Archives for 2008

What to write about? In here, and song-wise.
See, I’ve hit a point, where I can’t just write about what I’ve been writing about.
No more “girl girl pretty love love girl,” as the joke has been made.
(But I do swear, there’s more depth in it than that).

Anyways, what am I now supposed to write about?

Last night, I had a few dreams.  One of them was about some sort of highway murder, mutilated bodies, felled trees in the middle of the road.  Another was me walking around a house (that was mine, but wasn’t, you know how that goes), and I had shaved my beard, and was reading The Great American Novel by Philip Roth instead of the book I’m reading now, in protest of something I didn’t know.  Then I was trying to go to bed and a dog was poking it’s nose through a hole in my bookcase, because there was a gap between my room and the next door neighbors (?).

So do I write about that dream?  Do I write about meeting people on airplanes?

Or do I write about that one night over this winter break at home, when we went to a holiday party and were very lost on the way up, then got there, and I saw a friend I haven’t seen in a while (to my surprise)?

Probably the latter, for now.  But maybe all of the above?  Or what about the advice Bradford Cox said to impatient Animal Collective fans, to make their own music that sounds like what they hope Merriweather Post Pavilion will sound like?  It’s good advice, but it’s too late for me to do that, because I already have Guy’s Eyes on permanent repeat.  (Actually, it’s between that and Antony’s new song Aeon).

See, that’s my goal, sort of.  I want my sound to bridge the gap between The Crying Light and Merriweather Post Pavilion.  Because sound-wise, those are the best.  And the year hasn’t even started yet.

And before I go on that tangent, which is sure to be depressing, I’ll put up a song-sketch.

There are a few times when I get to mix music with the classes I’m in at school.  This is generally really great for me.  The first time I got to do this, it was for a project where I made a wall-diorama about Jesus & Elvis, because of that maybe-fake quote from Elvis that said “There’s only one King, and that’s Jesus.”  So, dressed as the Pig, I gave a little speech/demonstration, leading everyone through the story.

As I can’t really talk through that mask (great concert ideas crushed by latex), and because I don’t think The Pig’s voice is exactly my voice, I recorded a backing track to mime to.

I Dreamt of Two Kings (monologue)

And, as an added bonus, here’s the music behind that monologue.  It’s like a REMIX!

I Dreamt of Two Kings (soliloquy)

Also, soliloquy is the best word.

More comics up in the Visual section. These start a little old, but work their way up to very recent, yet still before Good-Bye, The Pig.

Did I mention? Happy holidays, you.

There are new (to you, they are actually a little old. think of them as a precursor to Good-Bye, The Pig.) comics up here!

You can read them by going here

The next batch of song-ideas are weird-sounding.  Hyphens, yes, yes.

If I haven’t said, I started doing these things because I’d been losing songs for years.  Often while walking home I’d get the basis for a killer riff in my head.  It would seem that my best creative period is when I’m walking places (there’s a better story of that.  later.) Anyways, what always happened was by the time I got home I’d totally lose the song I had in my head.  At the time (and still), I had no convenient way to record them as I walked.  So I began to make a concerted effort to remember the riff and record it as soon as I got home.  And if I was already at home, then I would record the riff as soon I started enjoying it (or before).

So, I do believe the first time I did this was with the song Violence (which I am fairly sure the casual reader doesn’t know, but here’s a summation: it’s the title song that wasn’t on the album, and sums up the issues and themes held within).  It came to me while walking home in Albuquerque, around the corner of carlisle and copper, right around Ragin’ Shrimp (I used to work there).  The basis for the song came from the desire to write a song that starts with one line of verse before the music, like… (oh, and I hate to use this example) Bullet With Butterfly Wings.  Anyways, when I got home, I had the line I wanted, so I made the music for it, tagging it to another set of lyrics that were fast summing up how I felt that particular summer.  I quickly threw together a demo made of loops:

Humdinger

It’s called “Humdinger” because I was so proud of the lyrics, and felt obliged to call them Humdinger because I had referred to it as a humdinger of a song.  A similar thing happened in a high school band when we played a song and I said “that’s a keeper!” The song was called Keeper forever-more.

The next sketch up is called “Rise Up,” and it was probably the first song to come out of a song-cycle that I never completed/am maybe still working on.  This was a set of songs all related around the story of two people, alone on a world that is no longer populated, except for them, on a ship of bone, sailing a sea of blood.  They never talk to each other.  Hey, here’s an excerpt of a novel I started writing about it when I was buzzing from painkillers after getting my wisdom teeth out:

“With that she realized, not for the first time, that whenever he started rambling on about his past, he never once stopped to ask if she was listening.  She almost let herself laugh at the fact that it meant that not only had her companion been talking to himself the whole while, but that also she had been paying close enough attention to him to know that he hadn’t asked if she’d been paying attention.  The realization was so severe a change in her usual day that she almost spun around to begin a conversation with him, but was interrupted by a gust of wind and an influx of rain.
She began to feel dizzy, the wind usually did that to her.  She tried to calm herself down while at the same time trying not to show any outward emotion.  She realized that she was doing so so her companion wouldn’t worry.  The last thing he needs is to worry, she thought.  She went through her excersizes to calm herself down, thinking of words upon words. Fetid and foul and flour and foul and fowl and four and floor the store the more you abhor the less you control you control you control, she thought to herself, but it was no use, and she collapsed to the floor of the boat, blood filling her mouth.  As she fell she remembered a time from before she was on the boat, and opened her arms to the memory.
She was alone, and laughed to herself because of it.  The way her mind works, any time she noted her surroundings she would be reminded of how obvious they were, how cliched, and she’d start laughing. It gave her the look of a crazy, but she was long past caring.  And at that thought, she laughed again, because she knew it wasn’t true.  She looked around as a mild frantic, making sure no one was around.  Her shoulders sunk when she saw someone else in the room.  When he saw that she saw him, his eyes widened and he looked away.  She figured that he had been staring at her, but she couldn’t figure out why, unless he thought she was cute, which made her angry when she realized she wanted that to be true.  She imagined that he was angry for the same reason, and decided that she should stop thinking about it, she wasn’t going to get any work done if she kept dwelling on someone she’d never met before.  But the more she thought about him, the more she imagined that she’d seen him before, at the store she worked at, maybe.  On the street.  It was a big city, but it was entirely possible.  Maybe they lived in similar neighborhoods, or maybe they went to the same school.  She met new people everyday that she didn’t know she went to school with, it was possible.  And his pants were dirty.  It looked like ink.  Maybe glue, too.  She stifled a chuckle at the glue.  A friend of hers had told her once that when people get glue on their pants, they’re really worried that people will think it’s semen.  Even though they look pretty different.  And most people would have the decency to wipe the semen off of their pants.  That was the thing with glue vs. semen, you couldn’t get the god damned glue off.  But you could get semen off.  She remembered this one time that her friend told her about, where he was talking to a teacher and almost accidentally said the word “dildo” to her.  For no reason, either.  The word had just popped into his head, and he said “dil-” to the teacher, but he didn’t think she noticed.  Apparently the teacher was talking to the student about a relationship that had just ended, which seemed funny to her because it didn’t seem like something teachers and students should talk about.  But he had gone to private school, maybe it was different there.  Maybe they had weird orgies like her friend said they had in college.  She didn’t believe in these orgies, she’d heard of them, but had never seen any proof of their reality.  Not that she would participate anyways.  With 80 percent of the population having herpes, she didn’t need to be a part of that particular statistic.  Let someone else get it.  She didn’t even get cold sores.  Which was weird, because she had a—
She shrugged off her companion’s hand.  He was lightly shaking her, and had his hand on her face.  She wanted to ask him why, but she knew he had lifted it out of the pool of blood that covered the deck.  She didn’t say anything.  She tried to remember what she had thought about when she fell, and realized that she had confused her and her companion’s stories together.  She never had cold sores, that much was true, but it was his story more than hers.  They only had each other’s stories these days, what was going to happen if they mixed their stories together? Would they make new stories, or would they just be trash? Useless trash! It didn’t really matter anyways if they remembered or not.  She only told the stories to herself.  He told his stories to her.  Maybe she should tell him to stop.  Maybe she would forget all of her stories because his would always be echoing in her head.”

Oh, god, that’s much too long.  Anyways, “Rise Up” came from a bit of lyrics I’d written in junior year, after a very stressful event happened that turned out to be a lie.  Oh, I remember gravity failing my legs.
soon this world will fall apart.
and i will stand in the ashes.
i will stand in the sea of bone
i will
rise up and taste the fruit of the lord
as the ascent begins
and all is lost
and all is lost
and all is lost
but as the ascent begins
the descent will follow
and i will stand in the air
i will stand in the ocean’s wake
i will live in the sea of bone
i will
i will rise up. inside.
outside. inside.
i will
rise up and taste the fruit of the lord.
and the juice will fall from this tongue
and fall into the sea
and fall into the sea
and fall into the sea.
and the fruit will laugh.
and i will live in the ocean of bone.

and fall into the sea.

and fall

into

the sea.

Rise Up

This song became a similar, but better song.

Anyways, now you are all running for the hills.  More later.

You chose this street for the trees:

Walking through the alley and street where so many lyrics came from.
“from sunflower to staircase”
basically just sing the song “violence” while walking, you’ll get it.

Little Wolves Think of You

Today’s a day, my hands are cold.  Oh, and today I finished Honeybear.

But that’s news for a fierce different day, my friends.

I’m holding on to the Girlz/Violence (fake) era as long as I can.

And to further that point, this is the post where you get the skinny on the Girlz EP.

So, it was May 2007, and I had finished all the music for Violence (including frantic guitar solos from Jesse before he got on an airplane).  I was home, and didn’t bring the recording equipment I usually use to record with me.  I was taking a break, I told myself! No more for a while.  I’m spent.

Well, I wasn’t spent, and starting writing new songs pretty quickly, but not too many.  The first to come was just a piano riff that sounded so good I couldn’t let it go.  That riff became the basis for a song called Heart Like Toast, which I think had a title before it had any words.  The title comes from a paraphrased poem a friend of mine wrote in her, what, middle school journal? Anyways, the line was “I am a woman who will cook you dinner.  You spread my heart on toast.”  Ha!

Heart Like Toast (piano)

Heart Like Toast, as it is, is about meeting new friends and allowing them into your group.  It’s also more romantic with that.  Funny that the particular person the song’s about is now our total enemy.  It’s a long story you don’t want to know.

Heart Like Toast (earliest)

That was the first song written.  The next was a song called Fool, and it certainly has the best story behind it’s writing.  I love Sam Shepard (playwright) and while at a used book store found a copy of Fool For Love that had a poem someone had written in the inside cover:

Lisa—

I was at your door

At the crack of dawn

But out into town

You had already gone

I wanted to buy you the sunrise

Or at least tea for two

tea for two.

I couldn’t possibly pass that up.  Later in the summer I was walking in an alley in the rain, but the light made it look like dawn.  I don’t have a picture of the alley, nor do I have a picture of the poem (someone else has it and i am unlikely to get it back), but maybe later I’ll take a picture of the alley and show you what I was talking about.  This particular alley inspired many more lyrics down the line.

Fool

The thing about many of the songs on Girlz is that the lyrics are often stolen from life, conversations, things people have written, or books.  The song Sparrow Camel (the title of which is taken from what Marianne Moore called Ostriches) came from messages I’d received on the internet (which is sort of embarassing to say, but they were so good I couldn’t resist).  Literally every line in the song comes from something that was written to me, re arranged into some bizarre romance narrative.  This early version comes from me being unsatisfied with my singing and trying to mask them with flange.

Sparrow Camel

The song No Life In Oh came from the worst response you can get from someone when you tell them you like them: “oh.”  The song is built around that and another thing said to me, which is “see how you feel after the summer.”  That line had already been used on Violence, but since this song is more directly about the person who said that to me, it made sense to use it.  I recorded it at night and recorded two tracks of cricket sounds to emphasize the room I was in.

The last two songs that was originally on Girlz were called Total Coward and Violence.  Violence is the title track that wasn’t on the album, but more on that at a later time.

Total Coward was another appropriation from a terrible message sent to me that summer.  It reads like this:

“Here’s another one for the cheap seats in the back. Bye, kid. It’s been terrible. I think you’re a complete and total coward. I’m not unfriending you again, so why don’t you be a gem and do it for me? You probably think I’m crazy and irrational, eh? Despite the fact that we used to share root beer floats and Dr. Pepper lipsmackers and go on walks where you’d buy my slurpee and that time you gave me your jacket when I was cold… despite, or perhaps because of all these things I’m going to have to hate you forever. I wish we could have said goodbye the proper way. I wish you’d know I didn’t message you about that photo comment because I wanted or expected an answer. I promise I didn’t. So I basically blame you for faux-starting this up again. Fuck you for doing this to me twice, you insensitive asshole. I’ll miss you. I hope I never run into you again.”

Total Coward

Anyways, I was so upset that I just haaad to put it into song.  So I recited it over and over again, adding harmonies that didn’t quite add up. And that was Girlz as it existed the summer I began it.

Unfortunately, I found it unlistenable.  I had used the recording equipment I used in high school for all of my Artiste songs, and found myself going right back to all the usual tricks I used back then.  So when I got back to Chicago, I immediately re-recorded Heart Like Toast.

Heart Like Toast (earlier)

But for some reason, one of which being the beginnings of Honeybear and the emergence of another strange set of songs about a Sea of Blood, Girlz got sidetracked until the next summer, where I had a burst of arrangement inspiration for Heart Like Toast, re-recorded Sparrow Camel, used a later version of Fool, and dropped Total Coward.

Heart Like Toast (early)

Right now, at this moment, I have no words of summation for Girlz, other than maybe adding that the title is a pun about the recurring joke about what all my songs are about.  Anyways, if you don’t already have it, here’s the EP as it is and will be forever:

Girlz EP

Like was just asked me, I thought I was through going through old songs.  But here I am, alone in my apartment, feeling not well, cold, etc., and I’m listening to old songs from high school (which, I realized in conversation last night, was a lot longer ago than I thought).  Anyways, before I go all teary from watching Star Trek (almost happened today, I think.  What episode? I can’t remember… already… *sigh*), I’ll write about this one song on this one fake EP I made in, what, the 10th grade? No, 11th.  That infamous junior year.

Why this one instead of other songs? Well, it’s an easy reason.

This song’s called Mice.

Mice

That isn’t the only reason I posted it.  I put it here because it’s a very pretty, very short little instrumental.  It’s one of the few songs that you can hear the unclouded strains of Violet Mice starting to poke through in my music.  A breakthrough, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Oh, it’s so cold.

Nothing can warm up this room.

It is here.  It’s been around for a while, but now it’s right here, and you can have it!

Isn’t that fantastic? No, because you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Anyways, it’s Violence, my new album.  My rock and roll album.  Epic, like knives.

It’s been done for a very long time, everything was written and ready to be mixed in May of 2007, but this time I wasn’t going to just mix it myself.  It was far too dense, too jumbled, too much for me to deal with (I mean that more emotionally than technically—I didn’t just pawn it off because I was lazy).  I entrusted the sound and future of this album to my dear friend Jake Strick, who has the very keenest ear for sound.  Without his slender fingers, this album would be Mud City.  Instead, it is pristine.  When it needs to be, of course.  This album is an onion.

And to pull off the first skin, here’s one sentence:

There was a balloon salesman...

Sudden great idea that is impossible until I have a full rock band:

Performing side one of the album “Heroes” with no explanation until the very end, when I say “that was side one of ‘heroes’.”