Taking stock and making new music

I finally got around to starting my next solo record last night. I have most of the material written already, so all that's left is recording. I smashed through the first song, "Call Me Ishmael" yesterday. I've still got a bit of vocal work on it, but I'll post it to my myspace page tonight. There are some songs left over from The Curious Flying Machine as well as some brand new ones.

Speaking of solo stuff, I started cataloging all of my songs from about 2003 onward. I have around 100 songs recorded since then, but I know that I'm missing a bunch. The scary thing is that I know I've "lost" a bunch because I never recorded them. It sucks to look through old notebooks and find lyrics or chords to something that was never recorded. I guess Noel Gallagher was right. If you go to sleep and wake up the next day having forgotten the previous day's song, well, it was crap anyway!

All of the cataloging was pretty interesting. Looking at the songs, there were definitely threads of ideas that were dropped. Theoretically, I could go back and assemble all of the stuff into the intended albums/EPs, but it's great to just have an Excel spreadsheet listing all of the locations, names, and details for the last 5 years of creative output. Here's some of what I've found:


Clever Love EP - recorded in 2003, and reviewed on Threeimaginarygirls.com
Track List:
Clever Love
The Unwritten Letter
Birthday Waltz
Silly Boy Dreams
Weeping Wall
I'll Get You (by The Beatles of course)

Perhaps the Next Day EP - recorded in 2003 and intended as a follow-up to the previous EP. I never threw this one together, and some of the material landed on Shutdown Vol. 1
Track List

Perhaps the Next Day
Proof
The Grand Exit
Lonely Surf
Little Things That Happen
In the Meantime
Crying (Roy Orbison cover)

Shutdown Vol. 1 LP - I have a real soft-spot for this album. There was so much material recorded, that I found 4-5 unused backgrounds along with rough demos for almost all of the songs as well. I never did finish designing the cover for the album, but imagine me on the beach, a surfboard, and a typically rainy Seattle day. Fun! If I were all famous and stuff, someone could make one of those outrageously expensive "Super-Deluxe" versions of this album with the second disc full of unused songs and drastically different demo versions. The (d) next to a track name means that there is a different demo version as well.
Track List

The Mighty Crash
Repeat History / Godspeed (d)
Perhaps the Next Day (d)
Slide (d)
Ghost Talk (written with Matt Gervais from Curtains)
Time
Shutdown
Tourism
Lonely Surf
Bad Words (d)
Surfer Blues
SfL (written after the death of my Grandmother, Louise. It stands for Song for Louise)

Unused songs:

4
Wicked
Normandy
Hole In Your Heart
The Moon Was Out (vocals only doo-wop song... someday I'll finish it)


The City of Good Neighbors LP - This one is the first "cohesive" album I've ever written. Everything on it was written specifically for it. Some of this stuff ended up on the first Curtains For You record. It's pretty psychedelic at times, and very poppy at others.
Track List

A Beginning
The Big One
The Pugilist
King for a Day
Insomnia Can Kill You
The Diagnosis
She Married the Earth
Futurebright
The Ballad of Gavril Ivolgin
Small Change
The Island Life
Skating with Wilma
(HIDDEN TRACK) The City of Good Neighbors

After CoGN, I started to write a straight ahead pop record intended to be called Dumb Angel. I never finished the album, and Dumb Angel wasn't even written until my last record for the RPM Challenge. Here is what I had for the album.
Track List

Halictidae
Hummingbird Blues
Surprise
The New Deal
Licorice Skies
Watches & Trains
The Missing Piece
6/5




Next comes my last LP, The Curious Flying Machine I've blogged about it before, so not too much to say...
Track List

Roadtrip to Disaster
The Great Land Grab
They Could Have Been Bonnie & Clyde
Just Like That, She's Gone
Sal's Wild Years
Sal & Ramona
Safety Glass Blues
Dumb Angel
Blueprints
I Can't Explain
The Curious Flying Machine


The next record has these songs so far

Call Me Ishmael
Selling The Future
Briars & Brambles
Apex Blues
Ballad of Molly McGinty
The Song of the Ants
What it Takes to Get By


So, in my hyper-OCD way, it feels good to have accomplished a pile of stuff in the last 5 years. Maybe someday I'll go back and finish some of this stuff. Until then, they all live on my hard drives collecting virtual dust.

Noise for the Needy

Album Endorsement

I don't normally endorse many modern albums, but this one's a no-brainer. You owe it to yourself to go and pick up Freedom Wind by The Explorers Club. Find them here.

Also, they will be playing Chop Suey on the 17th of June. Wanna go?

Update the damn thing already!

I know, I know, no updates in a while. Here's the scoop:

Melissa and I left Annabel with Grandma D on Saturday so that we could go out with Doris and Chris. We took in a showing of Iron Man (AWESOME!) and then went off to the most unfortunately-named place in America (well, besides Bunghole Liquors in Boston,)the Beveridge Place Pub. Try explaining where you are going to someone over the phone. They will frantically be googling "beverage place pub", and ending up with nada. Anywho, it was a blast to get out of the house without the little one in tow.

Speaking of the little one, Annabel is just shy of 8 months, and she is displaying super-genius powers already. She's been crawling for a long while now, pulling herself up on furniture, and has identified me repeatedly as "Da Da". Next week, she's probably going to balance my checkbook. Here is a shot of her conducting static experiments while smartly wearing protective gear.


Other than that, I heard the demos from Brian Wilson's next song-cycle, That Lucky Old Sun. It is quite good. It reminds me of Orange Crate Art, which was a great song, but a terrible album (thanks Van Dyke!) It should be released in September, and will no doubt be compared to sMiLe for its content and style.

The Curtains record is moving along. We are hoping to drop it sometime around the end of July.

Sony GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Let's start this post by saying that there are two companies that I have an all-consuming white-hot hatred of. Apple is one, and Sony is the other. I'll leave Apple alone, namely because they owe me $500 right now, and I don't want to get iScrewed out of my refund. They already iScrewed me for an extra $130 plus $8 in fees this week. Once they sort out the financial hoo-hah, then I'll proceed to rip on them. For now, let's turn our focus on Sony...

Sony has built a reputation on making over-priced gear that only plays nice with other Sony equipment/software. Going back to the days of Beta vs. VHS, Sony has been trying to make the world see that Sony alone will solve all of our technical problems/needs. I've owned TVs, Discmans (should I put a copyright on that... I'm sure Sony would want that,) gaming platforms, and countless other little doodads. They have usually been over-priced compared to other similar products, but there was always some kind of implied quality to a Sony product. For some reason, Sony products break down more for me than any other brand, so the quality may not be so great. Granted, I'm a little bitter because I own an HDDVD player, but that is not shading my opinion too much. I understand that Sony was angry over losing Beta (still,) and that they basically just paid the movie studios MONDO amounts of money to make themselves successful. I admit that "buying friends" sucks in real life, but it sure works in business. I digress...

I am the proud owner of a great little HD camcorder from Sony. It was a very generous gift to Melissa and I shortly before the birth of our daughter. I have spent countless hours of my life with video camera in hand, coupled with a good amount of time with both linear and non-linear editing systems from broadcast tapes to DV. I don't do it for a living, but I'm the guy that often gets tapped to assemble and edit things when people around me have footage. That said, I fell in love with our camera because the video looked so fantastic. When hooked up to ye olde HDTV, this camera rocks! Unfortunately, it comes with some serious caveats.

The first thing that I noticed about shooting in HD was that if the lighting was perfect, the shot was perfect. Daytime light means good HD footage. Conversely, "poor" light (anything less than a bright sunlit day) means that the footage is so noisy that it is almost unusable. I would love to have a film crew setting up lights around me as I document the everyday awesomeness of having a child, but that isn't practical. Having a camera to catch the first time that one's child does this hugely random and monumental leap in development is great. Having to have a professional lighting setup to come out with decent looking footage is impossible. I shot our proceedings last weekend in the studio in pretty low-light conditions. Studios are dark places. The footage shot looks grainier than if we had shot it on 8mm. Now that seems like a great effect, but when it's not intentional, I get angry. Grr.. Hulk no like camera noise!

The straw that broke this camel's back is the fact that Sony wants to shoot video in its own format which is incompatible with EVERYTHING except for the piece of shit software that comes with the camera. I have thousands of dollars worth of editing software, and I have to use something that looks like it was designed for Windows 95 . All that it allows is looking at the footage... not editing it. Also, I have a pretty beefy rig to watch the video on, and the included software cannot even run the video from an internal hard-drive without choppiness and audio mis-matches. When I found a plugin for other media players, they did just fine. Even Windows Media Player can do a better job than the software made for the camera. Put that aside, and you're stuck with footage in some Sony-only format called m2ts. They will allow you to convert it all to Mpeg2, but the audio is still in some exotic Sony-only style, so all that can be done is to watch the footage (hopefully) and not edit it. Thank you, Sony!

Having a mountain of footage means that I need some kind of slick workflow to get it ready to be edited or archived. Having to convert each file (thereby doubling the space it takes on the hard-drive) means countless hours wasted waiting for the footage to be "ready" to use. Sony refuses to let go once again, and the consumer suffers. I feel sorry for the people who bought cameras similar to this and have no clue as to what to do with the footage. Even backing it up to a DVD to watch on the TV requires hours of internet research, experimentation, and technical know-how. Mom and Pop America are not going to have the patience for that. They suggest that you plunk down big bucks for Vegas, their own editing suite. Of course, they fail to mention that Vegas does not work with the format particularly well. Sony drops the ball just to be totally in control once again. Whether it is their penchant for making goofy Sony-only batteries (that are impossible to find,) or their love of walling themselves off from the rest of technology land, it is time for Sony Corporation to stop being cocky assholes about their proprietary hardware/software. Even Apple, obsessed with locking down every piece of hardware and software it makes, still bows to the public now and again. Sony just doesn't get it.

Don't get me wrong, I dearly love the camera when it works. It takes breathtakingly great HD video. It has outstanding battery life, a HUGE hard-drive, and hooks up to my television with ease. Even the built in mic sounds good. It's just that when I shoot some footage, I would like to know that it can exist outside of the camera it was shot on. I would like to load up my copy of Adobe Premiere, and be able to use said footage.


Aside form the doom and gloom, I've edited together about 20 minutes of "making of" from the sessions. I'm intending to get about 50 minutes of footage into some kind of cohesive film about this new album that we are doing. The eventual plan is that we are going to rent out the Jewel Box Theater to show the film and then play a private show for friends and family. I would love it if we did some sort of formal dress-up affair. Sounds fun, right?

Here's a peek behind the curtain(s)...

Tired... ZzzzZZzZZ

Well, the lads and I are in the studio this weekend recording our next LP. That means that anyone wishing to get in contact with me should just wait until Monday. Our first day in the studio was uber-productive. We laid down 6(!) tracks today. That's darn good for a a day in the studio. We are recording at London Bridge here in Seattle. My favorite thing about this record so far is that we are recording old-school. That means live in the studio. That means if one of us screws up a take, we can't use it. That's how records were made before the days of digital. We're laying it down to 2 inch tape as well. How sweet is that? It all feels very '60s right now. Other than Oasis, I cannot think of one modern band that still records live in studio... well, except for Mudcrutch, but that's a record review for anbother day! All in all we are all very tired but very pleased with how this monster is turning out.

I'm trying to document as much as possible on the old DV camera, but studios don't make for sexy TV. In fact, recording studios are pretty much the most boring place to be for 90% of one's time there. It's the 10% when the red light is on that counts...