Keith Handy 1.999

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.