bantam

Bantam, Connecticut is a borough of the larger town of Litchfield, and it has about 800 people, an eponymous lake, a sweet thrift shop and a movie theater. The lyrics were inspired by a visit to Litchfield and its surrounding towns during a strange Thanksgiving adventure about a couple years ago. There was shouting, driving, and singing abound. I had other instruments recorded for this track but it didn’t sound quite right, so I thought that I might as well make it sound apparent that it’s kind of an off-track song. Hope I done good, slice dog.

american, i

The American Series, #6:

That’s it, I’m a-gone live in Cuba now.

Joking, joking, joking. Miss out on the fireworks here? Bloody likely, my friend.

american, n

The American Series, #5:

Empires are silly things. All that hard work, only to incinerate in a blaze of glory.

american s

The American Series, #4:

I was going to paraphrase a George Carlin quote for this one, but I thought that instead I’ll just let the whole quote speak for itself. Not that I ENTIRELY agree with all of this, but should I entirely agree with anybody on anything? Besides, it saves me the trouble of tweaking it to my liking.

american, l

The American Series, #3:

Much of the modern American lifestyle has been made possible by cheap, abundant energy; energy to heat and cool homes, to produce and transport goods and services over long distances, to power our recreational and conventional devices like televisions and coffee makers, to provide health care for just about any ailment from disinfecting a scratch to giving oxygen to those whose lungs can no longer do the work on their own. Cheap, abundant energy gives the human race an incredible advantage over the natural world and has allowed us to populate the land at immense rates and reconstruct the Earth in the image we desire.

But at what cost? How do we feel when the air conditioning fails and we’re succumbed to the outside elements slowly seeping through the cracks of the doors and windows? How do we deal when a machine fails to properly make a product or is no longer able to take us to the places where we’re most economically viable? How are we able to occupy our minds when our appliances break? How do we cope with the pain of a malady that we cannot treat?

We already experience these ills, for the most part in the short term, and we generally treat them with a huff of indignation, believing that life will be so much more of a headache without these privileges at our disposal. Who among us, especially the younger generation of Americans who have no clue what a lifestyle without cheap abundant energy is like, can imagine living in such a hell? Short of traveling to a third world country and living amongst them, how could we REALLY imagine this?

What could happen if this cheap abundant energy just suddenly DISAPPEARED?

american, o

The American Series, #2:

According to the Hirsch report, the world will change abruptly and in a revolutionary manner after the inevitability of peak oil, especially for countries like the United States that rely heavily on oil, and while we may have the technology to eventually adjust to this change, it will take twenty years to adjust to it if we hope to have no substantial impacts on our everyday lives if we finish the transition before oil has peaked, and ten years if we all take enormous efforts to mitigate. But if we wait until oil peaks, then we’ll have an energy crisis for at least twenty years, and the impact on modern society as we know it will be devastating.

That being said, many estimations for peak oil center it around this time period (if it has not already peaked), so it is likely that Americans will have an incredibly difficult time in the coming decade or two trying to live the way that they’re used to. However, these predictions are very hard to pinpoint and many have tried in the past and have failed to figure out how much oil is there to extract. But there IS a finite amount of oil that is becoming more costly to extract, and thus more costly to transport ourselves over long distances in a timely, efficient manner, which seems to be one of the key ingredients for our American economy.

OK Aaron, enough preaching.

american, u

Oh snap! I forgot to update the Democore page before I left for work, so here I am during my break, making an entry for a song that you can’t listen to on the regular page. Thankfully, there IS one song on the Black Candy Plus Myspace that hasn’t been talked about here, so hopefully once the Democore page gets updated by tonight, BC+’s Myspace will be completely out of date. Well, I guess maybe not COMPLETELY, but you get the picture…

Anyway, this entry marks the first of many songs in the American series. Each letter tries to correspond to a sound that corresponds to a word. Sometimes, especially with something like American, U, it works rather well. They tend to be oddly experimental, although this one is relatively straightforward, along the lines of New Haven Dance Party.

But why did I choose to label these songs “American”? Maybe it was an observation that I felt as an American ON Americans, or maybe I was trying to be patriotic somehow, or maybe I was trying to create a new national anthem and make a bundle of that sweet, sweet American money. Mmmm, U.S. dollars…

Which reminds me: I need to change the last song in the (expectations) archive to say “american, n”. Silly me, I wouldn’t repeat an American series song on two consecutive albums!

encourage him

Encourage Him may have been the first song I wrote meow when I moved into Jackson Heights, and definitely the first song I wrote meow for Black Candy Plus. The first set of recordings I made meow has this song right there meow as the first track, but with an acoustic guitar meow and two tracks of normal vocals. I brought it back to life meow when I moved to Brooklyn because I felt that it was quite a catchy song meow, but I wanted to do something meow really weird with it. I’m not sure if I pulled it off meow, but I still think it’s a cute li’l track.

…

…Meow!

new haven dance party

For my first shout-out to Connecticut on You Do What You Can, I chose New Haven Dance Party’s city because it seems like THE famous Connecticut city of prestige. Sure, Hartford might be the capital, and Waterbury might be the city that I’m most familiar with, but as the first planned community of the original British New World settlements, the Elm City was the center of the New Haven Colony, one of the three original Connecticut colonies before uniting in 1664. If it weren’t for economic disaster in the mid-1600’s, it could have been nearly as prestigious of a trade city as Boston. It was actually co-capital of the state with Hartford until 1873, perhaps since Hartford was a more central locale (New Haven lies on the Long Island Sound coastline), and Roger Sherman, its first mayor, was the only founding father to sign the original U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and both Articles of Association and Confederation. New Haven also hosts the “other” Ivy League college, Yale, from which Eli Whitney graduated and set up shop nearby to manufacture the cotton gin and various armaments (it was this manufacturing plant where Samuel Colt also invented the revolver), and is the birthplace of the current U.S. president George W. Bush, when his father and former U.S. president George H. W. Bush attended Yale before graduating and relocating to Texas in pursuit of oil and riches.

Thank you, Wikipedia!

sore

Lyrics like the ones in Sore were originally intended as more of a writing exercise for me than to make it into a song. There was an original song that I wrote for this one, the sound lost somewhere in the aether, but the lyrics remained in my notebook until I recorded the music for what would become the (expectations) version of it. Another one of those Joy Division style vocal jobs, eh? I definitely distorted the overall sound by using the tape speed function on the Tascam, something that you will most definitely hear in the upcoming sound files.

Black Candy Plus was originally supposed to be my sole solo project, but it quickly became, in large part, a experimental sound outlet. There are some more traditional singer-songwriter songs on here, but I think that for the future, BC+ will continue to manipulate what the four-track can do while another solo name will do the folk-type stuff. But yes, fair warning that if you’re not already familiar with the BC+ records, things may get kind of weird from here on out…