seeking, how in touch she is with her sexuality – which is really just a hobby and not the quest it comes off as in the album – and also her ability to continuously outsmart men into thinking that they have the control… while she’s obviously manipulating them into taking advantage of her, but only in the ways she deems okay.

I’m not sure how well the story translates to people that aren’t me, but there’s very little I’d change about this EP now. Maybe I’d not have played with the pitch control so much, and I’d have waited until my ears were fully healed before I tried to jump into mixing this… but that’s my biggest shortcoming. I always feel the need to capture the immediacy and excitement of finishing a song on tape, and not so much making a record of the song after I’m comfortable with it and it’s become what it eventually will onstage. Records and stage shows are two totally different things, and as I go through this back catalog, I’m finding that I don’t treat it that way as much. It’s something I’ll certainly be more aware of in the next project… and as for what else I’ve learned here from this EP? That I shouldn’t be scared of experimenting. My favorite part of this whole EP is the end of “Every Inch Of You”, when I’m singing a melody line into the sound hole of an acoustic guitar that’s being run through a distortion pedal, plugged directly into the four track. It’s the little things like that and the tones that I somehow pulled off in the middle and ending of the title track – which I honestly have no recollection of how I did it in general, let alone with only four tracks – that totally make this for me. The first thing I made that I felt great standing by 100%, even if the listener wasn’t gonna get it.

By the way, I’ve been asked before why I don’t do more songs from “Hey Rape Girl” at shows. The answer is simple. I only performed it in its entirety one time. I opened with the six songs from the EP, and left the stage as soon as they were done, crying like a little baby. These songs don’t mean much to me on paper, but they affect me very deeply when I sing them. I’m still not sure why… and that’s also why there’s never been a ‘volume two’. There likely never will be.

2003 – Shock Treatment: As I add a little more to this album whenever the mood strikes me, I’m not sure that I can really comment on it. I can tell you that I listened to it again a few months ago, and I found that I wasn’t totally comfortable with how dry some of the solo performances were. I added a bit of room tone to it, and one day I’ll let the updated version be heard.

This album wasn’t heard until 2004, and new songs were added to the album in 2006. The reasons for this are so myriad that it would take longer than I want to spend on this topic to explain it all. This album had been in the planning stages since the inception of the Marc With a C monker, and I still feel that the songs that Richard O’Brien wrote for this soundtrack are vastly misunderstood. I’ve seen comments about this record on the intraweb that complain about how slowly I redid some of these tunes, particularly “Duel Duet”. I’ve also gotten a bit of crap for getting some lyrics wrong. Let me make something abundantly clear about this… I wanted to make someone else’s songs sound the way that they feel to me. This meant doing the record without using a lyric sheet because the only true interpretation could be expressed by singing what my brain processed the words to be. Everything was uniformly done in one take as soon as I was comfortable enough with the song to hit the record button.

I made “Shock Treatment” to please myself. Even listening now, I think I succeeded in spades. I wouldn’t change a thing now, not even the heavily criticized noise version of “Carte Blanche”. And I often think I’ll leave the project as is, but a big part of me would still like to do “Looking For Trade” at some point. What I’ve learned by going back to this one is that if I stick to the sounds and lyrics that come out naturally without revision, I’ll be happier in the end, even though it seems to frustrate the listening public to no end.

2004: Bubblegum Romance: And here we are at the war horse, the one often considered to be my best album by longtime fans and the passerby that only likes a few of my songs. How do I feel about it nearly four years later? I still really like it. I think that “Normal Bias” is a superior album by far, but it really doesn’t bother me in the least that this album is held in such in high regard.

If you’ve read any of the journal entries I’ve done in, say, the last five years, you’ll know that this album was two years in the making. In a nutshell, Joe Panton was producing a true follow-up to “Human Slushy”, and when the sessions got nearer to being completed – which probably never would have happened at the rate we were going – I listened to a rough mix of what he’d done with the tracks and made a staunch decision that this album would never see the light of day. I still stand by the fact that it was possibly the best decision I’d ever made as Marc With a C. Chris Zabriskie offered to record the album exactly the way I wanted to, meaning he’d play drums on it, and we’d do everything in one take. We’d be more concerned about catching a really good vibe than the perfect performance. In what might seem like a slap in the face to my prior working relationship with Joe, we recorded this lo-fi gem in Chris’s living room over two days. It’s the unfiltered sound of two friends playing songs together for fun. Along the way, we dropped a few songs from the original tracklisting, most notably the crowd favorite “Liana”, “Music Can Heal”, “You’ve Got This Curse”, and the title track. Only two outtakes exist from the sessions with Chris at the helm, and those are a sparse solo reading of “Music Can Heal” and a rough version of a still unreleased song called “Satellite” that simply wasn’t as good as the original demo.

So when I listen to this album now, what do I notice? Well, I like the fact that I had a few different guitars at my disposal while at Chris’s house. This gave a few different textures in subtle ways on a few tunes. I also really like the way Chris plays drums on the album. Last time I talked to him about it, he said that he could hear himself still learning to play the songs on the record itself, but I think his sparse approach is really fitting to the overall vibe. I also wish he’d have sang more backup vocals than on just “RetroLowFi” with the other people that happened to be at the apartment that day. I really like the way our voices blend, and I think it could have made the album even cooler. I’ve also noticed that when we play these songs live now, we have really sped them up. That’s always due to the energy in the room, of course, but I almost wish we could relax them a bit sometimes. It gets really hard to sing the chorus to “No London In Brazil” when we’re playing it at a breakneck speed, but then again… it’s hard to play that song and not want to jump all over the place. I have only two major regrets about this album:

1.       I regret the fact that audiences didn’t take to “The Real Story” more than they did. It’s a really fun song to play live.

2.       I regret the eleventh hour decision to drop “Satellite” in favor of “When You’re Not Around”. I don’t like the latter at all, but that’s for personal reasons and not because it’s a bad song. 

Other than that, I think this album was made at exactly the right time, with the right people behind it. Even the things that I claim to “regret” about the album aren’t that bad. It wouldn’t have happened without Chris being in my corner, either. This album pretty much laid the blueprint for all that came afterwards, really.  I’ve also taken particular notice to just how muscular the three tracks with overdubbed bass guitar sound in comparison to the rest of the album: “I Need A Hug”, “Just A Few Words”, “The Real Story”. Now, the chances of me ever using a bassist live again are very slim, as I tend to change arrangements, chord structures and keys of songs at a whim live, and a bass player would end up wringing my neck. Drums though? Yeah, I can follow a primitive beat and vice versa. But after paying close attention to those three tracks, I’m  thinking that I might want to consider some more bass on future recordings…

2003 – This World Is Scary As Fuck: This record should be really painful to listen to, but I’m actually increasingly proud of it with each passing year. It was born out of my having a certifiable nervous breakdown, nearly every friendship and relationship  in my life coming to an end, the record shop I’d been working at closing it’s doors unexpectedly, the death of my daughters mother…  and eventually meeting the love of my life. If Nicole hadn’t come into my life at that moment, I think it’s very doubtful that there’d have been anymore Marc With a C records. I was in a miserable station in life, and I met her at just the right time. The story goes that she came over to eat soup with me one night, and she still hasn’t gone home for three years.

The original version of this album was ten songs, and it only contained “I Am Going To Fuck Your Life Up”, “This Is Hopeless” and “God Save The Queen From Navy Seals”. In their place were weird experimental tunes along the lines of “Harrison Ford”, an epic called “Debt Is Only What You Make Of It”, strange improvised instrumentals like “Vasco De Gama”… it was just a strange, dark album. It was going to come out under the name Bunnythumbs, as I’d already done a ‘farewell’ Marc With a C show. Something happened along the way where I simply had a lot more to say – and I couldn’t release the Bunnythumbs album in the intended fashion for a pretty major reason that I should have looked into before planning so heavily around it.

Practically all of the songs that were new to the album when it finally hit the streets had something to do with Nicole, with the exception of “Bite Size Help”, “Terror Song” and “Amy, It’s Kevin”. Those three were just live favorites that hadn’t yet found a real home. And while “One Hit Wonder” and “Stuck With Me” weren’t specifically written for Nicole, they certainly applied to a newfound happiness that I hadn’t experienced in a quarter of a century. Hell, sometimes I still feel like I’m adjusting to my life being enjoyable.

This album was done entirely on a four-track. “This Is Hopeless” needed the most amount of tape-bouncing, using pretty much every single instrument in my house at some point in the recording. If you listen closely, you can hear a phone ringing at the end of the song.

I like the songs that were miked closer on this album, like “God Save The Queen…”. I tried experimenting with miking most instruments further away than usual to pick up the really strange acoustics prevalent in the house we lived in at the time, but I don’t think it translated well. I love all of the songs here, but I think I’d like (for example) the recording of “Music Geek” more if I hadn’t miked it from so far away. It was almost as if I was making it deliberately inaccessible. Of course, those different tones and textures all helped make a pretty unique and interesting unified whole, so I doubt I’d ever go back and change it even if I could.

What did I learn from listening to this album again in 2008? Well, for one, maybe I’ve put too much stock in “room tone”. It can actually detract from a really good song. Also, no matter how excited I am to record a new song, I should probably wait until I’m in good health to do so. See, in the case of “Stuck With Me” – which is still pretty much my favorite song I’ve ever written – I was rushing to finish a demo of the song before an oncoming cold had totally set in. At points I was holding my raw throat with my hands to keep myself from coughing and blowing yet another take. This is why the bridges of the tune are sung so damned off key. At the time, I’d planned to re-record the song, but every subsequent attempt just didn’t have the energy or presence of the first one, the version we’re all familiar with.

Also, until Chris pointed it out to me last year, I never noticed that “One Hit Wonder” was almost a note-for-note rip off of Pete Townshend’s “Keep On Working”. That’s why we don’t do the song now, and my apologies to Mr. Townshend. It was totally unintentional, and his song is clearly the better tune. I mean, obviously.

2006 – Life’s So Hard: If you’ve talked to me one on one since this record was released, I’ve probably made an aside that would lead you to believe that I don’t exactly hold the album in high regard. After revisiting the album – which I really hadn’t done much since I put it out – I’m actually pretty surprised at how much I like it. What I remember about making it was trying to be very mindful of what my then-drummer Ryan Price would be able to do onstage, and since we’d barely played together at all near the time of the album’s completion, this led to a record with hardly any drums on it at all. Not because I didn’t have faith in him, but more due to the fact that I had no idea how we’d click onstage. And if you saw any shows during this period, you’d be deaf if you didn’t notice that we hardly played any of this record onstage together. I also remember putting this album together with Chris via numerous long distance phone calls discussing pacing, song selection and overall feel.

It’s a good time to mention that once I’ve hit on about five really good songs, I’m determined to make an album out of them and it really doesn’t matter to me at the time that I haven’t got any others to go along with them. This explains why the last four songs on “Life’s So Hard” had all been heard in one form or another before this album came out. And let’s not forget that the title track used to be a totally different song known as “No Kidding”. The version we all know now had actually been kicking around since “This World…” and I’d never really figured out what to do with it. This means that nearly half of the album was old hat to me before I recorded the first note.

The record was intended to center around teenagers in general, and in that aspect I think it was pretty successful. It was melodramatic – both jokingly and not – with just the right amount of sarcasm thrown in. This time the jokey aspects were pretty much just flat-out dark or depressing. That’s odd as if memory serves, I was mostly happy during these recordings. I guess I didn’t like working in a liquor store at the time, and I was a bit more bitter at the human race than normal for that reason, but beyond that, I was pretty okay. 

Listening back now, I wish I’d have done a bit more work with compression. I tried using a digital limiter, but that made the vocals come out much more choppy than I’d have liked. Also, if someone would have nicely told me that the multi-channel delay that I went nuts with on songs like “We’re All Gonna Die” and “Diane Works For Ozzy” would annoy me so much later, I might have thought twice about using it. I can say that I love Ryan’s drumming on “Every Single Friend”, the fake choir at the end of the title track and… even though I admitted upfront that “What If I Can’t Swim?” was practically album filler, now it stands as my favorite tune/recording on the whole platter.  I wish that audiences had taken to it a bit more, and that there was an effective way to play it live. I’m gonna bring it up to Chris and see what we can’t work out. I also highly, highly regret my decision to cut “If I Had A Dealer” from the album, but firmly stand behind the eleventh-hour removal of “I Know What’s Best For Everyone” in favor of “Every Single Friend”.

You know, I just remembered that in the first review of “Life’s So Hard”, Orlando Weekly writer Jason Ferguson made it sound as if “Military Brat” was about me beating my wife. Let’s make this totally clear: The song is sung from the fictional perspective of R. Lee Ermey (best known as the drill sergeant from “Full Metal Jacket”) being displeased with having a daughter instead of a son. In no way does the song even mention striking his spouse, but it certainly isn’t autobiographical in any way. It was just something that I thought would be a funny idea for a song.

What did I learn from my revisitation to this album I didn’t think very highly of? Well, I thought that the aforementioned “Military Brat” would be a crowd favorite that I wouldn’t be able to escape. I thought the same thing about “What The Hell Were You On?”. I was way, way, way wrong on both fronts. It turns out that the ones that people took to the most were the most organic songs in the bunch, which tells me that my instincts for the more “straight ahead” approach to recording is probably what’s best for Marc With a C albums. I also learned that the points where I tried a bit of experimentation that was totally unfamiliar territory for me – the lead lines on “What If I Can’t Swim” that I have no idea how I created, the two drumkits on “What The Hell Were You On?, and the fuzzbass on “Every Single Friend” that was really just a pitchshifted and overdriven acoustic guitar – is what ultimately pleases me the most when I listen to the albums later on. Also, I realized that there is such a thing as *too sparse*, as evidenced in “Diane Works For Ozzy”. I’d thought that a less-is-more approach would put the emphasis on the story, but instead… well, it just sounds boring compared to how it works live.

The main thing I learned about what works for me and what doesn’t while listening to this album? The ultimate shortcoming of this record is that it sounds to me like I’m overthinking everything. Which I was. I work best when I capture something that’s accidentally good, and not because I set out to make a certain product or artistic statement. Sometimes you just have to let an album be what it’s going to become on its own, and this record would probably be better if I’d have taken a more “let the chips fall where they may” attitude.

And I think that brings us up to speed. I didn’t feel the need to dive into “Normal Bias” because I’m still pleased with it in every conceivable way. My issue is that I have to sort of map out where I’m going next. And if I put together everything I’ve learned and put it to use on the next Marc With a C album, it’d be the following, in no particular order:

-          Don’t overthink. Let a good song be just that.

-          Experimentation is the best way to keep yourself interested, even when it isn’t always successful.

-          Let the album dictate what it wants to be instead of trying to fit a pig into a lizard shaped hole.

-          Room tone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

-          Don’t be passive-aggressive about your own albums. I’m the one that has to live with and stand behind what I make, so if you don’t agree… I’ll consider your point, but I’m ultimately going to do what I want. If you don’t like it, please remind yourself of whose name is going to be on the cover.

-          Just because I don’t use a bass guitarist onstage, it doesn’t mean that there can’t be one on the albums. Which brings me to a very, very, very important point…

-          Albums are a totally different animal than the stage show and always will be. Don’t bother trying to fight the fact that they are two totally different formats of art and likely won’t always cross platforms the way that I or the audience may want them to.

-          Do what comes naturally, not what you think will please the masses. The masses likely aren’t listening anyways.

So, that’s it. Hey, I warned you that this was gonna be a long haul, didn’t I? I’ll be amazed if anyone actually read this whole thing, but if you did and you’ve got any suggestions that I might have overlooked, or maybe just what you personally hope for regarding the next Marc With a C album, I’m all ears. I mean it, I’d really like to hear your own individual take on things. I mean, if you’re reading this, I’m making the albums for you just as much as I’m making them for myself… your opinion matters more to me than you might think. A lot more.

Love on ya,

Marc