Encanto by Paris Street

Things to do in Isla Verde at 10pm:

1) Walk the beach. There’s never a wrong time to walk the beach.

2) Hit up the bar at whatever hotel you’re staying. Get to know your fellow tourists, and marvel at their inability to properly pronounce the local beer (Medalla), even though it’s stupid easy.

3) Hit up the casino at either the Embassy Suites or the Courtyard.

4) Catch some live music inside the El San Juan hotel, which I assume is a thing (I’m basing this solely on the billboard I’ve walked past nearly every day for the last 3 months).

5) Swim in the ocean after hitting the bar, and/or winning/losing at the casino (you will most likely lose – ain’t no loose slots here), and/or catching some live music. A little drunken nightswimming never hurt anyone.

6) Hang out at the nearby 24-hour convenient store/coffeeshop/bakery/bar that’s surprisingly hopping all the time.

7) Chat with some nice locals and ex-pats over at the Café 101 bar next to the currently-shuttered Ritz-Carlton. They’re open til 6am, so pace yourself.

8) Like, cherish your time with whichever friends or loved ones you’ve chosen to vacation with.

I didn’t choose any of these options. At 10pm, in Isla Verde, by the ocean, by the bars, by the casinos, by the nightlife of this beautiful island of enchantment, I made music. For 16 straight days. Then I paused for Thanksgiving. Then I got back to it.

What a waste.

---

It was not all in Isla Verde. There were a couple days in Mayagüez, on the western side. After Thanksgiving, there were 3 days in Ponce. In December, there were return trips to Mayagüez, then to Aguadilla, and Manatí (where the slots actually are a little looser). But most of the music-making – in particular, recording the vocals – was in Isla Verde.

Those places are just where I rested my head after those 10pm music-making sessions. During the day, I traveled to pretty much every city on the island, from Aguada to . . . oh, let’s assume Yauco is at the end of the Puerto-Rican-city alphabet. At the end of the day, I’d think, “Okay, what happened today?”, then try to fit the answer around a melody. A nearly-impossible left turn attempt in Bayamón. A gal who smiled at me in just the perfect way while at a restaurant in Mayagüez. A stop at the calm waters of Boquerón. When I couldn’t come up with words, I’d write an instrumental and name it after the town I spent the most time in that day (Lares, Gurabo, Humacao). When I couldn’t come up with words, but knew that the song I was working on just had to have some lyrics, I’d turn to the past, which would bring me back to Isla Verde, then a short ways over to San Juan
.
---

This is my third time in Puerto Rico. During my second time here, at the end of 2016, I walked one morning from Isla Verde to the San Juan neighborhood of Santurce, to the hospital where I was born (and that would be my first time here). Also during that second time, a friend joined me for a weekend, and we explored Old San Juan, then headed off to the rainforest, then off to Ponce, then off again to see the giant radio telescope south of Arecibo. During the last weeks of that second time, I befriended a taxi driver who helped me get around town while dealing with some bureaucratic red-tape garbage that still gives me a headache when I think about it. His name was Oscar.

All that found its way into these songs. As did the shoreline by my hotel in Isla Verde. As did the coquis that sing their mating call throughout the night. And as did a pig that I almost hit with my car in Rio Piedras, another San Juan neighborhood, the one where I grew up before my family decided to move to Florida.

---

It was not my intention to record a song a day, much less an album (or two), while here. I brought my usual gear that I travel with – my laptop, headphones, an audio interface, and a microphone – and was prepared to use it mainly to work on the mixes for a separate batch of songs that would hopefully form the basis for the next Paris Street album. I’ve yet to get started on those mixes. Instead, here’s an altogether-different album (or two).

That next album was (and still might be) going to be a little different from the last couple year’s-worth of Paris Street releases, for three reasons:

1) It was going to move away from synths and DAWS and focus more on actual analog instrumentation.

2) It was going to feature more collaborators.

3) Lyrically, it was going to start moving away from the ‘get drunk and screw around’ trope that I felt had reached its conclusion with last year’s 'You' and 'You (Too)'.

So, of course, all the music on 'Encanto' was made on the laptop, using a digital audio workstation called LMMS. It’s all performed by me, the first truly-solo Paris Street release in a while, which I consider a bad thing. But the lyrics are indeed different. It’s more personal. It’s more concise (the word count, unlike with this post, is much lower than usual). It’s a sexless album, with by-far the lowest alcohol content of any Paris Street release. I consider that a good thing.

One out of three ain’t too bad.

--

Three more things, not in order of importance:

1) This album is not and never was intended to be some sort of anthropological record of Puerto Rico in the final months of 2019. There are no bird sounds or field recordings or any such nonsense to make you think, ‘wow, he really is there, man’. I did not bring in local musicians to help Paul Simon things up. These are simply the melodies that popped in my head at the time, at 10pm, and the words that I chose to wrap around those melodies.

2) 'Encanto' has 10 songs, part of my general rule that no albums should be longer than that (my 100-song compilation album, 'Curtains', is exempt from this rule). I finished 20 songs while in Puerto Rico, which includes those instrumentals that I named after small towns. Those songs will be found on . . . sigh . . . 'Encantoo', which will be out on 21 February.

3) There is a gigantic, destructive elephant in the room, one that is alluded to in multiple songs but never mentioned by either it’s regular, descriptive noun or it’s randomly-chosen proper name. In the conversations that I had during the time I was writing and recording these songs, that noun and that name were never mentioned, only alluded to. I opted to do the same with these recordings (of course, if I had recorded these songs this month – with a new disaster bringing back memories of an all-too-recent other – then that might have been different).

Thanks for reading. Enjoy.

cp.
Isla Verde, 10pm or so, 21 January 2020

Catchy shit

open.spotify.com
Tumblr
Instagram