boats

I’ve a confession to make: I chose Boats for today’s song because I didn’t feel like typing up lyrics. I really should type up the entire album’s lyrics before I begin posting any song, but I’m such a lazy person that it’ll never happen.

Well, maybe I’m not completely lazy. I’m nearly at the end of a near-month-long crazy-busy time for me, involving among other things: work, theater, and lack of internet during my free time. While the internet problem may still be around, after today I should be doing the play for maybe two or three days a week until the end of the first week in August. Maybe I’ll pick up a few extra shifts at work, but not to the extent that I did before, as I had one week where I worked six days while rehearsing for four days.

So yeah, I hope you enjoy yet another instrumental. [smiley face]

kosmosshif

You may be wondering why I titled both song and album Kosmosshif. Well, here’s the story of the century:

Back in January, I was desperate for a car, since Amy doesn’t own one and I just moved from a place where public transportation was king to a place where the house feels fairly remote without a personal vehicle. Fortunately my friend Bryan showed up from Rhode Island where he’s currently studying landscape architecture to help us with this pursuit. We eventually found a 1991 Suzuki Sidekick in Burlington on sale through Craig’s List for $1000. I had just enough savings to avoid having to take out a loan, and proceeded to contact the seller for more information. It turned out that she was leaving for Colorado that very day and was about to give it to a friend to sell for an extra $500 if no one would take her offer, even though there were a few people who tried bargaining the price down to no avail.

If you’ve never seen a Suzuki Sidekick (or its twin brother the Geo Tracker), it’s an interesting sight to behold. It’s a precursor to an SUV, but it’s lighter and narrower, and thus especially prone to flipping over if you’re not careful (which I assure you I AM). Of course, because she was leaving that day, she needed the transaction in cash, so Bryan and I headed down to the bank to empty out most of my savings. As we were waiting in line, we saw on CNN that a town in Texas spotted a UFO in broad daylight and stood in awe as to how something like that made it onto national news. Then when we sealed the deal with the lady who was to leave in an hour, she told us that she wasn’t the first owner of the car, but it was blessed through a Jewish ceremony by the people who originally sold it to HER.

We did an internet translation of spaceship in Yiddish, and “Kosmosshif” was christened. Well, maybe “christened” is the wrong word…but you get the idea.

armageddon

Oh man, this site is totally lying to you. Apparently, just because I updated this site at 11 PM Eastern Standard Time on the 24th, because in GMT it’s the 25th it’s going on this dang universal time. I mean, come ON my internet here can only seem to work either really early in the morning or really late at night, and I’ve been rehearsing for a play and working a lot so my body gets tired and has trouble functioning at such an ungodly hour. I imagine those of us on the west coast of North America (who give a crap about such a subject) have an even more difficult time, pun unintended (but I wish it had been) with the issue. Curses!

So Armageddon is a song about happiness in a time where no one is thinking about how awful GMT is.

Edit: So I guess I was wrong, and now the links have been fixed to show that I did, indeed, make an entry on the 24th. I thought it said 2008/06/25…but what’s done is done, and now I have yet another entry that is pretty much all crossed out.

8 am dream

I’m sorry once again…I’m not sure when I’ll be able to make regular updates, but I’ll try to get on the ball as soon as possible!

I’d been working on the guitar part for 8 AM Dream since I lived in Brooklyn, and I even had a vocal melody and everything, but I didn’t like how the vocals seemed to overpower the guitar; I really wanted to have the guitar part stand out on its own and have any accompaniment be just that: background.

It seems like I have my best dreams, or at least my most memorable dreams, when I go back to sleep after waking up in the morning. I’m not usually able to sleep all that much longer (although I do my damnedest to try), but the sleep I get is awash with detailed dreams that have the best chance for me to remember them. I’m not sure if this one was reminiscent of a dream, but I think I named the song after I woke up from one. Yatta!

eden lost

Hold on! It’s a busy day for me, and I don’t have enough time to update the page this morning, plus internets during the middle of the day here seem to be iffy at best. I’ll do my best to work on this one when I can, so just hang on!

Huzzah for another late update! Eden Lost originally had lyrics, but I didn’t really like how they couldn’t quite fit into the music, so I decided to make it an instrumental, and a leading track at that! Who does this, I ask! Surely, there must be some songwriter of sorts who makes primarily lyrical pieces of music but has the occasional instrumental that could lead off ONE of their albums. And I’m not talking about something like Metal Machine Music or The Mix-Up where it’s ALL instrumentals despite the artists who are best known for songs with lyrics. Sigh, I’m sure there’s SOMEONE out there who will humble me. Maybe?

comet

The lyrics to Comet was inspired by an anecdote mentioned in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos book.

eights collide

What’s all this about a second solo project? I must be mad with power, like that Bill Callahan guy.

So the first amj “single”, Eights Collide, has a much different feel from anything I made with any of my previous bands mainly in that the country life of central Vermont pervades much of it. I believe that this song had been inspired by a traversing across the street from our house during a warm spell where some of the snow from the winter was still around but it had mostly melted away, creating these vernal pools at the bottom of the hill. I’m learning to walk around without shoes. It’s a wonderful feeling to walk through the mud.

ampersand

I apologize for the lateness of this entry, especially since there is no song really to accompany it, but internets in NoMo is still really shady, so I’m typing all of this from work. If you can’t wait to listen to the last BC+ track that I have yet to put on the main page, then you can click here and download the track directly.

So Ampersand completes the final track on (expectations). This one is one of the first songs that I wrote that I still enjoy playing, although not much like the version on this album. It started out in the set list for my band Phosphates, but was never “professionally” recorded like some of the other songs we played, so I decided to translate it on a BC+ record. It’s pretty nuts on here, I’ll admit, and I do like it better when I play it on guitar. I may put up another version of it in the near future…

So on Saturday (internets permitting), I should have the first amj track up and running, and as soon as possible, the rest of the (expectations) page. Latah!!!!

fifteen months

Sorry that Fifteen Months was quite late to be posted today, but the internets in my apartment haven’t been very cooperative, so I’m actually in Montpelier using Rhapsody’s free wi-fi and eating some of their foods. There was a guy who looked like a young John Cale wearing sunglasses, but the guy who rang me up said that the shades reminded him of Lou Reed. I just pulled out Transformer the other day and now I want to find some more of his records, but I hear that his catalog is kind of spotty. I already have the one that he collaborated with John Cale in the 90’s on cassette. I need to pull it out again now that the tape player in my car is broken. For my next yet-to-be-heard Lou Reed album, should I try Berlin, Coney Island Baby or The Blue Mask? Those seem to be my top three, besides Metal Machine Music that I’d like to listen to once in my life before I go deaf. I mean, Lester Bangs swore by it. How bad could it be?

Ah, that reminds me that my friend Melody has the copy of one of his collections that I lent to her now ex-boyfriend a long while ago. I hope you’re reading it, ‘Ody, cause it’s a heck of a book. And as a tribute to the style of his writing, may I say that if you (the general “you”, not the singular “you” that may suggest that I’m addressing ‘Ody and not everyone else) don’t like The Velvet Underground, then you don’t REALLY like rock music. Period. Oh oh oh, and back to the singular Melody “you”: Amy pointed out that I’m currently wearing your horse shirt, and the guy who thought that the other guy looked like Lou Reed thinks it’s pretty rad too. OH MAN I’M SO BRILLIANT TO BRING THIS ENTRY FULL CIRCLE EVEN THOUGH I HAVEN’T TALKED A BIT ABOUT THE BC+ TRACK BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

further

Further came to fruition first after a failed take of Farther that I tapped over shortly afterwards. However, the first take was so much longer that the last bits of it still lingered, so I just kept it there mainly because I was lazy. I also tried to do some track bouncing (where you rerecord a bunch of different tracks onto a single track in order to free up the other tracks for additional layering) which would have been wonderful to extend my four-track so that I could put as many instruments as I wanted onto a song, but the wiring got mixed up somehow and I ended up with this high-pitched squeal that you can hear at the end of the song. So instead of deeming it a throw-away failure, I put it smack-dab in the middle of the album. Go me.

Ooh, have you seen the newly revamped archive page? I separated the albums so that they have their own page, which now that You Do What You Can is now completely online as of today, you can see and listen to the whole album pretty much as it was meant to be listened to. I shall do a little dance, then make a little love afterwards, and finally I’ll get down. TONIGHT.