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.

Sara Palin is a genius!

I don’t know about you, but I kind of grew up with the impression that it took some brains to be president.  I am just baffled by how things go in this country sometimes.  I don’t understand why so many people supported the invasion of Iraq in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’.  I don’t understand how Bush declared ‘Mission Accomplished’, what like 5 years ago almost?, and we’re still losing lives there.  I don’t understand how we stopped counting votes in the 2000 election and no one complained.  WE STOPPED COUUNTING VOTES.  In a DEMOCRACY.  Which  we claim the need to spread around the world.   You all know these facts.  Now, we are again in an election year and  I don’t know what to think again.

 On the one hand, we have Obama, who to me, seems to say ‘change’ over and over.  I’m still not clear on what that means.  On the other, we have McCain, who during the convention in his biography video stressed that he ‘lived in a box’ which I guess means that he has a superior world view.  In the past week he said the economy was fundamentally sound.  Then we have Palin.  

Apparently the fact that you can read a tele-prompter and speak makes you qualified to be president.  I didn’t get all the praise she got for the convention speech…true, she spoke well.  She read well.  A speech someone else most likely wrote.  People were IMPRESSED by this.  How did we get to this being a great thing? Anyway, it seems like many people are ignoring the fact that she is going to be next in line for president if something happens to McCain.  And she doesn’t even speak in sentences.  And she doesn’t even answer the questions asked.  

Here:   This is a direct excerpt from Katie Couric’s One-On-One interview with Sarah Palin, which aired Wednesday on CBS.

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? … Instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess? 

Gov. Sarah Palin: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we’re ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the — it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

If McCain wins, this woman will be a 72-year- old heartbeat away from being president of the United States.

And here: A Question Reprised, but the Words Come None Too Easily for Palin

It just amazes me that the polling could even be so close.   Well, there ya go.  I’m gonna go hunt a moose and say I’m a foreign policy expert because NY borders Canada.

Titles

I now have 2 new favorites.  I LOVE them.  No, like really.  I LOVE them.  One I already mentioned, the David Gray-ish one, although I don’t really think it sounds like him anymore, and a new new new one.  It’s going to be called ‘Actress’.  I LOVE it.

Things are moving nicely now.  Here are some titles for the songs:

Sunshine

Come With Me

Actress

Goodbye

Escape

Denver (this one may change when I finish the chorus)

Song for You

Coming Home

The rest you’ll have to wait for because I am.  

So my drummer is coming soon.  I’m happy.  He’s an old friend of mine who I haven’t seen in about 3 years and I ran into him on the street about 3 weeks ago walking his dog.  His name is Grey LeGere and we used to play in an acoustic trio about 7 years ago with our friend Jim McArdle.  We all sang and Grey played percussion.  Since then he’s toured with all sorts of different people and is getting ready to do a stint with a band from Peru.  He’s a real good guy and a great drummer and I can’t wait to see what he can add to the songs.

short today.  Til next time

peace

mike

 

ps Happy Bday to Marcia my lil sis!!

Writing on the Road

It’s getting good now.  I am in the final stages of recording.  Adding parts, finishing the arrangements and hopefully coming up with some lyrics.  I have a drummer coming next week and that is really the last piece missing before I go back and tighten everything up and sing final vocal passes and go into the mixing phase.

Thinking back on how some songs come about, I’ve been trying to figure out how this album matches the other ones. With ‘Reach’ I was playing about half the songs on the road before they even had lyrics.  The music was all done and I had a sense of the melodies so this was fun and the crowds didn’t notice because they had never heard them before.  I think it paid off because I had a really good sense of how the songs went before I ever started recording.  This past fall we were still on the road and I had some GREAT guys playing with me.  I started putting things in the set list like “new song 1 6/8 in E” and we’d play it.  They really didn’t know what was going on and I yelled out chord changes and off we went.  There are probably 4-5 new songs that still are making the cut that started that way.

I have also written a whole bunch just sitting on my couch.  I’ve noticed that the ones we played on the road stayed mostly the same and the newer ones, or the ones NOT played out have changed the most.  I make little mixes and listen to the rough tracks in my car or on my I-pod over and over.  Usually this gets pretty annoying.  But it lets me know which ones I get sick of or just aren’t going anywhere. Others I change melodies or arrangements on.  It’s the method I have to substitute for the whole ‘4 guys in a room playing at once’ scenario and it helps me ‘live’ in the songs.  Another thing that is important to me in the writing process is to let go of the fact that these are MY songs.  I try to get to a place where I hear them as preexisting songs so I ‘know’ how they go.

I have one brand new one that I wrote about 2 weeks ago.  It reminds me a little of David Gray.  I love it.  I thought I was done and I came up with a little riff on the acoustic and everything fell into place that night.I had a quick demo done for my trip to Colorado and I would wake up in the morning and sit on my balcony, look out at Pikes Peak in the sunshine and listen to it.  It sounds the way you feel when you look at something like that.  When I listen to it, actually it’s on right now, I truly can’t think of it as anything but what it is.  It came out pretty much done.  And it sounds like it sounds.  It just is.  Nice when that happens.

So after the drummer lays down his tracks, demos will be posted like crazy because I’ll be done with 90% of what I need to put them out there.  I hope you will like what you hear.

peace

mike

Ahhh-Colorado

Just got back from a weekend in Colorado where I’ve never been before.  Stayed in Colorado Springs. Hotel room looked smack into Garden of the Gods. That’s the picture below.  Drove to Denver and Boulder.  Up into Wyoming.  Back through Estes Park and to the entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park.  Back to Boulder.  Huge Mountains to the west no matter where you go and rolling plains to the east.  Got back to NY and had a whole new appreciation for trees and air with oxygen in it.

 

I wrote a song for the last album ‘Mountain Song’ about the Adirondaks here in NY.  You can listen to some of it here:    Mountain Song

Peace

RIA, Nuclear Physics and Life

I’m calling the new album RIA.  I got this idea from a little movie I really like called “Tennis Anyone?” that came out about 2 years ago.  It’s a cool story about two friends who are trying to become successful actors, and ends up being about being true to yourself and what you really should be doing on this earth.  There’s a scene about half way through where one of the characters father has passed away and he’s telling a story about him.  How he would walk the beach every morning and once he got sick one day was having trouble breathing and shouted “RIA” which is air backwards.  It gave him a big boost of energy and he finished his walk.  Everyone on the beach eventually adopted this saying and would greet him with it everytime they saw him.  Ria!  

This got me thinking about other things too, like the power of words or sound.  In the movie “What the Bleep do we know?” there is a part about the effect of words on water.  When someone taped the word love or hate to a bottle of water, (or maybe they said the words, it’s been awhile since I saw it), the actual structure of the water molecule changed.  The one with love looked really beautiful, like a snowflake and the other looked like smashed glass.  I always found this interesting since I create and play music.  The vibrations travel through the air and can possibly change the molecules and therefore the people listening.  Kinda neat.  Then I found that RIA is also an abbreviation for “rare isotope accelerator” which is going to be used to study “measurement of nuclear reactions at astrophysical energies” as well as discovering new isotopes.  Which ties in nice with the atomic level effect of sound.

In Yoga practice, there is the thought that the chants are so important because the sound of the words will help you into a posture or into meditation.  Sound affecting the physical again.

All this also made me reflect on the life cycle.  I just saw Bob Dylan and it made me realize how lucky we are that he’s still around to see.  LeRoi Moore just passed away and we can’t see him anymore.  We should all be more aware of the fragility of time and what a gift it is that we are around to enjoy and share in whatever it is that we do.  My own mother passed away 4 years ago and it is still shocking to realize…  So call your mom or dad.  Hug your dog.  Write that song.  Finish that project.  Ask the girl out. climb the mountain.  Cause you can.  And that’s a great thing.

RIA

 

peace

Sad day-RIP LeRoi Moore

Sad and sudden and unexpected.  Here’s a good article on their show last night:  Dave Matthews Band’s Farewell to a Fallen Brother.

I didn’t go to the shows this year in Saratoga for the first time in 11 years.  But I got to see them a lot and they are always uplifting and the music was joyous.  He will be missed greatly.

Bob Dylan

So I’m going to go see Bob Dylan tomorrow at SPAC.  I’m psyched.  I’ve never seen Dylan before.  I’m not sure why, because I’ve always wanted to.  Any how it made me start thinking of all the people I have seen and who I haven’t and out of those I haven’t who would I really like to see?  I’m mostly only listing LARGE shows, not club shows, that’s for another time…

I have seen (and I know I’m forgetting some):

Ray Charles-saw him at the NY State Fair.

Neil Young-(with Crazy Horse–one of the loudest shows ever)

John Mellencamp

CSN

Jewel-opening for Neil Young

Indigo Girls

Paul McCartney–um, GREAT

REM–6 times, last time in June @ Jones Beach in the lightening storm

Radiohead 3x’s, once opening for REM

Counting Crows 3xs

John Mayer

The Wallflowers

Dave Matthews 14x’s

Sting

KD Lang

Cowboy Junkies

Paul Simon

Brian Wilson–he opened with a snippit of ‘Brian Wilson’ by barenaked ladies

Barenaked Ladies -also met them in a borders in Syracuse.

Blues Traveler

Gov’t Mule

Ben Harper

My Morning Jacket

Trey Anastasio

World Party

Billy Joel

Duran Duran

Shawn Colvin (opening for sting)

Modest Mouse

The National

Elliot Smith

Sarah Mclaughlin

Lisa Loeb

Missy Elliot

INXS

10,000 Maniacs

Lyle Lovett

Norah Jones

Bela Fleck and the Flecktones

 

Ah-I know I’m forgetting some.  Oh well.  This was just off the top of my head.  

There are a few groups/acts I’d like to see that I just haven’t yet:  U2, Allman Brothers, Flaming Lips, I guess I’d like to see the Stones, just cause they’re the stones…,Tom Petty, Elvis Costello, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Prince.

That’s it for now.  

peace