The Young Person’s Guide to Leave of Absence vol. 2
KeithHandy posted in Uncategorized on October 17th, 2007
IMPORTANT NOTE: THE AUDIO CLIPS ON THIS PAGE ARE VERY OLD, CRUDE CASSETTE DEMOS, AND FOR THE MOST PART SOUND TERRIBLE. THEY MAY BE INTERESTING IF YOU ALREADY LIKE A SONG AND YOU’RE CURIOUS TO HEAR HOW IT EVOLVED, BUT THEY ARE NOT MEANT TO SHOWCASE MY WORK. If you haven’t heard the actual album, you can download it here (paying/tipping $5.00 to $10.00 is awesome but not required — see PayPal link on right) or buy one of them old-timey CDs. Also, no smoking, no flash photography, and please keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times. Enjoy this page full o’ factoids and rarities pertaining to all the songs on my 2000 album, Leave of Absence vol. 2!
1. Never Turn Back
This is one of the few songs that was truly “current” — less than a year elapsed between conception and recording — when the album was completed in 2000. (So if you think of the album like a movie, most of the rest of it happens in flashback.) I still have all my scratch paper from when I was working out the lyrics, and though I’m happy with the end result, it would have been nice if this little nugget could have somehow been worked in:
That’s quite okay
Don’t apologize
You’re still a winner in my eyes
Assuming losing friends
And gaining enemies
Is what you call a prize
I think it was just a matter of not having a way to get to the end of the verse from there.
2. Open the Window
Originally the song was called Layers, and it was on an album called Open the Window, which I worked on between 1991 and 1993. The song itself was born as part of a longer improvisation to a four track cassette portastudio, using a delay pedal’s infinite loop feature to create a repetitive throbbing/pulsing percussive sound, then making up a bass part off the top of my head (played on a keyboard), then writing down a crude chart of what I had played on the bass part so I’d have a chord sequence on which to build up everything else. (Because it was originally improvised, the same chords are never repeated identically.)
Here is my initial attempt to transform the original improv tape into a useable version, before I abandoned that idea and started a new version from scratch:
The only thing retained from the demo is the high-pitched whistling effects at the beginning and end. When I re-recorded it as Layers, I sang the whole thing, but struggled to find ways to make my voice weirder, including, I think, singing into a bucket. I didn’t replace my voice with a speech synthesizer until 1999. Even though the lyrics have a “get back to nature” theme to them (or maybe because of this), it didn’t sound right to me until it had that extra element of coldness.
The voice at the end is a former employer at one of my many minimum wage jobs, when I was “playing hooky” from work and ignoring my answering machine messages a la Office Space. Yes, he was standing right outside my building. Creepy.
3. P.S.R. (Lewis/Handy)
Sometime around, I think, spring or summer of 1992, I was spending a night in Fredonia with my friend Jeff Lewis, having one of those typical “get stoned and try to make sense of our depressing lives” hangouts. I didn’t partake on that occasion, but I tend to get stoned via contagion and/or sympathy anyway. I was playing this dumb “ba-dum ba-dum” riff on a guitar while he waxed philosophical, and suddenly he had this moment, beckoning me to keep playing it, while he rapped “and so you mean, on a simplified level” over it in a sort of New York-ish accent. (Notice the accent is mysteriously long gone after the first verse, and he reverts to “upstate nerd” for the rest of the song.)
Next thing we knew, we had the pen and paper out, and were finding it hard to sing this emerging piece of pure idiocy with a straight face. We even put a “country” verse in it for some god forsaken reason, and added in a “C” to the last refrain to account for it. (P.S.R. incidentally stands for “philosophical swing rap”.) I think we recorded the bulk of it the very next day in my all-black bedroom, in my parents’ house in Elma, where I was sequencing and recording stuff for my Open the Window album. We invited our friend Paul Ceppaglia to help with guitar, backing vocals, and general production. He pretty much deserves a writing credit for the catchy electric guitar line, but what can you do in this unjust world?
4 - 5. Quit Your Job and Join a Traveling Hindu Cult/Revelation in the Resonance
Both Quit Your Job… and Revelation… initially came from the same portastudio improvisation as Open the Window (see the explanation for that song). I decided to get a little fancy with the former, though — and I’ll never be sure if this was a good idea or not — but I made it into ka-dump soup. What is ka-dump soup, you ask? This is apparently a term my great grandmother (mother’s father’s mother) used for soup consisting entirely of leftover scraps from previous meals she had cooked. “Waste not, want not” was her expression. (Here in Rochester there’s a restaurant called Nick Tahou Hots, famed for its Garbage Plate, based on a similar philosophy.)
So while the first and last minute or so of Quit Your Job… provide some cohesive bookending for all the random, disorienting stuff in the middle, I’ll never be sure they provide enough. I would easily expect this to be the hardest track to sit through on a first listen, but I think the payoff is worth the persistence, because the sense of chaos resolves beautifully in the mournful opening tones of Revelation in the Resonance.
6. Soldiers of Music
I originally wrote this in Fredonia, while still in Episodes, probably around 1988 or 1989. It was originally based on a Paul Ceppaglia guitar riff, but that riff has since morphed and evolved so much that it bears no resemblance to the original — and once again, my friend Paul is shafted out of a composition credit. I think Episodes actually performed this on stage once or twice (in fact, I remember opening a show with it after having way too many pre-show beers), but there’s no recording of it that I know of.
7. Ten Years From Now
This was also written towards the very end of the 80s, or maybe even early 1990, but in any case shortly before the breakup of Episodes, because I remember handing a demo to Scott and Garrett and starting to teach it to them. Musically, it’s meant to convey the vapid soulessness of disposable pop music. Lyrically it satirizes the mentality that artists (and the human mind in general) would be made obsolete by technology, rather than using it as a tool. This was a very 1980s mindset. I envision a video in which obnoxiously face-painted clubbers are bouncing up and down with their arms limp.
Here’s an early version. It’s not my first demo (which may exist somewhere), but it was my first attempt to record an “official” version immediately after buying my drum machine:
As you can hear, I got a little carried away with the drum programming — new toy syndrome and all that — but the worst part is the vocals, which upon playback were my first clue that a.) I desperately needed to use a compressor, and b.) there was absolutely no way my two DAT machine ping pong method was going to be adequate for vocals.
8. Undue Strain
This was my favorite song on the album, and also a “current” one as of when the album was put together (see Never Turn Back). While I was writing it, in order to get from my studio in the Village Gate to the common showers, I had to run through a shopping area with my hands over my ears, to keep this song in my head and keep the muzak out. I don’t care if I looked like I was insane.
9. Various Fakes
This was recorded as a hasty demo, with no intent to put it on an album — but with all that high-energy guitar soloing all over it, I couldn’t resist. You see, I’m quite a fan of the “electric guitar” and the “guitar solo”. I’m looking forward to the day when these are regarded as timeless and universal, and not as a trend that has passed its peak. If you want to know the truth, though, I cheated a little. That is me playing, but I had the tape running at a slower speed to record it. It still sounds like me, just maybe a little more frantic.
The “Soap Opera Sue” verse is by far my favorite.
When I first thought of this melody — probably while driving — I was singing it as “Jabba the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt”, in the spirit of a children’s song. (And remember, kids, say “no” to subconscious plagiarism!) The heavy rock-out interpretation came later.
10. Waitin’ for the Wind (Lewis/Handy/Kaiser)
This is one of the few amusing bits salvaged from an impromptu “run the tape and fart around” session in Jeff Lewis’ kitchen around 1993 or 1994. Lon Kaiser was in our circle of friends around that time, and he is actually a far better pianist than what you hear in this window into our weirdness. Incidentally, he tuned this upright piano himself, and not too horribly, considering it was his first time attempting such a feat. Meanwhile, I’m on there making very poor use of a violin (pretending it’s a ukelele), and now I’m sharing possibly another “you had to be there” type personal treasure with the world — my fondness for the way Jeff and I were able to crack each other up by trying to out-stupid each other.
11. X-Ray Tex and X-Ray Ted and the Marvellous X-Rated X-Ray Specs on their Heads
The fact that this plastic insult to jazz even sounds like music at all is kind of miraculous in and of itself. The chord voicings were all worked out using some complicated number system I worked out, and entered into the computer the slow way (I couldn’t possibly play this), just to see what it would sound like. The synth solo was played on the keyboard, into the sequencer, but only using white notes, and then I adjusted the scales to match the chords after the fact (using the entirely un-intuitive event view screen, which is just a list of notes and numbers). So the shape and character of the solo is me, but the harmonic correctness of it is not. Or it’s not the “immediate me”. The entire solo is also apparently harmonized, which I don’t remember doing, but it must have been painstaking.
This would be easy on modern software — just do a search on “algorithmic composition” — but I was using Cakewalk 3.0 for DOS on a dinosaur IBM compatible with a monochrome monitor. Not that a color monitor would have made a difference; I just wanted to paint that picture for you.
I think this would be great music for marketing Soma when that becomes widespread.
12. You Feel Exactly Like Me
At first blush, “I feel dead/I feel like I’ve been shot in the head” probably does not appear to be one of the most uplifting lyrics a songwriter can write. But when you’ve been clinging to something (or someone) for a good length of time, and are finally forced to let go, there’s an initial period you have to go through where you feel raw, weak, powerless, and “carved out”. You can’t immediately jump back into the game of life; you have to take time to just lie there, maybe cry a little, and feel it. And if it soothes you to strum an A minor chord over and over, and you happen to find a few words that uncompromisingly convey what’s going through your mind — right or wrong — you’ve taken a positive step.
13. Zero Gratitude
The main part of this instrumental is built on a much sped-up copy of Jeff Lewis’ drum track from a song he recorded in my studio, called Old Man Winter. Since I typically held onto the reels for other people who recorded in my space, I frequently took it upon myself to dumpster-dive for drum tracks and other goodies.
The tune that I played over the top of it was a composite of a couple things: first, a much louder instrumental version of a quiet song that I never recorded satisfactorily (I’ll have to check and see if I ever recorded vocals for it), called Not A Word. If you’re familiar with the beginning of Zero Gratitude, you can try singing these words to it:
Not a word
Can be heard
When I talk to you
The next section, starting from where you first hear a simple keyboard line, is a remake of yet another piece from the infamous portastudio jam experiment, this one called Details at Six (for lack of a better title):
Again, if you’re familiar with Zero Gratitude, you should recognize a theme in there.
Finally, the disco-like outro, an entirely separate piece of music grafted onto the end, was a demo of a song called Can’t Miss, done in the same session as Various Fakes (see above) and using the same tape speed trick for the frantic guitar soloing. (For all I remember, I may have let the reel play straight through and soloed over all the songs in one non-stop take; it was an uncharacteristically efficient session.) Unfortunately I don’t think any version of Can’t Miss still exists, apart from this solo, but there is a slim chance somebody I know could have a copy, so I’ll add that if they can find it.
