Justin the Bug Man

Around 2:00 this afternoon, the doorbell rang. Our hero (and nemesis to all things crawly) Justin the exterminator returned for another round of critter genocide. The bell tolls for roaches and palmettos once a quarter, and on such nasty occasions we are usually good to remember pulling bric-brac away from walls to speed up the process.

No more than ten minutes into his rampage of bug doom, Justin burst through the office door with a look of fire in his eyes unfamiliar from our previous visits.

"What kind of Guild is in that case?"

One of the many items not tucked into its usual spot was my acoustic-electric cutaway. He must have seen the emblem on the case.

"It's an F4-CE. Post Fender, but still pretty sweet."

That's all he needed to unearth the true Justin from under pounds of bug-man disguise. What was a gray-uniformed employee morphed into a human being full of vitality and wonder. We engaged in a conversation about guitars, and guitar brands, and recording, and home recording, and musical goals, and songwriting, and lyrics, and, and, and...

Turns out Justin is one of us: a person whose heart palpitates for music. He has a wife and two kids, all supportive of his art and at the same time all needing cash for groceries, shoes, and school supplies. I already knew that Justin pummels bugs to put potatoes on the table, but I learned today that he been jotting lyrics and rehearsing songs for twenty years.

He traded me some yellow paperwork for a 75 dollar check and headed for the door.

"This is your year. You have to do this now." I encouraged.

He agreed to aim for some recording and a little bit of performing in the coming months. I hope he follows through. I hope he can let the music out. I hope he will get heard.

Justin, if you land on this page, know that you have found a small but fiery band of sisters and brothers who all wrestle deeply with the issue at hand. There is music, art, prose, dance, drama, poetry inside trying to push to the outside. Time to let it out.

Why Redline?

Many have asked how The Redline Project came to be the title of this blog. Here is the answer:

Redline is a generic recording term. In an audio project, the levels of the tracks can be seen on a dynamic graph, often a series of LED lights. It is good if the recording illuminates the green lights and fine if the signal goes into the yellow ones, but if the red ones are lit, the sound is overloading the system and distorting. To redline also means to encounter an emotional experience greater than one knows how to handle.

There are many bands, recording studios, music projects, and sound-related ventures that use the term in their nomenclature. And yes, a search of the term will also land you in the domain of public transit systems as the name is a common indicator for subway lines.

Redline introudced itself as a possibility in a simple way: I am an avid mountain biker with passion for the sport that far exceeds my abilities as a rider. I pedal Redline bikes, and my favorite is the Monocog Flight 29er. It may have nothing to do with music, but I liked the sound of it well enough that it stuck in my head when I was looking for a name suited to a music project.

When I took my first office job five years ago, I was making a choice to quiet the music of my life. But there was a flame, somwhere down there, that kept it simmering. In recent months, more and more of those green LED lights flickered on, the levels creeping occasionally into the yellow. As I contemplated this project in the weeks leading up to the New Year, the red lamps lit, the pot boiled over. The music needed to come out.

So Redline Project it is. It is commonly held by many musicians, and artists of all types, that we were made to create. The Redline Project is an outpouring of that sentiment, an acknowledgement that my double-helixes have a loud voice in my pursuits.

I am shouting out to all of you poets, painters, potters, wordsmiths, sculptors, musicians, and the like. What are our struggles? How do the realities of life hinder us from creating? What do we do with the fear of failing? What do we dream may happen? I covet your input and will feature it, along with a link to you, on this blog.

Out of the Woodwork

At present, the Redline Project in its entirety consists of a few patchy blog posts, a Facebook group, and a Twitter account. You can imagine my surprise and great delight to find out that several people from around the country, and yes even a couple from across the pond, have chosen to connect to this idea. It seems the social networking services are living up to their claims.

I am somewhat bewildered and deeply encouraged by comments submitted from people remembering me from the high school and college days. I assumed I was long forgotten; what a treat it is to receive kind remembrances of my then-budding musicianship from many with whom I have performed, studied, and composed.

One of the greatest hopes I have for this humble, strange project is that it will strike a chord (as it were) with other artists - musical and otherwise. If you are someone with an artistic talent that never made it into the stratosphere of fame, please drop me a line and tell the story. Just as I am hoping to wiggle out of the woodwork, it will be a pleasure to bring our common sentiments into the light.

On that note (again, as it were - apparently it is pun day), I am thankful for the two contacts I received with offers to borrow recording gear. $1000 is not much of a budget, but it is still a lot of money, and borrowed-for-free is a concept much more in line with the spirit of the Redline Project. If anyone has an audio interface (firewire/usb), decent microphones, XLR or quarter-inch cables, a midi-controller keyboard, or anything else even remotely useful that is in a corner getting dusty, please send me a note. I will give credit where credit is due.

The Idea

I am a musician. This is admittedly a bold statement because I have not played a gig in over three years, I am not in any sort of band or ensemble, and I have never been in a studio - not even as a sideman.

So what gives me the right to pin such a title to my lapel? To be honest, I'm not sure if I can in good conscience accept the honor of it. Or at least not yet.

I may have years of experience playing both piano and drums. I may have both a bachelors and masters degree in the field. I may have a good ear and natural ability with composing and arranging music. But the somewhat sad and all-too-honest truth is that I am completely average - nothing more, and nothing less.

Has there ever been a musician who hasn't daydreamed about excelling in their field? Performing in amphitheaters to a sea of followers? Releasing the record that pulses through the earbuds of iPods across the nation? A reality any artist must face: there are millions gazing at the celestial beings, but only a few shooting stars. Most end up with shreds of dreams and workaday posts in gray cubicles.

Like most recipients of masters degrees in music, I failed to launch any sort of career in or related to music. So I hung up my instruments and slowly pieced together a career in graphic design. Working first in an office for three years, I steadily became adept enough in this new vocation to build a freelance work base. I now sit in my basement daily, clicking away on my Mac, producing disposable artwork for nonprofit organizations that is, familiarly, neither awesome nor terrible.

I have always felt this drive, and as years come between me and the days of actively pursuing music, a sadness has crept in. I ignored it for a while, but the sense of loss has only grown with each passing month, and I have finally sifted through the lament to see what the trouble really is.

It is not money I am after, and it is certainly not fame. I believe that music resides in me and has been trying to bust through my ribs for decades. To this point my music has been the proverbial tree that falls in the middle of a thick wood. Without a witness, the whole stunning thing comes and goes without so much as a raised eyebrow.

Well, I have had enough of that. It is time to let the music out. Time to create something... put it out there in all its glory, with all its faults. It is the second day of the new year, and at this time next year, I am questing to release a digital album of my music, striving to have 10,000 people download and listen to it, aiming to spend only $1000 to do it.

There it is: a set of goals that sound simple enough and seem all but impossible. Please join me for the adventure.