#001 — Starting Again

There are currently three instruction manuals on my desk, a Gibson SG leaning against my chair, and more cables on the floor than any reasonable person should own.

Apparently this is what starting again looks like.

Not starting over.

I’ve done this before. There was a time when making music meant three women, a truck worth of gear, enormous amplifiers and a rapidly developing addiction to volume. BØTTØM came out of New York City’s Lower East Side in the late ’90s. We rehearsed. We wrote. We loaded the van. We drove. We played. We loaded the van again.

I knew that world. Give me a guitar, a fuzz pedal and an amplifier and I could find my way around. I knew how to build a song around a riff. I knew what it felt like when a band locked together and suddenly the thing became bigger than the people making it. I knew how to be loud.

Then life got loud in entirely different ways.

There were other bands, other chapters. There was work. A lot of work. A career producing things for other people. There was a family to raise, bills to pay, problems to solve, dinners to make, people to take care of. There were years when creativity moved farther and farther toward the edge of the room.

I never stopped being a musician.

I just stopped making music.

There’s a difference.

And now there’s an SG leaning against my chair again.

The strange thing about returning to something you once knew deeply is that you are simultaneously experienced and completely incompetent. My hands remember things. They remember where to go when a riff starts moving, how hard to hit a string, that sometimes the ugliest note is the right one. They remember the particular physical satisfaction of standing in front of an amplifier when a guitar sound hits somewhere below your rib cage.

Then I turn around and look at Ableton.

What the fuck is that?

Apparently while I was off producing events and raising a human, musicians acquired approximately seven thousand new ways to make noise. So now I’m learning. Ableton. Push. HeadRush. Drum machines. MIDI. Signal chains. Loops. Routing. Things that talk to other things that occasionally refuse to talk to the thing they’re specifically designed to talk to.

And cables. So many fucking cables.

Some days I feel like a musician. Some days I feel like the newly hired intern in my own band.

But something interesting is happening inside all of this learning. At first I thought I was trying to figure out how to do what I used to do without having a band standing behind me.

I’m not.

I’m trying to figure out what I can do now that I couldn’t do then.

That’s different.

Mother King isn’t BØTTØM twenty-five years later. I’m not interested in recreating the woman I was or making a museum out of my own history.

I like her. She was fearless in ways I had no idea were fearless at the time. She wrote enormous riffs. She climbed into vans and drove across the country because somebody said there was a stage waiting at the other end. She knew very little about what was impossible, which turned out to be useful.

I get to keep her.

But she doesn’t get to make all the decisions.

I’ve lived a lot since then. I’ve made things. Lost things. Built things. Raised someone. Loved people. Left things behind. Stayed too long. Started over. Changed careers. Learned how much a human being can carry and how important it is to occasionally put some of it down.

All of that comes into the room when I pick up the guitar now. So does the kid who loved records. So does the woman in the van. So does the person sitting here today staring suspiciously at a HeadRush Core.

They’re all in the band.

Maybe that’s what Mother King is.

Not a return.

An accumulation.

Right now I’m building songs. I’m figuring out how I want them to sound live. I’m learning which pieces of technology expand the music and which ones simply make me want to throw expensive equipment through a window.

Mostly, I’m listening.

That’s probably the biggest difference. When I was younger, I wanted to get somewhere. Now I’m much more interested in finding out what’s here.

There are songs appearing. There are sounds I don’t completely understand yet. There are old ideas coming back in completely different clothes. Occasionally I’ll play something and recognize myself immediately. Other times I think, Who the hell made that?

Those are becoming my favorite moments.

Because maybe starting again isn’t about recovering what you once had. Maybe it’s about bringing everything you’ve gathered since then back into the room and seeing what it does when you turn the amplifier on.

So that’s what I’m doing. No grand declaration. No map. An SG. A notebook. A ridiculous number of cables. A few songs that won’t leave me alone.

And somewhere in all this machinery, memory and noise, there’s a sound I’m beginning to recognize.