Wrap-up from last night.

Last night's show went well. Aside from a broken saxophone (fixed with tape,) the show went well. It always feels good to give back to the community, and this year's cause was pretty great. Considering the amount of homeless people in Seattle, anything to ease their burden is fantastic. Thanks to all of you who made it out for a fun evening.

Other than that, I'm now hopelessly addicted to Facebook, so find me on there. I just wish they had more music options.

Noise for the Needy

realizing that my previous post with this title was blank (duh,) I thought I'd rectify that. We are playing tonight at the Sunset up in Ballard at 9 PM. The show is one of the benefit concerts for Noise for the Needy this year. All this leads me to give a piece of advice to all you rockstars in training. DON't SHAVE YOUR HEAD BEFORE A GIG!!! I'm remembering the last time I shaved my head and then played a show. Let's have an equation of what will happen, shall we?

1 hot venue + 1 bald head + hard work = nothing to stop sweat from rolling into one's eyes. Ouch!

Maybe I should rock the headband?

Dig it...

Autumn Island by The True Bugs

Every once in a while, I like to slip in an album review on this old blog. I’ve toyed with the idea of just having a review-only blog, but that’s another battle for another day. Anywho, I’ve been addicted to this album for the last week now, and it’s time to shine a light on a great album from 2007. I am speaking of Autumn Island, the swansong by The True Bugs. Let dissect…

The now defunct True Bugs have made a great rock record. The music grabs you from the get-go due to the immediacy of the songs coupled with supremely evocative lyrics. Mike Gervais has a great way of weaving little vignettes of heartbreak and resignation into beautiful self-contained universes full of political fire, social disillusionment, and an overwhelming adoration of the natural world.

The album is coming from a very specific corner of the post-“American Century” landscape. Anyone half-conscious of the current political climate who was born during the seventies or eighties will immediately latch on to the coming-of-age in modern America theme of the album. In less capable hands, this could have turned out to be a preachy mess. If you need a comparison, listen to early Springsteen or Mellencamp. Mike carves out the same territory by making intensely personal and detailed observations from the point of view of very real characters who inhabit his 3 minute slices of life. The power of all three as songwriters is that they bring you directly into the lives that they are examining without pretense or judgment.

The lyrics are dense and beautiful. Here are some random lines from the record (as best as I can transcribe…) I’ll arrange them as sentences, because they sound as if they should be in the middle of a novel.

Cars drive by on a tandem-highway. Paul and I work on my bike in the driveway
‘til Diane says “come in I made some dinner darling.”

Spiced tea steeped in its cup on the table. Sirens scream out a warning as flashes burn and as ashes fall on land that’s known a thousand fathers.

Silently she wipes the grease off of the cutting board, smiling as she’s dying for another hour more.

Drops cling to drops as the air begins cooling and fall through the mid-Autumn sky.

Open the door - handle creaks as it turns - to newspaper smell and dry eyes.

And no, he’s not coming back again, letters can’t bring a reply. Desert sand drains his memory, staining rocks red as they dry.

Cracked into wakefulness - coffee and corridors -the river is rusty today.


See what I mean? The man is no slouch when it comes to filling his songs with visceral details.

All this talk of the lyrics doesn’t mean that musically there is something lacking. The album straddles the territory of Neil Young and ‘90s rock. Fans of Wilco (the “real” Wilco, of AM/Being There/ Summerteeth fame) will feel right at home. It’s all very competent sounding, with great little flourishes here and there. One of my favorite tunes on the record is “Morning After”. It’s all very carnival-esque with flashes of Dark Side of the Moon-like saxophone in the opening. Much like other songs on the record, it’s a twist on familiar conventions of rock and roll. There’s enough to feel comfortable about in the music, but there’s always a bit of something extra thrown in. “Morning After” falls into a very slow blue-beat feel at times before shifting back into gorgeously slow guitar passages. Many a modern band could learn more about playing with slow intensity by listening to this record than thousands of others. Not for one second is any of the power or passion lost because people aren’t screaming and playing at breakneck speeds.

Overall, there’s not much to dislike about this record. In fact, it’s damn fine. It’s a very smart album without being too clever. In a strange sort of way, I would love to sit down with the Bush administration and throw this record on. I think that it would be a very revealing picture of where we are as a result of their policies and practices. Yeah, it really is that political in its undertones, but as I said before, in less capable hands, it could have been too preachy. What we’re left with is a fantastic snapshot of one writers take on modern America.

Come on already

Here in Seattle, it feels like September. It's June, and the heat is still on. Sigh. Oh well, another cup of tea should do the trick...

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?