Whoo!! A successful Trio is being uploaded as we speak, featuring absolutely no talent, coherency, or enunciation on my part (but one half-naked neighbor walking into his refridgerator). Oh, yeah, and the songs world in my hand, novel/gaze, & lament you. I suggest checking out the lyrics, cause otherwise i might make even less sense than i usually do. Really.
my music
Trio: Season 1, #3
I suppose for all my fucking up, Trio is a very true thing. For example, last week i made it through two songs perfectly, and then turned in a fun but flawed version of a third song. My playing is obviously not always up to concert quality, and by posting the first live take that i make it through i show some of the thoughts (musical and actual) behind the songs. Sure, i might have messed up all three songs tonight, but wasn’t listening to it more fun, in a way, than listening to some glistening album cut? Maybe that’s just my love of Ani and Tori showing through, and maybe that’s a bit strange for someone who’s a fan of good music, but i love outtakes. And, rest assured, Trio is heavy on those.
Trio: Season 1, #2
New Trio is up and featured a bit more prominently on the sidebar (god only knows how people were expected to find the link from last week, ‘cuz i don’t). I encourage you to listen to it, since this entire site really did start from my music (which remains the center-piece). This blog just adds background to where i’m coming from in my songs.
On that note, i’m gonna talk about “deadweight,” which is one of the songs from this week. I originally wrote the lyrics in July of 1999, and then arranged it in early August. When i first wrote the lyrics i thought they would head in the musically jerky direction of Elastica’s “Hold Me Now,” but i wound up being more influenced by my summer obsession with Melissa Ferrick (one part Ani, one part Melissa Etheridge, shake well). I actually didn’t think “deadweight” would amount to very much at all, which is evidenced by the fact that i wrote it upside down in the margins of another song (which remains unused).
The chorus came first to me first: here i was headed to college while some people seemed to be intent on keeping me rooted to the spot where i stood in every sense. While most people tend to think the song is about my mother once they hear that much about it, it’s actually about a friend of mine from highschool. He was perfectly fine as a friend, but his whole life was centered very much around secrecy, competition, and negative energy. I increasingly found that being with him kept me rooted in the catty snappish spot i spent much of high school in, and i didn’t want to be there anymore. However, as many times as i tried to “cut him loose” in the past, i always wound up friend with him again. Realizing all of this in “deadweight” put an end to the vicious cycle; i haven’t spoken with him since.
For more commentary you can head here or here. Audio of “deadweight” and most other songs i mention can be found in the AMkitchen, which is the core of my webpage.
Trio: Season 1, #1
What’s going on with the layout, you ask? Why have i been idle for over an hour, you wonder? Let me tell you why!
As of this instant i have added a new weekly feature affectionately dubbed trio. Basically, once every weekend i will sit down in front of my computer and play a continuous live take of three songs to RealProducer, and then upload them as a 28k RealAudio stream to the site. A trio concert will only be up for a single week, when it’ll be overwritten by the next one. This week’s selections and performance was rather tame, but in coming weeks look for me to debut brand new songs and a few covers as well. And, unless i change the name of the feature, i’ll always play a trio of songs – no more and no less. This might lead to some creative rearranging on my part, but i guess we’ll have to see.
In this week’s trio streaming concert you can HEAR “Never Say Goodbye, “Bridge,” and “Under My Skin.” Send any requests to me and i’ll see what i can do. I have been known to do Tori Amos and Madonna covers by order in the past.
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Sometimes i think of the title for a song and just need to write “that” song. Writing towards a title is harder than writing from a line or a chord progression, because you have nothing and still need to go in a certain direction. For a long time i wanted to write a song called “As If,” because i felt like it was a great title. When i finally managed to cobble together something that ended its choruses in those words i wasn’t impressed: the song just didn’t live up to the name i had imagined for it.
Earlier this summer i got sunburnt very badly on the bottoms of my arms, and it annoyed me to death. While spending several uncomfortable days waiting for my skin to heal, i thought that i might like to write a song called “Burn.” I never did anything about it, but i suppose the word was floating somewhere in the back of my mind ready to be included in any son in progress.
Last night i wrote “Burn.” The lines started coming to me and i opened up blogger and started to write, figuring it was more trustworthy then my email program, and that it would be on the page today for me to practice. I finished it in under five minutes; it just flowed out like water through a dam. I pressed “post & publish.”
And i’ll never see those words again. Sure, i managed to reconstruct the bare bones of what i was writing, but several turns of phrase were lost forever to the infinite wasteland of the internet. I went through my cache, checking every file written to in the 20 minutes surrounding the disaster, but found nothing.
Impermanence frightens me. Maybe i need to become a more deliberate and organized person, but there’s always that chance that disaster will strike as you hit the save button. And every time it does i lose a piece of my life’s story. Hopefully this one’ll go through.