We Should See Other Blogs

He might sound something, a little something, like this:

If Steve Reich Was Happy (mp3)
If Steve Reich Was Happy (Ogg Vorbis)

Also, I’d like to digress: “Ogg Vorbis” sounds like it should be an unmentionable bit of human anatomy. Not an audio format. No matter how often I say “Ogg Vorbis”, I still lower my voice as if I’m afraid my parents might overhear.

I really wanted to get this down on the hard drive… and I didn’t realise how bad the piano recording was until I had got to singing. So i just gave up and didn’t bother correcting any of the (obvious) flaws in the levels. It isn’t pretty, I tell you.

Scatterbrain – Ogg Vorbis
Scatterbrain – MP3

Everything I record these days seems to have a ringing noise at the high end… anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem?

I’ve never had a muse. I’ve always wondered what it might be like to have one.

There’s so much to the creative process I don’t understand. Why two people’s art can look and sound so different, yet be distinctly theirs. Why when you seek to imitate it you feel like a forger and your art like a forgery, no matter how remarkable the result.

I can’t count the number of songs I’ve written and the number of poems I’ve pulled out of my head. I don’t think I’d want to. They come and go in phases and shifts. I could never count on a living as a musician: I simply can’t turn it on like a tap. I can sit at the piano and write fifty different phrases and attach fifty different lyrics to those phrase but they won’t satisfy me. Thirty minutes or two days later I sit down and the first thing I play is magic.

There are so few chords and combinations of notes, really. There are only so many ways to put them together before you run out and have to start recycling.

Sometimes you can want desperately to write about something but find yourself unable to write about it and instead spend a half hour writing about something else when you should be sleeping.

Playing old songs is a challenge. I can never remember exactly how they go. Maybe I’m making them up as I go, again, and I have no way of knowing. Only the few I record I know for certain. The rest are possibly recent.

Isn’t it strange how music can reach out and tweak something inside you that logic and facts and science can never explain, much less themselves touch? I played a song the other day that made me feel sad in a way I haven’t felt for a long time now. It made me feel something. This amazes me.

Thinking back, my former art was a shallow imitation of feeling, a tissue-thin façade less tangible than those things I professed to know and write about. If you had to hear them, I am sorry. If you felt a remarkable kinship for me then, even more so. I should be forgiven, I think, for those songs and the words to those songs. We all should, who wrote like that. We were children. If we had a grasp of irony far in excess of our years, we squandered it on songs we thought were about love. We were obsessed with love and being in love and writing about love and being in love. When you are in the desert you write songs about water. We are adults now and instead of obsessing some of us have moved on and are actually loving and being in love. That’s a much harder thing to write about. There’s almost no way to do it properly.

If I’m being too subtle in my lyrics, I don’t apologise. If you can mine seventeen different meanings or none at all, I couldn’t care less. These songs are for me, not for you. These things are the most intensely selfish things I will ever produce, the most tuned to myself. They can’t help but be. They’re my intellectual and emotional children. That you hear them, some of them, is a raw vulnerability I can’t help but shy away from. This is the singer/songwriter curse, of course. These are not songs written by a group of people in a room. They’re not statements about politics or revolution or technological disorientation. They’re songs that bubble to the surface in privacy, when alone.

I have become too verbose.

I have recorded yet another rough demo. It’s called “The Red Wall”, inspired by General Fitzwallace and his tragic death in Israel. Maybe some of you will know what I’m talking about, but for those of you who don’t, here’s a song.

The Red Wall (OGG Vorbis)
The Red Wall (MP3)

Here are the words:

This is your first day.
This is your last day.
Hidden in tear gas,
buried in scattered glass.
Terror in pipe bombs.
Nails in the brick walls.
People like strewn dice
over a concrete lawn.

Will you remember all of this?
Appalling fall, the tender kiss
of flame and pain and bliss
of being spread over the wall.
The red wall, the red wall, the red wall.

It was your first breath,
or was it your last breath?
In amneosis,
screaming to let them know
that you have arrived here.
Why are you crying?
You’re supposed to be happy,
you’re supposed to be happy here.

Is it all you remember,
the red wall?

I had something I wanted to put here, but I don’t remember what it is anymore. Where’s my head at, anyhow. In any case, here are some brand new old recordings of the rough kind. They’re all MP3s, pardon me for not also posting OGG Vorbis.

Everything: a sort of acoustic balad type thing going on here. Recorded with only one crappy mic in a basement somewhere.

February: the subject matter is sort of ironic and not as topical as it could be, but we’ll let that go seeing how I wrote it last year, not this.

Nothing: insane ramblings. Not sure what I was doing here.

Rattle and Hum: this is what happens when I decide I am a Goo Goo Dolls/Barenaked Ladies hybrid tribute band.

Back in the Day: this is what happens when Jars of Clay inhabits me and I have delusions of Hasseltine.

Enjoy!

Maybe the best song ever. Or close to it. Watch:

To Charlotte. An Elegy.

I’m not a bricklayer, darling,
and I’ll never build you a house in the sky.
I probably won’t make you happy
when I promise to be there whenever you cry.

I’m sorry it’s not complicated.
I wrote you this song in the back of a book
with words you won’t find too confusing:
the sentences there if you’d hazard a look.

I won’t lie – the future is awful.
And no, it doesn’t get better than this.
But if you want, I’ll come over sometime
and we can stop the world with a kiss
or two.

I’ve got a heartload of nothing
but a blessed disease that is killing me still.
I’ll probably find ways to lose you:
a notch in my arm for another clean kill.

I won’t lie – our future is awful.
And no, I never get better than this.
But if you want, I’ll come over sometime
and I can stop your heart with a kiss
or two.

I used to think I was worth it.
I thought I had something to give.
The illusion broke with my spirit,
as these days I’m not so convinced
of it.

I hung out with my sister today, and whilst doing so, wrote this song. Originally it was going to have violin in it, but hey, violin is not an easy instrument to play.

The song itself is a reflection on the scripture that says, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Which I think, in my quest to become a better child of his, is the only way to avoid becoming resentful.

God, Can I Thank You [MP3]
God, Can I Thank You [Ogg]

The lyrics are as follows:

God, can I thank you for the glass between my toes?
Lord, can I thank you for the way these muscles burn as they grow?

God, can I thank you for the way you break these bones?
Oh, how they’re aching like they have ever since you brought me home.

God, can I ask you for something, if I may?
Oh, I don’t deserve it, but I’ll ask you for this favour anyway.

Lord, if you’ve got time, could you catch this thing I throw?
Keep it in your hands; it’s so precious to me, but I think you know.

God, can I thank you for the things you take away?
Oh, I am learning how to live under your scalpel every day.

Here, for your listening pleasure is short song I wrote, something I might possibly develop someday. I blatantly stole the title from Nickel Creek.

Why Should the Fire Die? [MP3]
Why Should the Fire Die? [Ogg]

As it turns out, the latest round of recording has finally produced – gasp – a song. You can click the links below to listen. I’ve uploaded it in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format. Again, this is a pretty rough cut. Cut me some slack, will ya?

Mourn [MP3]

Mourn [OGG]

Enjoy.

Edit: fixed those links.

Edit 2: on an unrelated note, I think I may have tiny little crush on Riot Becki of the Pipettes. In Britian and in a manufactured indie pop band (when did that start happening?) nevertheless, I fear it will be a short-lived thing. I just can’t get past the polka-dot dresses.