GET IT OUT!
Apr 1, 2005 12:00 PM, The Remix Editors, Robert Hanson Erin Hutton Kylee Swenson
Listening to Casey Spooner talk about how much fighting and anger and stress went into recording Fischerspooner's latest album, Odyssey, I, Kylee, laughed so hard that I almost started snorting. For one, Spooner is animated and self-deprecating and hilarious. It's hard not to laugh. But there was also an underlying, somewhat painful reason that I was laughing so hard.
They say that being in a band is like being in a marriage with four or five (or however many) people. And marriages are hard, right? More than 50 percent of them fail. I don't know if there's a statistic out there, but I'm willing to bet that the percentage of bands that break up after a few years is pretty high, as well. When Spooner said in this month's cover story that he and Fischer fought bitterly up until the end of the recording process, I felt an enormous sense of relief that I'm not alone. The sad fact is, when my band and I finished recording our album last year, all I wanted to do was drink myself into a stupor. It was painful. I think we called each other morons and idiots and countless other names. Even when we are just rehearsing, there are dark moments. For example, the other day, I went to the practice space after a tough day at work, and, naturally, I played horribly. Even though I had warned everyone — something to the effect of “Watch out: I'm angry” — at one point, the rehearsal devolved into yelling. (Sorry, guys.)
What can you do? Well, the first thing to do is to not lose sleep over it. Don't lie in bed thinking about how everything's gone to shit. The next thing you know, it's 4:30 in the morning, and you're imagining that the zombies from Shaun of the Dead (funniest movie I've seen in months) are crawling into your room to eat your flesh.
Before it gets to that, you have to understand that there will be times (and maybe a lot of them) when you won't want to be in the studio or in the rehearsal space. And there will be times when you'll want to wrap your hands around someone's neck and give them a good shake. But whether you have a short fuse or not, you absolutely need to learn how to deal with your anger if you're in a band and you want it to work out. One solution is a punching bag. We all need one — I'm totally serious. We need to punch away the negative energy in a positive way so that we can stop wasting time freaking out and hating each other.
Great albums come from intense emotion, be it good or bad. But the bad energy, if it festers, will only cause a huge delay in your production schedule or your rehearsal progress. So you need to punch it away so that you can move on and get through the process. I've learned my lesson. And thanks to Spooner, I am not only in good company but also fully aware that something needs to change. Some punching bag out there should be quivering in its red leather because as soon as I buy it, it's going to get a beating it won't recover from.
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