Catching The Big Fish
Like many people in music and arts, I was saddened when I heard David Lynch died last month. He is one of my favorite directors and creators of all time. I watched Twin Peaks for the first time right after college while living in Chicago and was immediately hooked. I had never seen anything quite so weird yet compelling. I remember feeling a
little embarrassed by the over-acting in the show as the characters reacted to the death of Laura Palmer, backed by Angelo Badalamenti's beautiful, but somewhat cheesy, piano theme. But for some reason, it all made sense. In Lynch’s world, everything is presented at its most extreme, from the battle of good versus evil, to a hot cup of joe with a slice of cherry pie. I’ve been rewatching a bit of Twin Peaks and am noticing even the colors of the photography are extreme. Everything is so vivid and dreamlike. I even named my ASCAP publishing company “Who Killed Laura Palmer? Music”! I think that qualifies me as a true fan. Over the next few years, I dug into more of Lynch’s work like Eraserhead, Dune, Mulholland Drive, and another one of my favorites, Blue Velvet.
While becoming a David Lynch fan, I inevitably became aware of Transcendental Meditation. Lynch was a huge advocate of the practice, even writing a book, Catching The Big Fish, highlighting his methods as an artist and how he was able to capture his creativity through meditation. TM is a simple, mantra-based meditation that is done for twenty minutes, twice a day, ideally once in the morning and once in the evening. TM’s claim is to reduce stress and anxiety, increase mental clarity and creativity, and even get better sleep. I also learned that a few of my other favorite creatives like Rick Rubin and Jerry Seinfeld were practitioners of TM as well. I figured I should give it a shot.
Under Pressure or Stressed Out in the Studio
If I remember correctly, I had been living in LA for about three years when I decided to start TM. I was still getting my footing as an engineer, mixer, and musician and was feeling the struggle. I was stretching myself pretty thin in those days; working in the studio as a mix assistant for mixers Jon Castelli and occasionally Tony Maserati, writing, producing, recording, and playing bass with my friend Mitch Rowland for our band, freelance engineering for some producers, AND gigging with a couple of other local acts as a hired bass player. I of course was not making much money at the time, so the pressure was on for something to stick, for something to start to click. However, it wasn’t pressure I was feeling, it was stress. Stress that was distracting me from what I had to juggle with all these gigs. This is when I decided to start taking up TM. If TM’s claim was that it could help manage the amount of stress I was feeling from overworking myself, trying to make ends meet, and being far from home, I was down to try it.
I think being under pressure in the studio isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Even when mixing, we’re trying to capture a performance, and to perform at our best, we sometimes need to feel that pressure. We sometimes need good tension between band members to create energy in the room, or sometimes we need to feel the compression of the mix bus to give us the energy and power in a track. Time restrictions and deadlines, while sometimes detrimental to the creation process, can oftentimes be a good way to apply some pressure to the situation and force us to commit to our creative decisions. Pressure is so prevalent in music that it is in the definition of how we perceive soundwaves in the air, in sound pressure levels, or SPL.
After being in these studio environments for a few years, I’ve found it is very important to distinguish a feeling of being under pressure and being stressed out. You can usually sense when an artist is feeling anxious during a take; their performance can feel rushed or they may not be hitting the notes quite right, or there is a lack of assertiveness in their tone or attitude towards their part. Stress is detrimental to the engineer as well. You might be too overwhelmed with a full band in the live room while there is a technical difficulty on your end only to realize it’s a simple fix with a click of a button. If the artist senses you’re stressed out, there may be an underlying feeling that you’re not quite the right fit for the job. I think artists, engineers, and producers can feel stressed in the studio mainly because of fear; the fear of failure to capture the sound “properly”, the fear of being embarrassed about presenting an idea, or the fear of people not accepting the song or album. Enter, meditation.
Removing the Clown Suit
Before practicing TM, I sometimes felt stressed out in studio situations. I even remember writing in my notepad that I used to carry around at Castelli’s spot, “Don’t fuck it up!”. I was probably a little harsh on myself, but I wanted to do a good job and to prove myself as an asset in the studio. As time went on and I started doing all the jobs that I mentioned above, I knew I had to do something to deal with some of these anxieties. I had a little money saved up, found a TM center in Los Feliz, and decided to “put some skin in the game” (as Maserati would always say) and sign up for some intro meditation courses.
If you’ve gotten this far in this post and are thinking this is starting to sound like a cult or something, I swear to you, it’s not! There were some ceremonial and organized elements to the course, but it certainly is no cult or religion. They even reiterated that you could do TM and practice whatever religion you’d like if that’s your thing. I’ve never been asked by the Los Feliz TM center to donate or participate in anything regarding their organization in the almost ten years since going to this course.
After going through some short classes outlining the benefits of TM, some scientific evidence backing up these benefits, and explaining the process of the meditation, we were given a mantra and guided through the meditation (yes, you can find TM mantras online but I do think being guided at first is beneficial, and I had to put some skin in the game!). It wasn’t long before I started feeling the benefits of meditation; I was being more present in the world around me, my senses felt heightened, I was more relaxed, and above all, I felt more positive, like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I felt a sense of clarity and negativity starting to leave my consciousness. It sounds a little crazy to me writing this but I swear doing the meditation was helping me and I think that’s all that matters in the end. David Lynch wrote in Catching The Big Fish:
“When I started meditating, I was filled with anxieties and fears. I felt a sense of depression and anger. I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It's suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. Then when it dissolves you have freedom.”
Kind of a weird way of putting it but it is David Lynch after all! And he’s not wrong. Once I began meditating, I felt my stress disappear and I was able to focus on what I was doing. Being in the studio and doing tasks that were asked of me became easier and less stressful, I felt I was playing better in rehearsals, making less mistakes because I just wasn’t fearful of making them in the first place. It was around this time I started taking on bigger roles in the studio and when my career as an audio engineer and record maker really started to take shape. I don’t think it was a coincidence that it was when I started meditating, started getting rid of the negativity and stress, and thriving under pressure.
Ideas are Fish
In Catching The Big Fish Lynch describes ideas as being like fish swimming in a deep ocean - the deeper you go, the bigger and more powerful they become. He believes meditation helps you dive deeper to catch these ideas. This metaphor resonates strongly with the process of making records. When we're in the control room, we're fishing for the right sounds, the perfect take, or that magical mix decision that will elevate a song to new heights. It’s important to have mental clarity to be able to determine which ideas are worth catching.
Just as Lynch talks about needing clear water to see the fish, we need a clear mind to truly hear what's happening in our monitors. I’ve been in a headspace where I’m worried about if the artist is going to like the mix, if the low end is hitting correctly, are my speakers screwing up my perspective…so many things that make the waters murky. When we're able to quiet those surface-level anxieties through meditation, we can dive deeper into the sonic space of the record and start being more creative in the mix. We might notice that one harmony that needs to be pulled up 0.5dB, or even more importantly, a larger mix idea like completely panning something to one side of the speakers for a moment, distorting it and mangling it, might present itself to us, ready to be caught in our net.
The bigger fish - those breakthrough moments that transform a good record into something transcendent - often lurk in the deepest waters of our creative process. On the surface, we might hear a mix that's technically perfect: the low end is tight, all the elements are balanced, and every frequency sits exactly where it should. But dive deeper, and you might discover that pulling back the drums lets the vulnerability in the vocal shine through in an unexpected way. Or maybe it's about finding that perfect delay-throw that makes the last chorus dissolve into a memory. These are Lynch's deep-water fish - the choices that make listeners feel something they can't quite explain. They're the decisions that elevate a song beyond just being well-recorded and well-mixed, reaching for something more profound. And just like Lynch's ideas, these revelations are impossible to catch when we're thrashing around in the shallow end, distracted by technical decisions and second-guessing ourselves.
Diving Deeper
I think meditation can be a great tool for any creative person. It doesn’t have to be all-consuming, it’s easy to do, and it’s highly adaptable. I still can’t quite put my finger on the type of clarity I get from doing it. Even little everyday tasks become less burdensome. If you stop the twenty minutes, twice a day, you can always pick it back up, the tool is there when you need it, and it comes back quickly.
I had stopped meditating consistently for quite a long time. After things started picking up for me and I was able to get my engineering career going, I felt less anxious and less stressed in the studio, and the desire to meditate went away. I would do a meditation every once in a while if I was feeling really stressed out about something but never got back into the rhythm of it. I’ve recently begun consistently doing TM and can confirm that the slow-forming “Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity” is starting to melt away.
David Lynch will always be one of my favorite creatives, not just for his art, but for sharing this simple yet powerful tool. His advice to "Stay true to yourself. Let your voice ring out, and don't let anybody fiddle with it. Never turn down a good idea, but never take a bad idea. And meditate" resonates deeply in the studio. After all, that's where we're all searching for those deep-water ideas - the ones that transform good recordings into great ones. The water's clearer when you meditate. The fish are bigger. And somehow, they're easier to catch.
Comments