One of the most important lessons that I received on writing — indeed, on creative practices generally — came from the unlikely pen of a contrarian sound engineer and rock guitarist from Chicago.

Somehow, it always comes back to Chicago.

Steve Albini, who died earlier this month at the unjustly young age of 61, created a catalogue of music that I, and many of my fellow generational travelers, have browsed obsessively for decades. To say he was revered — by musicians, producers, fans, and the in-the-know listening public alike — is akin to saying Mumtaz Mahal was held in fond regard by her husband, the Emperor Shah Jahan.

It is not for me to scan the Albini firmament here, pointing out the whorls of his fingerprints across the constellations of songs and artists and albums that, even now, hold us in thrall. But it is also not inapposite to mention how, from his modest studio in a neighbourhood of western Chicago once known for the clay pits and brick factories that helped rebuild the city after the Great Fire of 1871, Albini steadily constructed a new ethics of human relations, founded on his devotion to music, that attracted enough adherents to justify many a monument indeed.

Call him the Mughal of Bricktown, then. He would have glared (or reverbed) you out of the room for that. In fact, he was known above all for two things: a bias toward the egalitarian — he refused to take “points” on the albums he recorded; and even at 60, he was to be found helping bands load their heavy equipment into his studio — and a complete mastery of his craft, the craft of capturing sound.

Oh — and a third thing, his punk-inspired irascibility, which sometimes led him astray, but at least as often drove him to utterances that count, more or less, as immortal.

Lest I get carried away, let’s turn back to his writing advice. Albini inadvertently bestowed it upon me in a piece he published in 1993, entitled “The Problem with Music.” The piece counted as a rant extraordinaire against the business model that prevailed in the music industry then, which saw talented musicians get short shrift (if that) for recording their work. 

Albini doesn’t mention writing even once.

Instead, in the piece, which was published in the fifth issue of the legendary Chicago alt mag, The Baffler — many of us who read the magazine heralded it as the highest anti-New Yorker exemplar possible — Albini elaborated on the difference between producers and engineers. “Few self-respecting engineers will allow themselves to be called ‘producers'”, he wrote. This was because, he continued, “the minimum skills required to do an adequate job recording an album are” — and here, you (and The Baffler) will permit me to quote at length:

• Working knowledge of all the microphones at hand and their properties and uses. I mean something beyond knowing that you can drop an SM57 without breaking it.
• Experience with every piece of equipment which might be of use and every function it may provide. This means more than knowing what echo sounds like. Which equalizer has the least phase shift in neighbour bands? Which console has more headroom? Which mastering deck has the cleanest output electronics?
• Experience with the style of music at hand, to know when obvious blunders are occurring.
• Ability to tune and maintain all the required instruments and electronics, so as to insure that everything is in proper working order. This means more than plugging a guitar into a tuner. How should the drums be tuned to simulate a rising note on the decay? A falling note? A consonant note? Can a bassoon play a concert E-flat in key with a piano tuned to a reference A of 440 Hz?  What percentage of varispeed is necessary to make a whole-tone pitch change? What degree of overbias gives you the most headroom at 10Khz? What reference fluxivity gives you the lowest self-noise from biased, unrecorded tape? Which tape manufacturer closes every year in July, causing shortages of tape globally? What can be done for a shedding master tape? A sticky one?
• Knowledge of electronic circuits to an extent that will allow selection of appropriate signal paths. This means more than knowing the difference between a delay line and an equalizer. Which has more headroom, a discrete class A microphone preamp with a transformer output or a differential circuit built with monolithics? Where is the best place in an unbalanced line to attenuate the signal? If you short the cold leg of a differential input to ground, what happens to the signal level? Which gain control device has the least distortion, a VCA, a printed plastic pot, a photoresistor or a wire-wound stepped attenuator? Will putting an unbalanced line on a half-normalled jack unbalance the normal signal path? Will a transformer splitter load the input to a device parallel to it? Which will have less RF noise, a shielded unbalanced line or a balanced line with a floated shield?
• An aesthetic that is well-rooted and compatible with the music, and
• The good taste to know when to exercise it.

There: all you need to know about how to write, and how to be a writer, is encapsulated in those seven fervidly-made points.

You want to improve civilisation, change the world with your words? Or, perhaps more realistically, simply get to a place where you, as a writer, know you can do an adequate job? Why, it’s as simple a matter as gaining the same level of expertise in your craft as the Master of Bricktown had in his. In other words: never rest, budding engineer; drill ceaselessly into the pith, the marrow, the very heart of the matter at hand. Eventually, you may find yourself with enough of the requisite artistry to hit some kind of stride, and make some kind of music.

(Decades earlier, the Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who also died this month, aged 92, articulated something similar, writing in Lives of Girls and Women: “What I wanted was every last thing [from Jubilee, the fictional town in her work], every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together – radiant, everlasting.”)

Albini’s words, their implicit injunction against laziness, their explicit insistence upon mastery of craft, have lived with me from the mid-90s to the present day, and remain more salutary than nearly all other creative writing lessons that I’ve received in the interim (goodness, but there have been so many such lessons).

Ben Williams outside Electrical Audio recording studio in Chicago. May 2024. (Photo: Supplied)

I happened to be in Chicago a few days after Albini died. I walked down Belmont Avenue into the Bricktown / Avondale area, feeling the heat of the city’s notorious summer just beginning to lurk nearby. I stopped at the door of his studio, where I left a small tribute, in amongst the other small tributes that lay scattered about the threshold and the pavement. (It was a packet of Skittles, if you must know.)

In that moment, I remembered reading “The Problem with Music” and knowing, as I read, that the purity of its fire would change my life. I remembered brushing shoulders with its author, the Master of Bricktown, in Barcelona — the thrill of that briefest of encounters. I remembered standing on a balcony in a Chicago theatre-cum-bar, watching him attack a song on the stage below with his band, as though the world hardly existed, but depended for its continued existence on his performance. Just as it should have been.

I stood outside his studio for perhaps a little too long. Not a soul stirred around the place, except a passer-by who agreed to take my photograph. Eventually, there was nothing for it but to shoulder the heat and trudge on, in the direction of Shangri-La, as we creatives all are driven to do. Albini, as ever, lighting the way, radiant, everlasting.DM