This is about my friend Linc.
Back in 2002, I was entering high school after having spent K-through-8th at a private school, where the total class size hovered around sixteen kids. Conversely, my new high school had roughly 2,000 teenagers roaming the halls. Still, I wasn’t anxious or uneasy the first few months of high school. I met friends quickly, the first of which was Linc. He grinned a lot then, and still does now.
It wasn’t until the end of high school that Linc and I started making music together. My freshman year, my high-school-brother and middle-school-sister went to visit my college-brother over spring break. His roommate had a very simple DAW installed on his PC and I was immediately interested. By the end of summer, entering my sophomore year, my brother and I had hatched a plan to turn our parents’ garage into a recording studio for the duration of the mild Texas winter. At the end of the next summer, entering my junior year, we had started a record label. Linc joined the label sometime during the 2005-2006 school year. We made some demo recordings and played some shows, but then he went off to Austin while I stayed in town for one more year before moving to Chicago.
Linc and I wouldn’t start his album until after we had both finished school. Linc came up to Chicago to record in my band’s basement for a week over Thanksgiving in 2011. We used sessions and parts from the high school demos, along with audio snippets he had made on his laptop during college. We knocked out the rest in the basement, with an intention to add more instrumentation over the coming months and to have it mixed, mastered, and released by the end of the year. The new year came and went and the album wasn’t done. Another four years passed. So now it’s 2016. Linc has a wife and a daughter, and so do I. The album is finally finished, and I just want to say a few things about it.
I wanted all of the time spent on it to mean something, to fulfill some Franklin-esque proverb that you have to put in the time, that hard work pays off. Surely I will have learned enough by the end of it all to have recorded, mixed, produced a proper album. But that’s not the case — the album is good because the songs are good, and they started that way. What’s more, the performances are real, sometimes raw even, and I think they are authentic, a word I normally hesitate to use. The record capture his grin — the same one he’s had since high school — while also unabashedly putting old wounds on display. And just as any work spanning a decade should, it demonstrates progress. Old thoughts transform to new ways of thinking. The oldest songs on the album are grand and self-important romances; the newest song is a shrug and a laugh at the seriousness of love. I’m proud of my part in the album, but I’ve abandoned my high-school dream of being a famous record producer, or overcome the incredible odds involved in being successful in the popular music industry. So in all the years where the project dragged, as I came to terms with these realizations and shifted my career accordingly, I kept working on the album because the songs were good, and because Linc in all of his earnestness and honesty made compelling recordings that say something worthwhile.
Special thanks are due to several people:
Matt and Virginia and Cameron of Pagelings hounded us to continue working on the album during our many various lulls. They are amazingly focused and diligent artists, generous with their attention and personal investment, and they prove to me the necessity for artistic collaboration, time and again. Will Gosner assisted during mixing and was an invaluable sounding board when making production and arrangement decisions.
