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

Hey Joe, Where Are You Going With That Detective Novel In Your Hand?

As I've mentioned earlier, my brother Joe is a composer.  He was recently commissioned by the California Chamber Orchestra to create something related to Perry Mason, the fictional defense attorney created by Erle Stanley Gardner in a series of books, and later made into a popular TV series starring Raymond Burr.

The premiere was November 7, 2009, and Joe's wife Amy caught each of the three movements on her iphone.  Don't laugh - the video is so-so but the audio is remarkable for a cellphone capture.  In addition to the Chamber Orchestra, the performance featured the other three members of Joe's ensemble SWARMIUS (see the link to the right).

And yes, the violinist in SWARMIUS is freakishly tall.

Suite Noir: The Passion of Perry Mason by Joseph Waters

Movement 1: Whispering Sands

Movement 2: The Court of Last Resort

Movement 3 Cerulean and other colors of the sky

This Just Dropped Through A Freak Wormhole From A Month Or So In The Future

NOTE: As this is a song about Christmas, a few edits have been made so as to not detract from the holiday spirit.

And now I'm gonna shift gears a little, and move away from demonstrating my total mastery of creating "rock music" in favor of demonstrating my total mastery of creating "country rock".  Or maybe I should say my total mastery of creating holiday-themed novelty songs, because this is what it is - a happy song about the joys of shopping for Christmas presents.

I wrote this in the early 1990s.  And it started life as a wonderfully enhanced version of the Peter Gunn theme, a favorite riff of punky new-wavers back in the day.  Once I became awesomely proficient at playing the first guitar part, I picked up my beautiful hollowbody guitar, a stunning example of the luthier's art, and started messing around with arpeggios.  And once I had a 2nd guitar part I liked, the original 1st guitar part no longer sounded right.

One thing led to another, and I know you're right there with me when I say that once you reach a certain point with a song, there's really nothing to do but make it a novelty song about Christmas shopping.

And yes, the title is a total steal from Mad magazine.

The Ghost Of Christmas Presents (3.09 MB 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

Somebody Else Remembered So I Don't Have To, part 2

Having had such success recording tunes at my brother Jim's studio, I decided to try my luck at my brother Joe's studio. Yes, at that point in time I had two brothers operating recording studios as part of their musical lives. I come from an artistic and musical family. I'm like that Baldwin brother who can't act. What's his name again? Zeppo?

This was still in the late 1980s sometime. Joe, at the time, was in Philadelphia. Now he's in California, teaches at a university and is involved in a whole bunch of musical directions at once. Jim, by the way, still runs a studio, but he traded the urine-soaked pavement of NYC for the stinking desert of Tucson.

Joe was part of a group in Philadelphia that promoted New Music, and my visiting to record coincided with them starting to put together a show. Just by coincidence, the theme of the show (the fusion of New Music and Pop music) dovetailed very nicely with this song. Also just by coincidence, one of the people in charge of putting the show program together was related to me. And so this silly little song got its world premiere before a paying audience at the Painted Bride in Philly.

The audience was stunned by the sheer brilliance of the work. So stunned they couldn't even remember to clap. I'm sure they were deep in introspection after hearing the lyrics, a searing indictment of people's television-watching habits.

Yeah.

Your Glass Eye (4.86MB mp3) Download from MediaFire

You can still hear me trying way too hard with that drum machine. Jeez.

Anyway, this is one of those tunes for which I remember the exact origin. In 1985 we moved to New Jersey, and our new next-door neighbors were gutting the building next door to turn it from a run-down old tea shop into a proper house. Since there was no TV, their kid started coming over in the afternoons to watch He-Man, She-Ra, and Thundercats. I was struck by how blatantly they were ripping off Phillip Glass.

So one day I was walking down the street, as one does, and a semi-Glassian tune kept playing in my head, and just when it was about to drive me insane, a voice (also in my head) sang, "with your glass eye" ...and I went straight home and wrote the first draft of the lyrics.

Casual Recordings: Don's Boat Nos. 1, 3 & 5

Edit: For those who have trouble with Rapidshare, I've added links for using MediaFire to download the songs.

Way back in the olden days - I don't know exactly when, but I was doing my MIDI sequencing on an Atari ST computer - some siblings-in-law, who were into amateur video making, asked me if I would provide some music for a video they were making about Don, another family member who was a competitive bass fisherman. Without having seen the footage, or having the first clue about making effective score music for that matter, I eventually tossed off a dozen or so tunes, gave them catchy titles like "No. 01", sequenced them for the drum machine and synths I had on hand, and recorded them straight to a cassette which I mailed to them. I don't remember if they actually used them.

Anyway, time passed and in 2008 I needed to get a file off the old Atari, leading to a few days spent recovering as much stuff as I could off the old dusty disks. I recovered most of the MIDI files from the Boat video and played them for the first time in years.

Boy, were they bad.

No, not all bad, but a lot of them sort of sounded the same: 120 beats per minute, bouncy synth bass, and (since I had just gotten a sample player that had decent horn sounds) lots of horns. It sounded like a bad marching band trying to play disco jazz.

Anyway, since I'm getting back into recording after a long hiatus, I thought it might be amusing (for me anyway) to take these songs and see if I can't make them sound very different, and also replace all those freakin' horn samples with, I dunno, guitars maybe? And so here are three of them, all MP3, 128kb.

Don's Boat Number One - 3.9MB
download from MediaFire or Rapidshare
I'd been messing around with a bit of quasi-Hawaiian slide playing, so I decided to slow this one way down and try to make it Hawaiian. Well, so much for that. I actually had it even slower than this, but I wanted a quick-and-dirty substitute for the bongo track I had sequenced, and I found a few bongo loops at this speed, so there you go.

Don's Boat Number Three - 4.3MB
download from MediaFire or Rapidshare
Well, this one had a very happy sound to it, so the logical response was, 'I wonder if it will still sound happy if I do it with super-overdriven guitars?' I believe the answer is Yes. And the cheesy resolve is still cheesy! Hooray! Longest fade ever.

Don's Boat Number Five - 4.6MB
download from MediaFire or Rapidshare
This one was all bouncy bass and trombones, with a muted-trumpet lead that was me trying to do a Miles Davis thing, although Miles would've used about 1/3 as many notes, and, you know, been good. Nothing to do but take the bounce out of the bass, ditch the trombones, and play the trumpet part on a guitar, even thought the notes don't really sound right on a guitar.

mood: spearmint

The Hall of Dead Records: The Baby Flies

The Baby Flies were a NYC band in the late 1980's. They had three releases that I know of. The first was a 7" single by a 5-person version of the group with a male lead singer, Pictures and Parties on the A-side, and I Only Burn in the Morning, which was given new lyrics and a general spiffing up and became Washing Over Me on their last record. After the self-released single they put out two albums, Rain and A Colorful View, on an indie label. By the end they were a three-piece with a female lead singer.

I've never seen Rain, but the CD version of A Colorful View included six tracks from it as bonus tracks.

Track List
From A Colorful View:
1. Let it Fall 2. Washing Over Me 3. A Colorful View 4. Chains 5. Where the Creatures Call 6. Coming Back to Haunt You 7. Just the Beginning 8. The Only One 9. Searching Everyday 10. Give Me The Light

From Rain:
11. In This Town 12. Don't Be a Stranger 13. Without You 14. Rain 15. Turn Around 16. Undertow

7" single:
17. Pictures and Parties 18. I Only Burn in the Morning


It's about 70MB, encoded at 128kbps.
Download the whole dang thing

If that's too big a chunk, here's one song: Washing Over Me.


mood: versimilitude