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

The myeck page: new home, same old stuff

A note from the editorial wee:

"The myeck page, home of myeck's excessive extensive family history, his own tragic life story (tragic in the sense that he was allowed to live), Ingebeeld Neef's short-lived UFO journal Keep Watching the Skies, and myeck's stupid audio page, has been forced to relocate. You can now find the entry page at http://www.waterses.net/myeck/index.htm unless you don't have Internet access, which I feel is unlikely.
Thank you."

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