I’ll say it right now: I would like to party with Dave Grohl. I can’t think of anyone as famous that appears to be just having a goddamn ball doing what they love. Not to mention that he rocks.
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.
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After coming up with the lyrics for the chorus of an upcoming song, I brought it up on studio night. Mike, Kenny, Jeff and I all suggested ideas for words, phrasing and melody. I had old lyrics from another song that were unused and seemed to fit the concept of minute by minute change, so we used those as a starting point:
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…