Leaving the Twigs, Heading for the Forest

The Umpire, riding a lightning bolt, welcomes each baby born on Earth, calls her SA-F-F-FE AT HOME! His assistant, Angel, with the mink wings, gets ready to set the baby onto the Ump's chest protector. In the lower left corner is Gerry Gallow, the media mogul, owner of XS-BS Records. Illustrator Greg Reyna drew this and ten other illustrations for The Perfect Pitch, more than 25 years ago. Plotnik found them in his attic yesterday.

Where did he find them, after turning the attic upside down? In a file, marked: Perfect Pitch Illustrations. He had filed them there years ago, for safe keeping.

The Great Plotnik's partner David, The Wave of Groove, is back in Nashville, getting ready to mix The Perfect Pitch. It's a monumental task, made somewhat easier only by the amount of work that has been done electronically in advance of this week. Plotnik will be in touch by cell and by G-Mail document. Best of all, he won't be in Nashville, where he would probably blow his brains out after a day and a half.

Patience in a recording studio is not Plotnik's strong suit. This is twig work to the max.

Yesterday, for the first time, Plotnik listened to the entire Act One, which is close to an hour of music, without allowing himself once to dance into the twigs.

What are twigs? When you hear any piece of music for the first time, you are listening to the whole forest. The forest is what is audible, visible, understandable, as an entirety. It's what the audience sees and hears. However, the people who created the forest built it out of trees. They had to pay attention to each tree. And each tree is made up of tiny twigs. And each twig has a few leaves and each leaf has a pathetic little microbe or two dripping off the edge.

At some point in the creation of this forest, Plotnik and The Wave of G have examined every goddam microbe on every leaf on every twig on every tree. Only now can they begin to put it all together again and allow themselves to think about the final forest.

And the thing is the twigs don't matter. Nobody hears the twigs.

Most of the time, when you finish a project you flee from it like Peter running from the wolf. You can't stand the thought of going back in there again. But Plot doesn't feel that way. He's really anxious to hear what comes out of the studio in Nashville next week.

The Great Plotnik listens to this music and can't help but remember things about himself, about the way he used to feel about the creative process, about the power of collaboration, when it works, and, most of all, how good it feels to finish a project and still like it. It probably helps that Plottie ran for his life once already, away from this forest, out into the clear air. He didn't like very many of those twigs for quite a few years. But now he does again. It feels good. Go figure.

Yesterday, with his headsets wrapped tightly around his ears, when he got to 'Earth Music,' the last song in Act One, where the Umpire realizes music is the only thing people on Earth pay attention to anymore, and where Plot and The Wave of G attempted to wring everything that can possibly be wrung out of two chords, he could finally listen to the forest again, since he wasn't concentrating on all the twigs anymore.

An Umpire, welcoming babies into the world, needs songwriters on Earth to write a very special song to help save the planet. It's all so silly. So incomprehensible. And so much fun.