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.

bop

Bop came to me as a guitar part when I was but a wee freshman in college. I’m not quite sure why it’s stuck around for so long, but dagnabbit I had some tape to fill for the recording session and decided to put it on there. Two off-the-cuff vocals and a leg slap later, I had myself yet another track for (expectations). Hey, that’s how I dooze it, homes.

what do i do?

What Do I Do? has changed meaning for me so much since I first wrote it a year and a half ago. I used to abhor love songs to the point where I would tell people that I’d only write a love song if it avoided the words “I” “love” and “you” in any way. I didn’t think that most songwriters said anything revealing or interesting in love songs anymore and I wanted to avoid their ranks, especially if love songs were something I was, as an artist, “supposed” to write. So I wrote about anxiety instead. I had plenty of that in my life, so why not write about what you know?

Then I started timidly to leave my shell. However, being so isolated from strangers for so long, I had a hard time meeting new people and I was so nervous about what I was getting myself into when I found myself engaged in the occasional social setting that all I could think about was what I was doing right and wrong instead of just enjoying the moment. This song was written in that frame of anxiety.

But why did I choose to blatantly use the word “love” in this song? Perhaps I began to understand what love really was, rather than what I was told that love was supposed to be. Perhaps I was getting sick of limiting my vocabulary and wanted to explore new lexicons in my lyrics. Perhaps it was a symbol of my newfound self-confidence, and surely someone who was so sure of himself could use any damn word he pleases, no matter what others may think of him.

Now I look upon this song from the point of view of an outsider. What was once a personal account of a person questioning what he should do with a person’s graces, I now wonder if this is something that most people do. Are some people ashamed of love to the point where we’re genuinely scared that there could be someone out there who looks after people’s well-being for no particular reason other than compassion? Do some people try to make excuses to stay in relative misery when happiness is but an embrace away? Or do some people believe in an ideal to the point where they become disillusioned when it fails to happen to them the way they expected it to happen?

thirteen

Thirteen was supposed to be…I dunno. I remember getting very excited at how it sounded in my head, and I really liked the lyrics at the time. But now it sounds a bit too sappy and juvenile, I suppose. Maybe if I put a little more care into how I recorded this one, or if I had a band to record this with…but then again, if it doesn’t sound right stripped down like this, then how can covering it up with layers of sound make it better?

Sorry Thirteen, I don’t mean to harsh on you. You’re a good song. Awwwww.

set

For Set I used a Fisher-Price Pull-A-Tune xylophone (a misnomer, as by definition xylophones have wooden keys, but perhaps Fisher-Price didn’t think that kids could spell “glockenspiel”, I don’t know) circa 1978 for this one. I totally remember the one I had growing up in Plymouth, but this is not the same one, as far as I know. If it is, though, I wish I could ask it what kind of adventures it had…

Me: Hey Mr. Xylophone! You are so awesome!
Xylophone: Yeah, like twenty years ago…
Me: Whatchu been up to, homes?
Xylophone: You put me in storage for over a freaking decade, then sold me at a tag sale for a dollar! Not cool.
Me: Dude, I couldn’t play you forever, you know. The clarinet has like a million more notes, and you could blast that noise for sure.
Xylophone: What? Screw the clarinet!
Clarinet: Yo, that’s whack, dog. I didn’t do nothin’ to nobody.

Nah, this couldn’t have been my Pull-A-Tune. Mine would have killed me in my sleep by now. This one is totally loved.

early dismissal

Perhaps one of my favorite personal pieces of filler I’ve made so far, Early Dismissal was improvisationally recorded with only a bass and a keyboard on about maybe 20 seconds of tape. It cut off way too soon for my brain to comprehend, but I listened to those 20 seconds over and over until I asked my friend Brendan to do what he could to loop the tape and whatnot. We even came up with the name of the track together. Teamwork!

Oh, and if you’re reading this Lauren, Happy Birthday, ya l’il scamp.

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, n

The American Series, #5:

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

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?