Pacing Circles: This was a behaviour that became very prominent for Oscar over the last year or so. Thinking back, it was probably slowly taking hold for years. Maybe it was a “characteristic” that became more dominant or obvious as he aged. I’m really craving that “paint clear” button now!
Treats A Lot: I was getting to the end of the development and mastering of the tracks and recognizing that the approach was redolent of what I had done on the album, “So Many Birds,” back in early 2021. I was playing around with a title for this song and wanted it to represent something about Oscar in this last period that brought us happiness (the sadness is covered amply elsewhere). I thought, “I still like treats!” But that conjured voids… “Everything else is gone. But I still got this!” So then I got to “I like treats a lot.” But it seemed too long and too concrete. Then I remembered the song “Betty A Lot” on the “So Many Birds” album. The chorus of the song starts, “I really like Betty a lot.” Though even Oscar’s tail had stopped wagging (except once when I came back from being away for a few days), he still came running when he realized there might be treats!
Tupperware Barriers: While (at least compared to the recently-departed pandemic) in 4 months I hadn’t produced much music, I did remaster a lot. At one point I remastered the album that, in some ways, my “Stewarding Experience” master’s thesis was based upon. The thesis mostly ruminated on my experience of producing the album, which chronologically covered my “memories” of what led me to calling myself an “addict,” and then what led to me stopping. While that was the content, it was the process that felt, not new to me… but worth trying to define. Anyway, as I was remastering the song, “Fear of Drinking” (from what had been one album, but which, in the course of remastering, I decided to break into three… so this one falls at the end of the middle album, “Alcoholics Anonymous”). The density of the “background music” on the song seemed overwhelming, so, among other things, I stripped away a lot of what might be called “crackle” in one pass, and then reduced what could be called harmonic “hum” in another pass. But I didn’t just remove the crackle and hum, I also outputted the crackle as one file and the hum as another. Then I used those files to start creating something new. Oscar forgot he could back up, so he’d end up stuck in lots of places… mostly corners. Thankfully he was a mini-dachshund with very short legs, so I could put rounded, plastic Tupperware containers in places where he might otherwise get stuck and anxious. I might find a circumscribable correlation between Oscar’s “forgetting how to back up” and the process or content of this song… but, really, what does “forgetting how to back up” NOT have to do with?
A Lifetime: As I fleshed out this song, starting about a week after we said good-bye to Oscar, it took on this joyous tone. I think it seemed a bit much, so I started to mix up pieces of the song, overlay them… not losing the joyousness, but making room for all the momentary fissures of other feelings that are always bubbling up amid joy… or is it the joy always bubbling up amid…?