Toward the end of "Sing a Song with You", from Don Zientara's debut solo album Sixteen Songs, a phone rings in the background, its insistent digital purr interrupting his acoustic guitar strumming and stage-whisper vocals. Seemingly unrehearsed, it more or less determines the song's finale, as Zientara quickly wraps it up and answers the phone: "Inner Ear."
Yes, it's that Inner Ear, the studio Zientara founded in Washington, D.C. during the late 1970s, where he has produced acts like Fugazi, Q & Not U, Bad Religion, Rites of Spring, and Deceased. And yes, to record Sixteen Songs, Zientara forsook all the technological marvels of the modern recording studio and apparently set up his analog machine at the receptionist's desk. Whenever Zientara gets excited and the song builds to a climax, as on "Waiting for the Muse", the machine can barely capture all the sound, and the resultant muddiness implies real intimacy and vulnerability. The sub-demo quality of the album, like a field recording or some 60s troubadour's lost tapes, is purposeful, the underproduced and lo-fi-primitive sound intended to convey unprepossessing spontaneity: Zientara wants you to think he recorded these songs off-the-cuff, possibly during his coffee break. And most likely he did.
He calls his approach "minimalism" in the short liner notes: "Most important is the fact that with a single voice there is a littleness... a feeling that the singer is no more important than the person listening, probably less so." As a veteran producer's manifesto, those words are a bit meandering and unedited, much like the music itself, but the album's basic cardboard packaging and matter-of-fact title would seem to bear out his message of "littleness."
But Zientara is a producer first, a musician second. The intimacy on Sixteen Songs sounds practiced, which makes the album's murkiness seem a little calculated. He wants to remove himself from the music completely, to subjugate his ego to the songs themselves-- a noble effort, but an impossible feat. The more he tries to erase his own identity, the more obvious such machinations become, like the guy in the bar whose pick-up line is that he has no pick-up line.
Sixteen Songs isn't a lie, though; it's just a casual feint. Lyrically, these songs try to be about real things, but ineluctably they circle back on themselves. As the song title "Sing a Song with You" implies, the album's evocations aren't emotional but musical, which Zientara seems to realize deep down. These aren't songs about life or love, pain or happiness, but about how cool Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens were, about recording at the office and taking your work home with you, about music being the single defining aspect of your life and the excitement of pure creation.
