Boxer is available on Bandcamp.
This was originally intended as a “cleaning out” album, songs I’d had written from long, long ago – some of it nearly forty years old, stuff I wrote on my guitar, or bass, or my Casio before I had a band to work with, or decent recording equipment – even a four-track.
It was material I had conceived of in a sort of transient state, stuff I’d intended to flesh out once I found my band, which would surely be comprised of like-minded individuals, who’d improve the rough edges and flesh out the bits I wasn’t really able to think through at the time.
It was music that was perpetually in “almost done” state. I had some recordings of a lot of them, but none of them really matched the ideas I had in my head.
Most of the songs originally slotted for Boxer are still in that state. What Boxer ended up being was some of those songs – “Honor,” “The Ends,” “True Believer” – with one more (“The Hands of Time”) being close, but not quite there.
This release saw a massive upheaval in my recording approach, as usual. I switched from Cubase to Studio One on a lark, just to see if the change would inspire creativity in how I approached the music; that worked, but not in such a way that anything I ended up recording in Studio One actually made it on the album. I added new instruments – a theremin, a fretless bass, a StingRay – and my old faithful Stratocaster found its way home, too.
The StingRay ended up being used on one song (“Drive”); the fretless is in “Vibe.” The theremin I found myself unable to use in a musical sense; such is the joy of experimentation!
There’s one collaborative song on the album, “True Believer,” which I wrote and orchestrated, but my oldest son contributed the vocals for the verses. He did a great job with them.
There’s a mix of real and sampled drums. “Vibe” and “Drive” have real drums; the others are sampled. I’d prefer to use real drums on everything, but here’s a secret: drums are loud. Even played quietly. Even electronic drums. And that means that practice time is scarce, and that means that even capturing a good drum sound is hard. I did what I could, when I could.
A lot of this album was driven by frustration, a constant struggle to figure out what I wanted it and its songs to be, a struggle to find creativity in a collection of material that had always been defined by a sense of needing some outside perspective. In a way, Boxer is a surrender to time, a sad acquiescence to the me of 1986, that says that those dreams of finding the right people to play music with, creating a fabric in which all of our creativity could shine, were only dreams.
And like a boxer would, we can only get up and move on.