Last month, thanks to an Advancing Artist grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council, I oversaw and presented a professional sound design and mix for The Furious Light documentary [trailer].
I’ve been working on this personal film for more than 11 years now—and in some ways my whole life—so it feels strange to think that it is quickly coalescing into its final form.
Shaping the Cinematic Sound of THE FURIOUS LIGHT
Sound designer Kent Militzer of Uproar Music and Sound had the unenviable task of making 35+ years of wildly inconsistent source material sound sonically cohesive: VHS home movies, camcorder interviews, live performances, studio recordings, phone and video calls, archival audio, newly recorded narration, music, ambience, effects...
Kent and I worked through five successive mixes, many pages of my timecoded notes, and one especially fruitful five-hour session together in his studio. (“Fruitful” meaning Kent patiently enduring me sitting behind him with a clipboard obsessing over breaths, crickets, room tone, crossfades, and fractions of decibels.)
Every improvement in clarity exposes something else. A piece of dialogue becomes easier to understand, which suddenly makes the room around it sound strange. Noise reduction reveals an edit. Bringing a song forward changes the emotional weight of the scene around it.
There was a lot of listening, adjusting, sleeping on it, and listening again.
Sharing the Work-in-Progress
On August 13th, folks joined us at the Northfield Arts Guild Theater for a free work-in-progress screening—the public capstone of the SEMAC grant. My friend Nat Wilson moderated a conversation afterward with Kent and me, and audience members were also invited to complete anonymous feedback cards.
One of the first comments during the discussion was essentially that the movie already felt finished, which was encouraging after all those years of wondering when I would ever be able to say that.
The audience also gave us useful, specific notes about the mix, voice-over, pacing, and graphics that informed another round of revisions.
But some of my favorite moments had nothing to do with technical feedback.
People started talking about their own creative lives.
Kent shared that he reached a point in his late 30s when he thought he might simply stop making music before realizing that it was too deeply embedded in who he was to give up. Other people in the room picked up on that idea and related the film’s questions to their own experiences of aging, ambition, artistic identity, and figuring out what it means to keep doing something even when little external reward arrives.
That is very much what I hope The Furious Light can offer others—an opportunity to reflect on the role of creativity and connection in their own lives. The movie starts with my particular hang-ups, history, family, and music career, but I don’t want the conversation to end there.
Musician Talk on KYMN Radio
Four days before the screening, Pauline Jennings rebooted her KYMN program Musician Talk after a long hiatus and invited me to be her first new guest.
What could have been a straightforward promotional appearance turned into an hour-long conversation about music, creative fulfillment, self-worth, persistence, changing definitions of “success,” and why people continue making things at all.
Here’s a little piece of that conversation, about some of my earliest musical memories:
The show has since returned to a regular schedule, which is a lovely outcome in itself.
And then something truly unexpected happened.
[Re] Emerging on Stage for an Autobiographical Concert Series
Four days after the screening, Pauline invited me to perform a 30-minute opening set of songs and stories at the Northfield Arts Guild Theater on September 20th as part of its 411 Concert Series.
The “[RE] EMERGING ARTIST” billing made me smile. It’s kinda perfect.
I spent more than a decade making a documentary largely because I was trying to figure out what to do when the music career I’d been pursing was not panning out and how to maintain a creative practice and identity without continuing to measure myself against that old ambition.
Now the documentary about that experience has gotten me a gig I would have been desperate for when I first moved to Northfield in 2012.
The 411 series this season is built around The Singer’s Voice, an autobiographical combination of music and storytelling, so I’ll be putting together a half-hour set that draws from different periods of my songwriting life and the stories surrounding those songs.
Sunday, September 20 at 7:00 p.m.
Northfield Arts Guild Theater, 411 W. Third St., Northfield
30-minute [Re] Emerging Artist opening set
General admission: $25
411 Concert Series details and tickets
I don’t want to overstate the significance of any one performance. Part of making The Furious Light has been learning not to turn every opportunity into evidence that something is finally “happening.”
But I do find this recent series of events pretty remarkable.
I started making the film because I was trying to let go of “making it” without giving up making things. Somewhere along the way, filmmaking became the primary creative form through which I explored that question.
And now, without any conscious effort or unpleasant striving, filmmaking has led me back to the stage as a musician.
That feels like a pretty good place to be.
The sound design and mix for The Furious Light was made possible in part by an Advancing Artist grant from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council, with funds from the McKnight Foundation. Huge thanks to Kent Militzer, Nat Wilson, Pauline Jennings, the Northfield Arts Guild, and everyone who came out, shared feedback, or otherwise became part of this latest chapter.