Recording - December 2014 - 72

A Selection Of Holiday Reads
By Mike Metlay

Without Frontiers: The Life And Music Of Peter Gabriel
By Daryl Easlea. 416 pages, illustrated with color photos, trade paperback. Published by The
Overlook Press, 2014. ISBN 9781468309645.
$28.95; www.overlookpress.com

I had the chance to meet and chat with Mr. Gabriel some years ago, and came away from the experience
deeply impressed; I often wondered what sort of life led to the tall, soft-spoken gentleman who shared a moment
of his time to chat about his music with an overeager magazine editor/fan. He's a figure that looms large in
our industry, standing at the end of an unfinished pathway through decades of hits, misses, albums, DVDs, stunning live concerts, a groundbreaking record label, charitable work, successes, failures, and some pretty spectacular face paint. This book gives readers a broad (and in places deep) view of the path Mr. Gabriel walked to get to where he is now.
The book is thorough and thoughtful, taking much of its text from a variety of quotations from carefully-researched sources and from a huge
number of interviews with colleagues and friends of Gabriel's (if not the man himself); chief among the contributors are Gabriel's lifelong
friends and cofounders of Genesis, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, and the oft-neglected but brilliant Anthony Phillips. Easlea gives Gabriel his
props for his vision, entrepreneurial spirit, stubbornness, and strength, and notes his very human foibles where appropriate. But he also is
careful to credit, as Gabriel does, the many amazing talents whose lives have intersected with Gabriel's, from the famous members of laterera pop superband Genesis to lesser known (at least in the USA) lights like Ant Phillips, Kate Bush, and Peter Hammill.
With a broad cast of characters, some truly touching stories, and more than a few laughs, this book is an informative, respectful (without fawning), and thoroughly entertaining read.

Beating Songwriter's Block
By Gary Ewer. 192 pages, landscape-format spiral bound book. Published by Backbeat Books, 2014.
ISBN 9781617131028.
$24.99; www.backbeatbooks.com

Gary Ewer, a composer/arranger and author who runs the songwriting website secretsofsongwriting.com, calls this a self-help
book for the aspiring songwriter who finds himself or herself unable to come up with songs. It's designed in a unique 10 x 6.5"
format with a spiral binding and cover that lay flat on a table, perhaps to allow you to read as you play guitar or piano. It's organized into easy-to-follow chapters, with pages of text nicely broken up by important quotes and ideas in larger print and boxed Pro
Tips that offer deeper insight into the topic under discussion-or perhaps avenues for exploring it more deeply on one's own.
Ewer's thesis is bold: that songwriter's block is scientifically understandable and systematically treatable, and that understanding what it is and
where it comes from directly leads to strategies that can beat it. And those strategies are not intuitive, nor do they always line up with what "everyone knows" about where songs come from. Ewer argues that relying on inspiration is not as good as relying on hard work-his regimen involves
a steady schedule of writing, even when one doesn't feel inspired, and setting up measurable targets and goals for specific time periods.
The body of the book backs up this basic premise with a framework of handy ideas and strategies to help you along, including the
best explanation of how chord progressions relate to the songwriting process that I've read yet. There are melodic and lyrical exercises,
analyses of everything from successful song structure to the psychological pitfalls and cures of songwriter's block, and even a glossary of
musical terms. The end result is a fascinating, fun-to-read book that may well give you the tools you need to get writing again.

Zen And The Art Of Mixing: Rev2
By Mixerman. 312 pages, B/W trade paperback. Published by Hal Leonard Books, 2014. ISBN
9781480366572.
$29.99; www.halleonardbooks.com

Last but certainly not least, a quick shout out to a fun and enlightening read from Mixerman, the (formerly)
mysterious mix engineer whose exploits in a hysterically funny (but, as it turns out, fictitious) recording session
from Hell became the oft-quoted and much-loved The Daily Adventures Of Mixerman. His topic here is simple
but daunting: what makes a good mix, and what makes a good mixing engineer?
Mixerman considers the whole picture, from basic concepts and underlying philosophies to cold hard practicalities of gear, setup, workflow, and gauging results. There are chapters like "Arrangement and Focus", "The
Mechanics", and "Gear" (expanded and updated for this new edition, with frank callouts of products Mixerman
swears by). My personal favorites are "Dealing With Clients" and "Thinking Outside The Box", where we get
a refreshing dose of that classic Mixerman who-gives-a-f*ck snark that made us love the Daily Adventures.
When a guy advises you to watch where the band members sit in their car as they drive away, so you can design a mix so the
lead guitarist hears himself louder depending on whether he's on the driver or passenger side, you just have to smile and shake
your head... before admitting he's probably right.
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RECORDING December 2014

http://www.overlookpress.com http://www.backbeatbooks.com http://www.secretsofsongwriting.com http://www.halleonardbooks.com

Recording - December 2014

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