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arcati crisis

Cover songs or originals – which are easier to play?

July 17, 2016 by krisis

We held an unusual rehearsal in our dining room today – three hours of running through the Smash Fantastic cover song repertoire, but as fronted by my Arcati Crisis co-writer and BFF Gina.

gina-peter-1997-sharks-cant-sleep

An incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind shot of the first time Gina and I performed music together on stage (also the first time I sang solo in public!) This was in 1997 at Masterman, peforming “Sharks Can’t Sleep” by Tracy Bonham. From left to right: me, Joanna, Lucy, and Gina.

The strange arrangement is the result of being asked to play a big benefit show during a week where Ashley will be on vacation. It’s a fun show and we love donating our time to it, so Ashley gave her blessing for us to play it with a fill-in vocalist.

Despite you all knowing Gina primarily for her amazing songwriting and intuitive harmony vocals, she is an awesome interpreter and karaoke veteran. It helps that the rest of the band – Jake, Zina, and I – is the same for both Smash Fantastic and Arcati Crisis.

It was a rollicking rehearsal full of surprises – for example, after over 20 years of friendship I found out that Gina loves “Because The Night” as much as I do, but she does not quite know how to sing Queen’s “Somebody To Love.” We also played a rare pair of our own “Holy Grail” and “Better” with Gina on vocals but not on guitars!

The most interesting part for me was the conversation while we packed up. As we were coiling wires, Gina mentioned off-handedly that she found getting the cover songs right to be much more challenging than playing in an original band.

That took me by surprise! Gina is a confident, experienced singer – I would never expect she would be stressed by cover songs. In fact, I invited her to fill in because I thought she’d find singing two hours of covers a relief in comparison to the stress of shredding through our own songs. However, her reasoning resonated: when you’re covering a song, there’s an existing standard to be held to. As great an interpreter as you may be, you’ve got to get the lyrics right and hit the expected high notes before people will even begin to consider if your performance is any good.

I know that’s the reality, but I’ve never considered it that way. For me, cover songs are a fun vacation from the intense challenge of playing original music.

With cover songs, you simply have to capture the spirit of a song people know well. While Jake tends to hew closely to the real basslines of songs, Zina and I approximate their drum fills and guitar riffs. It’s about verisimilitude. If you give a crowd a hint of the real thing, they don’t notice all the elements you leave out.

That works in our favor on songs for which we can’t quite assemble all the elements of a recording, but it also works in our favor – our covers of “Bang Bang” and “Uptown Funk” dress up the more bare originals considerably with additional passing chords, while even on a classic like “The Way You Make Me Feel” Jake has installed a more propulsive bassline that is only implied in the original.

gina-peter-1998-with-or-without-you

The first time Gina and I played guitar together in front of people! This was in 1998 at Masterman, playing U2’s “With Or Without You” for the departing senior class. Psychedelic water damage courtesy of my Sophomore year apartment.

By contrast, playing originals is terrifying! The only context the audience has are the notes coming from the stage. There is no earned good will or existing song that will put a smile on their face. And, even when you’re in top shape with a set of good songs, it’s impossible to know when they’re good enough.

It’s like doing yoga – you can always challenge yourself to sink deeper into a pose. I have songs that are nearly 20 years old that I still haven’t mastered playing; I found extra harmony on one just a few weeks ago that makes it sound more like itself than it ever has before.

Gina doesn’t have that anxiety. To her, an original song is something entirely under her control not only to interpret, but to shape and transform. The entire point of the thing is that it belongs to you and it might continue to evolve. That’s nothing to be afraid of – it’s a joy.

I was so intrigued that as best-friends and co-writers Gina and I could differ on this point, but it explains a lot about our relative comfort over the years as performers. There’s no disputing that I’m more vivid and energetically myself on stage in Smash Fantastic, just as Gina is obviously transfixing in Arcati Crisis when she settles into playing an original like “Song for Mrs. Schroeder.”

It will be an interesting eight weeks of getting 30 songs ready for this cover gig, but I think I’m even more intrigued by what Gina and I will know about ourselves afterward when we turn our attention back to originals for the first time in three years.

Filed Under: arcati crisis, guitar, high school, thoughts, Year 16 Tagged With: Arcati Crisis, Cover Songs, Gina, Smash Fantastic, verisimilitude

Musical Fingerprints

November 2, 2012 by krisis

I often lament that there is no instruction manual to being a rock band, and one of the areas I most frequently wish Arcati Crisis had some sort of guide to is selecting songs when your band has multiple songwriters.

Ideally, this guide would be written by The Beatles, or maybe Fleetwood Mac. However, Gina would probably not read it if it was written by Wham!

(What is the grammatical rule for punctuating sentences that end with a name that includes punctuation? Like, I didn’t mean that sentence to be exclamatory. I certainly don’t want Gina to think I am shouting (again) about her not liking Wham!)

(There it goes again. Damn you, Wham!)

Lately Gina and I have been on a new-song-selecting kick. It is interesting to pick multiple songs at the same time because we always choose one song from each of us at a time, but there is a huge disparity in the pool of selections. I write a lot of songs – anywhere from 6 to 20 every year – in many different styles. Pop, folk, rock, country ballads. I’m all over the place. Gina writes relatively few songs. There have been years when I have only heard one or two finished ones, even if she has many others lying in wait. Yet, Gina’s songs are much more thematically consistent.

Thus, the selection process is a bit madcap. A few weeks ago, I played twenty-five songs for Gina to select a mere two. I had my preferences, but I have long since learned that it doesn’t do any good to try to force Gina’s hand into a pick. The resulting song will suck. Gina has to hear a space for herself inside of it.

In the midst of reading the monstrous New York cover story on Grizzly Bear, I discovered they utilize nearly the same process.

Ask them who they’re thinking of when they write, and it’s not an end listener—it’s the other members of the band, who might dislike what’s been written, or lack anything to contribute to it, at which point it’ll be tabled. “Everyone has to have a fingerprint on every song,” says Droste. The whole thing sounds like passing major legislation through Congress.

“Maybe it’s a lot,” says Bear, “that we’re asking ourselves to all be four democratic voices on everything. Maybe that’s not common.”

It is common, Grizzlies! See, this is why we need a guide.

(After reading, I was inspired to listen to Grizzly Bear’s new LP – Shields. It was very well-produced – transfixingly so. Yet, not a single melody was memorable. I felt pretty similarly about their last record.)

(I don’t think my votes would be very popular in their democracy).

By contrast, Gina played me a mere seven songs (a bumper crop, for her), of which I became immediately obsessed with six, so then she had to go back and choose four more of mine. One of hers was about zombies, another about Ben Franklin, a third particularly ingenious one about Daylight Savings Time. It helps that I am a massive fan of Gina’s sensibility in just about everything.

However, there was one I was not obsessed with. Gina also played it for me earlier this year, and at the time I said I thought it might not be done. I made the same argument a few weeks ago. “Maybe it needs more of a refrain,” I said, “or a slightly different chord change in that middle section.”

Now I realize – after Grizzly Bear so succinctly summed up the democracy of songwriting – that there is simply no room for my fingerprint on the song. It is distinctly Gina, with very little room left for my own devices. I am trying to convince her to change it to make room for my fingerprint, but it doesn’t really need it.

How is it that I have always understood that about Gina’s choices in my songs, but never about my choices of hers?

See: we really need an instruction manual.

Filed Under: arcati crisis

Who are your people?

September 6, 2012 by krisis

With Jake exported to lovely Rochester, New York for  little while, Gina and I have retooled our mid-week rehearsal into a sort of combo rehearsal, business meeting, new material audition, and general goofing-off night.

Which, honestly, is not so different than what it was when Jake was around for it, but now it’s been officially christened as such.

One of the things we talked about last night was something that came up over impromptu dinner with Matthew Ebel and Nan at #140Conf in June.

Matthew is an indie musician who is totally on the path of 1000 True Fans – and he makes it work spectacularly with steady touring and releases combined with a subscription service and webcasts. He was also the first ever musical director of the conference. I’ve wanted to sit down and chat with him ever since a brief run-in with him at the 2010 conference, so I was psyched to catch up with him about touring, songwriting, and our shared love of Amanda Palmer.

Eventually, conversation turned to my own motley collection of musical acts. Matthew set down his drink, stared me down across the table, and said, “Who are your fans?”

Now, I’m not so delusional as to think I have a massive fan base across all of my acts, but we’ve accumulating our steady listeners over the years. I began to stammer about them, but Matthew cut me off.

“Look, you’ve got friends who dig you. Fine. That’s not what I asked. I said, ‘who are your fans?’ Your people?”

This is the rabbit hole that Gina and I headed down last night. Matthew’s point to me over that dinner was that it’s all well and good to have fans here and listeners there, but it pays to know who your true demographic is. Twenty-something 70s nostalgics? Steam punk enthusiasts? X-Men fans?

It’s basic marketing, and I do it at work all the time at the start of a new project. We produce ad campaigns towards a specific audience, so why not do the same thing for our music?

I guess some musicians might shy away from this whole concept because it’s not artistic, or some frilly bullshit like that. Whatever. In the old, “find a label to be your patron” model of music, there was some marketing person and their intern out there scrambling to figure out your target audience so you could focus on being an ARTISTE.

Well, now your target audience is your patron, as it should be – and it’s your job to know who they are. Figuring out who they are doesn’t mean you have to write songs just for them or anything like that. It’s just a matter of fishing where the fish are. If all the Star Trek fans dig your music, then you better be playing it somewhere where Star Trek fans congregate. Matthew’s point was that putting together that thousand-plus fans is a little easier to do if they aren’t all one-off transactions.

So, who are our people? I don’t know. People in Philadelphia and People on Twitter are apparently categories too large, and People With an Endless Fascination With the End Times But Not In a Morbid Way might be a little too specific.

We’ll figure it out.

(Thanks to Mr. Ebel for a delightful dinner, and for hopefully being gracious about all of the misquoting of him I just did above. Be sure to check out his Lives of Dexter Peterson.)

Filed Under: arcati crisis, marketing

Trust

August 1, 2012 by krisis

I am sitting alone on the step in the small front hallway of my house, playing guitar.

A cage of microphones, stands, and cables surround my body in such a way that I can’t turn or stretch. If I drop a pick it’s lost to me. I just grab another from the tin sitting beside me and keep playing.

Gina, Zina, and Jake are less than 25 feet away – I know, because that is how long the 1/4” cable plugged into my guitar stretches. I can’t see them. We have erected a wall of cardboard boxes in the door frame that leads from our hall into the living room. Gina and I puzzled it together on Saturday while she hummed the theme to Tetris.

I can hear them. Only faintly through the boxes, but loud and clear over my massive, ear-cupping headphones. Gina chirps in a variety of accents through her control room mic, keeping me informed of the action in the other room and singing my songs on my behalf. Jake and Zina communicate via their instruments.

Every track I have ever released has been engineered, mixed, and produced by me. That means any time you have listened to me as a performer I was also busy thinking about a lot of other things, like if the mics are placed correctly or if the bridge is going to clip.

I can’t do that from this side of my wall of boxes. The control room is 25 feet away. Gina and Jake are the ones engineering my songs, and Zina is driving them. My only job is to sit on this step and play guitar the best I know how.

It was hard during my first song. I was still barking commands and telling Gina just how to cue each track. That did not last for long. It didn’t need to. If I can put my musical life in Gina’s hands, then who else can I trust?

That’s the word I keep coming back to in my tiny guitar room, stare fixed on the sideways logos on cardboard boxes as Gina cues up another track. Trust. I don’t know if I ever understood rock bands before now. I liked them and obsessed over every detail of their album credits, but I don’t know if I understood them.

Now, in my little box, I understand.

Rock bands are about trust. Every note, every rhythm and chord, is another blind fall. If you cannot trust the rest of the band to catch you it will never ring true.

I am ready to plummet through another take.

Filed Under: arcati crisis, recording, Year 12

independence doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help

July 4, 2012 by krisis

On a top-secret mission to Sine Studios at 127 S. 22nd Street in Philadelphia, just above Walnut.

Happy Independence Day!

Last night Jake and I conducted a special, top secret Arcati Crisis mission at Sine Studios, my favorite studio in Philly.

I can’t get into the details of our journey just yet, but given the context of today it made me think about what independence and DIY really means to me – and to you.

For a long time I was DIY because I had to be – because no one else wanted to help me make music or publish my writing or code my website. I didn’t have the money or the clout to attract anyone to my projects, so I did them all myself.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in the same place. Nobody would do it for you, so you did it for yourself!

That do-it-yourself know-how is a wonderful thing to have. I love that I’ve never been to a recording studio and that I’ve coded all my own websites from scratch or with open source. I love being capable and autonomous.

But being independent doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help.

This weekend in my JavaScript coding I got super-stuck more than once. Luckily, I am married to a self-taught JavaScript expert. I was happy to have her help. Last summer E laid down a set of beautiful new slate steps in our back yard, but mixing a new cement panel for our front walk was beyond her. We hired a local contractor, and they took care if it in a matter of hours a few weeks ago.

E and I never stopped being independent and capable. We still did our research and learned new things from the process. We just called in the experts when the time was right.

I have been working on recording projects for both Arcati Crisis and Filmstar over the past year. Recording a full rock band is a tall task. It’s not just about putting up a ton of microphones and rolling tape. You have to deal with noise, separation, splitting signals, phase issues, and tons of other aspects.

I can handle that myself as a recording engineer, but that takes a lot out of me as a performer. Add to that a fiercely played full drum set, and the hamster in my brain will run itself right off of his wheel.

That’s what lead to our top secret trip to Sine. I was asking for help from experts that I trust.

It doesn’t mean we’re not independent. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it myself if I wanted to. It just means that now I know when it’s time to reach out to someone I trust instead of suffering through difficulties on my own.

That’s what independence means to me today.

What does independence mean to you?

Filed Under: arcati crisis, house, over-achievement, recording Tagged With: DIY, Sine Stuios

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