AriKoinuma.com

This beautifully recorded gem was a find from a local radio station excess bin.  I don’t really know anything about them, except that they’re Aussies.  These 13 songs are mellow and understated acoustic chestnuts, but with just enough momentum in it so that it doesn’t really sap your energy.

It’s of utmost importance to me that an album has a great opener — it can make or break an album for me — and “Mango Tree” is a great one.  A song of quiet yearning, not heavy-handed at all.  “Silver Coin” has exceptionally lush string quartet going.  I often think critically of strings in pop music — the arrangements seem so lazy most of the time — but not here.  The title track is a stand-out as well, a piece of piercing vulnerability.  “Bella” is innocent, “Paper Aeroplane” is playful.  But the nice thing about this collection is that the overall pacing and mood are very consistent.  Everything feels so relaxed, sparse and organic.  #3 “Private Lawns” is slightly annoying with its repetitive “Windy City” refrain, but that’s my only gripe.

These guys are really accomplished at sounding very natural, which I admire.  There’s not a moment of strain or awkwardness.  They don’t try to be be something they’re not.  Their range has enough variety to avoid boredom but also focused enough not to be jarring. They’re very original, too — I can’t recall who they sound like off the top of my head.  The production’s mostly all acoustic affair, but they don’t sound all that folky or rootsy.  If you liked Nickel Creek precisely because they aren’t really bluegrass act — and had them grow up to be fine parents who still haven’t lost the heart of a child — and then added drums (a small kit, though, with brushes) maybe you’ll get somewhere close to these Stones.

Anyway, I’ve been enjoying this record a lot.  I highly recommend it.

Yesterday was my birthday.  I’m now 36 years old.

Getting older hasn’t quite been the experience I expected.  I don’t feel that I’m getting older — well, yes, perhaps I’m in denial.  But physically, I still don’t feel myself starting to sag.  Like I said recently about my voice, if anything I feel like I’m still growing up, still maturing.  That, I didn’t expect at mid-30s.

The other odd sensation about getting older is that there are more younger people around me.  This seems odd, because I don’t perceive that I’m getting older.  I feel that I’m still pretty green — inexperienced, clumsy, underdeveloped.  So it does feel odd to me that I see more people earlier in the process than I am, when I feel that I still have a long way to climb up.

Every year I make it a point to jot down where I see myself on the next birthday.  I pulled up what I wrote last year and read it.  Naturally, quite a bit of details are wrong — I wouldn’t say my last year turned out exactly how I thought it would.  I was a bit sad to see that some of the issues I thought I’d resolve, aren’t still resolved.

But I can also tell what the underlying feeling/hope was, when I wrote my birthday vision last year.  The description was put together to envision myself feeling a certain way, and I am glad to see that that feeling I was hoping for, I do have it now.  A certain sense of gratitude for seeing forward movement in my life.

So I’m now going to jot down my vision for the next year — my 37th.  I’m still pretty young and green, but I am hoping to see some things realized.  I just didn’t expect to be at this age and still feel like I’m a cocoon or a larvae — dreaming of the day to become a butterfly.

I took 4 years of voice lessons in college, while studying classical music at St. Olaf College.  I had never really sung before that, formally or not, so it was an eye-opening experience.

One of the things I learned then was the fact that voice is one of the latest features to mature in a human body.  It fully matures at about age 35.

Well, I’m almost 36 now, and I feel like there’s been a pretty dramatic change in my voice in the last year or so.  It’s not like I’ve been practicing singing everyday.  I sing along with my favorite singers when I’m driving alone, which is not often.  Recently I started telecommuting to my day job, which has me being able to sing along to my favorite music all day.

Singing along with a singer similar to myself in terms of voice quality and range has been one of the best ways to practice singing, for me.  I try to emulate and blend with the voice I’m hearing.  I also try to practice good diction whenever I’m reading to my kids — which is often — so that I can enunciate and pronounce properly.  I have a bit of extra disadvantage, as English is not my native tongue.  My short and clumsy tongue just doesn’t want to do complicated words like “another” or “world.”

The kind of music I got really into was the metal/hard rock of the late 80s.  Yes, those guys sung in stratospheric ranges.  Not having any foundation in proper singing, trying to reach those heights was pretty much impossible.  Nevertheless, when I auditioned to choirs in college I said I was a tenor.  My choir teachers agreed somewhat, putting me at the outside end of a row in the 2nd tenor section.  Basically I was one of those guys who just had a limited range somewhere smack in the middle — neither true tenor nor bass.  My voice stuck out like a sore thumb because my lack of proper technique and heavily accented pronunciation.  Really didn’t do much to build my confidence in singing.  Though in the hind sight, I should have considered it well enough that I was accepted into a choir.  I had very limited music education up to then, and St. Olaf is known for their excellent choirs.

Fast forward 10 years or so: in the recent year it finally dawned on me that I am really not a true tenor.  All along I’ve been trying to sing too high.  But my voice is actually stronger in lower-mid range.  I actually can sound like a man, instead of some junior high kid who’s waiting for hair to grow on his chest. So the last 3-4 years or so I’ve been focused on singing in easier ranges, being more conscious of healthy and strong singing, instead of trying to hit the high notes.  So it was a great surprise to me when I noticed that my upper range also started extending as I stopped trying to sing so high.

Apparently, a tree grows higher only after fully spreading out its roots.

Nowadays, I can hit notes that I only used to dream of.  It still doesn’t make me a true tenor, likes of Thom Yorke or Freddie Mercury or Robert Plant.  But occasional burst into the stratosphere is now within my reach.  Having a bigger range doesn’t automatically make me a better singer.  But you know what?  I’m really having a lot of fun screaming and reaching high these days.

Well into my 30′s I really thought I was finished growing — but I was wrong.  It’s fun to change, it’s fun to see that you have more than you thought you had.  I’m glad some things mature slowly.  Growing is not over, even after adolescence.

I’m a soccer fan and I rabidly follow soccer news from Japan, Europe and Brazil. The World Cup in South Africa is coming up next year, so there’s a lot of news about that.

The coach of the Japanese national team, Okada, has set the final four of the World Cup as Japan’s goal.  To be one of the last remaining four teams, when Japan has only won a couple of World Cup games in its history (and it was only when it hosted the World Cup on its home turf) seems not only ambitious, but more a folly.

But in a recent interview, he said something to the extent that the play style he’s implementing to the national team is the correct one for the Japanese, and that he can see his team reaching the Final Four.  He said “nothing will happen unless somebody starts seeing it, believing it.”

I really respect him for this statement.  For one thing, it takes supreme courage to make bold statements like that in Japan — where we consider our public statements much more seriously, we hold everyone accountable to a much higher standard than other countries I know of.  Being blasphemous, or at least not delivering on one’s promises, carry a very heavy price.  So Japanese tends not to say bold or strong things, afraid of being considered megalomaniac.

But it really takes Seeing of the Impossible or Unimaginable to make things happen in life.  None of the great inventions and innovations would have happened without that Mind Eye of imagination — the vision that something that has never happened can happen.  So many times we predict the future based on the past, thinking what happened before will happen again.  And that limits our view and slows down our progress.

Everything from world peace to cure to cancer to eradication of poverty — it has to be imagined first, and it has to be believed as possible, before it can happen.  We have to dare.

It seems silly to me, at least to the cynic inside, that I write about dreamy stuff like the last paragraph, when I struggle to make myself and those immediately around me happy everyday.  My tank has a big capacity but is filled so little that I have a hard time keeping myself running, let alone having enough to give out.

But I’m going to keep making small changes and taking little steps, and will make my contributions to World Peace and Heaven on Earth.  Turning struggles into thriving.  I see it.  I do see it.

The older I get, it seems that I am becoming increasingly pickier as a lyricist.  Music has always poured out of me quite easily — it’s now more effortless than ever — but the words, well, they take their own sweet time.

I have my own ideals of what good lyrics is.  It counteracts the gesture of the music, in my mind.  So heavier and dramatic music tend to receive more esoteric and obscure words, while simple and plain tunes have words that just seem to swim closer to the surface.  There’s art in both kinds — simple, ordinary lines can start strike a great chord, while I also enjoy the labor and discovery of digging into the challenging and mysterious.

But recently I dug up some of my grander prog-rock opus to have a run through them, and I realized how melodramatic and indulgent the words were.  I’m going to have to scrape about half of the words to these songs and do them over.  On these more impressionistic songs, I have grown to like the approach of picking out some interesting rhyming words first and then filling in the blanks to paint the picture.  But it seems that I am far from perfecting the technique.  Some songs take years and years to mature, with me changing out words, living without them for a while and coming back for a fresh look.  But the songs I consider “done,” they tend to stay with me a long time.  Still, the great many of the songs I consider the cream of my crop are songs that are over 10 years old.

Perhaps the words are getting harder because I’m trying hard not to repeat myself.  With heros like Glen Phillips, Tori Amos and Townes Van Zandt, I still have a long, long ways to climb up.

This album is in very heavy rotation in my player right now.  Copeland is an indie pop rock band from Florida — and that’s about all I know about them.  You Are My Sunshine is their fourth album, released on the Christian label Tooth and Nail, though the album has nothing remotely religious on them, which suits me just fine.  I found the CD in the dust bin at a local radio station — a secular station, in fact.

On the first listen, You Are My Sunshine struck me as just another Eagles/Beach Boys-inspired act, because of its stacking harmonies and high, falsetto singing.  But beneath the veneer laid something much deeper and personal.  The first three tracks — “Should You Return”, “The Grey Man” and “Chin Up” are all stand-outs, as is the cathartic “On the Safest Ledge,” but there are no weak songs in this 12-song collection.  The production is mature, understated and very consistent — doesn’t strike me as a hodge-podge gathering of songs but more like a uniform song-cycle.  I checked up on their earlier albums and it sounds like this soft pop/rock sound is a recent evolution for them, as the earlier songs sound edgier and come across more like a garage act, with more abrasive guitars.  Tinges of that are still apparent on this album, but it’s mostly a polished and slick affair.  But they do so without sounding sterile.

The main man Aaron Marsh pulls off something that’s very difficult.  First, his light and pure singing — very androgynous (look elsewhere if you’re looking for testosterone) comes across as very sensitive and emotional without sounding melodramatic.  And his lyrics employ fairly generic words, like love and pain and eyes-wide-open, yet none of the songs are shallow nor obvious.  When I try to write songs, I try to bring in exotic words to sound fresh and to camouflage its deeper meaning — but this guy does so with very everyday-language.  Yet its emotional depth is not diminished in the least, and even clichéd lines don’t sound so.

“Chin Up” is the album’s emotional center piece.  Stacked with soaring harmonies and lush strings, this is perhaps the most overtly dramatic songs on the set.

“With your eyes closed,
Watching a strange show play out in your head,
But you were smiling somehow.
And your day froze,
And everyone in it sat still as a rose,
But we were moving somehow.

Back to when we started losing who we were.
Maybe we should only tip a bottle back to keep us filled up.
Back to when we started losing who we were.
Everybody knows that you’d break your neck to keep your chin up.”

On the first listen I thought this was really melodramatic — the punch line about how you break your neck, simply to keep you chin up — the “chin up” gesture seemed too small for the violent “break your neck” image.  But then it occurred to me how true that is — meaning, how we go out pretending, trying so hard to present to the outside world that we are OK, when inside we are desperate and reeling in pain.  Keeping our chin up is such a small accomplishment for the heavy price we pay, the great extent we go to hide the truth.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek corny name like You Are My Sunshine, Copeland really pushes my “sensitive guy” button. It’s subtle and deep enough to withstand repeated listens, too, though the songs are fairly short, arrangements simple, and vocabulary un-exotic.  I highly recommend it to everyone who digs sensitive pop/rock bands with literary and insightful lyrics, like Toad the Wet Sprocket, Jars of Clay and Death Cab for Cutie.

For a long time, I was thinking backwards.

I was trying to fix how erroneous I am.  Reduce the number of mistakes.

But then it dawned on me.  I am fundamentally a good person.  But the life I was trying to live was not a good match for me.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I stopped striving to do a good job.  But nowadays, I try to think not in terms of how to reduce mistakes, but to approach things so that it’s OK if I make mistakes.

Margin of error.  Safety buffer.  Having a spare already in case it gets lost.

If I need to be somewhere, plan to be there early so in case something unexpected happens, I can still make it.

It’s such a simple idea, I feel very dumb that I really haven’t looked at things that way.  And still, there are many moments when I’m trying to cram too much in, not leaving any margins of error, thinking that I can get away with it. Well, I do get away with it some of the times (which isn’t really helping in the big scheme of things) but it’s stressful and worrisome.  I don’t enjoy it.

Giving myself a margin of error is much more humane.  I’m not demanding myself to be some kind of a machine, requiring the kind of precision and reliability I expect of my computers.  Hell, my computers aren’t all that reliable, either.  I swear these complex machines are getting more humane-like — meaning, they have temperaments that seem oddly humane these days.

To err is human, right?  Well, it’s about time I start accepting that, allowing my humanity to simply be what it is.  Unpredictable and not always reliable — but always, always good.   Because life has a margin of error.  And it’s much bigger than what I think it is.

This year was a time of trying different things and really letting my life vision change and evolve.  I started out with an elaborate business plan about an online business, which then got reduced to simple, off-line music freelancing activities, and now I’m back online, but working as a telecommuting web developer out of my studio/office.

The last couple of months I didn’t update my web sites much because I just needed the dust to settle.  And although I’ll never say never, it does seem to be settling.  For the next phase, I’m planning to broadcast some of my songs via quick web cam recordings through this web site, AriKoinuma.com — which will turn into more of my Artist site.  I’m going to move all the service-oriented stuff — like producing and film scoring — to another web site.

I’ve been battling cold myself and my family’s been sick on and off for the last 2 weeks, so I haven’t been able to sing much or work on writing new songs.  I’m still settling into the telecommuting life, too.  So it’s going to be a while yet before I do what I said above.  But they will come.

Jars of Clay has always been an act I greatly admire but I don’t like.  I’m sure if I meet them in person, I’d be great friends with them.  And it’s not that I can’t stand their music — in fact, I really liked their first album, and their acoustic-studio hybrid “Furthermore.”  In the other words, when they try to play the role of generic electric rock band — I check out.

But I digress.  The song “Work” is a very big exception to my relationship with Jars.  I don’t just like it, I love it.  I have always loved Dan Haseltine’s insightful lyrics and everyman voice.  I usually don’t like what he does with his voice, but I feel like he struggles quite a bit with his narrow range as a singer — a struggle I very much share.

And this is one occasion where what he can do with his voice just really falls in place within the context of an electric band.  Being aggressive and insightful at the same time don’t come easy for most bands, so for this one, Dan went for the raw universality of loneliness, the debilitating desperation of it.  The fact that it’s in a weird key for guitars suggests they carefully had to place it in the right spot for Dan to go all out — and all out he does, in the cathartic climax. The fear of being alone isn’t exactly my personal deepest fear but I just can’t help being drawn in.

“When all the demons look like prophets
And I’m living out every word they speak.”

I like the punchline about the fear of drowning, too, but to me the most sobering moment comes from the lines above.  How many times have I done things, knowing they are wrong?  Fully aware that I shouldn’t do them?  The feeling that I hook onto this song sits right there — the fear of admitting that I am an uglier soul than I’d like to admit, being something I don’t mean to be, but can’t seem to help myself.  Feeling powerless to control my own behaviors.  If that is not akin to the fear of drowning, then I’m not sure what is.

Incidentally, the video they did for this song is also one of the finest ever, not just of theirs but of all the music videos, in my book.  It’s a hit-you-in-the-chest display of the band actually slowly submerged into water — from the muted colors to the manic expressions in Dan’s performance to the sheer technical brilliance of pulling off the whole thing in a single, unedited take, everything in this video lines up to make a gut-wrenching emotional impact.  Boy, what I’m writing really doesn’t do justice to the feelings I get watching from it.  The official clip on YouTube forbides embedding, but you can certainly watch it there.