These are strange days to be a recording artist. Gabriel Birnbaum knows it only too well. In November he released a solo album (Not Alone), and since then the coronavirus has put everyone’s plans on hold. Unlike most artists, Gabe also has a day job working within the recording industry, plugging records and trying to get folks to review them. While it’s not exactly glamorous, it does help to pay the bills. The other day he took on the industry a bit, releasing his latest creation, Nightwater via the Bandcamp platform (recently reviewed here).
I remember a time when everything was recorded on four-track tape. With the current trend being more tracks, 16-, 32-, 64- …. working with a four-track recorder would seem to be a much harder process. What was it like for you?
I love restrictions in my creative output, so the 4-track was amazing for me. When I work on my computer or in the studio, I have access to hundreds of plugins and effects, infinite overdubs, all kinds of ways to paper over mistakes and crib final takes together from several passes. With infinite options, it feels hard to make any choice, and harder to master any of the tools I have access to. Anxiety creeps in about what I could or should be doing, and then I get stuck.
With the Tascam, I have limited options. I have a bunch of instruments (saxophones, wurli, guitars, lap steel, bass, plus whatever’s on my phone), a handful of guitar pedals, plus a few tape tricks – speeding/pitching, flipping it over to record something backwards. That’s all there is, really, so I just chose an instrument and started playing, and once I found an idea, I felt around for the edges of it until it was done. The whole process was more like daydreaming than composing. It was so peaceful. I find the computer unpleasant to work on, which is funny considering my job.
You started this project before the spectre of Covid-19 hit the American shores. Did your process change after that, as a result of having extra time on your hands?
Well, I’m lucky enough to be one of the people in the music industry who’s still working just about full time. So my personal experience of Covid was odd because, in many ways, my day-to-day life remained very similar. I work from home in general, and I continued to do so. I would still run in the park in the mornings. What went away was any break in routine, seeing friends, shows, touring, playing music with people. Anyway, because my schedule didn’t change, I continued working in a similar way, evenings and weekends. And I had plenty more anxiety to transmute.
With the election of an American president still almost seven months away, you mentioned that this recording was initially a reaction to election stress and anxiety.
Even though the presidential election is still a ways off, the democratic primary was hugely important to me, and to most anyone under 40. We’re facing a climate crisis, a horrific prison profiteering system, obscene wealth inequality, inhuman immigration policy, endless and stupid wars. My whole life, our country has done and continues to do hideous things in our name. To most people I know, the world looks more and more like a hellscape with no reprieve. I can’t even think about it most of the time. In Bernie Sanders, we had a candidate on the national level for the first time in my lifetime who was pushing ethical and humane policies that would have at least sent us in the right direction. And to lose that chance is crushing. Feeling the country veer towards a “safe” and empty choice that will cost us so many vulnerable American lives felt like a failure of courage, of imagination, of morals.
The climate, in particular, is an issue that haunts me, and this really felt like a last chance to get the kind of huge shift in policy we need to at least mitigate some of the damage. So a lot seemed to hang in the balance for me, for my desire to have a family, for everyone’s future. I don’t know what the world I’m going to grow old in is going to look like. If things really collapse, will the huge digital archive of music that me and my peers have spent our whole lives on even exist anymore? It’s all just on servers, computers…I know this sounds crazily apocalyptic, but that’s the tone of the moment, I’m afraid.
As a day person myself, tell me a bit about what it was like to begin creating something in the evening and then going on into the wee small hours of early morning?
A lot of my sharper and more critical faculties were mellowed out. Usually, I like to have a heady concept, or a really unique chord progression to spur me on and convince me that my work is original. This time I embraced following organic paths, even ones that felt familiar. I think one of the tracks has a whole chorus that has an identical chord progression to an old Wilder Maker song, but who cares? I also did stupid things that I don’t regret, like spending 2 hours playing a mellotron vibraphone part on the tiny keyboard on my iPhone screen. It was so difficult, and I kept messing it up and telling myself “ok, one more time.” It was so unnecessary, and it’s quite low in the mix on the track, but there was something fun about being so inefficient. Or sometimes I would spend 40 minutes trying to tape speed something to a particular pitch only to listen back and realize that what I was trying to do sounded terrible. It was sort of frustrating, but it was also freeing.
How much of a refuge is music for you at the current time?
It’s a huge comfort to me. Not only making and playing it on my own, listening to it all day while I work, but also I have been spending time making collaborative playlists with friends so we can listen to the same music, or using an app called JQBX with my coworkers, which lets you all DJ for each other in a shared “room” that links up your Spotify accounts, so you can each pick music and you all hear it at the same time. It’s been one of the few bright parts of my workdays, and it’s made me feel much less alone.
My bandmates are also my best friends, and I have spent a bunch of time hanging out with them on Zoom, and that has been a refuge as well. I love them, and I know I am going to get sentimental and cry the next time I actually get to be in a room with them, and it will be kind of embarrassing.
The titles of these pieces bring up an interesting point; they all seem to be “miniatures,” small moments in time. Do these items bring up certain feelings for you, or are they merely focal points, settings to extrapolate about.
When I started this album and still had freedom of movement, I thought I would use objects in my neighborhood (Flatbush, in Brooklyn) for the titles. I wanted to evoke the space in a neutral and non-judgmental way. I can’t explain it, but something about purely reflecting the objects around us as they are is very moving to me. I saw that orange crush on the recycling bin, and it was beautiful. I saw the BBQ grill too. I know this sounds like the plastic bag in the wind monologue from American Beauty, and I’m not sure why it’s different, or if it is. I just feel it these days. Musicians like to make everything archetypal and general and pure and huge, and I love the specific and small and intimate right now. And I’ve always loved the ambivalent. It’s trash AND it’s part of my neighborhood that I love.
As we had to stay inside more and more, I shifted my focus to the objects inside my apartment. I have actually been thinking about wanting to make more music about domestic space without sacrificing the privacy of my relationship with my girlfriend, and in some ways, this is that. Most of these objects are significant to us. We use them every day, but they also originate as gifts, expressions of love. I think about them a lot. She helped me with the titles.
It’s funny during these weird times I start wondering what it is that I miss most. I suppose I’m a bit of a character, the weird guy that drives for Uber and reviews music on the side. I realized that one of the things I miss most is just talking to the people at Starbucks. I used to be in there every day after work. What is it that you miss these days?
Hah. Yeah, my girlfriend said she really misses small interactions with strangers. I’m a bit shy with strangers, but one thing I love about New York and miss is feeling like a part of a huge group of people all experiencing the same thing. Spring in NYC is this huge collective orgy of good cheer and the fact that Covid has taken that away from us is what I mourn. It’s one of my favorite parts of the year.
Touring can be hard, but I also miss it. I lost a month-long tour in the EU to this, and it hurts both financially and emotionally. I love seeing new places, playing music every night, meeting tons of people.
You have some interesting insights on the music industry at the current time. The kind of stuff that could get you into a lot of trouble, aren’t you afraid of being so vocal about the state of the industry and biting the hand that feeds you?
…maybe if it fed people a little more they wouldn’t be so eager to bite.
Look, I make my living as a publicist and that’s great, honestly. I’m grateful. It’s so much better for me than bartending or being a barista, which is what I did before. I support artists and labels that I love, and I work really, really hard to help them achieve their goals. But even though I make a living from this work. The artists don’t. Most of the writers don’t. It’s not like some cartoon villain is standing there twisting his mustache and planning it out this way, it’s arbitrary to some extent. But it’s not right.
Watching all of my friends who make their living are touring musicians suddenly lose all their income for the foreseeable future is brutal. These are the rare talents that we should be taking care of, and there’s no safety net for them. I’ve watched people succeed and then be run ragged by agents and labels until they have some kind of breakdown, at which point they get left alone to pick up the pieces.
I’ve heard more rumors of inappropriate behavior with women than I can even remember at this point. I’ve heard about labels with outwardly progressive politics rejecting women artists because they had “enough women,” like there’s a quota. The industry side can be as ugly as music is beautiful.
I’m just so tired of all of it. Why wait two years to release a record and know that I’ll never see any money from it unless I live in a van losing money for six months out of the year. I could release it online myself and…make money. What an idea.
The romantic notion of being a troubadour has fallen by the way side. What we’re left with is something quite different and musicians like Gabriel Birnbaum still struggle to make their way in a system that seems to be stacked against them. They do it because one song or just one pure note can make a difference. Those notes are still out there, the question is how are we going to pay for them?
Order Nightware via Bandcamp: https://gabrielbirnbaum.bandcamp.com/album/nightwater