So Chris has been unflappable. He is the best bass player I have ever worked with, and a fantastic singer. And he's done those things for me—been patient, played bass, and sung—for over a decade. And, as with most of these musicians, I have reaped the better part of the rewards of that relationship.
But maybe what Chris does even more than those things is that he listens to my recordings. He cleans up the dirty mixes and fixes the levels, adds the backup vocals, takes the noise away where possible. I say “where possible” because my recordings can be noisy, because they are made wherever I happen to be, which is almost never in a studio. And so there is always noise in the background, the noise of traffic, weather, people talking and shouting, blackbirds.
But Chris, being unflappable, does not complain when he receives a couple dozen rough mixes from me, mixes of songs I put together in Kosovo. They were put together in my little home office in Mitrovica, in our flat in the neighborhood called Tavnik City, where the bathroom window opens over a cow trough. Where the landlord and his family lived upstairs, and brought us fresh spinach burek whenever they made it. Where I grew herbs we couldn't get in Kosovo on the balcony. Where the walls were decorated with prints chosen by the previous tenant, a British ex-military officer—portraits of hunting dogs, racing horses, and kings hung alongside hazy Pre-Raphaelite vistas of decaying Greek temples and Turkish waterfronts.
And later they were put together in our apartment in Pristina, on the street they call Police Avenue. Where half of Kosovo passes by on their way from one side of Kosovo to the other. Where they change the flags hanging from the streetlights every time another world leader pays a visit. Where the crows and starlings flock in the winter, every evening, coming in waves from the direction of the sunset to the trees that line the concrete boulevard. Up in my little room I finish up this recording or that, and then I always send it to Chris, back in Houston.
He listens to the tracks, improves them at least a little, and makes no comment about what he saw there. Because this is the moment when I must, musically, stand naked in front of someone and, unfortunately for him, that someone is Chris. It's he who listens to what my voice sounds like unaccompanied, and to the harmonies that somehow work in the mix, but are admittedly nowhere near correct in reality. To the questionable rhythm of the bassline, and the layers of guitar that have been constructed to sound like a single reasonably-played guitar. The errors, excuses, surrenders, and out-and-out lies. Chris cleans it up, makes it better, perhaps even sometimes quietly replaces it, and says nothing about it.
In Houston he creates sound designs for the theater, and plays music, often with his wife. For Apocalypse Town, he plays bass and sings. But he also helped to realize all thirty-some songs that we are selling on the various CDs of this show. For a long time now I have counted on him to make all things possible. Or at least, for me, he makes them sound that way.
- t
p.s. I love you, Ex-Yugo pop. “I need to touch / I need to feel / I do not want to lose you / Via America ... “ More 80's pop from Belgrade.
p.p.s. I love you too, Houston.
