I began writing this at 10:19 pm.

The deal is midnight.

All sins are safer before noon at night.

It won’t get awful until after that border is crossed. Count with me the mistakes you wouldn’t have made had you been home and in bed with your choppers minty before the hour of darkness and despair. Talk to me about the shit you thought you could get away with at three or six am.

Yer fucking high no matter what at those hours.

Borrowed time.

Everything gets worse the further south you get from the clock hands straight up.

There’s a reason this is a thing. Edgar Allan Poe. A lunatic and they barely had accurate clocks back then. A goddamn crow gave him his best poem.  He was high as fuck.  Thank gawd for that crow. Black as midnight.  It was brilliant.  Fucking genius, that raven.

An hour and ten minutes left.

I’ll be mixing a song.  Tomorrow. I don’t know what I’m doing.  I never have. I’m golden because I’ve done it before.  I remember knowing what I was doing. I don’t remember what to do.

I intend to start drinking at one minute past midnight. I can’t stand it.  Every record I ever made is so expert. Every one, so sober.

Satan will be my pal.  I’ll embrace him. I’ll be drunk. At the crossroads.  We’ll talk and my mix will be one that gods and mortals hear differently.  He will appear in the form of a female cat because that makes me comfortable.  He’ll talk to me while I watch his cat lips make a voice that sounds like the crackle and boom of a raging  fire.  I’ll believe him. He will be in possession of one of my cats. It will be talking to me.

My guitars, vocals, bass, kick and snare will occupy more space than humanly possible.

That’s my plan.

It’s 11:36.

It’s 11:42 and I’m having doubts.

I’ll have a puff.

Jesus tells me to brag about it later when I’m already drunk because that’s inevitable.

11:46

I will kill it because I always know what to do.

11:50

I’ll build it from the bottom up.  Inverted pyramid.  Anchor it and lush it out.  Find the hook and make it sing.  So many tracks.  Like seventy. Seventy goddamn tracks.  That would be an analog console forty feet long. Skating back to the middle of the monitors to see if the knobs you just twisted worked.

11:55

We keep what works. Toss what doesn’t.  I’ll produce the mix.  That’s my job.

11:59

Happy Halloween.

Fast forward a month:

The other producer and the artist and I met today in my friend’s control room.

Where we mixed this pig.

It’s actually a laboratory.  All the x-ray, centrifuges and vital function monitors I need. Rows of pills and medicines. Salves and bandages.  He walked me through the differences between the digital plugins we’re using on the screen and the real world counterparts.  The ones I know and understand. The analog ones.  The real ones.

He explained that if I spin this particular centrifuge too fast, the liquid will coagulate instead of separate. He tells me that where I used to use a small bore needle, I might need a big one. That there are several drugs from the 90’s that are no longer efficacious.  He warns me about the radiation in certain parts of the gear. He tells me how flawed his laboratory is and exactly where it’s flawed.

As soon as I heard his monitors I know I could mix on them. He can shine an MRI on goddamn anything.

Everything I used to do and the way I used to think. The same language.  He keeps an eye on the song and makes sure it doesn’t die a gory death because of my ego.  Giving me the side eye. Waiting for me to realize he’s chasing something stupid. Making me the grasshopper.

Then he drops his analog gear wizardry on the stereo buss and the whole thing blooms like giant white cumulonimbus.  Glistening air, pure pop crunch and glassy fat vacuum tube pork. All the sudden it’s dark and raining.

Hard.

Fuck me.

He slides his art in while he admits that sound is more important than songs.

He’s wrong.

I look at his etchings and I get it, but he never sacrifices the music.

Mixing outside “the box”.

The digital box.

Servicing the hybrid of digital and analog.

Thank gawd.

We went to the same school.  The best recording studio in the world. Thirty years ago.  There was no box then.  There were no limits.  It was pounded into us by the best artists, the best producers and the best engineers in the world.

This guy listens better than I do.

He’s got fabulous disco meters and spectrum analyzers for everything.

My friend is talented.

He’s a firm believer in lots of garlic and strong but flavorful coffee.

The clients are happy.  We did a Henley thing with the lead vocal but left it at a fork in the road because I knew the other producer would have a strong opinion. He did.  We took his fork and it’s better.

The mix is lush as a forest on the beach but fucking punchy.

I’m a Jedi again.

We’ll dry the lead vocal up a bit to make it to more intimate and back off the vocal refrain that repeats in the choruses. It crowds everything.

Probably print vocal up and vocal down versions and call it a day.

There’s nine more.

It’s 1:11 am.

I owe the Devil.

Drinks for my friends.

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