Until the Day Is Done

REM has long been my favorite band.  Their new album rocks, but there are a few quieter moments.  This is one of the best songs they’ve done.  It’s very ‘traditional’ REM-y.  The album was released last springs, so this was probably written at least a year and a half ago.  They lyrics are spooky accurate.  Great stuff.

REM \”Until the Day Is Done\”

Find it in the spaces

Listening back to what I’ve been working on.  Thinking about where it comes from.  The final songs sometimes are very far removed from what I originally thought.  Even if I was going for a certain ‘mood’ or ‘feel’, how I get there still remains a mystery even to me.

I posted a version of ‘Goodbye’.  This is among the first of the songs I came up with for this album.  I always loved it.  It’s really emotional, big, there is passion and tension, a longing and pulling away in it.  The words came very quickly, there are actually very few lyrics, and the chords were there right away.  Getting to the version you can hear now though, well, it HAS been 9 months.  

This song came to me after something I went through back in February.  I already had the music and the words just came out in a rush.  Every once in a while that happens:  you have an experience, it brings up a feeling and the music is already there.  I had come up with the chords about 3 weeks prior to this event.  Afterwards, I was feeling the way I was feeling and revisited the chords and click! It fell into place.  Now I just needed to get the right feel and mood in the music.  I would love to sit here and say it was my genius with sounds and knowledge of music that helped me.  Maybe it is and it’s just really invisible to me.  But here’s what really happened.

For months I was set on this being a big huge guitar song.  Moody little bassline, some piano.  Layered screaming distortion guitars because damn it, this is a song with PAIN in it!!  I recorded about 7 versions with different takes on that theme.  They all sounded alright.  But I’m not going for alright.  Especially with this song.  Over the years I’ve become pretty good at the self-editing process and knowing when an idea isn’t working, or when it’s really going well. This was always one of the latter.  My huge powerful electric guitar passion gut busting emotional song.  Yet it wasn’t right. 

So I tried speeding it up.  Surely that was the problem, it was too plodding.  Then I tried to edit the length.  then I thought about maybe going in a more acoustic direction with a long build to the end.  I tried to add some staggered harmony vocals. Finally I just left it alone for a month.  About that time I met up with a musician friend of mine and played him a lot of the new tracks.  When one of the versions of ‘Goodbye’ came on, I was trying to explain what I was going for.  He looked at me and said that ‘this is the new Mike. It’s like this doesn’t belong on the same disc as the other songs.’  Which made me think.  In the last post I mentioned trying to talk about your own sound.  It’s hard.  They’re my songs, so I’m not sure I really even have a perspective on this.  But he was right-there was something new about this song.  Which in a way is weird to me because it’s really a fairly straight forward song–a basic 3 chord song.  No real fancy rhythms, no layered harmonies.  The song had something in it, just in it of itself that screamed for the right idea, treatment, to bring it out.  I like to call it a ‘huge’ song.  In my head it’s always been sort of anthem like, not in a U2 stadium sing along with your lighter way, but more in the way that the arrangement would reflect the feeling and that would give the song the power that was in it.  I began to think of what the ‘new mike’ part was.

I pulled up this song a few days ago and listened to what I had.  Not happy.  So I let myself just let go of the song.  I tried to not think about what I wanted,  and just let the song be what it was.  How do I do that?  Now what?  The first thing I did was mute all the guitar work I had done and that left me with my bass and drum track.  I pulled up a synth patch and played around until I found a funky sound.  I totally thought it would ruin everything and I would definitely delete it and move on.  It sounded cool.  I played this back and immediately went to my piano track.  Suddenly I was playing a totally different kind of piano part.  This was getting fun.  Now, will guitars still work?  Part one played.  Part two played.  Not even close to how I had played them before. Wow.  I like it.  I sing.  I sing differently then I did on any of the other versions I’ve tried.  I can feel the song.  I can feel the feeling.  I mix it down quickly to CD and listen to it and go to sleep.

Wake up.  Listen to the mix in the car.  Go over the parts in my mind.  What’s missing?  Home.  Turn the mics on.  Needs to drop out to an acoustic right here!  New mix.  I like it.

That’s the version that’s up on the web page.  Check it out.  I think it’s very different from anything I’ve done before, and I think it nails the mood I wanted. 

It’s cool to find things where you don’t expect them. Sometimes letting go of your expectations lets you really get to what is there.  That’s what happened to me on this song.  I hope you like it.

Goodbye–DEMO

Peace

Ahhh–new sounds

So as I’ve been saying, after the pain in the ass of loading all the new software, everything is finally working correctly.  I have been working like a crazy man for the last few days on finishing up songs.  I just did an interview where the guy asked me to define my sound.  Listening to all the past albums, and what’s coming out now, I have no freaking clue.  It’s hard to define your own sound.  I never get the luxury of hearing something I create for the ‘first time’.  I always carry with me every version of the song from scratching out the first chords to the final version.  It’s weird.  Anyway, I think the new songs definitely have a new sound and direction.

 

You can read the interview here:  Saratoga Today Interview

AND you can listen to demos of 2 songs, ‘Goodbye, and Come With Me here:  Demos

Until later…

 

peace

Don’t miss what you didn’t miss

I can’t believe it’s the end of October already.  It’s been a strange year.  It rained a lot in NY this summer, so it seemed like I missed it.  Then fall showed up and I just noticed that the leaves are pretty much past the peak of their colors and browning and falling off the trees.  I missed that too somehow.  Things change quickly.

So I haven’t gotten a lot of work done in the past couple weeks because I was updating all my recording hardware and software.  This is not as easy as it sounds. There are all kinds of ‘copy preventing’ steps that the music programs have now.  You need a usb key that has your codes on it to ‘unlock’ the programs.  Then there are all these passwords, registration codes etc that you have to enter into your installer, THEN go to to software manufacuters website to get a code, THEN re-start everything, THEN open that application, THEN enter your new code, THEN get another approval code.  That’s it.  Ready to go.  So what happened to me is I got my new programs, loaded them and started typing in all those #’s.  I started at 11am.  Finished at 9:30pm.  Whew!  Ready to go. I turned on the computer the next day to start work, and NONE of the instrument programs worked with my keyboard.  3 days down the drain later, I have fixed the problem.  Actually, they just kinda started working.  I’m not sure what I did.  Now I hope they don’t stop working, because I don’t know what, if anything, I did to fix them. 

Anyway, everything is working now. The only good thing about the delay is that I’ve written another new song that is good and will make the CD!  

I just got home from doing an interview for a local paper.  It was fun, and the questions were good. Actually it was really good because he asked a lot about songwriting, recording etc, and since I’m right in the middle of that part of the process, it made me realize a few things as I was answering the questions.  Sometimes you don’t really know how much you know about something until you have to explain it to someone else. So it was a great time for me to be thinking about the answers to his questions because they directly applied to what I’m doing right now.  Well, not typing this, but the recording.

The other reason I can’t believe that it’s October, is because I began working towards this album in January.  As I’ve written before, I thought that I would have the CD out by June.  Ooops.  The delay no longer bothers me since I’ve been able to stay productive on the writing side of things and have actually come up with a getter batch of songs due to that. Also, I have fleshed out many many of the song ideas so there has been a lot of work done in total.  I looked at all the songs after I finished setting up the new software.  73.  73 new songs/song ideas since January.  That’s more songs then I had previously written BEFORE January.  Crazy.

I guess it’s been a nice lesson in patience.  I was so attached to the idea of releasing something before September, that I got really down for awhile.  That’s not good because then it colored how I was looking at everything.  Nothing sounded good, I got bored with what I had done and tried to resist the new things coming out so I wouldn’t have more unfinished songs.  Yeah, about the end of August I was ready to just stop and go work at Burger King.  

Once I let it be ok to be where I was and not try to force it anymore, it got lighter.  More songs came. The work on the songs got easier.  The album came into focus.  Now I’m armed with totally update stuff, and all I have to do is finish.  

It’s been raining all day and about 48 degrees here.  Yuck.  But I just looked out my window and the sun is poking through and the tree right outside my window is bright gold and full of leaves.  I guess I didn’t miss too much after all.

more to come

peace

There is no Spoon

I’ve been thinking lately about how things don’t ever seem to change.  I mean if you look at history the same types of things happen over and over and over.  They are just packaged differently.  Wars, invasions, genocide, etc.  It was just Columbus Day.  He’s celebrated as the discoverer of America.  Sure.  He did. But he also wiped out all the native people who were here.  He’s a hero.  The Indians were pretty much totally wiped out by western expansion.  We’re heroes.  Bosnia happened, Rwanda Happened and we have ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’.  It’s just packaged different.  Same result.  We invaded Iraq.  We’re ‘liberators’. Russia just invaded Georgia, guess what?  They’re ‘bad guys’ who invaded a nation with no cause.  Hmm.

Looking at the election, what the fuck is going on?  We’re in 2 active wars.  $10 billion a month.  Our economy is tanking.  Our schools don’t work.  People are losing their homes at a record pace.  Now we’re giving huge amounts of $$ to the banks that were a huge cause of the problem so they can keep going.  But many people are also against ‘big’ government and tax increases.  The debt clock broke.  The number is too big. What do we hear about from our candidates?  William Ayres, Obama doesn’t ‘want to win’ the war in Iraq, Palin goes to the debate and announces she won’t answer the questions asked, McCain promised multiple times in the past to not engage in smear campaigns or negative ads.  Now people are yelling ‘kill him’ and ‘terrorist’ at his rallies.  Obama ads say McCain “can’t use e-mail’.  I guess these things are important.

Bill Clinton left us with a surplus, good economy, and we weren’t at war.  Oh-wait-he got a blow job.  Silly me.  The packaging of these insignificant details into larger than life ‘facts’ is always happening. War? let’s talk about Obama’s middle name.  Economy gotcha down? Let’s talk about someone he knew who did something we don’t like 40 years ago.  Obviously THAT is more important.  Palin is accused of being un-ethical in abuse of her office?  Well, not really.  That must be the other guys slanting the results of the investigation.  

It’s the “we can do it, but you can’t” thinking that we seem to fall for every time.  Or at least enough of us.  Or at least the crazies screaming at the McCain rallies.  Are we that stupid?  Forget for a minute whoever you’re supporting in the election.  Shouldn’t SOMEBODY speak about the ISSUES we’re facing and, oh maybe give a non-vague answer to what they think should be done?  Shouldn’t we care about what they want to do? NOT who they bumped up against because they were active in the world? If we’re pretending we’re talking about ‘character’, isn’t it more important what we actually DO verses what someone we know does/did?  Palin has been found to be in violation of her ethical duties as govenor.  She DID that.  Obama knows this guy from Chicago who did some things most people wouldn’t like.  He DIDN’T DO those things.

I read a thing recently that said that about 80% of the american public believes the first thing they hear.  WOW.  That’s why these tactics are so effective.  If I put out the insinuation that Mr. Smith beats his kid because I saw a bruise on his arm, there ya go—most people will forever look at Mr. Smith with suspicion and loathing. He beats his kid after all.  Forget the fact that he got the bruise at little league when he got hit by a pitch.  I said it first.  Suspicion has been raised.  Nothing else matters.  To most people.

Now, that last part is hard for me to swallow.  That 80% of the people will just make a snap judgement like that.  But then again, I’ve seen it in action.  Do we really NOT think anymore?  Are we really THAT lazy and stupid?  I don’t think so, but…

I guess when you can record someone on camera saying something, then they can answer it by saying it was ‘gotcya’ journalism—you recording what someone ACTUALLY said—then the bar is not just low, there is no more bar.  When you can just make associations, accusations, denials without any facts, there is no bar.  When you speak gibberish during an interview and then get credit for speaking in sentences a few days later and are hailed as being ‘brilliant’ there is no bar.

It’s like the Matrix withour computers.  

Anyway, go rent the movie ‘Bob Roberts’.  It was made ao but 10 years ago.  Watch it and compare to the ‘reality’ we’re in now. Crazy.