a return! in the air!
COMING SOON LIKE ALL THEM OTHER THINGS.
PROBABLY TOMORROW!!!!!!!
Archives for April, 2009
I have made the best pot of coffee I have yet made. I will enjoy drinking it, as I doubt it will be this good again.
Also, I found the best t-shirt ever this weekend. Many who have seen it do not understand it’s greatness, but I am confident that it is the best. It basically sums up exactly my type of humor:
I am a fine purveyor of square items.
And what is the brightly colored square? The one of spring hues?
OH MY YOU WILL FIND OUT CAN YOU GUESS?
yes yes yes!
And here’s two videos from Sunday’s concert. While my amp was giving me sass, my voice was like “velvet.”
I’ll show more when they are up.
Also, exceedingly exciting, is the following picture:
i used to think it was “you know you’re famous when you have a wikipedia page you didn’t write yourself,” but know I know that it’s actually when this is the case:
go search-strings, go!
2 much Prince in my life. Eye won’t really write my words like that. OR WILL I?
Anyways, there’s a curious case of songs that you are totally meant to have, ones that defy all logic and everything to be written. I’ve been fortunate enough to have at least one sort of miraculous song, that being Ooh, Rode Off! from Honeybear.
So I got home from New Mexico last summer, and went out in Wicker Park looking for a job. While doing so, I was listening to music, and was way into it, certainly (it was Deerhunter’s Microcastle, if you must know). But since I was listening to music, it was going to be near-impossible to think of any words of my own. But as I was hearing “Nothing Ever Happened” for the first time, a riff of my own popped into my head, but I was nowhere close enough to home yet to write it down. I ended up finding a job (sort of, long story) that day, or at least a fair application, and went home, and as soon as I got home, I managed to actually remember the riff I had concocted perfectly, without a hitch or any sort of change to it.
So having this triumphant riff in my library, I fleshed it out into a full little ditty. Note that at this time, I was still adhering to the idea that the song should bust into “Rise Up” (a song previously blogged about) in the middle, before exploding back into the normal song. This was a terrible idea. Thank Goodness I managed to hack together a normal version of the song. I had gummed up the file so poorly, uuuugggghhh eeedddiiiittttiiiinnnng.
Anyways, here’s that first version, with a goofy scratch vocal of how I wanted the melody to go.
So, having that melody, I went off to have an interview for a job. I didn’t have pen or paper, and I ended up having to wait for over an hour at a Starbucks, but lyrics for the melody started flying into my head, spurned by a dream I’d had about a friend riding off on a bicycle (which in the dream meant that she would always be watching over me, but off in the distance and never in my presence. i can’t ride a bike). Also there was a sign in the window that said “love what you do,” and this mixed into my waiting daydream about the dream.
So, without pen or paper, I waited for an hour, then had an interview for half an hour, having to think about other things, yet when I got home, I wrote down every single lyric I thought of, despite all the things that should have made me forgot them completely (I got that job, btw). So flying in the face of forgetfulness, I wrote Ooh, Rode Off! and got a killer song.
I don’t know, maybe it’s not so miraculous, but it sure seems it to me. Cha cha cha.
wouldya look at that? my, how it looks good. backwards, and in my dark room, and with my clenched teeth behind it, but good. you can get them next week.
get what? OH! “It Won’t Be Long,” a new mini-comic by Me. It’ll be available at local Chicago stores and at any shows I’m playing. But get ready baby, because it’s about to be quickly followed by TWO more minis in the next coming weeks.
Productivity, baby! It’s what happens when you listen to a Prince album all the way through. Very interesting.
I’m trying to work on new songs, but when I tried to write lyrics yesterday, I had dub in my head and couldn’t. I guess it’ll come easier when I have less to do. I hope so.
ALMOST FULL BLEED:
here’s the scene: pasted to the inside of a movie theater window was a Have You Seen Me sign. On it was a listing for a girl, seventeen, gone missing a week prior, last seen wearing a t-shirt that said “whatever”.
i swear you couldn’t make this shit up if you tried.
First off, in my life, isn’t it funny that the album listing for that old version of Sweet Girl was called “Love, etc”? That’s a funny name for an album, but I guess it was pretty clear what all these songs were shaping up to be anyways. Someone said, in that January of last year, “You’re lovely. Purely & Simply,” or something to that effect. That was also going to be the title, with a cover very reminiscent of the cover of the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (never got to take that picture, wah-wah.)
Anyways, that’s more Honeybear backstory (gearing you up for MAY when IT COMES OUT and YOU CAN GET IT FROM ME and STUFF and WHATEVER).
These are the demos made when I was home for 10 days in May of last year (whoa, I said home meaning Albuquerque. What a good mood I must be in…). During this break, I made great use of my piano, recording every piano track you hear on Honeybear, as well as the piano track which made the basis of Good Humor on Olympian.
(I am trying to find a picture of this piano, but I can only find pictures of Kyle Throssell’s ass…)
here’s one… 
…it’s from, what, 2004? Jesus Christ. I weighed a full 40 pounds more of emotional weight.
What the hell. Here I am, listening to myself and talkin’ about the past.
Anyways, there are two demos from that break in May of 08. They are both on the piano, and I don’t think you’d be able to tell, but I was listening to a lot of Sparks. The other two little things are me recording a loud dinner party, trying to get some snippets of conversation. It’s all a jumble, but that dinner party supplied the second chorus of Good Humor (i think it’s that chorus, it’s the one about leaning over to listen and articulating and all that).
5.16.08
Dinner Chatter 1
Dinner Chatter 2
5.22.08
Also something that came from that session was this long piano-coda to Or Even A Stethoscope, which will show up someday, I’m sure.
Phew. I’m going to stop before I go on a rant about taking the bus down Lake Shore with the sun in my eyes.
Show Time: Sunday April 26, 2009 - 7:00 PM
Venue: The Orphanage
Address: 643 w 31st
City: Chicago
State: Illinois
Country: US
Zip Code: 60616
Cost:
Description: Violet Mice at the Orphanage! Also appearing: Rusty Clearwater, The Drama Scene, Andy Suffers. I am billed as “clever, very clever,” which of course you know is… true.
Oh, no, i’ll be using that name for something else, I’m sure. But having come upon it last night, I just couldn’t resist.
Anyways, these following are a series of paintings that I was working on at the same time I was working on the Ringo’s Rainbow stuff, which is to say January-May of 2008. There are a couple of different facets to the series. It starts off as a desire to put the song Wolves with images (something it would certainly benefit from, in the future, it would be very lovely if Wolves was a painted book. hmm, ideas ideas), or at least to do paintings in the world Wolves inhabits. It’s a very specific world, one that exists right outside of ours, or really just is our world, just seen differently, with more truth. Like through a peepstone, but not as lame and influential to thousands of Americans (what?).
Anyways, here are the Wolven Paintings, done in Gouache and Watercolor, all around 5 x 7″ on paper:
The project then went more inwardly for me, (wow, inwardly is a word! that’s great!), and I began to make work more directly about things that had really happened, with the exception of this first painting on a chair with a great shadow.
This painting was more trying to move myself into the mindset of when I was about to paint, which is around three years old.
The next two are from real things that happened, the first being an awkward moment at three when I accidentally got totally wasted (it was all my fault, don’t blame anyone else but me! See, I was walking around the table at a dinner party being cute and asking for sips of champagne, and then when everyone left the table, I went around and asked for more sips. so dastardly. anyways i got wasted and started driving my tricycle up the stairs. whoops.)
This last one is from this great picture of me at three when I am totally naked, painting the floor of our bungalow blue. There’s a larger painting of this picture, but I don’t have a good reproduction of it yet.
So those are more snippets of the creative mind of a year ago. The reason I don’t have more to show of this semester is that all the work is in book form, and I don’t want to give spoilers, but Oh oh OH will they come soon (I mean, they have to, the semester’s almost over. yikes.)
I am feeling disheveled. My hair is starting to look like Emmett Brown’s, and in protest (of what I do not know), I have been wearing the same Zwan shirt for a fuabajillion years.
I must cover my face with a bag of glow in the dark spider-webbing.
Anyways, here’s two oddities from the vault.
The first is me making a mix of Property (from Olympian) that’s only some backing vocals and the organ tracks. It’s very nice and slides by your ears foggily. If I do say so myself.
The second is an abandoned (sadly, and for now) demo (I guess) for a song called Snaggletooth!. Snaggletooth! was an old demo for my old high school band Spirits of Salt. In freshman year of college I tried to write demos for our hopeful reunion, and Snaggletooth! was one of those demos (there was also a song called Leafe., and a song called Sex. If anyone I know has those demos, I’d really like to get ‘em from you). This version is much less math-rock than the original, perhaps thankfully. It’s pretty goofy, as it involves mouth-trumpets, but I was surprised upon re-listening to hear how nice the drums were. I do believe this song will make a comeback someday. Soooommmeeedaaayyyyy.
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