2012 was a busy year for making music here at Snoozeking. In addition to the annual production of a DD69 album (this year’s effort: Get Up), I spent a great deal of time working on the first new Foonspeeders album in over a decade.

Despite the fact that there’s no serious deadline for these projects, I try to set a schedule and stick with it. Given the history of some of our early records, if we don’t do this the music could languish unheard for 10 years or more. That’s insane.

I’ve found that setting a release date and trying to stay on target to reach it helps us get things done. Unfortunately this time around, my slavish devotion to completing the writing, tracking, and mixing, as well as arranging for mastering and manufacture, creating original artwork, and updating websites etc. wound up burying me. With all of those activities involved in making both records, in addition to, you know, the “day job”, playing shows with Skinny Moo, making time for family and friends, and all the minutiae that comes up daily… I got burned out.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful to be able to pursue my passions, and I love creating music and art as much now as I did when I was a little kid. But as with anything, too much at one time can make you feel crappy.

Don't bite off more than you can chew

So after the 6/9/2012 DD69 release was completed (at the last minute, with a quick and dirty mastering job on my part – more on that in a future entry), we wrapped everything up with the Foonspeeder release on July 4th. And then I didn’t even think about new music for months.

With a long break in the Skinny Moo schedule, and the unfortunate need to cancel most studio studio nights for months due to my usual collaborators having babies, going through their own flavors of burnout, or dealing with family issues, making music hasn’t been on my schedule for a while. I’ve enjoyed catching up on movies that I never watched, reading books from the library, and doing a little traveling. I’ve seen other bands play both here in Cleveland and out of town. I’ve started training for my fourth century ride with the Leukemia Society’s Team In Training, and have been raising more money to fight cancer. I’ve reconnected with friends that I haven’t hung out with for ages.

It’s only been in the last few weeks that I have found myself thinking about music and writing. I picked up my guitar a few nights ago and finished a song that has been unfinished for ages – and I am actually really happy with the result, which came all at once. I find myself wanting to listen to some works-in-progress, and it gives me the same feeling I used to get when I’d listen over and over again to a cassette mix of a demo I’d just recorded. I started to actually read the issues of Tape Op and Sound On Sound that had stacked up on the coffee table over the last few months. I picked up a new synth app (Arturia’s iMoog) for the iPad.

So it seems that after many months, there’s a wave of inspiration that is rising. I can feel a shift in the tide. I think I’m ready to jump back in and continue to create new music for myself and continue to work with my friends as well.

Mike, Maury and I have been working on and off over the years to put together a new collection of Foonspeeders songs. It’s been a part-time thing that has involved collaboration from Cleveland to California, slowly getting the pieces and parts together.

Last year after the successful completion of the Thomas Reed Smith Band’s album “Out On Your Own“, which had also been lingering for a decade, we were motivated to finally finish this collection of tunes. Our goal was to have it all wrapped up by the end of 2011, but we’ve spilled over into this year a bit – not a big deal, since we’re releasing it on our own and it’s not like there’s a real “deadline”.

We’re getting very close now – almost everything is tracked, and mixes are coming together. The cover art is looking tremendous (more on that in another post).

And we’ve got a title for the new record: Open Your Mouth

More to come…

One album every 15 years, whether we need to or not.

Foonspeeders have made their late-90s debut album “Who Are the Foonspeeders” available at Bandcamp.

We’ve added most of the lyrics, and some tidbits about each song. If you were familiar with the initial release of the album, you’ll also note updated cover art – back in the dark ages when the album was released, we didn’t have smashing skills when it came to putting the art together. Then again, it was supposed to be about the music, right? Right??

Yes, it’s been approximately one million years since this album was released. I still like it.

And I’m looking forward to the new Foonspeeders record that will be done this spring…

Oh, and has a highly entertaining sense of humor:

Take my first band's album... please!

I’ve been trying to clean up the studio (you know, to make room for new gear, heh heh). In the process I’ve come across a couple boxes of unsold Foonspeeders and drunkdude69 CDs.

Foonspeeders was a band that Mike, his brother Maury, our friend Scott Haumesser and I were in in the mid-to-late 1990s here in Cleveland. We released our first record “Who Are the Foonspeeders?” near the end of 1998, and we played pretty regularly around town. We had a good time, but didn’t really sell many of the 1,000 CDs we had manufactured. Even after ruefully throwing away a number of boxes of CDs, I still have a couple dozen lurking around.

DD69 is a band that Mike and I started after we moved on from the Foonspeeder days. When we finally finished our first DD69 record in 2008 we had CDs manufactured, but this time we only ordered 300. After all, times have changed – do people even buy music anymore, let alone buy CDs? We’ve done a little better moving the DD69 music, but I still have a stack of the “Funk Out With Your Junk Out” CDs here.

I keep  looking for opportunities that seem like a good stylistic matches for any of the music that I’ve been involved with. One of these days I’ll get a song placed somewhere that generates some interest from a wider audience. And maybe then I can finally make some more room on this shelf.

A happy place

I was very close with my maternal grandparents. They were a big part of inspiring and enabling my love of art and music, as briefly described here.

My grandmother was an artist: a painter, penciler, seamstress, creative cook. I spent my summers with she and my grandfather, and she and I often went to the lake with sketchpads and fishing poles to spend the day drawing and trying to catch the teensy fish in the lake.

It’s been ten years today since she passed away. I miss her every day. I wrote this song (“Painting Pictures”) shortly after she died. It’s not as hard to listen to it now as it was when I recorded it, but it still makes me sad. I’m hoping to get some friends together and record a live version of it this year, if I can perform it all the way through.

seconds pass into unseen places
can’t outlast it, and can’t outrace it
one way trip, might as well just face it
step right up, the next minute is here

The issue I had with those words was that, with all those syllables, the lines didn’t contrast with the lines in the verses at all. And it made it more difficult to fit the music and have a distinctive melody. The one thing that did work was part of the last line: the next minute is here. It fit perfectly with these rhythmic stabs at the end of the chorus music.

So we whittled down syllables and tried out some melody ideas and harmonies. Less syllables meant longer notes, and we came up with some harmonies that took me by surprise (reminiscent of King’s X) as you can see in the vid below:

The working chorus lyric at that point was:

Seconds
Passing
Can’t out race the fear
The next minute is here
One way
Ticket
Might as well just face it
The next minute is here

As we let that stew for a couple days, Jeff asked me to post a rough mix of the song. Before I did that, I wanted to fix a couple details. As it sometimes happens, while I was fixing some things I came up with some changes that I liked a lot better than what we were using.

That was the feeling that’s been eluding me for a long time: the sudden rush of inspiration, like you’ve finally gotten a big, cool drink after working all day in the sun. It felt just as refreshing. I think I’m addicted to that feeling because I always want more.

So as of right now Jeff Beam and I have fleshed out the chorus harmonies, and Jeff Endemann and I have worked on guitar solos and some harmonies for the bridge. I’m still trying to find the words for the bridge, but once those are finalized, the songwriting is done. And once we track the vocals and some assorted noises and the like, the tracking will be done as well.

And we finally have the title: “(The) Next Minute”.

More to come…

Its significance is its insignificance

Happy Groundhog Day!

As is usual, I will join a select few others on an exclusive pilgrimage to an undisclosed location to celebrate the holiday this weekend.  It’s a chance to go underground, so to speak, and get off the map.

There will be ukuleles involved.

Studio night Strat

Hard to believe that we’re already into the second month of 2011. January went by in a snowy blur here on the north coast, but it wasn’t without some musical progress.

As mentioned previously, the second Thomas Reed Smith album is finished, and should be back from manufacturing in a matter of weeks. Tom and I are really happy with the music and the design, and we’re hoping to set up a CD release gig or two this June.

drunkdude69 is well into the 3rd DD69 album, tentatively titled “As Big As You Can Get It”. We have several mixes completed, and we’ve been working on finishing up the tracking and mixing for several more songs. We’re also working on writing new material, and finishing some older songs that need lyrics and/or musical parts.

The last bit is what has me excited the most. I feel like I haven’t written anything new for a long time – mainly since most of my attention has been on getting old material out of the “pipeline”. Recently we started working on completing a song (working title: “Reigning”) that had music and most tracking done, but was still missing lyrics. The words can often be a sticking point for me because I want to write something that is meaningful as opposed to jibberish. (I know, why bother, right? It’s just a thing I feel compelled to do)

I had some rough ideas, you know, middle-of-the-night-after-a-couple-cocktails ad libbing. Most of it was useless. I was trying too hard for the “Tolkien” Middle Earth vibe, all “going up to the mountain” and stuff like that. Yes, weird, but inspired partly by the music, which has a very Led Zeppelin meets Rage Against the Machine at a Queen concert. The initial take was something like this:

Went out to the mountain
‘Cause it wouldn’t come to me
Didn’t want to keep looking
But knew I had to see
After all this time I find
That I still don’t know a thing
I came up here a poor man
But someday I’ll leave a king

Meh. Wasn’t really doing it for me. Scratch that.

Mike’s brother Maury was here for a few days and offered the seed of an idea for some words for the song. We went back and forth with the concept, which I liked very much, and started refining it. It was about the way things can change in the space of a minute, and the delivery we came up with seemed to fit the musical style well. It was a repeated set of phrases with stronger emphasis each time:

One minute she’s alive, next minute she’s not
One minute it’s fine, next minute it’s not

After chewing on the idea for a while, I came up with a set of four lines for each verse. Each set would get repeated twice using increasing emphasis. I even got a little bit of the “middle earth” flavor with the king/pawn line:

One minute you’re high, next minute you’re not
One minute a king, next minute a pawn
One minute you’re fine, next minute you’re not
One minute you’re alive, next minute you’re gone

I pulled the work in progress up on studio night a couple weeks ago and we all hashed around a little bit with some ideas for words and melody and phrasing for the chorus. I had a particular line that I wanted to keep, which defined the songs and led to the title.

To be continued…

The disc design for "Out On Your Own"

After many years of on-and-off work, the Thomas Reed Smith Band’s album “Out On Your Own” is finished. As I type this, the mastered album is on its way here via the good old U.S. mail.

This album is a follow-up to Tom’s first record “I Need A Change” which we released around 2000. Yep, your math is correct – it’s been over 10 years. Why did we go up against “Chinese Democracy” for the longest time taken to make an album?

Well, in a nutshell, shit happens. After we finished “I Need A Change”, we continued to play out and promote the album for about a year. At the same time I had gotten involved in playing with another Cleveland band, and of course I was working my day gig as well.

We started work on the new songs, and did a fair amount of tracking, including some sessions at Closer Look studios with Jim Evans on drums and Mike Holloran on percussion. Work stopped in 2001 when I had family issues to deal with. Then I lost my job, moved across town, and holed up for a while. Mike Adams went back to school for a couple years, Jim moved to Nashville, and Tom started his own business.

Time goes by fast, sometimes. For several years I hardly worked on any music – my head was just somewhere else. In 2006 or thereabouts, we started a regular studio night here, which we continue to this day. We initially worked on finishing the languishing drunkdude69 album “Funk Out With Your Junk Out“, which we finally completed in 2008.

Through 2009 we worked on the DD69 follow-up record “Wigs & Liquor“, which we recently completed. At the beginning of 2010 I decided Tom’s project had been on the shelf for way too long, and I somehow coaxed him into coming here and doing the final guitar tracks last February.

I finished the mixes in November, and we sent the songs off for mastering in December. As of today, the design is finished, and once the production CDs arrive, we’ll get the manufacturing process started. It’s a very good feeling to finally have it done, and we’re looking forward to making it publicly available after all this time.