The Light of Day

Subliminal messages are for the birds

I’m not that far from having a refurbed Leave of Absence vol. 1 for all y’all. (Refurbing volume 2 was one of my side projects last year, so I’m sort of working backwards.) I finally resolved a certain gray-area type copyright issue. The new mix of the offending song (Julie) will be missing part of its original vocal, and in its place will be, uh… something kinda weird. The backing track is generic enough to not even be an issue. I’ll probably list the title of the new mix as Julie Minus Julie. I love odd, cryptic titles like that.

Anyway…

Remixing, in and of itself, should never take terribly long. It’s when something crosses the line from “remixing” to “reworking” that we get sucked into a wormhole, and suddenly it’s ten years later.

Fortunately, Friend in the Room (above) was a relatively straightforward hour-or-two remix, starting with the nearly ready-to-go tracks I’d previously copied over from the old Windows 98 computer. I put some essential stuff like EQ on some tracks, and cut out some hiss between lines on the vocal track. Interestingly, all these years later, I’m hearing not just hiss on that track, but also a bird chirping loudly in the background. It’s likely that I had my window open while recording it, but I don’t remember hearing it while making the original mix. I considered that it might have been a squeaky reel of tape being picked up by the mic, since I was always in the same room with the Fostex, but it sounds too distinctively bird-like. You might be able to hear a bit of it in the middle verse (listen at the end of the line “I never could say”, and the next few lines following it).

If I’d already known it was on there, I wouldn’t think it was any big deal. It’s the fact that the bird planted his easter egg in my song and I didn’t even discover it until a decade later — that’s what impresses me.

Anyway, having both volumes of Leave of Absence in nice, tidy, finalized (for now) form will put a nice, big, guidepost-y dent in my mission to sort out my entire back catalog and make it all available in one convenient online musicfolio. (This will be my new word for “discography”, since it really has nothing to do with discs. I may also start using “collection” in lieu of “album”, but we’ll see about that one.)

Clever ending. Blah blah blah.

Does that make me crazy? Possibly.

“Crazy”, when used to describe someone’s mental state, is not a nice or modern term. But that aside, what does it mean? Can I say I was leaning farther that way than usual during a period roughly between 1990 and 1992? That’s what I tend to do, though I try to frame it with more compassionate words like “going through a rough time”. But what would it actually mean?

I know there are experts on psychology who discuss this in further depth than I’m able to, but let me toss out some definitions off the top of my head.

It would seem that I couldn’t claim insanity outright, because I’ve always had a well-developed sense of logic and reason. I didn’t take a course in statistics and probability, but I get the gist. (I’m not “crazy” enough to buy lottery tickets.) I know how to be critical of my own thoughts.

However, there are people with highly developed logical constructs of their own who manage to come up with terrifying conclusions, and can explain in elaborate detail why the muppets are communicating to them through controlled cloud formations that the FBI is reading their thoughts through stool samples collected at public bathrooms (unless they drink enough vinegar to scramble the data).

So this means “a sense of logic” isn’t good enough; we now have to distinguish between good logic and “crazy” logic. Each time I think of a way to differentiate between the two, I find myself coming up with notable exceptions. For example, favoring a majority viewpoint over a fringe belief, in which case we’d be discrediting the likes of Galileo and other pioneers.

Then I suppose I could try another defining factor: happiness (or lack thereof). If you’re happy, and at peace, can you technically be crazy? Even if you have beliefs which turn out not to be true, or logic with some holes in it? And it’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, which is what a lot of unhappy people do.

How about a total inability to communicate? If a person refuses to truly listen to anything you try to explain to them, and continues to repeat and reinforce a viewpoint that you’ve already explained away, you’re more likely to chalk them up as “not well” than if they said, “that’s an interesting point. I’ll have to think about that”.

Or how about lack of humor — inability to laugh from the belly, or to acknowledge absurdity? Or never asking questions, only ever making statements, as if you are The One with the knowledge? Or placing a high priority on some obsession of yours that ultimately has little effect on anyone, while disregarding the things that really matter?

Maybe insanity is one of those concepts that you can’t define by any one thing, but… well, think of an object with three elastic strings attached to it, and three people standing around it in a circle, suspending the object above the ground by each holding their own string taut in one direction. No one person is dictating the position of the object. If any one person moves from side to side, or increases or decreases his tension, the object will move, but it’s still dependent on all three people. Maybe sanity is similarly the sum result of several forces/factors pulling in a variety of directions.

A bleak moment before the creative storm (December 1990).

The way I felt (and feel) about music I was working on between 1990 and 1992 is mixed. Not just the usual “mixed”, but mixed with extremes at both ends. The extreme positive about it is that I had the will, ambition, focus, and commitment to get serious, take the wheel, liberate my muse from a dependence on bandmates, and try to ascend from “demo” level to “album” level on a limited budget without anyone’s help. I admire the Keith of that time for that. But I ache for how serious and important this was to him, to the point where he couldn’t just go off and have a bit of fun between sessions. It was like a religious mission. Hell, it was a religious mission. It was too important.

This is the backing track from Dear Diary (1991/92), without vocals. I wish I could listen to this and just think “that’s pretty neat, in a slightly embarrassingly dated way”, but there are too many emotional associations.

(Incidentally, this is when I was “born” as a guitarist. I wasn’t comfortable with it yet — improvising was clearly out of the question, although I tried once or twice — and I had to hunch over the guitar and stare closely at the frets to get the notes right.)

One thing I notice about people who exhibit various character flaws is that they’re often trying to compensate for something they perceive to be the exact opposite. My determination to rigidly control every aspect of the Open The Window album was a reaction to my feeling a greater loss of control over my life… and to a lesser extent, an uphill fight against the maddeningly convoluted digital ping-ponging technique I imposed on myself, for the wrong reasons. Any time I go back to one of these mixes it brings back the overwhelm and the futility. (Lesson: what you put in is what you get out.)

That said, it was shortly after the millionth re-EQ’ing of these nine overworked songs that I began the slow and clunky journey towards getting over myself (somewhat, that is… so, okay, it’s a never ending journey, and I’m fine with that)… so, it all ends with a light at the end of the tunnel.

Apparently, though, I felt like I had to stay in the tunnel until it was done.

What did we learn today, kids?

What if I wrote a blog post every single time I did a recording session? It would be sort of like a “what I learned today” thing, like at the end of any given episode of Fat Albert or Davey and Goliath.

I didn’t really intend to replace the bass and drums on every single song in my rock opera, but when you’re doing an inventory on the state of your remixes, and the bass guitar is within arm’s reach and already plugged into the board, and hey, the camera is right behind you so you might as well turn that on too… you know how it goes.

So, hmm… what did I “learn” from this one? What was the “moral”?

The lesson is: always give yourself a “thumbs up” of encouragement just prior to a take!

One thing I like about these Through Forbidden Black Doors session videos is that they make the songs actually look playable. By humans. Somehow, having originally done so much on a sequencer, I’d probably given myself and everyone else the opposite impression.

I don’t intend for the Chamberlain (Mellotron) sample to sound like a real flute player, but it would probably be a good idea to ride its volume a little and add a touch of delay to give it a more “trippy hippie fantasy” quality. Maybe also scrunch a few of its more metronomic sounding notes closer together, to loosen the overall rhythm and open some “breath spaces” between phrases.

The John Lennon t-shirt was a thoughtful gift from my friend’s mother, but somehow I get the feeling it was designed by someone who spends more time listening to Motorhead.

Happy Easter!

Anatomy of a family, through the lens of song

In innocenter times, while my mom, dad, sister and I were on one of our summer road trips, we jointly composed “Bubbles” as a game to pass the time:

Bubbles are the
Wonderfullest
Because they’re (or “they are”)
Round and poppable
But my friend
Henry says
He hates them
Each day

The idea (I don’t know whose it was) was that one person would sing three words, then the next person would add three more words, and so on. Because I have such a clear memory of how things went down, I can now distill its components to correlate them to our individual personalities:

Mom (Sandy): “Bubbles are the…”

Mom has always been the most innocent of the four of us. She never ever uses swear words of any caliber, let alone any nasty or cynical expressions, and she “just wants things to be nice”. Obviously she started this song with the intent to pay homage to something nice and happy.

Heather: “…wonderfullest. Because they’re…”

As we grow older, we lose our inclination to make up words like this. Well, some of us do. I remember that she thought her turn was done after contributing the “w” word, an easy error to make since it was the same number of syllables. But we had to coax two more words out of her. Later this warped into “because they are”, but I will insist all the way to my deathbed that it didn’t start out that way.

Me: “…round and poppable.”

Always a correct, literal, and scientific description from me. I mean, what else are bubbles? Wet, I suppose. Soapy, perhaps. But most importantly, what defines a bubble (and makes it more wonderful than anything else), is its roundness, and its capacity to be popped.

Dad (Fred): “But my friend,”

I don’t know what this says about my father, except perhaps “my friend” may have been the kind of thing that would be in a song he would hear on the radio. He could have initially meant it as “But, my friend,” — meaning we’re addressing the audience as “my friend” — but obviously we didn’t interpret it that way at the time. It’s not exactly bubble-specific, but that’s a good thing, because it opens the rest of us up to re-thinking the larger context of what we’re singing about.

Mom (Sandy): “Henry says, he…”

Who the hell is “Henry”? The only Henry we knew was Henry of “Henry and Amy” fame, who I’m thinking (but not sure) were grandchildren of one of my grandmother’s friends, and who Heather and I had to keep re-getting to know, because we only saw them once every two or three years. But I think this song is less about him, and more about “The EveryHenry” in all of us. Yes, I’m over-thinking this.

Heather: “…hates them, each…”

You could stereotype Heather as a child with a negative attitude — her first word was allegedly “no” — but to be fair, this line had to be something negative in order for the “but” to make sense. We just didn’t know how deep into negative territory she would go with it. At least it’s only Henry who is hating the bubbles. Really, that’s okay — we can’t all love them. Different strokes for different folks.

Me: “…day.”

Sure, I had credit for two more words, but the song was over (or was that the fun-ness of the game?). Besides, my father didn’t even get a second turn. Why should I be greedy?

Chords, ancient history, and happy accidents

I’m thinking about doing a video at the keyboard, showing some early chord progressions I wrote, and how I came up with them. One of the many tag lines for this blog was “I hear chord progressions”, kind of a play on “I see dead people” — which I assume everyone got, but who knows. I’ve always been a chord fanatic, though, more so than a melody fanatic or lyric fanatic; I had to develop those abilities later. But taking chords to the next level has always been my passion — getting them to go into unexpected places and still come out sounding cohesive. This isn’t an intellectual fascination; it’s a fascination with the sound and the effect. (When anyone boasts about how few chords they use or know, as if knowing more chords somehow over-intellectualizes the music and takes away from its immediacy, I have to take a deep breath and bite my tongue.)

The problem with this obsession of mine, is that in order to play along with most of my progressions, you have to actually know them; they don’t generally lend themselves to jamming away in one key or mode. Where music “happens” for me, though, where it has the most intense emotional impact, is the point where it changes, and particularly where it changes most drastically, meaning the very point where you have to change the mode to still be following it. Not the chord itself, but how it relates to the one before it, and the one after it, and finally to the overall key.

Because I familiarized myself with all this in a direct, unsupervised way, creating instant neurological links between the sound, the feeling, and the chords, taking actual music theory classes was more like an afterthought — icing on the cake. I don’t usually think in a methodical way when I write a progression; I follow my ear. But, having done so, I can then analyze it after the fact. Words like “interval”, “chord”, “triad”, “mode”, and “modulate” were not even in my vocabulary; I was just doing it. And I would like to see education reverse itself, to where you know and learn the thing on an immediate level first, and then learn the words for it; because as it is now, these words create an extra synaptic hoop for most students’ brains to jump through.

But, education or no education, it seems the “immediate level” thing is probably just either going to happen or not happen for a person. If they’re interested, they’ll go further down the rabbit hole. If not, they’ll take what they like and move on. In my case, that rabbit hole has been my personal universe for 20 years.

Insomnic Hallucinations (rough mix still available on the sidebar) was the first progression I ever wrote that a.) went well outside its own key, b.) actually followed my ear, and c.) really stuck with me over time. It’s an eight bar progression over a simple, slow 4/4 beat, one chord per bar. I never really wrote one definitive set of lyrics for it, or one end-all-be-all melody for it either. I just like the progression, and I keep going back to finding new ways to sneak it in, like a running gag or an easter egg.

Here’s how I would write it as chord names:

Cm(add 6) | Abmaj7 | Em | Bm | D#m | F#m | F(add#4) | G, G+

Here’s how I would play them on a keyboard, in simplest form:

C Eb G A

Ab C Eb G

B E G

B D F#

D# F# A#

C# F# A

C F A B

D G B, then Eb G B

The first three bars were initially just me trying something out. They started as Cm, Fm, Em. I was listening to Led Zeppelin’s Song Remains the Same (the song, not the album), and my still-naïve ear heard the chords under “anything I wanted to know/any place I needed…” as though it might be a minor chord (but not the one whose key it was in) dropping a half step to another minor chord. Of course, it’s not… not even close. But anyway, that’s what I tried, being in Cm and going from the Fm to the Em, and since I was now mentally hearing the Em as “the new iv chord”, going to Bm from there made it feel like it was “landing” on the new tonic.

So what I had so far (Cm, Fm, Em, Bm) was okay, but I think if it had stayed like this I wouldn’t have had such a life-long love affair with it. I did manage to write another four chords after this to bring it around full circle (D#m, F#m, F, G). I was particularly proud of the D#m chord, because even though it had no proper relationship to any of the chords before it, it was exactly what I heard in my head. The F#m was less daring, because I’d already played with taking a minor chord up a minor third (I thought of it as a sort of “horror film soundtrack” technique at the time). The F and G were just obvious, simplistic, almost cop-out ways of saying, here we go, back to C.

I have no idea how I decided to change the Fm chord to an Abmaj7 chord. But that made all the difference in the world. My inept attempt to recreate the Song Remains The Same vibe took on its own new identity, and ever since then, the Abmaj7 to Em part has sounded beautifully ominous to me. Also the thing of augmenting the G chord at the end to “pull” it towards the C minor was a good choice.

But two things that happened to this progression were purely happy accidents. When I was playing the first bar (C minor), and also the second-to-last bar (F), my poor keyboard technique occasionally would lead to me hitting the next note over. In the case of the C minor, it was an added A, which I think is a very spooky (in a good way) note to add. I said “add 6″ when I named the chord above, but I just want to make sure you realize I don’t mean Ab, the “natural” sixth degree, because that’s a different animal, which happens to show up soon enough anyway, as the root of the next chord. In the case of the F chord (played as C F A), my keyboard klutzery added a very mysterious and alluring B (I now know this is a “lydian” sound, used often by David Gilmour on songs like Mihalis and Terminal Frost), that made it more “dream-like” and helped pull it towards the G chord.

The thing is, my brain is hard-wired to immediately like these happy accidents. It also doesn’t think all accidents are happy. In fact, it’s very selective about which accidents it likes. But the question is, what is the purpose or usefulness to society that a sound might grab my ear right away, while to other people it might take several hearings before they internalize it?

Anyway, all these words (and chord names) get in the way, and I’m sure I would skim some of this post myself if it wasn’t my own… so maybe a video version is still a good idea. Something to take home from this, though: failing to copy something correctly can be a great source of originality. So try to play something you don’t know… and see what does come out.

Pulling a Radiohead…

For those of you that either link/bookmark straight to the blog, or use an RSS reader (and therefore skip the news page that keithhandy.com directs people to), you can now download and listen to Leave of Absence 2 in its entirety in 224 kbps mp3 format before deciding to purchase it! Nicely packaged CDs will continue to be available on lulu.com at a reasonable price if, like many people (myself included), you like physical objects.

I’ll soon write a more extensive post/page revealing more than you ever wanted to know about every single click, bang, and whirl on Leave of Absence 2.

Send some thanks to my friend Brooke for encouraging me to enter the twenty-first century. And be sure to check back for more music to come.

Interesting way to write a weird vocal melody

The usual (for me): really really old song gets rewritten with a new twist, but even then isn’t totally followed through on for a long time. In this case, we’re talking so old that the original lyrics were downright painful. It’s actually that “The Tube” song from the days of that old stapled-together loose leaf, pictured on installment one of the So You Want series.

Even at the age of 12 or 13 (early 1980s), I was already getting weird with chord progressions, almost by necessity. There was a guitar with only three strings on it, and I would tune them to either a major or minor chord (minor in this case) and barred it with my thumb while the guitar sat on my lap (and sometimes I’d also be tapping a tambourine on the floor with my foot). So The Tube was all minor chords, and the main gist was to start at the octave fret, go up one, down three, up one, down three, and so on, until it got all the way to the bottom. Then there’s another part from there, but using the same kind of barred minor chords.

Sometime later, in the mid 90s, I wrote a dumb poem about a recording session gone haywire, and then realized that it was written in the same meter as The Tube. I figured if I ever pulled that tune out again, I’d use those as lyrics, but they would have to have a more interesting melody than just following the “up one, down three” pattern of the progression. I have two different bits of sheet music for it, worked out at various points during the last several years, but neither one has a proper melody. One has a bunch of “pseudo-notes”; just notes drawn at approximate intervals to how my pitch would go up and down if I was speaking them, without any thought given to the chords, and no specific rhythm. The other sheet has a rhythm worked out, done separately, without any indication of pitch. So these were kind of like lost soulmates (or socks) that needed to be matched up.

In my Tracktion project for this song, what I’ve done is plunked all the notes in on a midi track (sounded as an electric piano, just as a sort of “musical scratch pad”), as they appear on the pages, and then fiddled with their pitches until they had some semblance of relationship to the strange chord movement underneath. But, I was losing track of which words went with which notes, so I did an additional guide track where I was speaking the words to the rhythm. Um, rapping? I don’t know. But the idea is that I can listen to this a few times until it embeds itself into my longer-term memory, then sing it in a more natural, less disjointed way. (Having a mental picture of what this sketch represents in terms of a real vocal part is what I mean by “hearing the greatness in the shit“.)

Regarding one line in there, “fat old maids that reek of booze” — I apologize for the social stereotyping, but I wrote the poem quickly, on a whim (on cardboard, no less), without much thought, and unfortunately, “full-figured, mature, single women who enjoy a good cocktail now and then” would not have fit the meter or rhyme scheme.

Leave of Absence vol. 2 - from a “drum slut” perspective

1. Never Turn Back - Yamaha RY30 drum machine played by hand to a freely (no click) recorded acoustic guitar part. Brief punch-ins and hits added in certain spots to cover up some of the less smooth-sounding moments.

2. Open the Window - drum machine sequenced on the old Zenith computer with Cakewalk 3.0. The original cassette demo had me playing pseudo-drum-like white noise sounds (using the CZ-1) over an infinitely looping thump on a delay pedal, and I programmed the sequence to emulate what I’d played there, only less sloppily.

3. P.S.R. - drum machine sequenced on the Zenith, using a click and quantizing in a conventional way.

4. Quit Your Job and Join a Traveling Hindu Cult - this is a mashup from several different sources. The bit at the opening and closing is from a cassette improvisation, using the CZ-1 white noise sounds again, but then I overdubbed myself playing a real cymbal and some triplets on a real floor tom. The second section is the solo section from Wake Up, from the original Open the Window album, and I played the drum machine by hand into the computer sequencer at half the actual speed of the song (with click), then quantized it and played it back at the correct speed. The third section is extremely edited bits from a Mind Mogger performance, with Jeff Lewis on drums (I think there were more people on stage than there were in the audience). The fourth section is me improvising on the drum machine into the sequencer without a click, and then deriving all the keyboard and bass parts from the drum part (was originally a longer stand-alone piece called Stampede of the Media Hogs). For the remaster, I’ve carefully added sampled drums throughout the entire piece to give it a little more “snap”, which has the added benefit of making it sound more cohesive from section to section. When I do add new drums like this, I’m very careful to make sure they’re perfectly synchronized to the old drum hits, so they don’t sound like flams.

5. Revelation in the Resonance - the original demo was also from that same improvised tape in which Open the Window and the bookends of Quit Your Job were conceived, but like Open the Window, I replicated the song without using anything from the original tape. I looped eleven bars of Barb Johnson’s drum track from a Peachy Nietzches session for a song that they didn’t complete. For the remaster I have added sampled drums to make it fuller; it was the only way to undo the damage from over-compressing the original tracks.

6. Soldiers of Music - I programmed the patterns right into the drum machine itself instead of using the computer. I don’t know why. It could have been during a time when I couldn’t use the computer, because the monitor had died and hadn’t been replaced yet.

7. Ten Years From Now - drum machine, programmed into the computer. Most of it is a looping measure without any variation, except for the section that leads into the final verse, where I played the part by hand (probably at half the actual tempo) in order to give it more of a drummer-like feeling.

8. Undue Strain - the second verse and instrumental section originally had only a guitar, and I wanted a “small drum machine” sound for those parts, so I programmed the bars right into the Yamaha and carefully fiddled with tempos until I could match what I had played on the guitar. For the big loud ending part, I played the drum machine freely into the computer sequencer (no click) and then just cleaned it up a little, before adding any other instruments.

9. Various Fakes - this was originally only meant to be a demo, so I think I only had one repeating bar on the drum machine except for the breaks. There’s a spot in the middle of the guitar solo where I wanted a fill, so I played that by hand to an open track and then carefully punched/ping ponged it in. You can hear the sound quality of the drums change slighty where that fill comes in.

10. Waitin’ for the Wind - there are no drums on this. It’s just my friends and me, goofing around in Jeff’s kitchen circa 1993.

11. X-Ray Tex and X-Ray Ted and the Marvellous X-Rated X-Ray Specs on their Heads - I played the drum machine by hand after the bass, piano, and synth solo had already been sequenced. It’s mostly a ride cymbal, with an occasional snare crack.

12. You Feel Exactly Like Me - played the drum machine by hand. It only appears at the very end of the last verse, and again no click was used.

13. Zero Gratitude - this is Jeff Lewis’ drum track from one of his songs, sped up to nearly twice as fast. On the original mix I ran it through a pitch shifter to make it lower sounding, and combined that with the unaffected sound. Since the pitch shifted version sounded kind of crappy, I did my best to drown that out on the pseudo-remix (or “remaster and then some”) with another, cleaner version of the original drum track. Since it was still sped-up and high-pitched, I ran it through a “sub-synth” effect so at least the kick drum would have some more bottom to it. The disco-ish ending, though, is just a single bar repeating on the drum machine. This was also from a quick demo for a completely different song, and I “cheated” on the remaster by adding subliminal hand claps.

For all you non-drummers, I’ll divulge plenty of non-drum-related factoids about these songs when I make my forthcoming announcement…

The Sunset - remix update

Holy mother of God, The Sunset/Slab of Clay are sounding so amazing to me right now. Even totally not mixed.

Not mixed?? So what did I just spend the past 48 hours doing??

That’s not “mixing”, that’s tweaking. And it wasn’t 48 hours, it was like 18 hours on and off. Your sense of time is distorted, but it’s understandable.

Not sharing yet. (Update 9/15: Oh, okay, twist my arm. It’s somewhere on this site. But you have to be a super-sleuth to find it, and keep in mind, it’s more of a theater piece than a driving song.) It’s that good. No, seriously, I’m in “that place” where the music is alive, and not just a sound coming out of my equipment. I’d say no human with a nervous system could listen to this and not start jumping up and down saying, “when are we gonna put this on? Huh? Huh??” — but I’m no stranger to that feeling. I think it’s just the spirit guides jumping up and down at the moment. The humans are still clueless. Well, not all of them. You know if you’re an exception.

Beep

Speaking of cassettes, I threw a lot of them away so that I can hopefully whittle the collection down small enough to fit in one carrying case. A few that I kept, though, were from my old-skool answering machine (I lost a part of myself with the obsoletion of the art of creating twisted, non-sequitur, perfectly-timed 20-second outgoing messages — if that beast had kept kicking, I would have kept using it forever).

All I can say about these is: dear everyone, as a whole, you are so freakin’ confusing. Who the hell are you all? (That’s not a literal question — yes, I know all your names, I just mean, like, collectively.) And also, I feel like a dick. I’ve been a dick to everyone, in the name of “fighting the system” or something. Sorry. (But thanks for the funny ones.)

Oh, and anyone who gave me their phone number in 1994… it’s not good anymore. Yeah, I actually tried some of them.

Psychology question

Okay, so assuming most forward-thinking people have rejected Freudian psychology on the basis that the past is over (not to mention I’m pretty sure we really don’t want to hump our mothers), what if we believe that time is an illusion and therefore the past is not gone, per se, but just in a different place than we are now? It seems pretty easy to bring it back into existence when I go through old cassettes, go to reunions, or rack my brain for autobiographical details for this blog, etc. — so does this mean it still should be dealt with, since it’s not “in the past” so much as “in a particular box”?

Speaking of autobiographical details, there was a gap in my So You Want… series where I stated flat-out that I don’t remember deciding to do an album in my own name. But I seem to have found a missing link in the evolution of that idea. A cassette labeled Knocked Senseless helped to jog that memory. Actually, the box was labeled, but the cassette, which was not in the box, was not labeled, so I thought it had gone missing over a decade ago. The little piece of splicing tape connecting the tape to the leader had long since come off at both ends, so I had to take it apart and fix it — twice — just to listen to both sides. And since it was still labeled as a promotional demo that had been given to me (which it was, before I taped over it), it could have easily been mistaken for trash.

When I say “evolutionary link”, I’m not kidding — it really is the mutant bastard frankenbridge between the Episodes album and Open the Window. It’s only a demo-quality mockup, mainly for me to listen to in the car and “think about it”, but does include rare early versions of Cheap Thrills and Hard, aka B. D. Caterpillar, that I don’t have anywhere else. Shortly after this, I went through one of those “dark night of the soul” thingies, and the tone of my song selection shifted from callous (it’s hard to believe Children’s Abortion Workshop was still making the list) to hypersensitive (Lullabye for a Fallen Angel). But the main point is, I was already conceiving of a self-credited solo album while taking those classes in Buffalo; I just wasn’t announcing it yet.

Four whole versions of one lousy song!

I didn’t mean to. Honestly. It just kind of happened.

If you really want to experience this from my perspective, scroll down and listen to the current version first, and then come back to the top and work your way back up to it. If, like most sane people, you don’t have that much time on your hands, just listen a little ways through the first verse of each one and needle-drop somewhere in the middle to hear a bit of the solo.

1988/89

This is my first four-track cassette demo of TIYC. I was still “just a keyboardist” so everything is drum machine and keyboards. All them “guitars” are distorted keyboards, the only guitar-like sound I was capable of making. If you listen to several my demos from that time period, you will rapidly reach a point of never wanting to hear that sound again.

The vocals are missing altogether, but somewhere there exists a version like this with a simple vocal added a few years later. The ultra-complicated four-part vocal arrangement didn’t exist until 1994, so when I did go to sing this, it was just a simple rhythm over and over on three notes.

1995

By the time I “got serious” about recording my rock opera, I was faced with the problem of how in the heck I was going to do that insane four-part vocal thing. I think I tried every “cheat” I could think of, one of which was to sequence all the pitches and hook the computer up to one of those DigiTech Vocalist thingies. But that sounded too much like a vocoder, so I didn’t keep that. For this version I tried to run a whispery voice through very short delays to make the notes, and apparently it was only marginally successful, so I re-recorded some parts in a more… conventional way… if you use the word “conventional” loosely. They don’t sound as unintelligible as I remembered them to be, but they do sound weird.

Hm, there’s a tambourine during the solo. Did I play that?

The 1995 version of my rock opera was important because a.) that’s when I really made the biggest leaps production-wise (what I’m doing now is comparitavely incremental), and b.) at the end of the year I threw a listening party to showcase it. It was mostly people I knew, but hey, it was still an event.

With 90 minutes of music to record and mix, and me being just plain sick of laying down guitar parts, I invited my friend Garrett to play the solo heard here. Notice there’s actually a walking bass line now (albeit synthesized), instead of just fast triplets on the root notes.

2002

Never quite happy with the metronomic triplet drum machine feel of previous versions, and wanting it to “swing” a bit more, I stupidly brilliantly recorded the bass guitar first for this version. Without a click track. Then I pasted drums on top of it and tried to make it feel rhythmic. The drums at the very beginning and end are lifted from one of Jeff Lewis’ recordings. I also got fancier on the arpeggiating guitar, playing groups of four notes even though they’re triplets… but what’s more noticeable is the gargantuan drum sounds and occasional reverse reverb; I’m not sure what the motivation was for that.

You will probably notice the vocals are now speech synthesized. I may have briefly considered keeping them as the official vocal part, but I quickly faced the truth: they’re just a guide.

Bonus: isolated speech synth

Here’s the synthesized vocals by themselves.

2007

The current version. (This mp3 is slightly quiet relative to the last two; sorry for the inconvenience.) You may have seen posts on this blog about “the hardest vocal part in the world”. This is how it sounds when I put myself to the grindstone and just do the work. Hooray! Fucking difficult it was, eh mate? Don’t ask me to sing this live; it ain’t happening.

The intro should sound familiar, since it’s just cleaned up a bit from the 2002 version. And the little violin bit (courtesy Mike Edwards) has actually survived being transplanted and re-transplanted since the 1995 version.

The underlying rhythm track is smoother too. Maybe a bit toooo smooth. [*makes shifty eyes*] It’s pretty much all sequenced on the computer, but using samples of real drums and real bass notes played by real me, so it’s franken-legit. The arpeggiated guitar has grown even more complex too, with seven-note, six-note, five-note and four-note patterns, but it doesn’t jump out as being such, because it’s textural. I just like it to be varied. Hey, if you’d been working on a song for 20 freakin’ years, you’d change it up a bit too.

In a way, comparing it to the others, it seems like maybe it’s too mellow. I do miss some of the “rocking-ness” from earlier versions. But first, well into the home stretch of a bombastic 90 minute piece, it might be good that the production style doesn’t compound the listener’s fatigue. And second, it doesn’t have any mastering on it yet, which should make it a bit “bigger”.

~

So admittedly, not an absolute favorite per se — not in my top twenty as individual songs go. Just a neurotic compulsion fueled by a series of technical challenges. I think since I was running out of ideas when I wrote it, it turned into a musical lab rat for ideas I’d come up with later on, because hey, it’s not like I’d be ruining anything.

Okay, that’s that. I hope you enjoyed it for whatever it is!

Ultra-rare “bootleg” - for the diehards only

A 1996 attempt to toss together a quick “pop song”. Do you really want the backstory? No, I didn’t think so. I’m simultaneously grooving on it and embarrassed for myself. Never one to hog the embarrassment, I’m generously passing it on to you.

I have a much higher quality copy of this demo on DAT tape, but this is from a cassette I ran off, and apparently is missing a guitar that comes in at 2:13. I’ll save my rant — about begging permission to borrow equipment just to be able to preserve music that I put all the work into — for another time. (Suffice to say, owners of expensive toys should be lining up to beg me to deflower their devices with my fertile and horny music.) Thankfully that’s mostly a problem of the past, with songs like this being the rare exception. I think I mixed it down quickly and then re-used the quarter inch tape for something else.

Anyway, the real reason I dusted off my cassette deck in is so that I can do some side-by-side comparisions between certain old demos and how the songs sound today. Might be interesting for ya. For one song in particular, I have not two, not three, but four progressively evolving versions…

The hardest vocal part in the world, post #3

As I mentioned in a comment on another mortal’s site, I sometimes tend to “micro-blog”, meaning I write about the details of whatever I’m working on without always giving a clear overview of what I’m talking about.

And today’s post will be no exception!

So, back to tweaking and cleaning up what I’ve here referred to half-jokingly as “the hardest vocal part in the world”. So ya’s doesn’t have to go searching through my backposts for the details, the song is called This Is Your Chance, one of the songs left off the 1998 CD version of my rock opera for time considerations, and it was written in traditional four-part SATB format. That’s where “traditional” ends, though; had I handed it in to my college music theory professor, he would have drawn a truck driving through the gaps between the notes. (He always used to do that on the blackboard.)

I made up my own rules for how to arrange it. I figured since it would be sung over rock instrumentation anyway, it wouldn’t need to stand on its own, so if it had some questionable voicings in it, that would be fine. I wouldn’t have gotten as complicated as I did with it, except that I was working double shifts at a gas station in 1994, and needed a challenging project (besides counting packs of cigarettes) to keep me awake in the wee hours.

This song, or at least the vocal part, is a rare case where my prime motivation is “climb the mountain because it’s there”. Truthfully, though, it’s coming together nicely, and not as likely to be an acquired taste as I’d thought.

Here are my most recent issues with the vocals and what I’ve done about them:

1. External genetalia. SATB stands for “soprano, alto, tenor, bass”. Two of which I’m not qualified for. One more of which I’m only semi-qualified for. So some thirteenish years after writing out this arrangement, I decide that it can’t hurt anything to just try knocking the two higher lines down an octave, since like I said, the voicings were weird anyway, so it can’t make them any weirder. And a lot of it does sound just fine this way, but some of it is very “clustered” sounding, like if you played a keyboard with your fist.

Solution: I created a varying delay effect that was pitch-aware (requires Praat and does not work in real time, sorry peeps), so that I could make versions of the soprano and alto lines that were consistently delayed by exactly one half of a wave cycle. When mixed with the original part, it cancels out the fundamental pitch and all the odd harmonics, effectively making the voice sound an octave higher. By changing the volume level of this delayed sound, I could gradually shift the emphasis back and forth between the higher and lower (original) octave. As the soprano/alto voices went lower and got too close to the tenor/bass voices, I increased the effect — and as they went higher, I used it less, because there was already enough space between the voices (and the effect would have sounded ridiculous on those higher notes). I think this even fixes my amateurish voicings, but how anyone would ever perform it live is… not my problem.

(I say “not my problem” now, but just watch, in another ten years I’ll be working out a five or six part version for live performance, to emulate the recording I’m making now.)

2. Intonation. Hearing the voices sound the way they’re really going to sound makes it easier to pick out where the tuning issues still are. When I recorded them, I was extremely fussy and did a lot of tweaking by ear, but that was only with a horizontal (time) reference. Meaning, I was working on each line by its lonesome, tuning it to itself and not to the other voices. And for the most part, I did a decent job of this; but with aural fatigue, and perception naturally distorted by the repetition of listening to a phrase over and over, one is bound to be off here and there.

Solution: well, this is simple enough, because I now have all four lines synced together on four tracks. If a chord doesn’t sound like it’s quite hitting it, I mute different combinations of tracks to see which tracks do sound in tune with each other, and this makes it easy to zero in on the culprit. Isolating the offending syllable (snip snip) and shifting its pitch by 1% or 2% (less than a quarter tone, since a semitone is about 6%) in either direction usually is enough, and only takes a few seconds.

There aren’t that many occurences of noticeably wacky pitch anyway, and besides, some syllables — and this goes for any vocal performance — are more important than others. It’s best not to waste too much time on un-accented “in-between” notes, especially if they fly by so fast that you barely perceive them as pitched. Instead, it’s better to waste time writing a blog post about it. That is to say, if I hadn’t stopped to write this, I’d be done now. Curse you, internet!

Sunset revisited

Yesterday’s task was to straighten out, condense, and clean up The Sunset. Written circa 1987 as a narrative intro to Slab of Clay, and remaining fairly faithful to its original incarnation, it depicts a dialogue between factory worker 881 and tourist Nicole, in a “worlds collide”-type first contact between an outsider and a not-quite-successfully brainwashed insider.

Is that what it looks like on the outside?

Not all the time
Only certain places, certain times
But sometimes it does…

Stylistically, it’s universes apart from Slab, which I’ve already done a ton of work on since the 1998 CD version (Slab now has a faster tempo, and features real drums, in turn supported by triggered electronic drums, for an enormous in-your-face beat). Sunset is less of a song and more of a conversation. Besides cleaning up the sound, I actually cut beats out. Changing a lot of the quieter bars from 12/8 to 9/8 was not some geeky attempt to be “progressive” so much as a theatrical decision to tighten up the pace of the dialogue.

The aesthetic danger that Sunset teeters on is that of sounding a bit “Disney”; and we’re not talking edgy vintage stuff like Dumbo, we’re talking sparkly corporate lunchbox fodder like The Little Mermaid. Again, though, I said “teeters”, not “falls into the gaping abyss”. So as long as the film interpretation has some bleak looking gray stuff in the background, it’ll be alright.

Did I say “film”? I really do have to come out of my shell and start talking about a storyboard/animatic for this at the local filmmaker meetings I’m attending. I’ve more than put in my time getting a “feel” for the meetings — it’s time to start soliciting for input.

I’ve “touched” several other parts of the rock opera as well lately, and it seems like there are two main things I’m doing with the weaker sections (the sections that bridge things together, but wouldn’t cut it as songs in themselves); one is the pacing, which I’m finding clever ways to tighten up by literally changing the rhythm (which kills a second bird by making it less plodding), and the other is to make some parts more colorful sounding by adding pleasing or atmospheric harmony to some of the bleaker and more monotonous melody lines.

Sometimes, when people review something, they specifically target overall length, and say the whole thing should just be shorter. My feeling about that is there is no right or wrong length for something; if it seems “long” to you, it means there are parts you’re not enjoying. That’s not to say certain parts haven’t benefitted from economizing, but I’m not a big fan of removing an entire idea from a piece, when the intention was, in fact, to make a rock opera, and not a mini rock opera. So, yes, I economize where it works to do so, but if certain bridges and segues aren’t satisfying, plan A is to ask myself what they should sound like and how I can get them there.

Leave of Absence vol 2 - analysis

I just listened to the rest of the tracks from Leave of Absence vol 2, the ones I hadn’t heard recently, to kind of evaluate them as far as what might be needed for a remastering. I was re-organizing the file system on my G5, so that the most up-to-date versions of any songs would all be in one place. I listened to a couple of “deep cuts” from Unfinished Business and Leave of Absence vol 1 as well, just to get a feel for where everything stood sound-wise and production-wise, but of those three albums, LoA2 would be the only one where I didn’t have any songs in the remix queue.

None of the songs from LoA2 can be remixed, because they were all assembled on the Korg D8 portable eight track hard drive recorder. Most of the songs did start out in some analog form on the Fostex, but the bulk of the work was done on the D8. It was all digital mixing and editing, like using a computer, but without the benefit of a screen to see anything on. It just has a little LCD display that tells you what song you’re working on, the elapsed time, and the paramaters of whatever effect you’re tweaking. You can copy sections from one track to another, slide things back and forth in time, and even do a “repeating paste” that effectively loops a sound up to 99 times. But you’re kind of doing all this in the dark, by today’s standards.

Whenever I was happy with an overdub, I would bounce the tracks down to make room for more overdubs, and erase the original tracks. So although I wasn’t losing sound quality, and I did have the benefit of being able to “fix” my overdubs to some degree, once I committed them to this submix, there was no going back. When I felt that the songs were done, another audio engineer in the same building was gracious enough to let me plug my D8 into his CD recorder to save the final mixes to CD before wiping the D8 clean for more work (the timing of the track IDs is weird because you have to hit a button at the exact right moment while it’s recording). So in the end, those CDs were all I had. I eventually ripped them to a computer, while they were thankfully still playable, and have preserved the files as I migrated from computer to computer.

I didn’t bother listening to the first three songs, because I’ve already got a remastered Never Turn Back and Open the Window on this website, and remastered P.S.R. for the YouTube video. So the first thing I checked out was Quit Your Job and Join a Traveling Hindu Cult. This is just a meaningless, silly title, to keep in line with my alphabetical naming scheme. What struck me about it is that it’s a mashup. You remember when mashups were popular? Oh, yeah, of course you remember, because it’s now. Well, this was a mashup I did in 1999, of my own material, and whatever tapes were lying around with friends’ material as well. Kim’s voice (backwards, mostly) wafts in and out, as well as some of Garrett’s voice and guitar from his album. A bit from Wake Up is used, some of the Mind Mogger jam from Friends and Players that didn’t wind up on volume 1, some of Paul Gaspar’s trumpet from the TFBD sessions, a bit of a weird “vampire” speech Jeff had done on a song of his — the surprises just keep a-coming. The overall effect is somewhat chaotic, like a more tuneful Revolution 9. Since I went to the trouble to time things musically and match keys, it also reminds me of parts of the more recent Love album.

Overall — and this goes for all three albums — the need for remastering is not “icing on the cake”, it’s urgent. Everything sounds muffled. But this is extra true for the next song, Revelation in the Resonance (the title lifted from Never Turn Back’s lyrics just to fill the “R” spot). I actually remember EQ’ing and re-EQ’ing this one because it never sounded good. And the only way to undo the damage is to EQ it yet again. It sounds like a beautifully sad and powerful eulogy for something, and I think that “something” is it’s own sound; this was the last time I ever faked a lead guitar by distorting the CZ-1 synthesizer (I did this all the time, especially for demos, when I was a “keyboardist”). In one spot it hints at the riff from Ten Years From Now, but only because they were both written around the same time.

My memory of Soldiers of Music, in contrast, was that it was sonically pristine. And my memory would be wrong. Although a step up from Revelation…, it’s in just as much need of treatment as the rest of the tracks. But it does groove solidly. I then skipped ahead to Various Fakes, which had me furiously bobbing my head, and X-Ray Tex and X-Ray Ted and the Marvellous X-Rated X-Ray Specs on their Heads, which as you might guess, was titled at the last minute to fit the convention. The latter, a short and sterile faux-jazz experiment, would be more suitably identified as something like “Plastic Lounge”, and sounds like it would be at home on a Zappa album.

You Feel Exactly Like Me is stunningly dark and pointed, and would be appropriate to dedicate to anyone who is hurtful for no reason. It was about something personal at the time, but I remember hearing about the Columbine murders around that time and weaving my feelings about that in with the more personal stuff, as if I was confronting a killer from a channeled victim’s point of view:

Who am I…
Watching you watching me die?

Fantastic improvised guitar noodling in the background on that one, too — sort of Oldfieldian. And then, at the very end of Red-esque rocker instrumental Zero Gratitude, there’s a brief sound of an acoustic guitar and my voice saying “I think I’ve got… enough of that one”, which is actually me doing takes for Never Turn Back, thus making the album subliminally circular (even though it’s supposedly the second half of a two-volume album). Without the listener knowing this, it just sounds like me casually saying that’s enough material for the album, and it’s simply time to end it — an equally groovy interpretation.

I think I can definitively confirm that the album was completed by the end of 1999, because as I recall, Christy had moved to Rochester, and our friend Rich was up to visit, and the three of us celebrated New Years by playing Worms Armageddon (and replacing the existing sound effects with in-jokes and obscenities, which probably made for one of the top ten most eye-tearing and snot-clearing laughs I’ve ever experienced) and listening to the album from start to finish. We all agreed in the end that it was a good album. I still think it’s a good album, but I don’t know if it would fly with something like Magnatune (the compilation idea felt “wrong” to me — I was starting to think maybe I’m a singles person and not an album person, but apparently I was right the first time). They stress that an album should be chock-full of good tracks, and not have fillers — but I think in the broader context, the fact that it does have “fillers” is what makes it work. The emotions are not always at an intense level, so it doesn’t burn you out. You get a chance to just relax and have a laugh between the catharses.

Well, it won’t hurt anything to remaster the dang thing and send it in…

The solemn bonds of geography and time

Sure, people can — and do — form bonds over such superficial things as common interests, common beliefs, common philosophies and values, a shared sense of humor — but pray tell me, what truly binds man to his fellow man like being born in the same one-year window into a family living within an N-mile radius of the other guy’s house? Yes indeed. It was with this thought in mind that I knew I could not make the same mistake I’d made ten years earlier, passing up the golden opportunity to reconnect with two hundredish soulmates that I’d been painfully separated from ever since that bittersweet day when mortarboards crowned our heads, diplomas kissed our hands, and tears flooded our eyes.

(Abrupt “record stopping” sound effect)

Well, actually, my friend Paul talked me into going, pretty much at the last minute, a few hours before the reunion. His exact words were, “come on, it will only be slightly painful. And there will be alcohol.” So I looked at my schedule, and it was painfully clear that I had absolutely no excuse whatsoever — really, seriously, what the hell else was I going to be doing that evening?

The whole time I was showering and getting ready, waves of nervous apprehension kept wafting over me, and I kept talking them down. I’m not going there to impress anyone, I’m just going to observe. Think of it like one of those rides at Disney World. All the people there are animatronic robots. No problem. I go, I observe, I come back home.

To describe the whole event in detail would bore you to tears. Suffice to say, once you actually get there and put on your name tag, it’s all downhill (in the good sense). You apologize to people for not knowing who they are, and each time you regurgitate your soundbite (”I work various jobs that I hate, although at this moment I’m unemployed, and in all my spare time I do creative work in my space which is both a recording studio and a living space.”), you refine it a little.

A few highlights:

My friend Dean Stresing apparently lost his job about the same time I did, and was every bit as elated about it as I was. (Not being sarcastic here.) We rejoiced in the fact that, essentially, the state was paying for every beer we ordered. Dean was perplexed that I let Tim Reed draw my caricature, when to the best of his memory, I’d always “hated” Tim Reed. I told him, yeah, maybe I did, but not on any actual basis whatsoever. (There were people in my past much more deserving of my wrath, but for some reason Tim was the unfortunate subject of several dumb stories, audio dramas, and 8-millimeter films I made with Dean between fifth and seventh grade.)

At one point, Dean’s wife commented on how condescending [name omitted] had just been to me. I told her I barely noticed, maybe because I was trying to be in a totally non-judgemental mindset, or maybe because my radar for that kind of thing was down. But I did notice [name omitted]’s girlfriend was particularly friendly. She repeatedly insisted she’d known me since elementary school, and tried to get me to remember when our kindergarten teacher lost a contact lens. While she was babbling about how much she had “changed” since high school, I said, “so you became a slut”, which didn’t even faze her. It was kind of endearing, actually. (The animatronic rides at Disney World would have at least said “hey, watch it.”) Anyway, I thought of [name omitted], and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Gimme Three Steps, and quit while I was ahead.

IN GENERAL, women tan themselves way too much (after the first couple of shades, it does not make you more attractive), and men eat too many hamburgers. Paul also noticed a trend with the hair:

Paul: “It’s good to see so much male pattern baldness.”
Me: “It’s good to not partake in that.”
Paul: “Shut up.”

For anyone considering going to such an event, it’s not a major life changer, but it will give you food for thought. You can draw karmic lines between how people behaved and how their lives turned out. (It should be mandatory to attend one’s 20 year reunion before starting kindergarten, if this were possible.) Some people apologized for instances of bullying that I don’t even remember, which makes me feel a little better about the human race. Some people will be stuck for years and years and years in some kind of identity crisis stemming from how they felt about themselves in high school. And everybody’s a little nervous about seeing people they haven’t seen in a long time.

Last but not least, though, at the end of the day, it feels good to come back to the present.

Sentimental treasures

While you’re waiting for my next exciting instructional video (I won’t tell you what it’s about yet, but it’s something that begins with the letter “S”… What? No, not “sex”, you moron…), I’d like to point you to a May post I just found on Matrixsynth that whisked me back to a personal yesteryear. Someone named Ron has posted the audio from several “soundpages”, the thin, flexible records that were included in issues of Keyboard Magazine in the mid 1980s, right around the time when I was reading it fervently.

I used to make mix tapes from these records, so I could listen to them more passively, and give some of the weirder and more experimental stuff a chance to inject itself into my subconscious. Although any collection like this is bound to be incomplete, there was a lot more overlap than I expected between what’s here and what I remember. A few of them are B-sides featuring ads for Kurzweil and Kawai instruments, which are fun in an “OMG the 80s were actually quaint” kind of way. Do you remember when announcers didn’t all sound like vomiting teenagers on speed? (Incidentally, last I knew — back when I watched television — Paul Shaffer was using that Kurzweil on Letterman’s show.  For its time it was admittedly pretty hot… but one of the demos here, subtitled “Rock Block”, features some of the least-convincing “guitars” I’ve ever heard.  Ah, who cares, rock was dead anyway.) One of the soundpages even featured my favorite columnist, Freff, whose way-off-topic articles on creativity I still keep copies of today — although, truthfully, that particular record is kind of corny, and I cringe a bit to envision it as your introduction to him.

If you want to hear these, but don’t like Windows Media files, let me know, because as soon as I downloaded them I immediately converted them to mp3 and gave them proper tags. Now if only somebody could post that mix cassette I stole from a house party in college, declared to be “stupid”, and promptly became addicted to, until it found its way into the laundry, care of a careless family member who shall not be named… sigh… they do hand all that stuff back to you when you check into the afterlife, right?  (Uh, Keith… no, not if it was stolen. HTH.)

P.S. - If you want one more hint about the upcoming video… it’s sort of relevant to this post… in a way.

What Do You Think Of Yourself? (demo, 4/6/99 8:11 PM)

Here is something straddling the line between demo and song-skeleton: What Do You Think Of Yourself. Thanks to Garrett’s verbal time-stamping, we can now pinpoint the exact year, day, and minute that the acoustic demo was originally recorded. The funny thing is, I forgot we ever did record the song, and it was a delightful surprise to find it intact when I was inventory-ing my reels a few years later. The drums (for part of the song) had already been played by myself in a separate session, and I had to do some time-squashing of our demo to fit it to the tempo of the drums.

Apologies for my out-of-tune vocal, and for, uh… Michael Bolton. That will be cut at the last minute, but I’m keeping it in the working version because it’s a cheap laugh. :)

Oh, I almost forgot the reason why I’m posting this now: I just used Da Hornet (plus a Leslie effect) to make the “spinning” chord for the intro (0:58 - 1:39).

Whenever all the noise dies
Behind the lids of my eyes
It’s never hard to give rise to a “me thing”
But when I see the whole earth
I wonder how much I’m worth
Or if I even deserve to be breathing

People pay a pretty penny
Collecting clowns to criticize
People love to make a fool of
That reflection in Bozo’s eyes

Have you noticed when you’re looking
At squirmy worms that crawl the ground
Squirmy worms are less repulsive
They look up while you look down

What do you think of yourself?

Every day you let slip away from you
Is a day you can never retrieve
Twenty four hours of your past down the drain
Your future might as well just get up and leave
And when you choke your deepest desires
Your worst fears are guaranteed to come true
‘Cause really, isn’t your worst fear of all
That nothing good will ever happen to you?

Are you good or are you evil
After all is said and done?
Is your life worth watching over?
And I mean that in more ways than one

What do you think of yourself?

Edit 6/11/07: “What’s all that with just the drums by themselves from 5:49 onward?”, I hear you asking. That’s for a section of music that bridges What Do You Think into the next song. Fortunately for me, as I sit behind a drumset, I can hear all of my chord changes in my head. Unfortunately for you, you can’t hear all my chord changes in your head, so all you hear is drums.

New piano part to the rescue!

I put in way too many hours — yes, that’s right, you heard me, “hours” — on this new piano overdub over this past weekend. First, I played the grandiose dramatic thing from 1:18 - 1:52, as in actually played it on the keyboard, since I’ve played it thousands of times and pretty much knew exactly note for note what I wanted there. Since you can only play so well on a $100 unweighted keyboard, I did take some time cleaning that up in piano roll view: erasing mis-hit notes, quantizing rhythm, smoothing out volume (”velocity”) of notes.

Then I did the quiet part from 0:50 - 1:17, the same way, but separate from the quiet “guide drums” so they wouldn’t be locked into that tempo. Since it was a little shorter/faster than the guide drums, I lined it up with the next part, and then slid all that stuff to the left to line it up with the part before it.

For the “apocalyptic chords” (0:22 - 0:49), I knew what chords I wanted there but didn’t have a set way in my mind to play them, so I “composed” that whole part by drawing it in the piano roll view, working backwards from the end of the section so that it would lead into the next part as naturally as possible. (Kind of bends the definition of the word “naturally”, I realize.)

For everything before that, the “jam-out” part (which you only hear the tail end of here), I did a combination of actual playing and creative note-drawing, got too far out with it — to the point where it was getting in the way — and then replaced the most excessive bits with simple filler. One of the big differences between the me of today and the me of 1992-1994 is that I realize I have this tendency to overwrite, and know when to cut out a crazy measure and replace it with dead-simple quarter notes and triads.

Towards the end, when I only had a few measures left to fill in (0:04-0:18 on this mp3), I felt creatively zapped. I was ready to call it a night and go to bed, when I asked myself this awesomely powerful question: “what would you put in there if you had to quickly put something there and didn’t have time to think about it?” That helped blast that block out of the way, for sure. And I didn’t cop out on those measures — I did wind up putting some real “artistry” into them — but that was kickstarted by the “just do something” mindset.

“So what’s up with the piano all by itself from 1:53 to the end?”

Ah, another day… another day…

Whatever became of “the hardest vocal part in the world”?

Remember this post from days long gone?

My goodness, will you look at how time has washed out all the color? I tell ya, you have to put those old internet posts in a climate-controlled vault, or they’ll put you in a vault… figuratively… okay, so they can’t all be clever, cut me some slack here.

I should probably assert here that I do, in fact, keep all these seemingly scattered sub-projects alive