Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Archives for 2007

Trio Season 6 – Suite #2: Transparency

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #2: Transparency
Deadweight, Save Your Day, Secret Queen

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Re: Transparency
All three of these songs are about the same thing: a person that wouldn’t ordinarily impact me so much that I would write a song about them, and having one moment of unusual insight into that person – where I really saw through all of their opacity and outside intentions to what they were really about at their core.

Deadweight
At the time, actually, I thought it was just a throw-away. I had written another lyric on a page in my notebook … and I wrote [“Deadweight”] on the upside down of that page. … Now I have to turn the poetry notebook upside down every time I go back to check something.

Save Your Day
One of my readers sent me an email [to say that] she listened to it and just cried … because it was describing her. … You don’t think I’m going to write a song describing somebody’s life. Those songs suck. But, if you are just writing something true people find themselves in that.

Secret Queen
Oh, that secret queen. I’ve got some opinions about her. One day I just thought to myself, With all of that negative energy, you could just be the biggest black hole in my galaxy. And then “Secret Queen” arrived.


Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its sixth season featuring my original music, recorded live and DIY in my bedroom. You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:

My Face Didn’t Need That Nose Anyway

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Alright, enough with this NaBloPoMo nonsense. I’m having way too much fun at the moment – both with life and with writing about life – to ruin it by forcing the latter in the former on a contrived daily basis.

That’s not to say that I’m not going to keep posting every day, but after taking time away from hanging out with Elise and her family twice this weekend I’m certainly not sorry about deliberately missing yesterday, and I’m not rushing my next Engagement post or Trio to get them done for tonight.

So there.

Guitarness

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I’m often at a loss for what to do with myself when we visit Elise’s families in New Jersey. At home, or at any friend’s house, my default position is guitar playing – it gives me something to do with my hands in idle moments so that I don’t feel like I have to carry on a non-stop conversation at all times.

I don’t usually bring my guitar with me to NJ, which means the families haven’t witnessed this particular phenomenon too often, but Elise was planning to leave me marooned while she went on a wedding dress tour, and I needed a way to pass the time. I added a wonderful new “print-version” feature to my lyrics database, so for the trip I printed out sheaf of my fifty most incomplete songs to workshop while Elise was out on her wedding whirlwind.

Isn’t that a little crazy – fifty songs that are unfinished and still relatively new?

I really vacillate about this sort of thing. At this point Gina and I have a solid sixteen song set, and I have ten or twenty of my strongest songs that go in and out of solo rotation. It’s a comfortable point to be at, but then I look at my freaking database and I see all of these unfinished songs – some of which I really adore and like to play, such as they are in their unfinished state. And, since my current setlist is heavily influenced by my 2003-04 stuff, there are incomplete songs hanging around that are about to be four years old.

Four years old! Which is a problem when I have a whole new fleet of unfinished songs to be working through – I only have so much headspace to to to push these things forward. So, I sat down with my sheaf today and had a touch of a workshop. I re-notated a few things in a more complete fashion, and I think finished one from 2001 – “4th of July” – once and for all.

All that rehearsal meant I was plenty limber for my post-dinner conversational gambit. Except, these are people who aren’t used to my schtick – that I like sit and underscore a conversation without needing anyone to pay attention to me, and that if there’s a lull I might sing for a bit before tucking my voice back under the din.

It made for a few awkward moments … I don’t know that Elise’s father has ever heard me play my own songs before? Certainly not songs about his daughter, anyhow. But, they won’t be getting rid of me anytime soon so they might as well get used to the incessant underscoring of my life. Along the way I turned in possibly my best vocal of all time on the bridge of “Love Me Not,” and also a very respectable version of the recently on-hiatus “Little Love.”

All of which is why I need to go home tomorrow and record a Trio. And then I need to record another another one. And then another. And so on.

Right. But, first I need to drink this glass of wine. And maybe another one.

G’nite.

all the world’s a stage

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Tonight we took in a bit of high school theatre, watching Elise’s (and, hey, soon my!) younger brother in his first ever play.

I’m self-aware enough of a blogger not to regale you with a blow by blow of his performance, but it did recall a certain memory of the last time I witnessed any pre-collegiate theatre.

It was in the same auditorium, seen with the same company, possible seated in the same row as tonight, again watching another of my soon-to-be-siblings on stage – this time Elise’s sister.

The main difference was that we were on the other end of our relationship; we had been dating three weeks at the time, and the show was a prelude to my first time meeting Elise’s family.

After the show I milled to and fro, self-conscious and worried about first impressions, while Elise ducked backstage to say hello to former costars. She was still connected to her school – certainly more than she was connected to me.

Tonight she picked those old cast members’ younger sibling out of the playbill, more mine than anyone else’s.

I like this life.

(Also, let it be said that Elise’s brother rocks incredibly; he’s like a better, more talented version of teenaged me. He’s made me – who from an early age had vowed to strangle any potential siblings in the cradle – really re-think my position this whole only-child thing.)

pee ess

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Okay, so, forgive my meta-ness for a second here, but we need to chat.

We are now at the halfway mark of the month, and I must confess I am not really feeling the NaBloPoMo love this year.

I’m quite sure the NaBloPoMo Ning site is mostly at fault. Last year there were over two thousand of us scrambling to post before midnight every day, and the only way for us to communicate and commiserate was to read each other’s blogs and leave a trail of comments in our wake.

This year there are six thousand of us, all amiably mingling on a social networking site, and our blogs would seem to have become secondary to our networking.

Or maybe it’s just me and my busyness, which is even more meta, because the whole point of NaBloPoMo was supposed to be talking about how great it is to be busy all of the time, as opposed to last year when I spent the entire month in my room reading blogs, drinking martinis, and cultivating my carpal tunnel syndrome.

I had quite a schedule plotted out to cut through the busyness with posts and Trios and links, but these days weeks go by so quickly that I don’t have time to figure out what to do with them. That, combined with some of the less amusing chapters of the engagement story and a Trio that doesn’t seem to want to be recorded, are a veritable blogging blockade.

Or, maybe I’m just taking this all a little too seriously, as is my wont. So, I’m looking to you, gentle readers, to tell me what’s what. Are there some NaBloPoMo blogs that I seriously need to be reading? Is there a type of post you’ve been dying to see from me? Or, for the more well-versed of you, is there a song I’ve been neglecting?

Speak now, or your next fifteen days will most likely mirror the last. Which, honestly, were fifteen days of fairly quality blogging, but I’m nothing if not an overachiever.