The Light of Day

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?

Stuff that’s not so great (quick thought)

I don’t think of myself as having “good stuff” and “bad stuff” — I think of myself as having “good stuff” and “experimental stuff”. The good stuff is, well, good, and that’s wonderful. Calling the other stuff “experimental”… I don’t mean to get all pretentious and pseudo-intellectual, or imply that it’s all on the cutting edge and you’re just too bourgeois to understand it… but simply to have the attitude that it’s potentially good, or at least potentially interesting, or at least potentially good or interesting in some context down the road.

And it’s stuff that I can play around with, without worrying that I’d be ruining something.

Yes, I do have a wastebasket. But I think our culture is disposable enough already.

What Do You Think Of Yourself?: new vocal

First, enjoy the session, ’cause I think it went pretty well…

It’s actually a lot easier than my Rival Big Bang sessions were, because it has a definite and more structured melody. The part between approximately 4:00 to 5:00 is a little empty, though, and rather than featuring me half-heartedly ad-libbing, I want to fill it in with something like gospel singers. I just emailed Paul Gaspar to see if he knows any.

I’ve only been saving my session videos as 320 by 240 MPEGs — better looking than what you see on YouTube, but still small — because the videos themselves aren’t meant to be works of art. That said, I’d still like to incorporate parts of them into more formal “music video” videos. There’s stuff you can do to low-res images to make them… not necessarily look hi-res, but at least look better when blown up.

First “final” mix of Rival Big Bang

“Final” because all the things are there that are supposed to be there. “First” because they never are, are they?

My ears are toast. Enjoy if possible. :)

So you want to make… something that’s “dead”

The good news is, not everybody takes glee in the album being “dead”.

John Lennon was only ever interested in singles. Paul McCartney was the one pushing to segue tracks together to build longer suites. But neither was right or wrong; it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping. What’s “dead”, if anything, is the need to bend your ideas in an inauthentic way to conform to a physical format. But even physical media itself isn’t “dead”.

We call something “dead” when a bubble bursts. (It’s our spiteful way of celebrating the decline of something that has been popular and ubiquitous, but maybe not a good fit for us individually.) A bubble is something that is bigger than it should be, or bigger than it normally would be, and as a result, can’t be sustained as it is. However, when a bubble pops, the material that made it up still exists; it only ceases to be artificially inflated, reverting to its real and natural size.

There may no longer be a trend of people making albums who weren’t interested in albums in the first place. If you are interested in albums, though, that’s good news for you; when the people who came to the party for the wrong reasons finally leave, that’s when the party becomes fun again.

Oh, and don’t forget all the other things that “died”: acoustic pianos, real drums, the orchestra, radio, live performance… seems to me like most things do quite well after they “die”.

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.

More final hour lyric tweaking

In case you ever have a need for it, I just downloaded Finale Notepad 2008 to make that little sheet music sketch in the middle. It’s free. I usually only use notation to sketch out bits that deviate a little from the rest of the song or get a little fancy. I was going to write a little more about it, but I started feeling angry just thinking about it. I’ve heard one too many hostile, pro-ignorance arguments and statements, almost to the point of making me feel like I have to apologize for knowing how to read, and I think it’s a sad reflection on our society. Granted, most of the music I listen to is by people who don’t know how to read, but in those cases there’s usually a George Martin, or a Ron Geesin, or a Michael Kamen…

(If you’re one of the people who read this blog, you’re not one of the people I’m angry at, don’t worry.)

Rival Big Bang: sorting out the pile

As I sort out my pile of lyrical ideas for Rival Big Bang (which I have twice as many words as I need for, not counting new bits I’m coming up with to link stuff together), I feel like I’m sitting across from a nice, friendly, counselor-type person, who is telling me: “there’s no right or wrong way to do this. Follow your instincts. You don’t need to perform great feats of internal rhyme, or acrobatics of alliteration; just get the general message across and the music will carry it.”

Notice, of course, that when she says “acrobatics of alliteration”, she is obviously taunting me in an ironic way.

Update 12:24 AM: Okay, it has a shape to it now. Still has gaps and placeholders, but seriously, it was like alphabet soup before.

Update 10/27: I think this is basically it. Feel free to snicker at the crossed-out garbage that bit by bit got shoved to the bottom. Also feel free to snicker at the stuff that’s not crossed out, because without the dark-ish music, they might seem hokey. I don’t really expect any of my lyrics to stand on their own as pure poetry.

This will be the last song on the album. The lyrics only run half the length of the song, and then it goes on instrumentally. It clocks in at 4:20. Dude.

White screen syndrome, on Freelance Switch

Here’s a short but well-articulated article about overcoming writer’s block, or as it’s referred to in the article, “white screen syndrome”. I think the general ideas are applicable to writing music and lyrics too. (We could call it “blank tape syndrome” or something.)

Excerpt:

My favourite method of getting something on the white screen is to just write what’s going through my head on the subject – then revise afterwards. I see it as a combination of stream-of-consciousness writing and Ann Lamont’s “shitty first draft.”

You know the subject matter, so just write. Usually it can be modified into something useful at the end and who knows, maybe you’ll find a few great sentences you wouldn’t have written if you were trying to stay professional.

I’ve written a few articles entirely like this and only had to edit out all the obscenities.

Here is the Anne Lamott (not “Ann Lamont”; hopefully FS will correct that soon) passage they’re referring to: an excerpt from Bird by Bird, which I hadn’t heard of before, but was curious enough to do a search on. (It’s awesome, by the way — except that as a mouse person, I would prefer she used something other than cruelty to mice in the visualization part at the end — regardless, don’t skip this one!)

And here are some notes that a fellow named Kyle took, summarizing Bird by Bird. Don’t sit back and let authors reap all the benefits of this stuff; how can you apply it to your music?

Progress report: Fr. Hifta Ryphtor

I suggest listening to the second audio clip in the previous post — the updated mix — while reading this.

It’s kind of scary to me how “right” I’m doing the current (coming fairly soon, hopefully) album, Fr. Hifta Ryphtor (assuming I don’t change the title), at least by the values I’ve been preaching lately on this blog. By which I mean, philosophically and artistically right… actually following my own advice, for real. And I’m using the word “scary” in a literal sense here. Not scary in a bad way, but scary enough that there’s a leap of faith involved in making it.

I’ve hit on this topic a few times in my So You Want To Make An Album series, but it bears repeating, and in plain English: if you have the luxury of working in your own studio, and not paying for recording time, it’s best to only plan the album out in a skeletal way, leaving plenty of holes open, so you still have something creative to do at every stage. In other words, don’t divide the project into creative work and busy work, and do all the creative work first, leaving nothing but busy work. Don’t pre-plan every detail in every single song, and then pound out the overdubs in an assembly line manner. It’s like giving your muse a temp assignment and then locking it in the closet after you think you’ve “milked” it. Instead, get it involved, and keep it involved every step of the way.

This is scary, and does require a leap of faith. I have gaping holes in my track list, and songs with incomplete lyrics. Yet I can tell from the material I have, like having enough puzzle pieces filled in to see the overall shape of the picture, that this is going to be a fucking fantastic album.

This is not how it was for Open the Window or Through Forbidden Black Doors. On both of those projects I nailed down the song order before so much as putting down a drum track, and clung to it religiously. Then I typically felt like some songs were behaving, while other songs were being difficult. There wasn’t an issue of not having any high quality material for either of those, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t demonstrating total trust in the muse. Great stuff still managed to come out, but I didn’t understand that I was putting the brakes on it, making it harder than it had to be. I got so frustrated with all the seemingly external obstacles constricting the flow of my projects, not realizing I was creating those obstacles. Unfinished Business and Leave of Absence were steps in the right direction, but with production quality sometimes taking a back seat to artistic exploration.

Still, I’m not saying this with regret; this is all part of The Great Learning, and it was necessary for me to experience that to the extreme in order to be where I am right now. Would I go back and do it differently? That’s a useless question. (For one thing, I have, in a sense, “gone back and done some things differently”, but that’s not what I mean.) If I were to change the past, I wouldn’t have the present as it is. It’s really as simple as that.

Oh, and another awesome thing about this album: no “boy-girl” themes (sorry, Mike Love). Nothing about relationships, heartbreak, lust, jealousy, or anything like that. Granted, when I have touched on those subjects in the past, it was always in my own way, bravely putting my passive-aggressive, co-dependent neuroses on display, so I’ll at least give myself credit for that. But one thing that really appealed to me about Dark Side of the Moon, way back in my musical infancy, is that the album isn’t about some external object of your desire; it’s about YOU, the person listening to it. And I’m happy to say Fr. Hifta Ryphtor seems to be my first album to have that consistently going for it as well.

Edit 10/16/07: I still haven’t escaped the “really old shit being released as new” pattern, mind you. I’m working on cleaning up Happy Birthday Pump Prototype, and reminded by this song that time is, really, in fact, going by, and I’m not entirely caught up to it. But the poor freakin’ instrumental has never been on an album before, and a lot of people liked it. Consider it the “token 1980s-styled drum machine song”. It’s kind of in the spirit of Propaganda’s Dream Within A Dream. No, I don’t know anything else about that band. I’m a cold-hearted one night stander that gets the musical influence he needs and then isn’t there the next morning to listen to the rest of your album.

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.

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 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…

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…

The guys with the ties

Dead in the center of industrial nowhere
The guys with ties pull up in their new cars
Expecting me to stand behind
The products that they’re selling
Never telling me exactly what they are
Could the guys with the ties
Explain or understand… why?
No, I don’t see how they can
Their eyes have tunnel vision
And glow a fiery red
All systems go, full steam ahead

Don’t cry, little boy, it’s alright
Take it like a man
Invest in our 401K plan

And late at night you can hear the sound
Of new necks being strangled
As fresh blood is recruited in their clan

Dear Mr. Melting Heart
We heard what you’ve been saying
And we don’t appreciate your damning tone
We’ve told you once before
You leave that “free speech” at the door
When you’re on our clock and in our corporate zone

[part that’s not written yet]

I don’t believe in evil
But I don’t believe they care
Look in their eyes
There’s nobody there

P.S. We’ll still be here long after your demise
Sincerely yours, the guys with the ties

Hit single

Here’s the mp3 for Broken Wheel, which has basically been 99% done for a while, but needed to be rescued off the Windows 98 time-bomb and subjected to some last-minute tweaks. Actually, I’m in the process of rescuing a few dozen songs from that beast, so you can likely expect more soon. Creative Commons “music sharing” license as usual — share it but don’t sell it.

I installed a plugin (PodPress) that would have allowed me to put that cute little player thingy right in my posts, but every time I activate the plugin, it turns my rss feed into pudding. (All the formatting disappears, including the paragraph breaks.) So if anyone knows how to handle that, or of a different/better plugin to use for that — I don’t need the whole podcasting functionality right now, just the little player — let me know.

Thanks, and enjoy the song!

Update 5/1/07 (testing, testing):

4/12/07

It’s not that I want
What other people’ve got
I wouldn’t know what to do with that crap anyway

I’m not for playing house
Or keeping my car clean
Or seeing myself through the words my friends and neighbors say

I’ve never been much of a lover or a boyfriend
As a brother and a son I barely cut it too

I skip most birthdays and I barely notice Christmas
Why they invite me to the funerals still, I have no clue

All I want is a real connection
All I want is a real connection

Now you see it, now you don’t?

If you thought there was a new post here, and now there isn’t, it’s because I had a new demo up and I switched it to private… the song was off to a decent start, but it needs more context. I’ll re-public the post when I feel like there’s sufficient context for it.

I wasn’t joking! I really do sometimes write songs!

As a follow-up to my last post:

If you don’t know what a demo is, or are completely lacking in imagination, don’t listen to this.

Enjoy!

P.S. - now you can see if you guessed right about which stanza was the “rock out” stanza, unless you are so profoundly clueless that you still can’t tell after listening.