The One About the Thing

Well, as usual, I spent my summer vacation being vacant.  Which is not to say that I wasn't working on things that could be called music.  At any rate, after a longish pause I have a new tune up.  It's about man's struggle for identity in an increasingly impersonal, mechanized world.

No, it's not about that at all.  At least, I don't think it is.  It IS about a very important subject though, which is why I worked extra long on the lyrics, to make doubly sure my message was not missed.

The song is called The One About the Thing.  I know, I know, a little obvious, but I felt that in this instance it was important that I be blunt and to-the-point, you know?

The One About the Thing (2.8 MB mp3) <-that's a direct download link.

(I know, it's past time I joined the modern age.)

The Word for Today is "Incongruous"

Here's a brand spanking new recording. You can also think of it as a brand new spanking recording if that's your thing. I don't judge. Work has been very slow lately, which is bad for the bank balance but good for you, the music lover. Next I need to fix up a couple of my guitars, and hopefully sell them on ebay, which should be good for both my bank balance AND you, the music lover.

The title of the song is Chien Ex Medusa, which is Latin for "hide the chickens".

Just now, typing the word "incongruous", I was reminded of a scene from Firefly that had the line "She's had congress with the Beast" which naturally led me to "incongruous with the beast". Somehow there's got to be a song in there. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, this song is my tribute to both Jerry Lee Lewis and Quentin Tarantino. So you know what you're getting going in. Or maybe not. The reality is that I wrote the original thing way back when, including a truly horrible set of lyrics. Stumbling on the remains of it recently in yet another defective MIDI file, I decided that musically it was good but the lyrics had to go, and what better way to replace a deadly serious set of lyrics than with an equally deadly, but non-serious set?

Aside from a few backwards hi-hats, all the "drums" in this tune are recordings of slamming doors.

Chien Ex Medusa (2.73MB mp3) download from MediaFire

AND TURN THE VOLUME ALL THE WAY UP

Completely Out of Season

Here's a song I wrote in, I think, the 1990s. I had been working on a version with the recording setup I was using at the time, but I can't even find those tapes, let alone having to deal with the moisture damage like with my other old recordings as chronicled ad nauseam in previous posts. (Yes, it really is spelled nauseam, not nauseum. No, I didn't know either.)

December Comes November Leaves is, as you might guess, about December coming and November leaving. Now, you might think that may lend itself to a certain air of, shall we say, mind-numbing melancholy, and you might have been right if you weren't talking about something written by me. Not being one for moderation, I decided to blow past melancholy town and head straight for maudlinville.

The recording procedure was complicated a tad by the fact that all I had from my earlier work on the song was my fabulous memory and a highly defective MIDI file I'd managed to rescue from the clutches of the ancient Atari ST computer I was using back then. I was also missing a copy of the lyrics. I could only remember about half of the verses, and you know that dumb guitar solo? The electric guitar is playing the melody of the vocal part of the bridge. I have no idea what the lyrics were any more, so the guitar gets stuck with it. I suppose I could have sung "doo doo doo" in lieu of lyrics, but lets face it, my vocals generally end up sounding like "doo doo" and belonging in the loo, so count your blessings. That's almost 30 seconds of me not singing.

You're welcome.

You can still hear a touch of the old MIDI file data, in that thing that sounds somewhere between a harpsichord and a toy piano. Everything else was replaced with either new MIDI programming or something played for real, like the bass part. Speaking of basses and parts, this is the first time I've used my little friend in a recording, and I am happy to report that it plays and sounds very nice for a junky piece of crap.

December Comes November Leaves (3.57 MB mp3) download from MediaFire

Scraping...I mean Walking, the Bottom- NO! The Floor! Yeah, the Floor.

Another recreation of one of the stupid songs I recorded in the early 1980s, and the tapes were destroyed by moisture blah blah boilerplate blahbiddy blah see the earlier posts for details.

Walk the Floor tells the time-honored story of person A who is sulking but won't tell person B why. This song is NOT autobiographical - for one thing, I actually enjoy documentaries - but on the other hand I have, on many occasions, walked on floors.

I tried so recreate the lovable stupid primitive charm of the 4-track original, but what can I say? I don't do lovable any more. The keyboard part was originally played on my wife's cheesy Casio. I tried in vain to find a close approximation of it. This will have to do.

Walk the Floor (2.71MB mp3) download with MediaFire

Someone Else Remembered What I Did Etc., Part Three or Something

I had plans for December. Things I was gonna record, including a new, very dumb song about the holidays, but man, have I been sick. Just colds and throbbing sinus, but I've basically been sick for the entire month of December. Bah. Humbug even.

Anyway, here's another of the alleged songs I recorded at my brother Joe's old place in Philadelphia way back when. This one didn't get played to a paying audience, saving them and the box-office staff much trauma.

I don't remember exactly when I wrote it, but I clearly remember that the germ of it was my first exposure to Bobcat Goldthwait, doing a standup routine on (most likely) whatever show David Letterman had at the time. He had a funny line parodying the idiotic "coffee achiever" ad campaign being run by some coffee marketing board or other.

Another inspiration was reading that Woody Guthrie wrote This Land is Your Land as a response to God Bless America. This sounded like a good idea, so I wrote this as a response to Bill Withers' Stand by Me.

Humanity Zoo (3.69 MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

And Now For Something Really Stupid

And by that I mean the song titled Something Really Stupid, of course. Duh. I mentioned it a while back. I know I did.

One day I heard that weird recording by Frank Sinatra and his daughter Nancy called Something Stupid, and I thought, "Well, it may have been stupid, but it wasn't really stupid, just sorta stupid."  And the next thing I knew I was filling the niche.

This song is an innocent victim of the turnover in my drum machines over the years. The drums were originally sequenced for a Kawai drum machine that was definitely not set up anything like a GM drums arrangement. I really liked that drum machine.

Needless to say, it was stolen. 

Next I traded some guy for a different drum machine, which used its own, completely different and non-GM arrangement. And the drum part was now completely wacky and I never got it completely normalized for that machine. At any rate, I sold it some time back.

Or maybe it blew up, I don't remember.

And now I'm using a software drum instrument, which started off as GM but has been mutated to fit my own purposes. And when I tried this song, the drum parts were wackier than ever. I was able to make parts of it usable, but it was just too messed up to deal with. If you listen to the part of the song where every line starts with "I don't know..." you can hear sets of four hits that were originally supposed to be drums. They're not drums. They're wood blocks. At some point I just threw my hands in the air and embraced the wrongness.

Also in the warm embrace of wrongness is my vocal track. This song was always a struggle to sing, since it was at the very top of what I humorously refer as my "range". I don't really have a range. More of a hotplate. At any rate, now that I'm less younger than I was, when I strained to hit - OK, to approximate - the high notes, I used to sound, well, strained, which was the point of the song. But now when I try it, I sound like a wheezy old man.

Something Really Stupid (3.56MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

What's the Signal-to-Noise Ratio for a Recording of Noise?

Note: Fixed broken download link. Sorry.

Continuing my quest to recover the crappy songs I recorded back in the day, we come to a personal favorite, Whipping Cream. Not a favorite because it was any good, but because it was, how can I put this, really goofy.

Following the example of the Beatles, for a while I was filling all four tracks of my tape recorder with parts, then bouncing those down to another tape recorder, giving me more space to record on. The Beatles did two things differently than I. First, they bounced down to only one track, leaving three to work with but mushing the original tracks to mono, whereas I bounced to two tracks, only leaving me two more to work with but leaving the originals in stereo. The other thing they did differently was being the Beatles. Still not convinced that's relevant.

So I had two tapes with this song on - one with the final four tracks, and the other with the original four backing tracks. Sadly, the final tape was one of the ones that was totally destroyed by moisture. "No matter," I thought cheerfully to myself. "I can start with the backing tracks and just try to recreate the other two!" Imagine my shock and horror when I discovered that while the sound on the backing tracks was clear, the tape had become stretched out oddly over time, and now had wildly uneven speed. Impossible to work with.

Crucially however, it also had the sound effects in fairly clear condition. Sound effects, you ask? Yes, sound effects. Well, mostly voices stolen from old dictation training and children's records. I said it was goofy.

So I had to recreate the whole thing. At least I could listen to the drum, bass, one keyboard and one guitar part for reference, but the rest I had to try to remember or just make up. I remembered the lyrics off the top of my head, which is pretty good for something I wrote 26 years ago. There's another song on the same tape that I only remember the first two lines for, so you probably won't have to suffer through that one.

Whipping Cream (2.66 MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

Casual Recordings: Don's Boat Number Four

The whole inedible saga of the Don's Boat recordings can be found here.

Well, I finally ran out of excuses for not doing one of the even-numbered songs and decided that since this tune was already pretty rock-y, simply recording it with guitars would be enough of a change for this one. And I think I was right. Which is remarkable in itself.

This is another song that I wanted to do as a vocal number, mainly because when I was working on it, I was hearing lyrics in my head. Sadly, I never got past the couplet So call me a cannonball / I'm flying right into the ground, and eventually I just gave up. Just as well I expect.

Don's Boat Number Four AKA Cannonball (2.29MB mp3) download with MediaFire

Casual Recordings: Don's Boat Number Seven

I already covered the saga of Don's Boat last year, so I won't repeat myself.

Here is Don's Boat Number Seven AKA Hi, my name's Ben (3.28 MB mp3, Download from MediaFire). If you were paying attention, and know your numbers, you may suspect some sort of pattern at work: First Numbers 1, 3 and 5, and now 7? So, what up? Heck if I know. Those are just the ones I thought were most promising. I swear there's a #4 I'm thinking of doing, but I can't figure out how to make it sound different.

Like the previous three, #7 sounded like BMBPDJ (Bad Marching Band Plays Disco Jazz), and, well, now it doesn't. I had actually done most of this right after numbers 1, 3 and 5, but as a vocal number. At the time there was an amusing phenomenon on the Intenet concerning an apparent attempt to create a viral publicity whatsis for a bodybuilder who wanted an acting career, or something. It was all very confusing as no one was taking responsibility for what they were doing and for all I know it could have been some sort of weird conceptual art piece done using a piece of found video.

At any rate, while I was working on #7 I suddenly heard words being sung to it, as happens now and then, so I started doing it as a vocal piece. And then a whole lot of Real Life happened and I didn't get back to it until now and I don't feel like doing the vocal any more. But you can sing it if you like, as I'm including the lyrics. Just sing along with the acoustic guitar (except for the first half of the second verse, as I was apparently planning to do a solo there).

It was gonna be called Hi, My Name's Ben.

Hi, my name's Ben
You may have seen me at the five and ten
Or where I used to work at the A&P
I still go in there now and then
But I'm on...my way
Don't wanna waste another day
In this life I'm living.

My name is Ben
And I've been awesome since I don't know when
Just look at my handsome smiling face
I'm like a walking 8 by 10
I'm like a sun ray
You can't look the other way
Even if you want to.

My wheels are spinning round and round in this
two-bit nowhere place
I'm gonna find my fame and fortune and
next time you see my face
You're gonna know who I am.

(solo?)

Hi, my name's Ben
Say hello to my little friend
You better not make me angry yeah
or you could come to a sticky end
It's like a nightmare
But it's finally coming clear
What I gotta do now.

They've been ignoring my existence in this
godforsaken place
I'm gonna be all over the nightly news
And next time they see my face
They're gonna know who I am.

I Know What I Did That Summer But I Have No Idea What I Was Thinking

More debris rescued from the moldy old tapes I recorded in a spare bedroom in the early 1980s.

Well now, what we have here are three of what a neutral observer might describe as "odder" entries. Each of them, however, is odd for a reason. Mind you, I'm not saying it's a good reason, but each of them does have a reason.

Two of these songs are odd because they started out as lyric writing exercises. You see, when I started out trying to write songs, I quickly realized that I sucked at it, just as you realized when you downloaded one. So to help myself grow and learn, I made a point of not only writing something every day, but now and then giving myself a "special task" as a sort of challenge.

I'm not saying I actually got better as a songwriter, but I did produce some seriously goofy lyrics.

Baseball Players (3.13MB mp3) download from MediaFire

This started out as an experiment in cramming as many random visual references and metaphors as possible into a song. Hence the first verse:

Upset by dreams of unicorns, baseball players cry
Their tears tear tiny holes in the fabric of the sky
Which lies like electric blankets on the towns where they live now.

Somewhere in the chorus, I realized I kind of talking about baseball players but also kind of talking about life in general. So there was nothing else to do but to make the rest of the verses sound like they were kind of about life in general while actually being kind of about being a baseball player.

See? I told you there was a reason.

This song, like Toothpaste, is in 3/4 time. Why? Because the song insisted on being in 3/4 time, of course. Jeepers, such questions.

Every Time (I See Someone Eat A Hot Dog) (3.69MB mp3)
download from MediaFire

Another writing exercise, this time in writing a series of lines that work in sequence and eventually come full circle. This is an early version. One of the tapes that was ruined had a more developed take that was slower and had backwards guitars and stuff, very arty. With this though, I hadn't even had the time to work out those subtle variations in the guitar riffs that I like so much.

Two songs in a row that mention baseball. No idea why, I don't think I ever mentioned it again in a song.

Listening to it just now, I finally realized that weird little stutter in the organ solo is me trying to work in the "CHARGE!" tune. Weirdo.

Riding The Range (4.13MB mp3) download from MediaFire

Warning - song contains gratuitous Rolling Stones reference.

This one was actually labeled "1982", which makes it the earliest recording I have. Probably made soon after I bought the 4-track tape deck and my first programmable drum machine.

That drum machine changed everything. Before that I had a "rhythm box" from Radio Shack. You could choose one of maybe 8 rhythms and set the tempo with a knob, but it would just sit there mindlessly repeating the same pattern over and over and over and over, and if you tried to work on song ideas with it your songs would just become monotonous drones that never changed.

This new box though - Whoa Nelly! It made a little "bop" that stood for a bass drum, a little "speh" that represented a snare drum, two little "doo" sounds that were intended to be tom-toms, a "ch" and a "sssss" for a hi-hat, and a "pshhhhhhhhhhhhh" for a cymbal. It had 16 patterns of up to 16 beats in length, and for each beat you could have any of the sounds play, and you could also have certain beats be louder than others! And to top it all off, you could chain the patterns together to form a complete song!

The fact that it sounded like crap did nothing to take away from the fact that it was fantastic.

At any rate, with all that power I did what any tyro would do, and that's try to make it doo more than it could. Hah! I typed "doo" when I meant "do". Leaving it as is. That'll show me.

So...here's this song. A very early songwriting attempt. Once again, a later version was on one of the ruined tapes, but I adore this one because good grief, what was I thinking in that middle section? Was I trying to do...reggae? The fact that I, the person who made this, have no idea if I was trying to do reggae should tell you all you need to know about my reach VS grasp situation. It is out to lunch lyrically, melodically, harmonically, and its aura is all schmutzed.

mood: schmutz

I Still Remember What I Did in the Past - I'm Doomed to Repeat it Again.

Three more alleged songs rescued from my dank cellar. Rich folks may have wine cellars, but plebes like us have to make do with vintage dank.

These recordings, like the previous three, date from 1983 or so. At least that's what it says on the tape box. If they had a Wikipedia entry I could be 100% certain, but for now I'll have make do with my own handwriting and memory.

Newspaper Man (3.67 MB mp3) download from MediaFire

My mom claims to love this song. But then, she also claims that I was a beautiful baby. I've seen the pictures though, and unless you have some sort of amphibian fetish, I wasn't beautiful.

At any rate, I clearly remember how this song came about. I was visiting my brother Jim, who was living in a slightly-less burned out section of the Lower East Side of NYC, and when we stepped out on a cold winter morning to get some breakfast, I nearly tripped over a sleeping homeless fella who had accumulated a bunch of old newspaper for insulation.

The whole stilted use of pronouns was done just so I could say "Me lie across the walk" and have it sound like "Me Lai". At the time, I thought it was brilliant.

At the time, I probably thought I'd been a beautiful baby.

I never have asked my mom how she feels about amphibians.

Fetch This (2.77MB mp3) download from MediaFire

Finally a protest song! Naturally, it's a protest song from the standpoint of a misanthropic dog. Hey, we've all got issues. OK?

OK, I have issues. But if I was a dog, I'd have these issues. I know this because I have these issues now.

By the way, I have a dog now. And I give it water in a dirty bowl and feed it from a bag. Which makes me a dirty hypocrite. But at least I don't make it wear a jacket.

So I've got that going for me.

Nuclear Family War (1.84MB mp3) download from MediaFire

One of those songs that comes about because a phrase strikes you as funny, in this case the combination of "nuclear war" and "nuclear family". This one is really muddy sounding for some reason - heck, I boosted the treble as far as I could on the vocal track and you still can't hear the sibilance. Possibly just a quickie demo that I didn't bother doing a better version of.

I guess I should put sarcastic air quotes around the word "better" there.