Pre-Pre-Production for Apt #6S – “The Listening Party” – January 9, 2000

Tonight I enlisted fourteen of my best and most discerning friends in Boulder to help me pick the songs for my next album. I was nervous. Kipp agreed to host the listening party at his house, ‘Timber Trails,’ off Boulder Canyon Drive. Outside, the winds fell down the drapes in the Colorado Canyon walls and roared to be let in from the bitter winter cold. Flickering like sunlight off a snowfield, fourteen smiles glistened at me above a sea of candles I’d lit for the occasion.

There were twenty-seven songs to get through, and though they were all great friends, I felt uncomfortable asking them to sit through two hours of shoddily recorded musical meanderings compiled over the past year in my bedroom with a dinky 4-track recorder. On top of feeling self-centered and unworthy, I was also vulnerable—concerned about how my friends would react to songs I’ve come to love, knowing I needed to ask them to help me abort half of them. I tried to relieve them of any pressure to save my feelings by constructing a rating system—one that would leave them anonymous after the music was over and the wine was gone.

I’d decanted several bottles of red wine and asked my guests to make themselves comfortable on Kipp’s L-shaped sofa and white, shedding, shaggy rug. I handed them each a sheet of paper with a list of all my new songs and explained with the air of an SAT monitor:

“On these sheets, are a list of all my latest songs. Since I can only put ten or eleven songs on the record, I need you tonight, to help me weed out at least sixteen. Next to each song, in column two, I would like you to rate each song. A #1 will mean that you think the song MUST BE ON THE RECORD. A #2 will indicate you can TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT. And a #3 will mean OUST IT. In the column on the far right, I would love your comments, suggestions, and/or production ideas. Please try to be as honest as you can. You don’t need to put your name on the sheets. If I catch you looking at someone else’s papers you will be sent to the dean’s office, do not pass go; do not collect $100 dollars,” I joked and hit play on the tape deck.

My friends took their job seriously. As the music started and the conversation quieted, I could hear their pencils studiously scratching away. I smiled and watched the floor. I couldn’t move a muscle (besides my drinking arm of course) for two hours. I felt the music might shatter like a mirror if I breathed too deeply, or hoped about a song too loudly.

My friends WERE honest, God bless their souls, and the effort was a success. We were able to eliminate all but 16 songs from the running and I was grateful none of my favorites landed on the cutting room floor. Preproduction starts tomorrow and while it will still be an undertaking to whittle away five more tunes—tonight, in the operating theater of Kipp’s living room, my fastidious friends performed a painful but necessary surgery on my song collection.

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*Preproduction: Before a band goes into a studio to record a record, they get together for a few days in advance to work out production ideas so that no time is wasted in the expensive studio.