Tonight I made one of those concoctions for which there is no recipe because admitting there was a recipe would imply somebody planned it. I started with my tomato sauce, added leftover chickpeas from the hummus, some toum from my failed garlic experiment, roasted cauliflower, soft tofu and as an after thought limes. I never know whether my concoctions would impress other people or be an insult to their upbringing. Fortunately I was the audience. It was pretty good.

The salad was lettuce, grated beets and parsnips, red onion and cucumber, with balsamic vinegar, maple syrup and squeezed limes. Damn, it’s hard to get juice out of a lime. Lemons cooperate. Limes think their juice is proprietary information. After squeezing them best I could, I threw what remained into the tomato sauce concoction, partly because there was probably still flavour hiding in there and partly because by then the meal ceased recognizing conventional authority. This added extra weirdness.

Good weirdness.

Three people have written to me about the latest song I put on the streaming services because they couldn’t make out all the lyrics. I wrote the words out and sent them along. I wasn’t terribly surprised. There are parts of the recording where the voice isn’t exactly standing politely at the front of the mix introducing itself. At moments the recording becomes less like a singer accompanied by musicians and more like everybody has simultaneously wandered into the kitchen looking for something.

I do not mind that. There was a time I thought recording meant getting everything right. The bass should occupy the bass department. The drums should report to the drum department. If there is a strange noise in the corner, somebody should call police. I don’t feel that way anymore. Sometimes I want a recording to behave like memory. Not everything at equal volume. One sentence perfectly clear and the next disappeared. A face comes forward and the room behind it dissolves. Something insignificant becomes enormous.

There is a fine line between making an interesting artistic decision and making a bad mix. Musicians have been using the former to explain the latter since recording equipment was invented. Still, I enjoy people cared enough to ask for the lyrics. They heard something they couldn’t quite understand and instead of switching off, they wanted to get closer. Not everything has to surrender itself immediately. A song can contain a little resistance. A garlic experiment can fail and then find employment somewhere else. Chickpeas from yesterday can belong to tonight. Then you put it in front of people. Somebody says, What is in this? And if you’re lucky, they’re asking because they want more.