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…

intuition

I believe that Intuition is a song about innocence and anxiety of the world the narrator lives in. It came to me during a time when I doubted my ability to “mature” into everyday society and would have to rely heavily on good will from others rather than take my life into my own hands. After graduation, I stayed with my friend Ingrid for far longer than I probably should have, then with my aunt for another few months (I still don’t know what I’d have done without their generosity and I love and thank them both dearly for it). Shortly thereafter, I committed the ultimate sin:

I moved back in with my mother.

Not that I don’t get along with Mom! Far from it; I’m very, very, very lucky to have such a caring and wonderful woman as my mother! My shame was within myself for not making a living on my own after graduation and I was desperate to prove to everyone that I was ready to “grow up” and shape my own reality.

Fortunately, a month had passed until Ingrid informed me of a job in the city that would allow me to afford a cheap apartment in the boroughs. So I stayed with her for another month until Justyn, Josh and I got our acts together and moved to Queens. I was so ecstatic about finally living on my own that I kept singing a parody of the Jeffersons’ theme song for months afterward:

Well we’re moving on up!
To Jackson Heights
To a deluxe apartment
In a building!
Yeah’ we’re moving on up!
To Jackson Heights
Gonna have ourselves a slice
Of apple pie!

And yet despite the space between the person I used to be when I wrote “Intuition” and the person I am now, the song never felt dated, like a relic from a bygone time. Because there’s still that doubt that lingers about how I’ll be able to function in modern society, and how we’ve been raised on what I consider to be misinformation (I hesitate to call it “lies” since I don’t think that there’s any bad intentions behind them; just proper advice to live in a world that, thanks to an ever-accelerating rate of change in society, no longer exists), it became a sort of head-dive into the human psyche. Who doesn’t have these doubts about where their life is going? Who doesn’t, in some odd way, dream of having someone take care of them and protect them from the nasty, unforgiving world outside? Who hasn’t noticed how the world suddenly becomes such a scary place when they’re left to their own devices for the first time?

iceberg

Iceberg is another “ode” to the city, although this one less about my relationship to the general population (close friends not withstanding, of course) but more about my relationship to the general environment. It does mention the people to a certain extent, but it is nearly impossible to leave people out of an ode to a city since it’s such a man-made entity. It is rather bitter like much of my writing about the city over the past couple of years, which may be odd considering the anthem-like quality of the music.

I chose this as my debut song off my debut full-length album since it seemed to sum up the sound and mood of what I was trying to accomplish with Black Candy Plus. It combines the acoustic guitar songwriting aspect with the electronic experimentation amazingly well, in my opinion, and gives the album a jolt to the listeners that I hoped would spark their attention throughout this ramble of a record.

branch out branch

Branch Out Branch appeared early on in my college years, when I thought I’d play the acoustic guitar in a sort of melodic way that was interlaced with chord progressions. This was the summer of the anti-Britneys, led by one Avril Lavigne, and while I was fortunate enough not to let her enamor me, for some reason I got into Michelle Branch instead. Listening back to it now, she’s not so bad, but I’m surprised at how much I dug her in the first place.

But even though my opinions on her music have mellowed since then, the guitar part that she inspired still crept around whenever I played the acoustic for a certain length of time. Five years later, I found myself playing it on the four-track to fill out some music for the record, and it became one of the standout tracks to me.

I’m still trying to figure out the connection between the two events besides their time proximity.

it’s time to go

I’m still surprised at how well It’s Time To Go has held up my respect, seeing as it’s a somewhat older song, many of which I’ve tossed aside as something that I’m glad I wrote at the time but I’m ready to move onto something better. It’s also one of the more traditional songs I’ve written (straightforward intro/verse/chorus/coda style), but one where the virtue of the lyrics hold the rest of the song together.

If you read the lyrics as you listen to the song, you may find a few differences between the two versions. When I recorded it, I wasn’t too sure about the chorus “It’s getting cold/And it’s time to go”. For a song whose narrator sounded so unsure about himself, that line sounded awfully definitive, so I changed it to something I felt captured his feelings. I think it’s an old change, but I suppose it isn’t quite old enough.

The second change is the line “I don’t want to hurt a single person I don’t know/except the ones who treat me like a gun”. This line always disturbed me a little, but it wasn’t until recently that I changed it to a more pacifist feel, especially since the narrator initially said that he doesn’t “want to smile like a man in uniform without washing out a single drop of blood”.

So there you go, a recipe for one perfectly good song.

necklace

Necklace was written in a constantly bitter state of isolation that I had felt living in the city when it came to observing members of the more attractive sex (I’m sure it could sway either way, depending on who you are). While this version was recorded in Brooklyn, I wrote it in Jackson Heights era song. I recorded another early version there that ended upon a rare EP that I rediscovered last night (if you’re reading this, Josh, could you send the mp3’s for the Cucumber EP my way? Thanks), along with some other cringeworthy “gems” that I may post in the foreseeable future.

Some could call this song an unabashedly emo effort on my part, and I wouldn’t argue there. I still like the melody though, and even if its coda repeats about how much the narrator (i.e. ME) can do without that kind of haughty person in such a desolate community, I could imagine the average urbanite embracing the lyrics and wearing them as a badge of honor.

I’m going to cry in the corner now and write another poem about how no one loves me except my cats.

waterbury shuffle

I believe Waterbury Shuffle was the first recording I made for (expectations). The title, by the way, is a reference to Waterbury, CT, which is also my town of birth. Connecticut cities deserve songs written about them that doesn’t include blood in the streets (thank you very much Jim Morrison). I suppose I’d like to make more dance songs for random Connecticut cities so that my home state is the hippest cat in town.

Yeah, like that will ever happen.

farther

I feel like I should put these recordings into a time perspective, especially since these posts aren’t exactly in chronological order. You Do What You Can was recorded and released at the end of 2006 when I was living in Jackson Heights (Queens). I made a whole lot of copies of this record that I still have available if you’re interested. I did some more recording in Queens, but didn’t really start working on (expectations) until I moved to Flatbush (Brooklyn) the following July, and finished it shortly before I moved to Vermont at the end of 2007. I’m still working on new recordings, which I’ll be posting under a new name (although I’ll still be making Black Candy Plus records too) in the near future.

I’m not quite sure what Farther is about anymore. Sometimes I can’t help but make the words so cryptic that even I have trouble figuring out what I meant when I say these things. I wrote the original version of this song when I first moved to Jackson Heights, and I rehearsed it with Justyn and another drummer (with slightly modified words). Then he never panned out and I decided to use the words for this Joy Division inspired Black Candy record. Yes, that’s a backwards guitar in the beginning and I’m still proud of how it turned out. I doubt that I could recreate it nowadays. Ah, the magic of not knowing what the hell you’re doing…

(inside joke alert)

Apparently, Happy Song is better than me. But it’s for me. The sleeper hit of Bulgaria! It’s going to eat me alive. Help…

look around you

I first wrote the lyrics to Look Around You when I was staying at my aunt’s apartment up by Lincoln Center, when I was thinking a lot about growing up in Connecticut and how foreign my hometown felt every time I would visit the place. The title was inspired by a faux school documentary that my Vermont friends showed me when I visited them in February of 2006.

When I left for New York after I had just graduated high school, my parents were still living across from March Farm in Bethlehem in a house that I had called home for over seven years, and most of my traveling and explorations were at the hands of my family, or in the small radius of my house where I was bound to find someone I knew by name. My parents are now separated and living in different towns (although Dad managed to find a house in Bethlehem) and I always seem to meet new people every time I leave the house, whether it be in New York or in Vermont (or wherever the wind takes me). When I go back to Connecticut, I no longer encounter those random familiar faces. Where have they gone? Do they hide in their parents’ basements? Are they constantly working to get out of their past lives? Or have they found adventure in distant lands?

To each their own, I suppose.