The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand
by krisis
(Also w/r/t my sleeplessness, I experienced a highly unexpected psychotic break into hysterical tears at of the intersection of Broad and South while singing along to “Morse Code Love.”
At least, I think it had to do with sleeplessness. That’s not one of my typical welling up into tears in the middle of the street tunes.)
by krisis
A few scant weeks prior to the birth of this blog in the summer of 2000 I had been working as an Orientation Leader for Drexel, helping to guide and socialize pre-freshman during their summer campus visit.
It’s nearly impossible to be a camp counselor to people who are only a few months younger than you, and by virtue of being an Orientation Leader you are a major geek in their eyes, so the only real solution to holding their attention and respect (for me, anyhow) was sheer, irrepressible, unavoidable, kinetic energy.
I had so much of that energy built up the evening before our first group of students arrived that I absolutely could not sleep (this was before the days of Benadryl w/vodka chaser, god bless my 18-yr-old soul). I remember the absolute hopelessness of it – the clock facing my dorm bed inexorably ticking closer to our 6:15 a.m. call time.
Around five I just gave up – sleep can’t be forced. I just enjoyed the lying still in my bed, counting down the minutes.
The intersection of insomnia and excitement worked. Spectacularly. I’ve always been of the manic, excitable persuasion, but that night was the catalyst to a major transformation: my metamorphosis from excitable boy to something akin to a walking cartoon – rabidly energetic, and afraid to stop moving because I might just pass out.
(Probably a contributing factor to my broken collarbone, but that’s neither here nor there. More Germain is that it was tangentially the template for my participation in Blogathon; I would have never dared to believe I could blog and sing and record for twenty fours hours if I hadn’t going through my insomniac-energy boot camp the summer before.)
I’ve been thinking about that all day because it has been one of those days. I put in a twelve-hour shift of mixing and recording last night, and if you consider when I usually get home from work you’ll realize that subsequently I wasn’t left with too much time for sleep between the end of that endeavor and the beginning of my new work day.
I usually dread getting up and out for work with less than four hours of sleep, but today I loved my barely-two. I was up and out of the house like a catapult, remembering all of my electronic accouterments, walking rather than taking the bus, at work and in constant motion.
The only detraction is that I can’t speak anything resembling English while trying to leave a voice mail, but that’s what the “do-over” button is for.
(Except when you call outside clients and bang the do-over button and then mutter “fuck” because you realize you can’t do-over on their system, and then you realize you just muttered “fuck” in a professional voice mail and the tape is still rolling.)
Today was an exception – I don’t do sleepless nights nearly as much (or, nearly as well) as I did back then – but it’s nice to pitch one in here and there to remind myself what it’s like to be not just unwilling, but unable, to stop.
by krisis
I don’t typically let my songs incubate for very long. If I don’t finish writing a song within a few days, or don’t record it within the next month or two, chances are I won’t wind up playing it very often.
My first new song of 2007 turned that whole philosophy on its ear.
Much like “Standing,” it woke me up from sleep to jot it down. Only this one was much more stubborn – the lyrics didn’t have a consistent meter, and I could hear only a few pieces of the music. It seemed unremarkable, especially for something thar had dragged me out of bed.
It didn’t feel unremarkable, though. It felt like something real and solid. A song that said something, because I had something to say to myself.
I refused to give up on it. Every day I came home to tinker. After a few weeks the chorus made its way up the neck from open chords to the 14th fret. A month later I was still tinkering with the lyrics, and the first day of spring found me changing up the rhythms and transitions.
I’m happy to say that the song survived that whole ordeal, and I debuted it at my Melange Theatre performance last Friday. And now I am debuting it to the world at large with its first proper demo recording. It’s far from perfection, but it’s already a long way from where it began.
“Love Me, Love Me Not” is the song of the day.
by krisis
Two years ago this week we were just about settled in this house, and I was packing up my gear from the third annual Lyndzapalooza. I had only written two songs in the previous year, and I hadn’t played anywhere other than Lyndzapalooza in just about that long. I had no new recordings to speak of.
A year ago this week I had just finished my yearly engagement at Lyndzapalooza, and otherwise hadn’t played anywhere other than the Shubin X-Mas Revue since… well, since the last Lyndzapalooza.
However, I had also just written and demoed two new songs that seemed not to suck, and I was arranging for and singing in an a cappella group (the latter for the first time ever).
Minor changes. Little earthquakes.
This year I am not quite packed up from Lyndzapalooza. Gina and I practiced weekly for several months to prepare for our evening set, which featured harmony on every song. I’ve written several new songs, and have played a few monthly engagements at Melange Theatre. Though I haven’t recorded much lately, I tracked 30 new recordings in 30 days of November.
I’m finally re-enrolled in voice lessons, with an awesome young PhD candidate at Penn. Also, I was hired (hired!) to co-write two songs, which I just finished recording (and received payment for!).
And, just to keep myself limber, I’m throwing a dinner/concert for my mother where I’ll be playing two dozen of her favorite songs, and I’m arranging the entirety of Tori Amos’s new album for guitar.
Still not quite a rock star, yet – considering I let my musical life grind to a halt in 2005 – I’m gratifying by my acceleration back to musical relevance.
by krisis
I have not left the house since Friday night – since dragging my sorry self in from the humidity with guitar and amp and bookbag after what maybe would have seemed like one of the longer days of my life had I not just helped to put on a music festival last weekend.
I unapologetically turned on the central air, flopped on the couch, and that was that.
Waking up the next morning – and, in fact, all the way through the weekend until earlier this evening – I couldn’t quite tell if I was sick, or just “under the weather,” or if my body was simply mounting all possible protests at once: sore from lugging amp and guitar around the city, voice fading after a week of talking and singing, stuffy from allergies (also: I need to change the filter on the central air).
I’m being paid to help an acquaintance write and record two songs.
It’s a peculiar arrangement – even beyond the peculiarity of being paid to do something that I spend the majority of my non-working life doing for free. She has words, and melody, and even some chords, but she needs help translating them into a coherent, performable, recorded song.
On her first song we completely clicked, suggesting the same exact chords to each other, minus our personal flourishes. The exception is a single, recurring section where she hears the accompaniment as happy and major, whereas I just feel it as minor and unresolved. She sees where I am coming from, but she doesn’t hear the song that way.
She’s the (paying) client, so I’m doing it her way, but it hurts a little – the song is losing a layer of nuance that only I will ever know. It’s a peculiar direction to head in, given I’ve spent the last year or two mercilessly deconstructing my own writing, trying to eliminate all of the nonsense whims to drill down to the perfect song underneath.
I’ve been reflecting on how my threshold for wasting money seems to be pushing in two opposite directions, leaving a vast middle ground of amounts to waste.
On one hand, I won’t even spend $.99 on a song I like on iTunes, whereas in the past I used to buy albums just based on cover art. On the other, a $400 piece of furniture or recording equipment is a necessary evil, whereas three years ago it took months of prodding to get me to buy my first brand-new electric guitar for that amount.
Is that normal? As we grow up are we all at once more willing to nickle and dime and more willing to throw money at seemingly inevitable larger purchases? It seems like the sort of thing I couldn’t understand as a child, but I feel like I live an entire life that I wouldn’t be able to understand as a child, so the finer points are getting harder to discern.
Last night I watched Battlestar Galactica on the floor of my room/office, head propped up by cardboard box because i was too sore/sick to wander downstairs to find a pillow. It was thing infinity-n on my list of things to do, but I did it anyway.
What is more modern-day than being able to download exactly the thing you have a whim to watch at 3am on Monday morning?
Do you remember when blogging was about recording that instant gratification? Now we have Facebook status and MySpace walls to record the instant – the offhand comment, the spurious wish – while our blogs sit in silence, waiting to catch a thought that is more fully formed.
Lying on my floor somewhere around 4:37 a.m. I thought, fuck that. If my modern adult life says I can stay up all night watching television on my floor because I am too impatient for the DVD to arrive in September, then I’m allowed to blog about whatever damn errata I want to.
It’s not the errata that is alluring and readable, in the same way that watching that one episode doesn’t mean that I am modern and adult. It’s that watching that episode was any of a thousand possibilities of things I could be doing at 4:37 a.m. – a range expanding from sleep to flying to Kansas City just to get drunk.
It’s that enough amassed errata is defining – maybe even arresting – but the only way to find that out is to collect it all in one place, instead of squandering it on everyone else’s internet page.