May in List Form

A list of assorted items.

May was a blur. Here’s a list of ingredients that combined together to make my May.

• Laying in the hammock. My family got me a new hammock for Mother’s Day, and I’ve been pretty successful at carving out a bit of time each day to lay in it. If only I could convince the cat to snuggle with me in it.

• Podcasts. I do technical production work for a couple podcasts, and one of them decided on a much quicker release schedule for their current season, which means we were recording episodes and I was editing them for release every week in April and May. As I’m writing this, I just sent off the files for the last episode of this season. I really enjoy this work. As far as technical production goes, it’s more like mastering than mixing or producing a song, but there is a tiny bit of creativity required, and I enjoy that. I get to decide the pacing of how the conversation should have gone, which filler words should be included, and which active listening responses should be muted. My favorite thing about the podcast work I do is that I get to dive into very interesting conversations between very smart people who are experts at what they’re talking about. The weirdest thing about doing podcast work is that I end up feeling like I know the people on the podcasts wayyyyy better than they know me; they spend a few minutes with me at the beginning of taping an episode and I talk to them mostly about where to place their microphone, but then I go on to spend hours combing through each and every word they said. Like a creepy person. I’ve talked to a few other people in the podcast biz and they share this same experience, so I’m not alone.

• Washington DC. Matt and I went to DC for The Understory Festival, hosted by Comment Magazine (where Matt works, and I do some contract work for them as well). I am hoping to get some time to write a full Substack post about that soon.

• My birthday. I happened to be in DC for my birthday, and that made for a very memorable day, indeed. It began with me singing a Gregorian chant in the crypt of the National Cathedral, and ended with me sitting in a different part of the same crypt listening to Francis Collins serenade a small group of us with a song about hope.

• Moving a studio. I do a decent amount of engineering and production work at Golden Bear Studio here in Des Moines. The owner/my friend Bryan had been talking for years about moving to a bigger space, and now it has happened! He finished the garage and gave it some good acoustic treatment, then I got to help thread cables and carry a bunch of gear from the old space in the basement to the much larger space in the garage. After that, it didn’t take Bryan long to get it up and running. It is so much bigger, and it has sky lights! I did an editing session in the new space, and it was so nice to be able to look up and see daylight!

• Shout For Joy Forever. Speaking of which, one of the songs I engineered and produced at Golden Bear released at the end of May. Go listen to “Shout For Joy Forever” by Empty Smith wherever you stream music!

• Recitals and concerts. May-cember is a real thing when you’ve got three kids who are tween/teenagers. Our daughter’s violin recital was this past weekend, and thankfully all of her three living grandparents were able to make it! There were school band concerts and school orchestra concerts and friends’ dance recitals that we also attended.

• Soccer games. I’ve been soccer-momming for years now, and this season has been my favorite so far! Our middle guy has been with the same team for years, and thankfully there has been a lot of continuity in the players and the coaches, so it has felt more and more like a community with real relationships rather than something I just signed my kid up for. Plus they’re getting really good!

• Reading. I binge-read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, but I already told you all about that. I am trying to force myself to finish Moby-Dick before I dive into anything new. I also read Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan—a short and quick read—I enjoyed it. Also, I’ve realized that I enjoy listening to memoirs of actors who aren’t that old, and aren’t Hollywood A-listers, but maybe at their height they were B/C-listers(?). These types of memoirs tend to be more down to earth, and they share more human-sized stories of a regular person navigating their way in the creative industry. I enjoy taking these memoirs in via audiobook, but only when they’re read by the author. This month, I listened to Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me and Keenan Thompson’s When I Was Your Age.

• Working on new music. I’ve got a new song coming out on June 19th, and I just finished up a final mix of another song that will come out later this summer. Then I’ve got some more songs to finish up and release in the fall, and perhaps I’ll write a few more for this album, you never know about me.