Strangely Looping

Banjo, cello, and charango, together at last!

I'm going to try to get back on a once-a-week schedule, but no promises. Edit: The weird buzzing noise is only on the upload, not on my original. I'll try re-uploading it, but if anyone wants a "clean" copy, let me know and I can email it. Edit2: Actually, the noise isn't in the uploaded file, just when it's streaming from the site. I have no idea why, but you can use the download link to listen to it without the noise if you want.

I borrowed a drum set today, so I was able to rock and roll a little. Due to getting a late start on this one and having some network trouble, I'm a little late tonight. Anyway, here is my impression of '70s riff rock. Enjoy!

I listen to this one on repeat.

Don't read too much into the lyrics on this one (actually, I would hope you wouldn't read much of anything into any of my lyrics). All the lyrics are based on the fact that I felt like the melody of the chorus ought to end every line with an "ow" sound for some reason. You probably don't realize how difficult it was for me, how much restraint it took, to limit the pseudo-choir backing to just one verse and the bridge. You probably do know that backup vocals are usually my favorite part of pop music, but I know it's easy sometimes to overdo it, and I'd rather miss the pseudo-choir than get sick of it. I also feel like I should apologize for the slightly onanistic bass part, especially at the end. Just be thankful it fades out where it does.

Short, but short. Based on a true story, by the way.

I sorta kinda took this week off, but I happened to have this one lying around, so here it is. Spider Explosion did a version of this song a long time ago, but it wasn't really rock and roll back then.

Synthesizer and only one vocal part? I'm not sure I wrote this song.

Not even a little bit. If you've been listening the last few weeks you will have realized by now that my songs tend to be pretty repetitive. That's okay with me -- I like repetitive music. But if you don't like the repetition, you might get bored with this one (or at least as bored as you can get in under three minutes). If you get really bored, see if you can count the guitars.

Some of you may have heard a version of this song before. It's been fleshed out a little since then. "Maria" started out life as a Christmas song (hence "God bless Maria"), but it isn't (necessarily) any more. The pronouns are totally arbitrary, except to the extent that it seems like there needs to be a 'she' since the song is ostensibly about someone named Maria, normally a girl's name, and two 'she's would be confusing/borderline nonsensical. I also played around with 'I's and 'you's. But just so everybody knows they're arbitrary, the second verse is exactly the same as the first with only the pronouns changed. There's some clipping coming in somewhere, but I can't find it. It's not on any track individually or even on any combination of two or more tracks. It's Chaos Theory at work: emergent clipping! I got rid of most of it by haphazardly fiddling with levels, but it's still there in at least one point. Oh well. I almost apologized for the sloppiness of the playing, but if I start apologizing for being sloppy, I'll be apologizing for every single song, and I don't want to do that.

Or: "Exercise in Sloppy Double-Tracking (A Love Song)"

This is my attempt at writing a pre-Dylan era folk song. The only exception is the A-minor chord: it would have sounded folkier if I played a C there, but I like it better this way. The backup vocals and melodica don't necessarily sound folky either, but I can differentiate between what I think of as the "song proper" (the Platonic form of the song) and the arrangement. Music is one of the few areas where I think it actually makes perfect sense to think about Platonic ideals (geometry is another) -- when we hear someone cover a song or perform an alternate version of a song, the extent to which we identify it as the same song as "the original" is the extent to which the two versions conform to some template. For most songs, that template consists I think more or less entirely of the chord progression and the melody (although different songs have different aspects that are fundamental to them), so when I think about "the song," that's really what I'm thinking of. Specifics of instrumentation and arrangement like the picking pattern or the harmony line are just incidental -- they have to be some way or other in any given instantiation of the song, but the ideal form does not dictate which among infinite options should be chosen. So when I say that this is supposed to be like a folk song, I mean the Form of this song, not this specific instance.

Ok, my first post -- we'll see how long I can keep this up, but right now my plan is to record a new song every week for a year. It's really just for me, just to give me arbitrary deadlines for writing and recording so I'll actually do it, but if anyone else is listening, let me know what you think! There are 52 Sundays in 2009, so my goal is to post something by every Sunday and end up with 52 songs by the end of the year.