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Stephen Pickering

Author: Stephen Pickering

  • The Symbolic Meaning of April Is the Cruelest Month

    “April is the cruelest month” — My first impulse when I hear this, is that nature becomes so beautiful so much what a fairy-tale or magical mythology looks, feels, and tastes like, that it fools you more or less into thinking you are on the right track to embark on an adventure of an everlasting kind, but then when the season ends with all its mythologically inclined and emergent sensations, so does your sense of everything magical coming into being. In this sense, Spring is the ultimate “bait and switch.” It seems to be fucking with you.

    In a way it’s like going to Disneyland. All that is in front of you is delight and beauty. It blocks out the reality of this world, namely that this world is built on violence and killing, on life eating other life. So for that idyllic month and half or so, you feel like you’ve entered the Mythological dimension. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if you can see it for what it is, like a vacation so to speak and not “the real thing” as it were. The cruelty of Spring is like when a transcendently beautiful women acts as if she loves you, makes it seem like you’re the one for a month or two, and then disappears, ghosts you. You thought you were automatically eligible for this transcendent experience, without any internal work being done, without crossing the metaphorical “sword bridge” or having an authentic initiatory experience, which leaves the fulfillment of the transcendental realm always just out of reach (“Craving, lust” in Buddhism) even though it’s image is right there in front of you. Spring shows you the gift, as it were, the sublime, before you are eligible for it. If you could use it like a great piece of art to inspire you to cross the psychological threshold (yoga, meditation) then you could use it to your advantage. It’s only when we are not conscious that it becomes so cruel.

  • How Women and Men are Different and How This Awareness Can Help Your Life

    Women are born multi-taskers. Men are built to focus like a laser on one thing. By multi-tasking women bring forth their clarity of purpose, and by focusing men bring forth a sort of ability to “do it all” and “be many places at once.”
    It’s completely ironic and none of it is conscious. It’s emergent from leaning into accepting their strengths (one might call it their calling) and most importantly not expecting anything else. Not needing anything else.

    Hey Whitney, I read Joseph Campbell all the time, and I can’t remember if it was his idea, or he got it from Jung or even something more Eastern and ancient but the idea of turning your weaknesses into strengths was looked at as the right track and not something to be ashamed of. It’s almost as if we’ve been brainwashed with this idea of being the perfect “all-around” person (College both academically and socially re-enforces this mode almost psychotically) as the goal when ironically that is the perfect exact recipe for schizophrenia, inauthenticity, and not bringing forth your true self and or creativity. Also, back in the 90’s when I had a retail store and thought I wanted to be a business tycoon, I read this guy Peter Drucker. He’s considered like the greatest consultant ever. I remember him saying you don’t want to hire the perfect “all-around” individual. He said, “The people with the greatest strengths have the greatest weaknesses.” Oh, and another famous quote of his is, “Stop solving problems. Instead pursue opportunities.” People get so literal, of course it doesn’t mean don’t call the plumber when the shower doesn’t work. It just means, in the bigger picture, focus the majority of your mental energy on opportunity instead of problems. Of course, I should have said this first, I’M OBSESSED WITH YOU AND YOUR SHOW! I think I’ve watched them all and thoroughly enjoyed. And that thing ya’ll mentioned about “Friends,” if I’m panicking, I can turn on your show, and it it’s so soothing in that way too for me. I totally understand that thing with parents and “Friends” but with me as an adult it’s like I need something current as well as having that soothing nature of your voice and your take.

    ME!

  • My Song Union Street (Hold On) was Added to a Distrokid Playlist

    My song “Union Street (Hold On)” that was released this past summer really as a B-Side for “Just for a Moment” was just added a Distrokid playlist for Singer/Songwriters. I think it goes to show that you’ve just got to keep putting things out and that something, usually something unexpected like this one will stick. Like I mentioned, this was a last minute b-side that I thought was interesting, but I thought if anything caught on, it would be “Just for a Moment.” That one did “ok,” but Union Street has done much, much better.
    There’s a lot of great songs on this 50 song playlist that I have been enjoying as well. Mine is #37: (Update: 11/28/20: It was added for a second week, and now it’s #28)

    Update 2/28/20: I just got the same email from Distrokid that I got last week: That the voters had spoken, and that I had been added to their Singer/Songwriters Playlist and would be there for a week. It didn’t say thing about “again” or “for a second time” as a matter of fact the email was an exact duplicate of the one a week before except for the date change. Playlists and voting for them is a new feature, so maybe it was a glitch, or maybe the song is really good, and was voted again to be on the playlist. The ladder would for sure make me happy, and there is evidence: The list looks for the most part different than the previous week. I hope I’m not jinxing myself. I guess we’ll see next week what happens.

  • Working on My Spotify Bio

    Stephen Pickering is the ultimate MTV Gen X’er. He began High School in August of 1981, the same month MTV initially launched. But while absorbing English New Romanticism in the whimsical kind of way it was presented, his roots were firmly planted in the Hippy Woodstock generation of music and its impact on the culture from his older siblings’ vinyl collections. His favorite performance is Ritchie Havens opening of the Woodstock Festival itself. While in college at SMU the big four of Alternative Rock: REM, The Smiths, The Cure, and New Order had a tremendous impact on his musical sensibilities. He was in a college band then at SMU in Dallas whose entire repertoire consisted of those four groups.
    “The Seventies groups were so good, even the non-Prog ones like Zep and Aerosmith, it made you feel you had no place in the industry,” he once told the Dallas Observer, “but the college audiences we played went wild over the simple 3 chord songs we were playing. I think there was a lot of pent up energy for the basics of Rock N’ Roll.”
    He went on to tell them in ’87, “But these days, especially with U2, the emphasis is on the emotion rather than the virtuosity (Van Halen aside) and that opens up a new avenue of creativity based on one’s spontaneity. The creative process in the world of pop music became inviting and welcoming again. Everything that happened in the 80’s from Alternative to New Romanticism wooed you back in in a way saying, “It doesn’t have to be painful to be fun and worthwhile in addition to being valuable to the audience.”
    “Just subjectively, as anyone would be in any field of endeavor, I want to get better at every aspect of my craft, but where I am today is fine and has value and I have no hesitation getting up on stage and expressing that.”

  • Just Released a New Single “A Magic Lake”

    Just Released a New Single “A Magic Lake”

    My new single “A Magic Lake” went live today on all digital platforms.

    Spotify:

    Apple Music:

    Youtube Music: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=blXM0cN8Zk0&feature=share

    Regular Youtube:

    This Hypeddit Landing page has links to most of the places it is available for streaming or purchase. The top two, Spotify and Apple Music, I think account for something like 90% of music consumption these days, but as I come across others, I’ll add them both to that page and this one.

  • Why You Must Dither When You Bounce

    Even if you’re keeping the same bit depth.

    The short of it is, that the bounce down, say from 96khz/24bit to 44.1/24bit is going to raise your True Peak and integrated LUFS by .2-3 points. When you apply dithering, it tames that gain to only .1 point. There are technical reasons for this, but the short of it is, my last track I recorded in 96khz/24 bit in logic and for what ever reason when I googled about Dithering, the impression I got was that it was only necessary if you were reducing the bit depth, say from 24 to 16, which has been the common practice for years.

    But lately Spotify, Apple Music, and I assume the others are streaming in 24-bit, so I didn’t feel the need to dither. But then I noticed that jump after bouncing. Dithering solved the problem, or at least most of it. There still was a .1 jump both in True Peak and iLUFS, but not the .2-.3 point jump that you get otherwise. There are three Dithering options in Logic Pro X bouncing: Regular, and two different “Noise Shaping” ones. I tried all three, but at least for my song, they sounded the same and gave me the exact same readings on all the parameters of my Youlean Meter. So I just went with regular, the first choice.

    Here’s a comment I just wrote on a Youtube video by the brilliant “In the Mix” channel that I will link to at the end:

    Looking at those guidelines, does it mean if you keep your TP below 2.0 Spotify will let you get away with a little louder LUFS? The most recent song I uploaded had a TP of -2.1 and an integrated LUFS of -13.4. Since I kept it below -2 TP do you think they’ll let the .6db “slide” so to speak (as we say here in the States,hehhe) or will they reduce it still? The guidelines are a little obscure. They say if you are going to master louder than -14LUFS then make sure your TP is below -2. So I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret that. For sure with indies like myself, the holy grail as it were is to have a sonic quality and loudness that competes with the majors. Oh another think I’ve learned: You’ve got to employ dithering, even if you keep the same bit depth on the bounce or mixdown. I accepted the Youlean measurements within the mix because they were the very last on the stereo buss chain. But the mix down from 96/24 to 44.1/24 even keeping wave lossless bumped up the TP and iLUFS by .2-.3 points. Employing dithering tamed those losses to only .1 And the readouts were exactly the same whether using regular dithering or the two “Noise Shaping” varieties. Cheers!

    Stephen Pickering