Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

Season 6

Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants

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This Trio almost wound up being titled “Primer” because of the following three quotes:

On being primed:
If you’ve ever read an interview with a songwriter … you’ll hear a repeated theme: that you have to constantly be writing, and constantly be revising and playing. It seems sortof counter-intuitive, because at some point you’ve written a certain amount of material, and you feel like you should be playing or rehearsing that material. But … when you have a new idea it’s much more easy to capture that idea.

It’s funny that you can apply any kind of science to songwriting. You spend a lot of years as a songwriter thinking it’s just lightning that strikes you, but there are things you can do to make yourself more of a lightning rod.

All This Time
When the chorus came in my head I literally walked to the piano and played the entire song in one go and wrote the lyrics. It all happened in 30 minutes. … Effectively the whole song came at once. It was because I was primed. That’s the challenge, you know? You have to be working on songs to have other songs that work.

Will It Ever Come?
Much like “All This Time,” it came at this point that I was very primed, in the summer of 2000. I wrote a lot of what are still my favorite songs at that time … songs that I really still play very frequently. And this one was kindof in the middle, and it just got ignored. It was at the very beginning of Crushing Krisis and I blogged the lyrics. [Ed note: Literally; I wrote them out in nine minutes in the Blogger window. They were my 81st post.]

The next year when I went into the recording studio … I can honestly say I don’t know that ever played it before. And we did it in one take.

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Lyrics and chords for “Time Is Running Out” are behind the cut. [Read more…] about Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants

Trio Season 6 – Suite #4: Good Bones

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #4: Good Bones
Something Real, 22 Steps (Andy Stochanksy), What It Is

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

Something Real
I’ve really learned a lot about my own songs, and about having some confidence in sometimes doing something different. There are many songs of that nature – many of which are about Elise – from throughout the years that aren’t in one of my “normal genres,” whatever they may be. And the song gets sidetracked.

22 Steps, by Andy Stochansky
It was one of those moments that you sometimes can have at a concert where the whole room went silent. Afterward everybody knew they had seen something major. It’s a wonderfully crafted song – I hold it up against “Every Breath You Take.”

What It Is
It’s from the complete opposite end of the spectrum of our relationship than “Something Real.” It’s unusual in that it never quite feels finished … it came all in one shot, but when I play it it’s never quite right.


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:

Trio Season 6 – Suite #3: A Confidence Game

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #3: A Confidence Game
Unengaged, Tangling, Wonder

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

Unengaged
It wasn’t the lack of confidence in doing that thing, but the lack of confidence that came in the wake of that – like, “Oh god, what have I gotten myself into?” … It’s also about [lack of] confidence in performing it: I wrote that melody almost just as an exercise in getting it up into falsetto over and over again. I didn’t ever think I was going to perform it that way. … If it’s your song, and you wrote it that way, then there must be a reason it’s in falsetto.

Tangling
It was the anchor of this set … Somebody moves out of your life for some period … and you think, “wow, we’re so connected.” And then they get back and you don’t feel that connection immediately. And you wonder – was that connection so tenuous that it dissipated with the distance? … People change over a period of time, and you have to take some time to retune that connection.

Wonder
I think anyone can identify with that walking down the street – or, in the case of this song, in a train station – and you see somebody, and in your mind you have a whole fantasy about them in a split second … and then they get on the train. Or, maybe that’s just me?


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:

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:

Trio Season 6 – Suite #1: Within

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #1: Within
Icy Cold, Love Me Love Me Not, Nothing To Say

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

Re: Within
To me [the theme] is equivalent to internal monologue. It got me thinking about blog as internal monologue, because you have no idea if anyone is reading it. In fact, when you start it it’s not often you have a guaranteed audience … I didn’t start my blog knowing anyone was ever going to read it. It was almost equivalent to my internal monologue.

Re: Voice Lessons
So, I’m taking these voice lessons, and she’s all like “it’s breathing, it all starts with the breathing. All singing starts with breathing” And you can say “bullshit” as long as you want (whether that’s one lesson or, you know, four months), but goddammit when you’re in your room and it’s two hours before you have to get this shit done and you can’t get through a phrase it all makes sense: it’s the breathing.

Re: Love Me, Love Me Not
[Love Me Not was] written over a period of several months. It wasn’t one of those things that came fully formed. I’ve read interviews with songwriters where they say, “oh, the good songs come fully formed, all at once, just popping into your head all at once. … But, you know, there’s nothing wrong with trying. There’s nothing wrong with teasing something out and perfecting it. … It’s the difference (to borrow from Malcolm Gladwell) between precociousness and practice.

Re: Trio
Trio – as far as I can tell, or anybody else can tell – was the first podcast by a singer songwriter. I just turned on my computer and recorded three songs. It was 2000 – I didn’t think anything of it. So, I never patented it.

Nothing To Say
It came pretty much all in one shot, but I had never played it in front of people, ever, until last week. … It was alive over seven years without being played for anybody.


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 Trio from Season 5:

(This post currently features an 11/6 remix of Trio. You can also hear the original version, which includes a more “acoustic” mix of “Love Me Not,” plus two minutes of extra commentary.)