The Light of Day

Follow-through

I suspect that my blog would be a more effective tool (CATEGORY ALERT!!!) if I followed through by consistently providing updates of the things I wrote previously. This would also make me appear to have an attention span of more than a few seconds.

Without even peeking at my blog, I’m going to pull a number out of some dark and dirty place, and that number is…

Five! Ah, the comforting sound of men and women singing an octave apart… and when we’re little kids, we don’t notice how thumpy the tom toms are. (Why do I suddenly have an urge to listen to Hair?) So anyway, without further ado, here are quick follow-ups to my five most recent posts, from oldest to most recent…

1. First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang. I’ve noticed that, within my album tracklists, there are some things that are more absolute than others. Within those lists, I’ll often find pairs of songs that are, in my mind, absolutely inseperable. You know the kind: Heartbreaker and Living Loving Maid. We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions. Well, in my case, one such pair would be What Do You Think Of Yourself? and Rival Big Bang. Those two songs are married to each other. So what I should be doing is making videos of these pairs as “mini suites”. And just think, these “mini-suites” will fit into the YouTube ten-minute limit (which for some strange reason doesn’t apply to everyone… hmmm…).

2. Open letter to Republicans. Some masochistic force within me made me watch a thirty-second Mitt Romney campaign promo tonight. By the six second mark, he had already said something negative about Democrats. By the 15 second mark he did it again. Only 30 seconds to talk, and at such loss for something constructive to say that the time has to be padded out with broad insults. But the greatest insult was that his voice was dubbed. You know the sound of a hollywood movie, where every time someone talks, it sounds like the microphone is a few inches in front of the actor’s mouth, even though there’s no microphone anywhere in the shot? Makes you wonder what else was fake about it…

3. I’m so tired. The “night crew” paid a visit to Cats and Critters this evening, because Emily Junior is gonna need to get fixed up, and she’s gonna need to take some meds for at least a week beforehand. I took the whole darn cage along, so Ralphie had a chance to check out the scenery too. Em Jr. is still acting sociable and energetic — but nonetheless, now would be a good time to send some positive energy her way. Thanks!

4. Possible video: creating drum parts. Maybe I can go ahead and shoot this. The main thing holding me back is how to get the camera to pick up the sound as I’m working, so I don’t have to sync it up after the fact… I suppose I can just turn my speakers on. Can’t do that for vocal sessions though. Other videos that I want to do: a video at the Fender Rhodes where I discuss chords, and a video at the desk of improvised doodling, cutting shapes out of colored paper, making some kind of “paper puppets”, and generally making images inspired by music without knowing ahead of time what they’re going to be.

5. My results on the equal loudness test. I finished doing what I had to do to create my vocal limiter/de-esser effect, which is both functional and theoretical, in that I’ve tested it, but not on vocals. Don’t forget, that post links to a site where you can test yourself to see how you perceive volume at different pitches. It’s useful stuff to be aware of when you produce audio of any kind.

Well, that certainly felt responsible! Let’s do this again sometime.

The stages of a song’s development over the course of your life

(Note: I’m too tired and hungry to write at my usual level. There are some inelegantly overused words, etc. — I’ll come back and spiffy this up later.)

The stages of a song’s development, none necessarily any better or worse than the others (with the possible exception of stage 5, an awkward but possibly unavoidable “growing pains” stage):

Stage one: You just wrote the song. You know it on a very immediate level, but haven’t formed a relationship with it. It’s almost a little frightening because it’s so unfamiliar, and yet you know in the pit of your stomach this is something good. It’s raw, though. Your melody is simultaneously repetitive (from line to line) and inconsistent (from performance to performance), because you need to have your lyric sheet in front of you just to get through it — but your inspiration, the thing that made you want to write it, is still fresh on your mind. You haven’t developed all the inflections yet; if you record this now and listen to it later, it will sound funny to you.

Stage two: a few days have passed, you may have made a couple of changes in the lyrics, and you can now pretty much sing it from memory. Since you don’t have to focus on remembering the lyrics, some new inflections start to form. You don’t even have to think about doing this; it happens whether you intend it to or not. Some syllables stretch, some get compressed, and the tone of your voice changes.

Stage three: you start to perform the song in front of other people. You’re gauging their reactions, and your self awareness naturally leads you to develop the “character” you sing it in; it may be grittier and more aggressive now.

Stage four: you do the studio version. You keep most of the inflections and character from stages two and three, but now your focus is on being anal-retentive. Your voice is probably not as raspy, because you’re drinking tea and sitting on leather couches. This is going to be (in your view anyway) the “quintessential” version of the song, and having solid intonation is crucial, lest you spend the rest of your life wishing you’d done one more take. It will sound good, but it will be more restrained and less spontaneous than your previous live versions.

Stage five: you continue to perform it, but now you’re mimicking the studio version. Little improvised flourishes from the session are now considered to be essential parts of the song, and you’re starting to tire of doing it all by rote — plus, let’s be honest, you can’t really sing as well in real life as you did on the album — so now you take some liberties that may or may not be entirely smart aesthetically. This is the stage where one would yell out something like “does anybody remember laughter??” in the middle of a song like Stairway to Heaven. Consciously, you’re trying to keep the song “vital”; unconsciously, you’re trying to put it out of its misery.

Stage six: you get so sick of your song that you start to think of it as a cliché. You’re older now, and you feel downright silly performing it. You might swear it off altogether, or only perform it for charity or novelty.

Stage seven: you rummage through your old treasures and find that cassette of your original demo of the song. Your apprehension is trumped by your curiosity, and you pop it in. On one level, it sounds just as silly as you expected it to, and is noticeably missing some key nuances that the song had accumulated as it matured. Yet, at the same time, you’re getting little shivers, smiling, and patting yourself on the back for writing such a neat little song — and remembering the uncomplicated, immediate feeling that sparked it, some of which had been lost in the translation when you “got too good” at singing it. 90% of the lines you sang on that old tape might sound quaint and embarrassing, but you’re too busy being blown away by the other 10%, half-wishing you could have preserved the elusive quality of those lines in later versions.

Stage eight: you use super-advanced modern technology to create a “fantasy mash” of earlier and later versions of the song, the new quintessential version, a version that could never have happened at any particular time in your life, and yet, there it is.

To be continued?

(Pretty soon I’ll have some “stage eights” to put up for your enjoyment.)

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…

Cutting-edge systems

It’s hard to see in this picture, but in the seventh column, fourth row from the top, under “Sunset/Slab”, there is a post-it note. Remember when I said I wanted some way of keeping notes on all the songs I’m working on? A notebook didn’t completely make sense, because I never really know how much I’m going to need to write about any particular song, and there will either be wasted paper or not enough paper. Not like I have paper shortage issues, but yeah. And besides, I already have a great big BOX full of notebooks containing ideas, doodles, lyrics, algorithms, and rants (all of which I need to go through, armed with scissors and stapler, and do an intensive sorting — not to mention remember what the heck is in them, so that I can have all these epiphanies about the forgotten purpose of my life and whatnot), and the last thing I need is one more notebook to lose track of.

(Exhibit A: this is only about half of them; there are plenty more scattered throughout the studio.)

There will ultimately be post-it notes in most of the boxes on the whiteboard. I can use as many or as few as I need. When it’s time to dive into a song, I’ll peel off the sticky notes for that song and go “a-ha, I still need to [whatever] on this one!” They won’t necessarily be complete lists of everything that needs to be done, just reminders of whatever I was going to do next, before my ears got all burnt out. Then, when it’s time to put that song away and go to the next one, I take a few minutes to put up revised notes/ideas for the one I’m putting away and look at the most recent notes for the one I’m moving on to. And the fact that there’s this big, physical, visible thing greeting me every time I walk through the room will help to compensate for the “out of sight, out of mind” effect of having my digital data a little too nicely tucked away on the hard drive, so hopefully any given song won’t languish in some freakishly half-alive state for quite so long.

I’m still interested in a randomization system for picking out what to work on next (unless I’m already excited about doing something on a particular song). Maybe simple dice would do the trick, but in that case I should have made it a 6×6 grid… Also, I may use some of the empty rectangles for other projects, like coding or video stuff.

(In case you’re wondering, the orange thing at the base of the whiteboard is a “giggle stick” noise-making toy. Such sound-producing objects are important tools of the trade, though admittedly it’s not doing much good up at the whiteboard and I have no idea how it wound up there.)

Better this than my underwear drawer

In my last post, I mentioned the “dozens of Tracktion projects on my hard drive”. So now you can see what I mean. Couple of notes:

“Teat2″ is supposed to be “test2″.

Those last three (Fangbonus/Everyone…/Funky…) are not mine. They’re sample projects that come with Tracktion. I haven’t gotten around to deleting them.

The country that invented itself

As with many Americans, there were gaping holes in my education, and history was a particularly weak subject of mine… so take it with a grain of salt when I suggest that America is a super-sized “man who invented himself”, or, the country that invented itself. You could criticize me here for reffing a song written by one Brit about another Brit, when England is the very country we’re celebrating our independence from (an inconvenient detail to mention these days). Of course, as George Carlin observed, “When you get right down to it, we’re Europe Junior.” Besides that, though, I think the Barrett analogy fits: we came over wild-eyed, passionate, and full of original ideas, overdosed on the fruits of our own brilliance, and became fat, apathetic, and schizophrenic… and now our own president stares at the world blankly while strumming the same chord over and over.

Before you fire off the hate mail, I realize that’s not the whole picture. America is about the people, and I’ll flat out admit I’m no good at talking about people; in fact, I can probably tell our story much better by talking about our things. So let’s look at a much-abbreviated list of American inventions, care of a quick Wikipedia search. In general, I picked the ones that had some emotional ring, be it “thank god”, “what have we done?”, or as in most cases, a combination of both:

• 1806: Coffee pot
• 1833: Sewing machine
• 1836: Revolver (the gun, not the album)
• 1837: Power tools
• 1843: Mechanical refrigerator (I assume this means “refrigerator” in general?)
• 1860: Repeating rifle
• 1863: Roller skates
• 1867: Barbed wire
• 1876: Telephone
• 1879: Light bulb
• 1882: Electric fan (gimme that and the coffee pot, and I’m all set!)
• 1887: “Platter” record (as opposed to cylinders)
• 1891: Escalator
• 1891: Motion picture camera
• 1902: Air conditioner
• 1903: Powered airplane
• 1906: Assembly line
• 1929: Frozen food
• 1934: Television
• 1945: Microwave oven (don’t watch the food cook!)
• 1945: Atomic bomb
• 1959: Integrated circuit
• 1960: Laser
• 1964: Operating system
• 1965: Minicomputer
• 1974: Product barcode (I remember these being spoofed by MAD Magazine when they first became widespread)
• 1983: Internet (the first TCP/IP-wide area network)
• 1988: Graphical user interface

…among many others. It’s likely that your eyes scanned over the list fairly quickly — it has more impact if you take a few seconds to register each item visually and ponder its subtexts, implications, motives, and long term (and indirect) effects — or better yet, read the full Wikipedia entry. I left out the medical and space-travel innovations because, important as they are, they don’t greet us in our day to day routines. So I don’t know what my rationale is for leaving weapons in; maybe because they look satisfyingly sinister lumped in with the other stuff. (Gun… gun… BOMB.) Yes, I am all about the drama.

I wonder if America’s two-century-and-counting invention spurt (or at least the sort of things we’ve been inclined to invent, since by no means do we have a monopoly on this trend) has been partly fueled by the nearly complete severing of our own roots, leaving a void where our world and identity had to be created from the ground up, a void that we filled with technology in lieu of culture. What culture we do have is largely bracketed within that technology — the preservation of early jazz recordings and newsreels, for example — and now, art and entertainment are practically non-existent outside of reproducible media, to the point where cutting edge technology is the very canvas we work on. Not unique to America, but very American, if that makes any sense.

I love technology, I love the spirit of invention, and I love the things we’re capable of coming up with. And while there may be some inventions capable of more harm than good, ultimately A.) it’s always up to people to choose to use technology for good, and B.) there’s no sense suppressing ideas, because if we force ourselves not to invent something, somebody else will. It parallels my views on speech: if you don’t like what was said, rather than silencing the speaker, say something back; and likewise, if a machine or tool is causing a problem, invent something that will either improve/replace it or correct the problem (I, uh, don’t know what to tell you about the atomic bomb here, sorry). We can sit around blaming the existence of refrigerators, escalators, TVs, microwaves, cars, and frozen food for that extra thirty pounds of blubber we’re hauling to Chuck-E-Cheese every day in our minivans… or we can re-invent ourselves again, now that we know even more about the effects of our inventions on ourselves, each other, and the planet. If we settle for the former, then America has jumped the shark; but if we pursue the latter, then I would dare to suggest that maybe it hasn’t.

P.S. - I was going to end this post with a link to one of the hundreds of “America F*ck Yeah” videos out there, before I realized there were hundreds of different versions (there must have been a competition or something)… and as I was watching them all, they became less and less funny to me, partly because half the people leaving comments on YouTube interpreted the song literally. See what I mean about schizophrenic?

Possible future installments for the “So you want” series

Here are some ideas I’m thinking of for future installments in the So You Want To Make An Album series:

Follow-through - is your flow on album #1 stifled by your refusal to touch album #2 too soon?

Meta-rhythm - swimmers (and other non-dead people) know it’s okay to breathe out into the water, as long as they breathe in from the air above. How do you synchronize music to your life for the best inflow (inspiration) and outflow (expression)?

What is originality? - is it pulling something brand new out of thin air?  Or is it drawing from a larger, more varied, less predictable pool of influences?

Colossal mp3 inventory giveaway! Everything must … uh … download!

I’ve uploaded lots of mp3s to my hosted space over the years. Some complete songs, some incomplete songs, some demos, some strange effects, and some category-defying rarities. Some of them are linked to from old LiveJournal posts that only a historian would ever look at again (and he would probably assume the links are broken by now), or were linked to from the old pre-blog Web 1.0 version of keithhandy.com. Some were put up temporarily just to be shared with someone else, and I never got around to removing them.

In any event, without any present-day links, they’re all up there collecting cyber-dust. So help yourself! Dig in! Mix and match! Make your own ultimate Keith Handy mashup album!

http://keithhandy.com/audio-coding_example_1.mp3
I wrote some code that helps to lay out a “grid” for a song with uneven tempo. It first finds the loudest beats in a recording, and then interpolates all the beats inbetween. This way you can start with a “squishy” human performance and add sequenced stuff to it afterwards.

http://keithhandy.com/audio-coding_example_2.mp3
This is interesting — a snippet from Momentum before and after an experimental transformation that would take a-whole-nother blog to explain. (Have you ever seen “a-whole-nother” typed out? Admit it, you’ve said it, just not written it.)

http://keithhandy.com/blahblahblah.mp3
New untitled song in progress. (”Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be”, etc.)

http://keithhandy.com/brownacidpartridges.mp3
This was one of the more hilarious and surreal things I’ve ever experienced, putting my family members in front of the microphone and telling them to improvise. My father is doing the lead vocal, and he swears up and down he has no idea where “little black baby” came from. I assure you we’re more progressive than that.

http://keithhandy.com/C64-bleepies.mp3
A rhythmic sound I made with a Commodore 64 emulator (similar to what I originally did with a real C64 in my teens). Legendary computer with sentimental value, but I wouldn’t want to use one on a daily basis.

http://keithhandy.com/catastrophic_noises.mp3
A collection of “catastrophic noises” that I found in various places to use as part of a piece of music. They sound hilariously jarring out of context.

http://keithhandy.com/Exactly_What_You’re_Looking_For.mp3
Exactly What You’re Looking For (aka There Will Always Be More), recorded early 90s. The instrumental lead-in is actually the recycled middle of Lullabye For A Fallen Angel from that same time period, minus the embarrassing lyrics.

http://keithhandy.com/foulsong.mp3
Earlier demo of the aforementioned untitled (blahblahblah.mp3 - “Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be”, etc.) song.

http://keithhandy.com/Insomnic%20Hallucinations%20(intro).mp3
Insomnic Hallucinations (first verse and creepy middle section). Old, old song.

http://keithhandy.com/Kid_in_a_Candy_Store.mp3
Kid in a Candy Store - cool experimental instrumental made by tossing a drum track onto a backwards orchestra, and then writing complimentary guitar and piano parts to make it sound like it was written that way on purpose.

http://keithhandy.com/Kim-mix.mp3
Backing harmony part for Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts, unwittingly sung by Kim Pinegar. I say “unwittingly” because it was just one note snagged from another song, and I used Praat to change her pitch without turning her into a chipmunk. It’s not music software, but it works.

http://keithhandy.com/Mana%20(overdub%20talk-through).mp3
The “commentary track” for my overdubs on Mana.

http://keithhandy.com/Mana.mp3
Mana. Originally recorded early 90s. Touched up a bit for this remix.

http://keithhandy.com/Momentum.mp3
Momentum.

http://keithhandy.com/onenote17.mp3
A demonstration of what one “bin” of an FFT sounds like all by its lonesome. A “horizontal slice of sound”, if you will. FFT breaks sound up into a few thousand of these, which can be mixed back together to reconstruct the original music. It’s useful for filtering. (You don’t need to listen all the way through.)

http://keithhandy.com/Open_the_Window.mp3
Open the Window - went by the title Layers in the early 90s. I could never get a satisfying vocal sound back then. The remix of course features a speech synth. This was not a musical speech synth, though, so I had to generate all the individual pitches separately and piece them together. Are you getting the picture here? Yes, I apparently love tedium. The tediouser, the better.

http://keithhandy.com/outflute.mp3
The solo section from Outside, remixed to feature sampled mellotron. Not necessarily an improvement, just something I felt like doing.

http://keithhandy.com/partialvox.mp3
A difficult four-part harmony with only about a third of the phrases actually sung by that point. I have finished all the singing since then, but to have told you that would have been like putting chocolate and graham crackers on my s’more.

http://keithhandy.com/skeletal_curtis_(with_cheezbass).mp3
Curtis’ Classic Collection Of Comforts. Just enough to get the song across. Don’t laugh at the drums and bass — they’re just temporary. I’ve put down a real bass since then. You get to hear the fake Kim in context, anyway.

http://keithhandy.com/soulpeer-demo.mp3
Demo for new song; the working title is Soul Peer.

http://keithhandy.com/t1.mp3
This is a test. This is only a test. I only had Tracktion out of the box for maybe ten minutes before I recorded this. Kinda charming in its brevity.

http://keithhandy.com/Thank_you_anyway.mp3
I’m not sure I should have this one up. I was really feeling awful that day (about a year ago, I think). And, uh … “poison darts”? Whatever. I did say “everything”, though, so I won’t self-censor.

http://keithhandy.com/The_Mark_Walnicki_Page.mp3
The Mark Walnicki Page (instrumental).

http://keithhandy.com/tv.mp3
A “chord bed” made up of random TV sound that has been re-pitched. I love the “freaking out about something” at the end — I think that’s Jessica from One Life To Live. Not that I would know who that is.

Miscellaneous bits

1. There’s no such thing as an unreliable person. Think about it.

2. When I die, I want my tombstone to say: “Hold down the fort for me, peeps.”

3. I’m going to have to stop eating Triscuits for a while…

… I just can no longer tolerate Rachael Ray’s menacing mug on the box, taunting me with her evil mind-beamed messages of “bwahahaha, I make millions spreading little bits of edible stuff on Triscuits, just because people love my infectious smile so doggone much!”

Infectious indeed. Remind you of anyone?

Get around, get around, they (The Other Gods) get around

I asked Mike Boas for a running list of all the festivals which have either shown or are scheduled to show his animated short, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Other Gods, which, as you know, I created the soundtrack for in a few insanely focused and self-disciplined days. Here’s the list as of now:

• H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival — October 8, 2006
• Something Wicked This Way Con — November 3-5, 2006
• Horror Dance — January 13, 2007
• Tromadance — January 24, 2007
• Emerging Filmmakers Series — February 26, 2007
• A Night of Horror — March 23-25, 2007

That last one is way out in Sydney, Australia. You gotta give Mike a hand for the tireless promotion he’s doing!

The boxless box set starts to take shape (possibly in the shape of a box!)

Assuming I can continue to stave off demons, dragons, and other disasters with the same level of tenacity that I have thus far, I foresee the assembly of a “boxless box set”, possibly titled “Everything I’ve Ever Done” or something equally cryptic.

It has to do with organization. In a way, I’m not sure why. On the one hand, if you collect 100 songs into one place you can guarantee them a “life raft” for the day when the body finally surrenders to entropy. On the other hand, depending on how things are organized, certain things will still manage to be drowned out by the rest of the collection. If they were “lost” and then “found” they might attract more interest than if they were sandwiched between a few unpopular obscurities. But then again, isn’t “sandwiched between a few unpopular obscurities” just another form of “lost”? Bottom line, I can’t guarantee them all a bright future with a two-car garage, but I can at least make sure they all make it onto the school bus.

They will be sorted vaguely by what phase of my life they were initially written in, regardless of when they were recorded or remixed. There are just too many songs that I’ve put away for a few years, done revisions and touch-ups on, put away for a few more years, done more revisions and touch-ups on, and so on. Bottom line is, whenever they first came out, no matter how crude they were, that’s when they’re from. And that’s a loose rule, because if something just “goes with” something else, it stays with it.

The general categories (what could be “discs” if the crazed fans insist on having a physical object in their hand) could be:

• Pre-historic (anything written before Insomnic Hallucinations)
• Unfinished Business (mostly songs written in high school)
• Through Forbidden Black Doors (started just after graduating high school)
• Open the Window/Leave of Absence
• Broken Wheel to Rival Big Bang song cycle (title?)
• Orphan songs (never been included on an “album”)
• Stuff with/by other people that I made significant contributions to

At least two of the items on that list would take up 2 discs each, which would be a total of nine discs. The Open the Window/Leave of Absence thing I’m not sure how to sort out, because they overlapped. I dumped Window on principle (because I didn’t like the “why” behind it), but then most everything on it was actually pretty good, so I remixed most of it for Leave of Absence and felt perfectly fine about it.

“Pre-historic” might not be enough material to fill a disc. Since I have working versions of several songs from a childhood album idea, I figured I’d assemble them into a skeletal mock-up of that, to give my inner thirteen-year old a “thank you” gift, as well as setting some kind of foundation for everything else. The “stuff by/with other people” might be thin too, so maybe they can share a disc. I guess I’d really only feature things I played lead guitar on.

Maybe I could have a disc of nothing but sketches, things that never got turned into full-blown songs but ought to be. I could call it You Finish The Damned Thing or something like that.

Who’s down with .CPP

As an amateur programmer with the organizational skills of your typical guitar-beating neo-hippie, eventually one accumulates so much code that one starts to forget where to find such-and-such neat trick that actually worked once upon a rainy day. So I figured I’d better go through my files now and write up a little reference guide for myself, while I still have any mental faculties at all. (Sorry if the indentation makes you seasick.)

It’s good to see that most of what I found in my old brainstorms has actually been done since then. What’s a little unnerving is finding some older stuff, literally hundreds of lines long, and not having the faintest idea what it is or what it’s supposed to do. COMMENTS ARE FOR PUSSIES. Uh huh. Keep telling yourself that.

Amidst much old and embarrassing garbage, buried deep in a sub-folder named simply OLD, one lonely and neglected project called tunnel sparkled off my eye like the edge of a favorite old toy in an attic. It felt bittersweet to look it over and recall how much love I had invested in it. It was an ambitious way to distort perspective and create the illusion that you were going “through” an arbitrary series of still images. Each aspect of the project was a project unto itself. It’s not that I couldn’t revive it, but it seems unimportant now, like that idea you had for the ultimate band in seventh grade.

The Keith Handy Essentials - collect em all!

Here are some of the more significant songs I’ve ever written, in chronological order. By significant I mean more unique than most, more popular than most, or both. Songs that felt to me like they marked some new rung of artistic growth. This is an attempt to put together a sort of gateway collection that can give the complete stranger an overview of my work over time. If you’ve heard a lot of my stuff, you may feel that I’ve left out some things you like. Everyone’s “best of” would be different, which is why ultimately I’m preserving everything I can — this list is just a starter kit.

Insomnic Hallucinations (1985) - by the time I was fifteen, I had already been writing for a few years. I was still too young to be writing great lyrics or melodies, but I got an early handle on what I wanted to do with chords. Chords are still the backbone of music to me; you can decorate it with all the licks and flourishes you want, but if the chords aren’t interesting, it’s just a jam. And the more unusual the chords are, the less you can just mindlessly noodle; you have to know what they are, and support them, in order for it to work. The eight bar progression that opened and closed this piece still sounds mature to me two decades later; I still love improvising to it. (The last recorded version actually flips the progression backwards at the end!) Everything in the middle was a bunch of hastily written dribble, sandwiched in to make it feel like a mini-opera.

Mana (1986) - my first attempt at “going all George Harrison”. Fact is, though, I had little to no actual eastern influence, so ultimately it’s a Keith Handy song with a certain type of scale tossed in. Although it has the old standby slow-four beat, I’m going farther with dissonances. The synth sound I came up with is pretty much inseparable from the song. The lyrics, although dark, are actually quite positive; they’re about being able to appreciate something that other people might not. (Incidentally, I remember being inspired to experiment with my hair when I’d written this.) Most people really like Mana, but I got one or two criticisms for hinting at the eastern thing without going all the way.

Slab of Clay (1987) - the only rock opera song that was actually written before deciding to write a rock opera. It’s never been anyone else’s favorite as far as I know, but I’m fascinated by it, especially the chords. Duran Duran’s Union Of The Snake was an influence, if you can believe that. It’s taken me forever to find the right way to record/rework it — settling on a tempo, settling on a key, eliminating a verse, time-compressing a sax solo from a slow version to make it fit a fast version, coming up with a non-embarrassing way of singing it. It’s been a challenge to find the right “zone” overall, but I think in the end it will be worth the effort.

Phone Booth (1988) - this went over well with people, and it had an unusual rhythmic feel coming from me. The few who criticized it had a similar beef to that of Mana’s detractors: now I’m guilty of hinting at jazz without being true/pure jazz. I went through a stage of being embarrassed by the lyrics (even though no one criticized them) because they weren’t really about anything, but in retrospect I think they’re perfectly fine.

Are Any Signals Coming Through? (1988) - it’s rare that I ever collaborate. This was with my Episodes bandmate, Garrett Lechowski. We jokingly referred to it as the hit single that even our mothers would like. After the split, Garrett continued to perform this with another band, and it fascinated me to hear someone I’d never met singing my part on their version. Also, their audiences supposedly became familiar with it and would sing along with the chorus. Hey, bands out there, I don’t mind at all if you want to cover any of my songs. Hint, hint!

Open The Window aka Layers (1989) - developed from a 4-track synthesizer improvisation, the passive, after-the-fact approach to the lyrics yielded something simple, serene, and liberating. Strangely enough, though, it never sounded quite right to me until I replaced my voice with a speech synthesizer.

Ten Years From Now (1989) - OMG THAT BEAT IS SO FAST IF YOU TRY TO DANCE TO IT YOU WILL FALL DOWN. Hypnotic. I’m surprised that people actually like this one, considering that it is kind of experimental, what with the five-note groupings over the 4/4 beat. In spite of the wacky math, though, the underlying simplicity cuts through.

Lullabye For A Fallen Angel (1991) - I was so, excuse me, emotionally fucked up when I wrote this song, that I’ve actually done a sort of recall on it to preserve my dignity. I can’t say it didn’t have an effect on people. I saw one girl break into tears the first time she heard it. But something about it felt wrong to me. Maybe it’s because a singer I tried to recruit for some harmony on it shrieked that it was “co-dependent”. Maybe it’s because I was venturing into new-agey spiritual viewpoints, condoning force, tossing in some Oedipal conflict, and generally being confused and authoritative at the same time.

If You Were Mine (1991) - written shortly after Lullabye, this song was comparatively honest. It’s pretty clear that I felt guilty for wanting to get the girl, but at least I was finally getting to the point (and certainly screaming it loudly enough). Although it changes key in the middle of every verse, its repetitive and pounding groove tends to suck listeners in and hold them ’til the end.

Have You Heard The Good News? (1993) - this one was massively popular. (He shoots, he scores!) Of course I have reservations about it now, because I just don’t feel that bitter about my friends and family anymore. It can be quite cathartic if you happen to feel that way, though — a good “release” song for things pent up.

Friend in the Room (1995) - writing the lyrics to this was like putting together a puzzle. I tried to make the words consistently applicable to multiple subjects. I had certain phrases in certain places, and had to fill the space between them in a meaningful way while working in much alliteration and internal rhyme. As complicated as this sounds, it’s actually a slow, sad song about the loss of something beautiful.

What Do You Think Of Yourself? (1996) - there are several equally good songs that will go together with this one on a concept album I’m working on, but I’m singling What Do You Think Of Yourself out because it actually has complete lyrics. Not only that, but lyrics that actually take the focus off the other person (for once) and put it on the one person you can actually do something about.

Lice Blue Hue (1997) - kind of a love song, for once written for someone that I was actually speaking to. It was supposed to overwhelm her and scare her away, but it didn’t quite work. Seriously, though, it was written for my own personal closure, and the fact that she actually liked it was kind of a wrench in the machinery.

Curtis’ Classic Collection of Comforts (2000) - one of my pet favorites which, once I’m much farther along on the recording, I’ll be anxious to hear if anyone else likes. The title and melody both came to me in dreams. The lyrics were a complex project involving lists of words that rhyme with “stools”, each following a pair of adjectives beginning with the same consonant sound; not to mention the eternal pursuit of internal rhymes and alliterations everywhere else I could put them. It’s about a furniture company (or any kind of company or person) selling out to the lowest common denominator — but I leave it open for a more scatalogical interpretation, if you swing that way.

For every song I’ve mentioned here, there are many others that were written in that time period or phase. If you like some of the songs above, chances are you would like a lot of the related songs too, possibly just as much or more — it’s just that you need a well-defined point of entry. I hope these selections serve that purpose well. Happy seeking! (Don’t worry, one by one I’ll make these easier to get!)