For the record: I’ve never actually lived in New York City. In fact, when I wrote the chapters about Dexter Peterson living in New York City, I lived in Nashville and had only been to the Northeast once or twice. Now that I live in Boston, I almost feel like a traitor for opening the new album with what is effectively a love song for the Big Apple. Sing this song on a Green Line train after a Sox game and you’re likely to get more than just dirty looks.

No, I had good reason to start the story off in the distant, foreign land of NYC, but first I needed to dispel a lot of my own misconceptions. I know I may sacrifice “street cred” by saying this (even more so than putting “street cred” in quotes), but I’m strictly a middle-class suburbanite kid. For the past few decades I’ve awakened to the sounds of birds and lawnmowers, not car stereos and construction crews. To put myself into Dexter’s shoes I had to learn something about the largest city in America.

Don’t Believe Everything You See

I’m probably not the only one who based his impression of New York City on movies and TV shows. If Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and 100,000 episodes of Law and Order are my guiding documentaries, then New York City is actually a pretty easy place to understand…

• The subways are controlled by roving street gangs who spray paint everything within reach and threaten everyone with guns and knives.
• Homeless people constantly wander around yammering to themselves and harassing people for change.
• Every street is littered with… well, litter. And people sleeping in boxes, used needles, obvious hookers…
• The sewers are infested with ninjas and Ron Perlman.
• Making eye contact with anyone, anywhere, for any reason will get you shot, stabbed, or both.

Big Apple residents, stop me if any of this sounds familiar. Maybe all stereotypes are formed around a grain of truth, but my few experiences actually visiting New York have been nothing like this.

Yeah, it’s crowded. Duh. But the impersonality of a major metropolis doesn’t completely degrade everyone’s sense of humanity. A suburbanite like myself has to get used to things like coffee shops with no bathrooms and traffic that ignores lines and signs, sure. The noise level is much higher and it never stops, but it’s not like Mayor Bloomberg has mandated that at least one jackhammer per square block must be running at all times. It’s just… busy. The subways are dirtier than Boston’s, but at least they run all night.

Where No One Knows Your Name

The important thing I noticed about the people of New York, though, is that they don’t care about you… in the good way. So many people from so many different parts of this planet live in such a small area that nothing really seems out of place. You can see a flaming queer in rubber shorts, an Orthodox Jew, an African in a dashiki, and a Muslim couple complete with long beard and hijab all waiting for the same bus. And nobody’s trying to kill each other (mostly they’re all just noses-down staring at their iPhones anyway).

Dexter could bump into all his former and future lives right there in Manhattan and nothing would seem out of place- WWII uniform, Antarctic parka, 1970′s lab coat, powdered wig… He wouldn’t even need to be near Broadway for people to accept such variety and move on with their lives.

Dexter himself grew up in Suburbia, just like me, but the Big Apple seemed like the best natural camouflage for someone living as thousands of other people. If he ever wakes up at home and can’t quite shake the effects of his previous life, he could still venture outside with little chance of anyone calling the police. I doubt he’d be able to do the same in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota.

Writing About What You Know

There’s no way I could claim to know what it’s like living in NYC, even if I grilled Ariel Hyatt for info. Then again, there’s no way Gene Rodenberry knew what space travel was like or Anne Rice knew what living through multiple centuries with no sunlight would do to a person.

I do, however, know what it’s like to feel lost. I know what it’s like to miss my home and my routine. I know what it’s like to be afraid of commitment and what it’s like to be self-centered. I know what it’s like to open up to someone for the first time and share secrets you wouldn’t even admit to your cat.

I know what it’s like to fall in love when you least expect it.

Like all science fiction and most adventure stories, The Lives of Dexter Peterson isn’t an autobiography. While “living in New York City” is a perfectly attainable feat, in my case it’s merely a backdrop to what’s really happening: A young man is lost in his own search for identity and no one- not one of the millions of people he calls neighbors -can help him figure out who the hell he really is.

So my latest album (and novella, and graphic novel) is called The Lives of Dexter Peterson, in case you haven’t heard me raving about it lately. Sure, it’s a new batch of musics and quite possibly the best-sounding record I’ve ever made, but I don’t think I’ve ever really gone into detail about who the hell this Dexter Peterson is and why I’m writing about him.

Those that know my inspirations and tastes might think that the album title’s some kind of homage to Ben Folds’ The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. Sure, that album kicks many flavors of ass and I’d love to think that Dexter and Reinhold might be friends somewhere in the charts, but other than the lengthy title they really have nothing in common besides a lot of piano.

No, Dexter’s origins are a bit more meta than that.

Strategically Planned Chaos

Back in 2005 (you know, when Facebook was where you found your old college buddies) I took part in something called NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to start with a blank page on November 1st and write 50,000 words by December. That’s over 1,600 words per day, or about five and a half standard paperback pages. Every single day. This kind of pace guarantees two things:

1. Whatever you write is probably going to be crap.
2. Any story you’ve got in mind will either be rock-solid or totally disintegrate, either of which can lead to a good novel.

It’s the second point that led me to create Dexter. I figured that if I was going to survive an effort like this, I’d better be working with a story that could move with the kind of random attention span I’d likely be suffering. Hence, Dexter was born not out of something truly compelling that I needed to say, his Genesis was more a utility to prevent writer’s block from killing my daily word count. His ordeal of finding his entire world shifted like the Mad Hatter’s tea party made for a convenient way to push the word count higher without devoting any excess time to a dying plot line.

Since Dexter’s reality jumps from one life to the next at any given moment, I had the freedom to abandon a thread as soon as I started running out of ideas. It’s the dream of every twenty-something male who’s afraid of commitment.

From Chaos, Meaning

About halfway into my NaNoWriMo ordeal, I actually began to formulate a direction for Dexter. If anything, his story is a story about finding focus. Are you the kind of person who has never held a job for more than a few years? A serial dater? Have you changed addresses more than you’ve changed hairstyles? You can probably relate to Dexter, even if you’re not a time-traveler. Dexter’s story is the same as every post-college American kid currently wandering Europe with a giant backpack and a 2-terabyte iPhoto library.

And yet he finds something in his existential ADD that brings consistency: Alexandria. When I started the outline process in late October 2005, she wasn’t in there at all. For all I’d blocked out beforehand (yes, that’s allowed in the NaNo rules), I never planned on Dexter meeting a girl that would change him. I suppose none of us really plan on meeting someone like that, but if we’re lucky we do. I’d like to think I’m that lucky.

So for thirty days Dexter lived in my tortured sense of direction (poor guy), but as the month wore on I found it easier to coalesce a coherent world for him. Ideas recapitulated in surprising places. An endgame began to present itself with each new idea. Sure, Dexter’s story began as an etude or an exercise, but it became something strangely autobiographical.

From the chaos of my imagination, a nascent sense focus emerged. This was also the year I released Beer & Coffee.

Life By Life, Track By Track

In the coming weeks I’ll try to post some more detailed explanations about each of Dexter’s lives as they’re detailed in the novella. Each of the album’s tracks will be explained a bit better as well. Hopefully I can impart a better understanding of who Dexter Peterson is and, with any luck, I’ll come to a better understanding myself. Penning the story and creating the album aren’t the final steps in this creative process, they’re really just milestones.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. They not only help make Dexter more real to you, they make him more real for me as well.

Turning A Harpsichord Into A Guitar

I swear, I don’t base my blog posts on what C.C. Chapman writes in the morning, but today it seems we’re writing about the same subject:  How limitations spark creativity.  Kudos for beating me to it, Mr. C., you win this time…

The album I’ve been working on for the past year and a half presented all kinds of challenges:  How do I take a story called The Lives of Dexter Peterson and write music to accompany it?  Will I be able to bring a fictional character to life through more than one medium?  Can I still do all this stuff myself or do I need to start kissing some record label asses?

For all the external challenges I faced, I decided to impose one challenge of my own:  This album will use only six instruments. In the past I’ve drawn from all kinds of sonic palettes.  Hell, Goodbye Planet Earth used everything from strings to synthesizers, tubular bells to a distorted washing machine loop.  And, of course, robots.  For the new album, though, I wanted to see if I could create the sounds I wanted with the same 6 elements:

1. Vocals
2. Piano
3. Electric Piano
4. Harpsichord
5. Bass Synth
6. Percussion

Something I discovered, though, was that this self-imposed limitation did not hamper my creativity in any way.  In fact, it broadened my abilities as a composer and arranger.  Let’s say there’s a spot in a song that needs a low-mid-range BIG sound to make it full.  Normally I’d grab something like a Hammond B-3 organ and play a big thick chord in the background- works every time.  Big fat organ = one of Matthew Ebel’s usual tricks.  With a 6-piece palette, though, I had to think of new ways to fill that gap.

An Actor Playing A Role

Harpsichord (Photo by dalcrose)

Since The Lives of Dexter Peterson is an album about a fictional character, I had to become an actor during the writing process.  The songs, for the first time, weren’t strictly coming from my voice and my experiences.  The limitations of my own life didn’t dictate what I wrote about.  Though I’ve never been to outer space, I had to become a starship captain and imagine what I’d feel if I watched the woman I loved drifting away from me through an escape pod porthole.  I played a role, just like I’ve done on stage in plays, musicals, and opera.

In the same way, the six instruments had to do the same.  The limitations of a harpsichord, for example, are many:  It sounds tinny on top and boomy on bottom, it doesn’t sustain indefinitely like an organ or strings, its dynamic range is limited, and the plectrum makes an audible sound when your fingers come off the keys.  So what?

I just released a video for my Matthew Ebel dot net members showing how the harpsichord dressed itself up as an electric guitar and sang. The instrument could sound so much larger than its inventor ever intended, thanks to modern guitar amps and pedals.  By limiting my sonic palette for this album, I discovered the potential that some of these simple keyboard instruments possess.

Here’s an example of what the harpsichord sounded like on the album, followed by what it sounds like on its own:

Harpsichord Guitar Example (Download MP3)

Again, if you want to see the video of exactly how I transformed a harpsichord into a guitar, grab an All-Access or higher pass at Matthew Ebel dot net and watch while it’s still available.

In any case, who knows what discoveries and new abilities will arise from limitations?  I am a limited person, just like you, but I have no idea what I will become- either in spite of or because of those limitations.

Image via Wikipedia

You probably collected something at some point in your life, right?  Runtt collects vinyl records, I’ve got a stash of old badges from conventions I’ve been to, I know a lot of dads that collected enough National Geographic issues to build a magazine fort.  God knows if you’re reading my blog there’s a good chance you have a stack of comic books somewhere.  Whether they’re on your bookshelf or in your attic depends on how regularly you need to escape from reality.  Do we really think about monetary value when we hoard things like these?

Absolutely not.  What’s valuable to us are the sentiments we attach to things like comic books.  Just like the CD’s that people buy at my live shows, they’re tokens of emotional memory.  Sure, someone could buy my music on Amazon from their phone while they’re sitting in the audience, but the tangible properties of a CD will rouse an echo of the emotions they felt in that room that night.

In any case, at some point in your life we’ve all had to make a decision to either free up storage space or hang onto something for no good reason.  Thank God this guy kept that old stack of comics in his attic:

Rorrer, 31, of Oxnard, Calif., said he thought his great uncle Billy Wright’s comics were cool, but he didn’t realize how valuable they were for months after finding them neatly stacked in a basement closet while helping clear out his great aunt’s Martinsville, Va., home a few months after her death…He found out that his great uncle had managed as a boy to buy a staggering array of what became the most valuable comic books ever published, and kept them in good condition.

…The Action Comics No. 1 – which Wright bought when he was about 11 – is expected to sell for about $325,000. A Detective Comics No. 27, the 1939 issue that features the first appearance of Batman, is expected to get about $475,000. And the Captain America No. 2 with Hitler on the cover that had caught Rorrer’s eye? That’s expected to bring in about $100,000.

-KCRA.com

A single, thin stack of newspaper-grade wood pulp bound in flimsy card stock, strategically splattered with four pigments.  Two million dollars. Damn.  I guess that which carries emotional value for me might just carry the same for someone else…  someone who might’ve freed up storage space and regretted it later in life.  Nobody read a little booklet about a man in red underwear and thought “when I retire, I’ll sell this thing for six figures.”

All they thought was “when I read this, I can leap tall buildings in a single bound.”  That kind of feeling belongs on display.  That’s the value of a good comic book, a good story, a good song.  That is why our attics are stuffed to the rafters.  Don’t be afraid to go digging through your emotional echoes sometime, you might just find treasures worth keeping on display.

Image via Wikipedia

Like you, I dream of fantastic things.  I call myself a space pirate captain because, in my mind, I want to be out there.  You know, that Shatneresque “out there” that implies boldly going and exploring strange new worlds and all that.  Maybe even the occasional green woman here and there, but mostly I’m interested in the new scenery.

Fortunately my line of work involves a bit of travel- more so than most cubicle-dwellers, I’m sure.  Thus far, though, it’s only been around the USA.  I’m not complaining- there are some amazing things to see in every state (even New Jersey).  In fact, I’m sure there are people who already envy the amount of getting around I’ve done in the past few decades, but I still find myself less than satisfied.

I dream of mountaintops wreathed in clouds (like Machu Picchu).  I dream of cliffside temples where Buddhist monks spend their entire lives just trying to learn how to be quiet.  I dream of Antarctic tundra where only penguins, Russian scientists, and crazy bastards dare to tread (I mostly envision that view from the inside of something with heated cup holders).

As much as I’m sure there is to see out there, I could spend several lifetimes just seeing what’s around here.

I Write What I Dream

This is why I write.  Hell, my latest effort- The Lives of Dexter Peterson -is practically a catalogue of places I’d like to see.  I’ll never be able to see 17th-century Jamaica, but maybe I can see what it’s become in the last 400 years.  I may or may not be able to visit a space station before I die, but that just means Antarctica isn’t too far by comparison.  I’ve never been to France, Germany, England, or anywhere else outside of North America.

But I will.  Part of the reason I write is because I am there whenever I’m creating something.  I put pen to paper because these narrative fantasies let me explore even while I yet lack the resources to do so in person.  Who knows, maybe the next blog post will come from somewhere out in deep space.

What places do you dream about?  When you close your eyes and try to make your manager’s voice go away, what scene fills your mind?  Write about it, please, and let me know where your mind spends its vacation time.

This is a guest post by my talented artist friend Genesis Whitmore.

I powwow with artists sometime and during one discussion the subject of people’s characters came up. I’m altering the specifics just in case someone is afraid I’m singling them out, but basically it came down to someone loudly insisting their character was unique because they had different colored markings. Their cheetah had blue and purple spots while someone else’s cheetah had purple and blue spots.

I can almost discern the age and creation timeline of someone’s character by their appearance these days. A lot of the old guard represent themselves with fairly common characters that resemble their creators. As time went on people started picking more exotic creatures, then we ended up with characters that had wings, multiple tails, horns, then hybrid animals, then exotic colors and more horns and wings and tails and elaborate tattoos and jewelry, and they were no longer known by their creator names. Joe Fox became Steeltalon Dragonwolfen (And if there is a Steeltalon Dragonwolfen, I apologize for taking your name in vain).

All this is well and good, but one of the problems is that people are creating characters for the sole purpose of them being different with no thought to design. They just want MORE wings, MORE bright colors, MORE words in the name, MORE hybrid.

One thing I find in common with the really detailed and strange creations is that the creator always has the same complaint about their commissions, “Nobody ever gets my character right!” It’s amazing how few people consider that they just have a crazy design that needs to be simplified or changed instead of simply blaming the artist.

During a livestream I pulled my blotter sheet under the camera view so people could see the mad swatches of color that covered it from me testing the hundreds of colors I use as I work. Then I got a black marker and drew a simple black rectangle next to it. I asked the audience which was more memorable and the answer was the black marking.

Look at iconic characters from comics and consider how many have very simple color schemes. Their uniforms are 1-3 colors. Some have weird physical characteristics but not all of them. The thing that makes the character unique is what it does and how it acts.

People are losing sight of what makes a character unique and turning them into impressionist paintings rather than characters. Having spots that are six different colors isn’t the thing that will make you stand out, and in the long run it might, in fact, make you more of a complicated mess that nobody really finds that memorable as it gets lost in a sea of sparkledogs.

Weird colors are fine, wings and horns and other things are fine as well, but remember that more isn’t always better, or as memorable.

It’s time for me to disappear. I’m so steenking close to finishing my next album, The Lives of Dexter Peterson, that I might go insane if it ain’t done soon. Rather than risk a padded apartment, I’m locking myself into the studio with a pile of fish and central coffee piped in. I won’t be blogging much, tweeting much, or seeing much sunlight until I have a disc ready to send for mastering. BUT I’LL STILL BE HERE.

In the mean time, PLEASE help me out by spreading the word about the upcoming album. If you’ve got friends that haven’t heard my music yet, burn ‘em a CD of your favorites and pass it around. One thing I really want to do (since the album’s also paired with a novella and comic) is play comic, sci-fi, and anime conventions once I come up for air again.

If you attend any of these kinds of cons, PLEASE drop the programming people a line and point them to www.matthewebel.com/geek

I’ll see you on the other side!

For as long as I’ve been writing short stories I’ve struggled to formulate plots and environments that immerse, entertain, and provide an escape for the reader. I say “struggled” because every time I write, that’s what’s happening. Some authors can craft fantastic realms that are so real and so engaging in a single brainstorming session at Starbucks.

Not me. I’ve found that, as far as fiction-writing is concerned, my comfort zone is in character creation. I love bringing someone or something to life and seeing what they can become as the plot progresses. For as many calories as I burn trying to write that plot in the first place, developing a character is actually fun. Hell, it’s practically the reward I get for working on the story itself.

One of my favorite examples lives in my current endeavor, The Lives of Dexter Peterson. At one point Dexter becomes the captain of a small starship and one of his officers is an entity named Huey. Here’s a blurb:

“Hang on to something,” [Dexter] interrupted, “we’re going for a field goal.” [Alexandria] looked confused for a moment but wrapped her arm around a nearby rail anyhow. Huey could be seen behind her, oozing about and generally enjoying the excitement. With no bone structure and a body that closely resembled key lime pudding, he never needed to strap in. The last Dexter saw of him, Huey had splattered all over the ceiling with an enthusiastic giggle.

I wrote the last two sentences as an afterthought- a “wouldn’t it be cute if” moment -never thinking a peripheral character like that would develop much. Then he grew on me. All it took was the image of a pile of goop riding out a space battle and screaming “wheeeeee!” Humans can be predictable and commonplace, but an amorphous space blob just proved too much fun to resist. The “wouldn’t it be cute if” turned into a serious line of questions that would define the character.

If he’s not humanoid, how does he move?

What kind of voice would a pile of goop use, if he spoke at all?

Does Huey eat? How? What’s his diet like?

The questions kept coming and, as I learned more about Huey, he became more than a prop. Huey was alive.

I decided to make Huey a simple-minded creature because I couldn’t imagine any reader taking a pudding-based life form too seriously. The simple mind gave Huey an innocence that further endeared him to me, so I couldn’t kill him off in his first scene. That’s a trap I’ll often fall into; if I end up liking a character, I really don’t want them to go away. I wanted the readers to learn more about him.

Okay, that’s a lie. I wanted to learn more about him. Playing with an intelligent pile of goop was like finding that one Lego that fits a hundred different ways into whatever you’re building. The possibilities stacked up quickly and as I wrote I was almost giddy with fascination. Okay, that’s another lie, I was giddy. At points I actually giggled like a schoolgirl in whatever coffee shop I wrote in. People must think I’m weird.

In any case, as I write more fiction (and, on occasion, song lyrics) I’m always looking out for those characters that I can fall in love with. Whether or not my settings and story progression suck, at least I’ll be surrounded by good company.

Sometimes the muse just ain’t kicking in the way you want her to.

Planning a long-term creative project is like planning any other business venture: If you’re only planning for success, you’re planning to fail. If your budget doesn’t account for the inevitable months or even years of sluggish numbers, you’re looking at your business through rose-colored glasses. Smart businessfolk plan their futures assuming some shit will eventually hit some fan somewhere up ahead.

The same is true for creating a new world. One of the reasons I was so excited about doing The Lives of Dexter Peterson was the fact that it involved more than one creative outlet. I, like you, am rarely ever out of ideas. Even if I’m staring at the keys unable to conjure up a melody, there’s a good chance I’m thinking about some lyrics or another chapter of the story itself. When I started this journey I knew there would be times when I just didn’t feel like making music.

Right now I’m in a lyrical trough. I’ve got a ton of interesting musical ideas in my head, but nothing to say. Even guided by the now-complete story itself, I’m stuck without words. And that’s perfectly fine.

Eventually, words will come. Right around the time my Tonal muse disappears, the impish little Lyric muse will show up again. I can’t plan on when these muses shift, but I keep all the different aspects of this project at the ready. When I feel a creative shortfall settling in, I’ve already got a Plan B.

Music piracy, as we all know, is the sole reason for the downfall of the Big Label Music Industry™, right? Those damn kids with the BitTorrents and the WiFi’s, P2Peeing all over my lawn like they own the place. They don’t value music at all anymore, so musicians will have to earn their living selling shirts or with a side job. Right?

Bullshit.

My industry, like many right now, suffers from one major source of adversity: De-humanization. For twenty to forty years “stars” had been bred as an image of an elite icon, something above the rest of us. Rock stars are whisked away after the gig into a locked bunker where only the VIP’s are let in. Rap stars drive Bentleys made of solid gold, at least according to all of their videos. Country stars are driven to the Nipper’s Corner Starbucks in a Hummer limousine, yet are expected to sing the ballad of the blue-collar working man.

When the peak of “legitimacy” in your industry is to become an icon so far removed from reality, you rob the entire process of its humanity.

It’s something like the tale of Icarus from Greek mythology. The larger-than-life images are like wax wings, taking the industry higher as the fantasy appeals to the buying public. Soon thereafter, the perception of music itself changes: Regular human beings don’t make this stuff, rock stars do. There’s no emotional or personal connection with the human being that made that album on that torrent site, so it’s much easier to download it without feeling guilty. The human being simply isn’t perceived as a part of the process anymore.

The wax wings just took the industry so high that they melted under the heat of reality.

At the heart of all creations- music, textiles, cars, websites -there is a human being burning calories and sweating to make it happen. There always has been. We don’t value music or toasters or plumbing nearly as much as we value each other. This new world of new media has made it so much easier for fans to connect with the artists they love. Maybe we can still be larger than life, just not so far above it that our own hubris brings us down again.

The only thing that will save the music industry- and any industry, to be honest -is a focus on re-humanization. Less of the factory-farmed processes and more of a real, personal “I made this” approach. Everyone loves a fantasy, but as any geek living in their mother’s basement can attest, eventually you must connect with other human beings as a human being.

People, at least in this life, are more valuable than anything else.