Neil Speers on recording music and getting past writer’s block

00:00

All right. Welcome back to In Conversation With, Season 4, Episode 1. Congratulations, Neil. You’re number one. Number one, with a bullet. Number one. Yeah, with a bullet on Season 4. Congratulations. You’re starting it off.

Well, congratulations to you for four seasons.

Yeah, it seems like it’s been longer, but there were many… The first two years, there wasn’t much going on, but now three and four seem to be picking up, so that’s good.

Last time we were talking to you, you’d just had a recent diagnosis of ADHD, and we discussed squirrels and all that kind of stuff. So what have you been up to, and what challenges have you got?

Well, I’ve been dealing with a lot of osteoarthritis pain in my spine. I had an episode, and I still have it, but thanks to medicine, I’m not noticing it. A pinched nerve in my neck made it feel like my arm was on fire, with about 40,000 volts running through it. It took a while to dial in the medicine. It took several days in emergency, going, “Please help me.”

01:36

The doctor finally got me onto something. I’ve maxed out my dosage for gabapentin. I’m also dealing with the same problem in my low back, except it’s localized to the bottom of my spine. We’re looking at some more drastic treatments for that. But, yeah, these things happen.

I’m not doing any gigging these days, which is unfortunate, but I have been doing a lot of recording. I’ve really enjoyed being the producer and engineer for a friend who’s writing a lot of songs. We’ve been releasing them. His name is Ross Thurston, if you ever want to look him up. They’re available in all the usual streaming and download places, like Apple and Bandcamp.

I’d definitely like to hear them and maybe add some to the radio station. It’s nice having local talent on Mental Health Radio. We play your stuff on The Langdon Auger Show, so why not play his? Have you got anything else besides Breakfast at Epiphanies that I can get a copy of and add? I think that’s the only one we have of yours.

03:14

No, I’ve released quite a bit of stuff. It was under Hardwire Speers for quite a while. Lately, I’ve been recording as Neil D. Speers. There’s a guy in Britain named Neil Speers with the same spelling. He released an album about two months before I did, so I had to do other things to differentiate myself.

That’s the same reason why you’re not known as Hardwire anymore, right?

Yeah. I found that I liked Hardwire, but it wasn’t really being true to myself. Neil D. Speers is what you can find. I released an album under Hardwire Speers called Snapshot Blues. I’ll have to get you a hard copy because I have a few.

It’s in all the usual places. If you want a digital copy, just let me know.

I do it all by CDs. That’s why sometimes, especially on used CDs, it’ll make a little digital kind of sound while you’re playing it. You know, that sound, it just kind of goes, which kind of sucks when you’re dealing with digital and you’re live. But that’s the joy of being live. Stuff like that just happens. Like being live here, an ambulance blares by with the sirens going. It’s what you do.

05:13

So tell me, how do you produce songs?

What we’ve been doing for his material is, he records what’s called a scratch track, which is just him playing guitar and singing. I throw that onto the computer and start adding parts, like redoing his acoustic guitar. I have a better one and a better mic. Then I start layering in things like bass guitar, keyboards and other things. We use a drummer, a friend of mine who’s local. Recently, for the last two songs I recorded with him, we used his digital kit.

The kit outputs sound, and it has some decent sounds, but I wanted to be able to edit it more easily than having two tracks of drums. We recorded it as MIDI, which is digital information. A small digital keyboard like this doesn’t have any sounds in it yet. It just sends data to a program, which can play samples, say, of a piano. There are a lot of sampled pianos. They’re actual recordings of notes put into the computer. When you hit a key, it plays the right note.

06:37

You can do the same thing with drums. I put the data into my computer and say, okay, these pieces come out as the same kind of notes as the keyboard. These are the kick drum, the snare drum, the hi-hat and cymbals. That way I can choose the specific drum sounds that suit the song. We’re not stuck to one kit. I have access to hundreds and hundreds of kits and various treatments of them. If I want to edit a part, maybe he’s played one fill just a little off, I can quickly nudge things in the MIDI notes, and it comes across really nicely.

07:36

It has some advantages. I don’t use drum machine sounds. These are actual recordings of drums. I have some of his acoustic drums that he uses for jazz, and I can use those or any of the other sample systems I’ve got. They sound great because they’re real drums played by a real person. It’s just one step removed, just digitized.

When you were saying last time that you had to play bass, you don’t know how to play bass, so how do you fake your way through playing other instruments? Fake is the wrong word, but how do you play instruments you haven’t been formally trained on?

09:09

Bass is actually my first performing instrument. I played guitar for a while, then I joined a band as the bass player. I’ve played bass in various bands and recordings for the last 40 years. I’ve played in rock bands and jazz bands. I was in a trad jazz band recently, and in a Rolling Stones tribute band. I don’t look like [unclear] at all, but it was a lot of fun. I play bass pretty well.

09:52

Things like mandolin, though, mandolin isn’t something I really play. I’m not a bluegrass guy or a folk guy who’s played mandolin all my life. I discovered that the four strings on a mandolin are like the bottom four strings on a guitar, the thickest four, but flipped upside down. If I play guitar chords upside down, it sounds like I know what I’m doing.

I remember years ago I was visiting a friend, and he had a mandolin. I knew this trick and asked, “May I try it?” I picked it up and started playing. He said, “You’re the first person I’ve had yet to actually play a mandolin.” It’s like, I can’t play mandolin. I can [unclear] my way through it.

10:59

Same thing with banjo. I borrowed a banjo to put on one of Ross’s songs because it was crying for a banjo. As soon as we recorded the bass tracks, it was like, this needs a banjo. A banjo is tuned in what’s called an open tuning, which means all the strings are tuned to the notes of a guitar chord. A guitar normally… that’s not a chord. That’s a chord. A banjo is tuned to the chord G, like this. You can just strum it and suddenly you’re playing a G. If you hold your finger down on the fifth fret and strum it, you’re playing a D. Sorry, no, a C.

12:00

It’s really easy to make it look like you know what you’re doing on banjo. I wasn’t doing the clawhammer thing, which takes a lot of practice and learning. What’s called three-string is much like playing fingerstyle on a guitar. Knowing it’s an open tuning, which I’ve used for slide guitar, and knowing how it works and being able to finger-pick a guitar, I could make it sound like I was playing three-finger banjo. It worked really well for the song. I was really happy with how that turned out, so I might have to buy a banjo.

You might have to. I love the banjo sound and the mandolin sound. I love them. I’ve always thought about getting a mandolin and trying it, but these pork chops I’ve got here for fingers probably don’t encourage that at all.

All right. Some of the other things you brought up…

Go ahead. No, keep going.

We’re just going to move on through. You were telling me how shooting headshots taught you the true nature of writer’s block.

13:20

Ah, yes. Through 45 or 50 years of photography, and the last 10 years specifically doing headshots, I’ve discovered that 99 percent of people hate having their photo taken because they’re self-conscious. Even the most beautiful women. I had an assistant who was an international model who had turned down a $10,000-a-month modeling contract to come work for me for just above minimum wage. She didn’t like her own photos, even though she’d made her living as a model for a long time. So what’s going on with that? We see little things we perceive as problems because we see somebody else and think, “I wish I had those eyes. I wish I had those lips,” and so on.

The first time I had my headshot done in a long time, I wanted to put [the photo] on my business card because I keep selling that to people. I thought, “I should put that on my card.” I had my photo taken and thought, “Oh my God, who’s that old guy with these wrinkles, like Keith Richards? And one eye is lower than the other.”

15:00

I had to tell myself the same things I’ve always told my clients: it doesn’t matter. There’ll always be somebody heavier or skinnier than you, taller or shorter, more symmetrical or less symmetrical. Some people have bigger noses, some smaller. They always wish they had something else. Even the most beautiful people are generally the hardest to photograph because they’re the pickiest about their looks. The most photogenic people are generally fairly plain. They didn’t care. They said, “Here I am, take me or leave me. I don’t care anymore.” When you do that, you become photogenic. It’s the weirdest thing. It’s a very Zen thing. You have to divorce yourself from your looks.

Writer’s block is, “I can’t write because I can’t make it perfect.” The secret to writing and getting past writer’s block is to give yourself permission to really suck at it.

16:30

My biggest talent as a musician was that I was willing to suck long enough to get good at it. Same thing with recording. My early recordings were awful, terrible, before Breakfast at Epiphanies. Even that, I go back and listen to it and think, “Yeah, I wish I could have done…” Anyway, I am proud of some of the songs on there.

The trick to getting past writer’s block is to say, “Okay, I’m going to write some terrible songs. I’m going to get them out of me.” Even the best writers in the world, those guys and girls in Nashville writing every day, writing hundreds of songs every year, how many do they actually release of those hundreds? Five or six, right? They’re amazing songs because they’ve got all the awful songs out of the way. They’ve let themselves write those ones. Then they can say, “I’m going to file that. There might be a line I need to steal later.” That’s what they do.

That’s why you say writing about half a million words has taught you what to do when stuck.

18:01

Yep. When I’ve really been stuck as a journalist, I was a journalist in my twenties. I went to journalism school and got onto papers. Whenever I was stuck on how to write a story, I’d pick up a newspaper and start reading it. At some point, I’d come across somebody’s intro, the headline and getting into the first paragraph. That would trigger something. I wouldn’t write the same thing or even in the same style, but it got me thinking about my writing differently.

18:46

Then I was able to bang out a story. I was banging out so many stories. In four years, I figured out that I had about half a million words in print. That’s nothing compared to people who’ve been doing it for 40 years, but that was a lot of words actually printed, not just written in journals or whatever.

That taught me that if you’re really stuck, if you’re writing songs, go listen to some music. Sit back and listen to the lyrics and stuff. At some point you’ll probably go, “Hey, I could use… I can steal this line.” That happens all the time. You hear a line, maybe buried in the third verse, and it becomes the hook for your song.

A hook is typically the chorus, in songwriter jargon. It’s the most memorable part of a song, the part of the song that people keep singing. That’s your hook, like hooking somebody. The other kind of hook is a musical phrase that gets used repeatedly through a song to trigger your mind so you remember it. So, you know, anything Rolling Stones, AC/DC…

Are you there?

20:48

Twenty minutes. Hi, Mickey. All right, what’s going on, man? Yeah, you’ve got the helium voice.

Okay, well, why don’t we restart this whole thing again and just record the ending? You can send them to me and I will smash them together again.

All righty. I’ll end this recording then. Yeah.