Mark and Steve, spring 1991

I’ve done some remote collaboration over recent years with mixed results. I’ll record a song and send it to a drummer or guitarist I used to play with, and sometimes the person will be all jazzed about it and record a part right away, or sometimes the process will drag on for months, or the part I get back isn’t usable, etc. I’ve gotten plenty of good parts out my old MayTricks bandmate Steve Petrinko, but had not stood in the same room with the guy, much less recorded, for something like seven years, since I stopped having to travel regularly to Michigan to see my wife’s relatives (who have all since moved, died, etc.).

We finally arranged a trip for Steve to come drive up by himself last August for a weekend, and it so happened that my wife and kids were traveling without me and I was even between pets at the time, so we dedicated most of our time to collaborating on some new material, which went really effortlessly and egolessly. My computer had just died two days before the visit, so I had a new one built which I picked up right as Steve arrived, meaning that our effort was delayed by things like trying to figure out how to hook up my monitor to the new video card that didn’t have the right inputs, get a new recording program and the drivers for my new audio interface all up to speed. We didn’t even have effects installed at the time of recording, and I consequently didn’t get around to finishing the mixes on these until now.

So, here they are, two new, fully collaborative tunes, the first of which, “Freeway” (featured at the end of our Pirsig episode) was initiated based on Steve’s frustration in driving through the Chicago area to get to me. That one was very much he-wrote-a-line, I-wrote-a-line, whereas our second tune “Stories,” initiated when Steve came up with a piano riff, was more of an I-wrote-a-whole-verse, then he-wrote-a-verse affair. As with all of our collaborations, though ideas came from both of us, the on-the-spot quality control was more important: we had to both like every line, every riff, every idea, though we were pretty relaxed about it, really; no fighting went into these. The second tune, “Stories,” I initiated as a sort of drunken lament, but he turned it all hopeful.

Though we’re satisfied with the results, we pretty much just ran out of time in actually recording these, so the final bits of “Freeway,” i.e. the percussion and harmonica at the end, were just me putting something on to fill it out while Steve started to nod off. I did most of the engineering, including solving the “how do we get piano on the recording when all the equipment is in the basement and the piano is in the living room” problem that generally prevents me from putting piano on anything. I played rhythm guitar and bass, while he played drums and lead guitar (sans amp: I used an amp simulator after his departure to make them not sound so stark), and of course we both sang. A very fun, sentimental kind of experience that I hope to repeat this summer.

Listen to a few more post-MayTrick Mark Lint and Stevie P. collaborations.

If you like these songs, consider donating a few dollars to encourage our further efforts.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Probably my first experience with hardcore atheism was hanging out with Cliff Kaminsky, who played with my college band The MayTricks for about a year from fall ’93 to its end in August ’94. We auditioned Cliff a year or two earlier, and he played us a demo of this song, “False Morality.” Given that Steve our drummer was Christian and kind of touchy about it, we didn’t end up jamming with him further at that point, but with a few more lineup changes, his continued presence in town and level of talent (lead quality vocalist, keyboardist, guitarist, etc.) led us to sign him on, and though the band was already pretty full of songwriters, he was a great addition and great friend, and we ended up adding that very song that turned Steve off to our live set.

This recording, then, was released on our third (and double) album, “Happy Songs Will Bring You Down” (which I expect to have available on the web in full soon… all 35 songs of it), and features basic instrumental tracks played live as a full band, with overdubbed lead instruments including a rather off-the-cuff horn section intrusion (with Cliff playing trumpet and our other other guitarist Geoff playing trombone) that I think I was primarily to blame for.

Eventually Cliff moved out to Los Angeles from Ann Arbor, and in 2004 died in a rock climbing accident. I don’t know a lot of folks who have died, let alone in my age group, and he was the first of them, so I’ve since thought of him probably too often when mortal thoughts come up. One thing that really stuck with me was his totally open-ended tastes. I had always prided myself on my eclecticism, but I had my limits: he would listen not only the “cool” stuff I was into, but was into Brazillian top 40 dance tunes and had a John Denver song in his live set. He enjoyed what was on offer without shame. He was an activist (PETA and such) and otherwise served as an exemplar of a life well examined and adventurously lived.

I’ve also posted a solo tune of his, “I See God,” which demonstrates the kind of spiritualism
that does not require belief in the supernatural. To hear more of his work, check out his memorial page, and consider donating a bit to the foundation set up in his name.

-Mark Linsenmayer

This tune owes much in its conception to the old Steve Martin bit “What I Believe,” but I used that rough format to express, back in 2002 when I wrote the bulk of this (calling it “Stalking George Burns”), something about my actual, momentary beliefs (when I’m at worst); or distilling belief down to what appears true only at that moment, i.e. the phenomenological surface of things; or playing with irony.

For the record, here are the lyrics:

Lord, I believe in subtlety and in stating things with strict exactitude and attention to the nuance of how dumb I feel. For instance, don’t say “ouch;” say, “I perceive a tension in my left chest – there. And its proximate cause was when you ripped the hair out, leaving me lopsided and mildly less bushy and spiritually gushy, [and] I’m not sure why you did it though I could list three hundred reasons. Here goes: Number One…”

No! I believe in subtlety. I believe in sounding off at nothing when it really didn’t matter what exactly got me going in the first place. I believe in a few basic truths… None of which I could possibly do justice to now.

Lord, I believe.

Lord, I believe in long hard work… As long as it’s obsessive and completely self-invented and unwelcome. …Like stalking George Burns or writing songs.
I believe in bullshit – if bullshit is funny, which it is!

I believe if you hate enough and vent enough then everyone you meet will just adore you. I believe if I’m loud enough and I’m hoarse enough and I’m foul enough then I will win!

I recall the original version being considerably more wandering and pointless than this, and my wife was not impressed when I played it for her. My band at the time obviously wasn’t going to do the song, so it just sat there until 2010 when this song-a-week (at the time) music blog inspired me to finish it, lay down the guitar/vocal (in one take, on one track, with no click, meaning that the tempo is all over the place) and a bunch of cool background harmonies, and get my old Mark Lint and the Fake drummer Dave Hamilton to record a drum part at his place. …But then that effort slowed down considerably, so that recording sat there until just this month, when I decided to finish it for our existence of God episode. I added a quick bass part, a little acoustic guitar sparkle in the last chorus, and then spent some time with my newfound MIDI abilities to find a decent church organ patch, and here’s the result, which makes me happy.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Two very different but equally unfit-for-regular-public-consumption songs here.

I wrote “Mother’s Day” in September 2007 to send to my mom. She’d been diagnosed with an especially nasty kind of cancer the previous summer, and I’d spent time with her during her surgery and treatment. I was just depressed, and recorded this pretty quickly and sent it to her via the Web. She cried. When I went out to spend time with my father this last May before her funeral, I made some attempt at relearning the song to record a “real” version, but couldn’t easily figure out the chords again. It would have felt weird to play this in any form at the memorial service anyway.

I recorded this in kind of a unique (for me) way: I did one long performance of it with plenty of mistakes, but would just play the parts repeatedly until they were OK, all without stopping the recording. Then I removed the bad bits and put the rest together using a multi-track program, so that different phrases could have different amounts of reverb and things, and then overlaid a few harmonies to make the song move forward better. I’m still not entirely happy with some of the sudden changes in tempo, and overall it’s kind of disjointed, but it adequately expresses what I wanted it to. I don’t find writing for other people as easy as in my youth when it was pretty standard procedure for me to write at my current (or desired) girlfriend pretty much every passing sentiment I felt for her. Now, generally powerful emotion, when it comes (much more rarely), just knocks me cold rather than making me want to write about it. This song comes more out of a grim stability than any sort of overflowing sentiment.

On the flip side, “Poppo!” was a group composition between me and my kids (OK, I wrote most of it, but they fed me ideas and, along with my wife who I got to sing one phrase in the background which appears in most of the choruses, they had veto power over what I came up with). We presented this recording to my father (a well-known South Carolina storyteller and children’s singer) for his 80th birthday on 8/27/11, and he was very touched. It’s pretty fun.

To record it, I laid down the guitar and sang the whole thing, then had my 8-year-old daughter Mina sing the whole thing. Now, she took some voice lessons this summer (from her piano teacher; she’s been taking piano since a bit before she was 5), and also was in Girls Rock Camp this summer, so she’d been introduced to singing in a studio and was really a trooper with my making her do certain parts repeatedly. Then I had my 11-year-old son Abe sing the whole thing too. Now, when choosing what key to actually record the song in (i.e. where to put the capo on my guitar), I had Mina present, so it was nicely in her vocal range, but Abe was elsewhere, so what I ended up choosing ended up being amusingly either low or high for him, so he’s singing in a sort of rattly bass voice for him, i.e. in the same octave that I’m singing.

Mina then recorded a keyboard part that she made up herself (she didn’t want me to tell her the chords; she just did this single note thing). Abe then recorded the bass (which he’s never taken lessons on, though he took a year of guitar and so knows the notes; I tried to teach him a bit of bass this summer, though). In both cases, I corrected some rhythmic imprecision using studio magic and copied whole verses so they only had to play these parts for a few seconds rather than for the whole song. As an extremely side note, I finally figured out (having just gotten a new recording interface which should result in improved sound on my newest podcast recordings… i.e. episode 44, which won’t be posted for a while) how to use MIDI, which means I can use much better keyboard sounds now than my crummy 1980s Casio keyboard can produce. The part Mina plays through the whole song is one of the Casio presets (with plenty of effect added), but during the bridge, you may hear some high choir/string sounds filling out the sound sweetly; that’s my first recorded use of PC-based MIDI ever. This whole experience has whetted my appetite for further exploiting my kids’ musical talents and producing recordings that they can blush at when they’re adults.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Thanks to Lee for his donation to support our podcast. I encourage you all to look here and read about his struggle with ALS, his candidacy for president (here’s his platform), and his musical career. I know he’d love to hear any nice things you have to say about his music, so don’t be shy in contacting him through his site or commenting here.

Lee used to play bass with my band The Fake Johnson Trio back in Austin from the summer of ’95 through the summer of ’96, and we’ve been in periodic e-contact since then. As I haven’t gotten a chance to collaborate with him since he started writing music in the wake of his illness (he’s got very limited mobility at this point and can’t speak), I took this opportunity to throw together a quick ““Shalom”/”Nipple Song” 2011 Mashup” using some goofy tunes I recorded back in 1991 (part of a collection of “Spoo” songs that will likely be explained in some future post).

-Mark Linsenmayer

When reading Schleiermacher, I was reminded of my friend Steve Petrinko, who was my main cohort in my college band The MayTricks (previously covered in a number of music blog posts). Working in close proximity like that at that time of life (we were also apartment-mates for a couple of years) meant lots of philosophy discussions, and being young and opinionated, we clashed on a number of things, one of which was religion. He’s Russian Orthodox, which like Judaism focuses a bit more on practice and tradition than on believing weird things, but like all Christians he does ultimately get behind articles of faith, and he argued that the appeal of faith was emotional, not intellectual.

Thus this song came to mind, one of Steve’s best, and explicitly religious: it’s a Christmas song, about the fact that Jesus came and can’t really have gone away. However, I didn’t get the religious aspect at all until years after this was written.

Here’s the story of my interaction with this. After I left Ann Arbor in fall 1994 to go to grad school in Austin, Steve found a new bass player (better than me!) and kept our old band going under the new name “Fingers,” and this was one of the songs he wrote for that group. When I visited the following summer, I got to hear him and Cliff our rhythm guitarist singing this together in a very tight dual vocal arrangement that impressed the heck out of me, and this is definitely one of the nicest melodies Steve has written. They had started recording an album that summer, recording in an actual studio (plus Steve’s home setup had been upgraded since we finished our last MayTricks album), but by the fall, Fingers had broken up and the album was abandoned.

Some years later, visiting Ann Arbor again, I cajoled Steve into letting me take the lead in getting one of the tunes from this project (not this song) finished up, but the rest of it just sat there, as Steve recorded “Remembrance” and his other songs with all new people in a very different style. In 1999, when it looked vaguely possible that I might move back to Ann Arbor, Steve and I discussed playing together again, and I brought up doing this song as a duo. I did think, though, that the verse lyrics were too opaque: I honestly didn’t know what the song was about, and there were too many syllables, and I thought the winter imagery was trite, so I wrote new lyrics of my own to make it a love song. Steve absolutely hated them: “I’m thinkin’ that you’re my right arm, and if that’s news, then I’ll be damned away. I’m thinkin’ I could keep that harm I keep for you all safely wrapped away.” I also made the chord progression less prickly and wrote a vocal harmony line for the chorus.

Well, I ended up not moving to Ann Arbor (I moved to Madison instead in 2000), so the issue was moot, but when I thought of asking Steve to put this tune on the podcast, we remembered that unfinished Fingers version. Though I was especially looking forward to hearing that dual Steve/Cliff vocal, sadly, Cliff’s singing had never been recorded (and he died in a rock climbing accident in 2004). So, Steve did a mix of the recording as it stood (all instruments recorded, except no guitar solo, and only a lead vocal on there), and I filled in the last gaps (the backing vocal and the solo, which I did on a handbell set I had coincidentally unearthed in my basement just a few days previous), got Steve’s blessing, and that’s what you’re hearing. Given how great those 1995 performances were on this (dig those crazy lead guitar… guitar synth? sounds) and how often this melody goes through my head, I’m extremely happy to have been a part of finishing it.

Madison Lint in Spring 2003

New readers may not remember my 1/2 year music blog, wherein I forced myself to complete, or digitize, or remix or remaster a song from my past every week. The point of that was to get me to finish up a couple of significant album projects, but given that I was shooting for every week, I quickly fell into a pattern of finishing up things I could deal with more quickly, so my Sinking and the Aftermath album (mostly recorded in 2000) and the Madison Lint album (mostly recorded between 2001-2004) remain further along but still unfinished.

Well, here’s another post of this type, and I hope to resume doing them on a periodic, though not weekly, basis. If these posts seem not sufficiently philosophical or too self-indulgent to you, just ignore them.

For our Russell episode, given that I try (usually) to find some thematic connection between the topic and the song I choose to put at the end, this old tune of mine came to mind. It was written in around 1994 as a droning, driving mood piece for my solo guitar banging, with many less words than I typically put in a song, and more cryptic than usual. It’s about a relationship that I was by then several months out of (and which wasn’t very long anyway), about our love/hate dynamic. Here, because they’re so short, are the lyrics in total:

Do you trust me? Or do you hate me? Though you mock me, you still date me, and you know why…
One forward, two backward, said (sweet) absurd, say that word.
You’ve got fourteen, let seven go.
I think that finally you understand me, so you can truly be set against me. Tight against me.

What’s the “why” to know? Physical need. What’s “the word.” The word is love, of course, as the Beatles have likely taught you. I like the idea in the second verse that typically as you get to know someone, you become more sympathetic, but in this case, getting to know the real me meant that she increasingly disliked me. So these are all the lyrics for 5 and 1/2 minutes of song; the emotion becomes too powerful for words for the last and greater part of the song, I suppose. Whatever.

Musically, the long vaguely Eastern epic thing is a direct result of my love during college of XTC, who ended a few of their albums with things of this ilk (Here’s another example.)

This song wasn’t appropriate for the band I formed in 1995 (The Fake Johnson Trio), so it wasn’t introduced for live performance until very late in the arc of the band after that (Mark Lint and the Fake), who never really figured the tune out, so I reintroduced this for the second lineup of Madison Lint in late 2002 after we’d gotten our new fretless bass player Tom Broeske, who was ridiculously good (he’d appeared on Letterman with some band, I believe, and was previously in some band that actually paid him to come to practices). The instruments were recorded live (this has been my usual method of recording for some time) in December 2002 with the intention to eventually polish it up and add vocals and probably new lead guitar parts. At the time, though, I had a horrific day job that pretty much sapped all of my energy, so from that recording session, one tune (“Stop,” which was on our first Kant episode) actually got finished to use for demo purposes, and the other two just sat there.

More or less the day before this Russell episode posted, I recorded the lead vocals, invented some subtle backing vocal and and percussion parts, and made some attempt to straighten out some of the rhythmic deficiencies. (This is a prime technique picked up from the studio guy we worked on the New People mixes with: the drummer hits slightly late? Just move the hit a bit earlier.) This left the problem of the guitar solo, which takes up the last 1/3 of the song and I have no doubt we would have redone had the song been moved toward finishing at the time. I could likely bug Jim the guitarist to go record a better one right now (he already came out of retirement to record “Billie Jean” for me), but being impatient, I decided to see what I could do by adding a digital amp simulator to most of it and some heavy delay (echo) to part of it, and fixing up some of the less effective notes.

The version of the solo at the end of the Russell episode still sounds very random and wankity, so I spent another day since then pulling some guitar phrases from an alternate take, fixing up more individual notes, adding an octaver effect over some portions of it, and pulling up the rhythm guitar a lot during that section so that it doesn’t get so overwhelmed by the solo. So I think it’s OK now, going by the standards that I’ve set for myself for finishing these tracks, which are certainly much lower than those I’m putting on our brand new material that we’re actively trying to sell. It’s nice to finally have this tune in a listenable format, it being one of the darkest things I’ve written and performed by one of my most competent and fun bands.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Note the nifty art by Ken Gerber, who did the P.E.L. logo and caricatures.

Are the songs philosophical? Oh, yes, there’s one about Heidegger and one about Schopenhauer and… no, not overtly philosophical, though typically reflective and/or infused with some oblique point. The other two writers are not so much philosophy readers, but very sharp. Some nice pessimistic meditations there.

Hungry for more music? Try here.

-Mark Linsenmayer

This was compiled in late 1992 with recordings recorded over the previous year and a half or so, all after the previous spring 1991 demo. During this time, we lost our keyboardist and never got a replacement, replaced the lead guitarist, gained a rhythm guitarist then replaced him one and a half times (this oddity is not worth explaining). This collection includes the best recordings we’d made to that point, with 8 out of the 16 tunes being essentially solo recordings by me or Steve (and in one case our guitarist Geoff), with in a some cases one other band member playing on it.

So a couple of these songs, notably “Slipped Into Words” and “All Too Familiar” have me playing all of the instruments, including very basic drums. “Green Song” is one where I reclaimed the keyboard from my Backdrop days (well, not the same keyboard, but the same model purchased a few years later) and programmed it over a few months. Another production number, “The Ballad of Taxi Max,” was a simple song penned and sung by our fall 1991-spring 1992 rhythm guitarist Matt Diaz that I took and arranged in foul and crazy ways with marching and TV noises and crazy percussion and tin whistle. “Love Song #1″ was recorded directly after a bad break-up and is embarrassingly naked, maybe one of the only things I’ve recorded that has been known to make grown men weep (if they have a pathetic spirit!). “Waygo” is one of my favorite songs that I’ve written, with me on all instruments except drums, and I like the goofy home-spun background vocals that I had my best friend and my sister sing with me. “I Die Desire” was my signature tune on acoustic guitar, and the very carefully overdubbed arrangement was a breakthrough for us, with our old keyboardist Josh come back to reprise his parts and new lead guitarist Geoff adding some crazy wah-way licks that we figured out together, on-the-spot, measure by measure (through the miracle of punching in, where you just record a bit at a time).

Steve Petrinko the other main songwriter is on the whole better represented by our second album, but he too was exploring mutli-layered solo goodness, with “Happy Songs” and “Oceans,” and his circus-like “I’ll Make More,” which was more of a group effort, is zany and great. “Dance,” another tune reprising Josh, is maybe too over the top for most listeners (though I like it a lot now), and “The Devil’s Candy” has some great, viscous instrumentals to it, but the lyrics (written when he was 17 or so) were garbage, so I rewrote them (I left the last chorus intact; that’s what the whole thing used to sound like), making them much much worse, frankly, so that’s a mixed blessing.

Maybe the best song on the album is a truly group effort: For “Drake’s Song,” our summer 1992-summer 1993 rhythm guitarist Brian Drake just brought in an acoustic guitar chord progression, and the whole band make up parts over it, with me getting to add the lyrics and melody.

On the flip side, the most polarizing track is “I Am the Author,” by our extremely nimble, artistic lead guitarist Geoff Esty. When Geoff joined the band in the summer of ’93, it redefined our sound: he could play very very fast, and usually used a very pointy (i.e. treble-heavy) tone and preferred jazz chords and blistering, out-of-key solos. He was older than the rest of us by maybe 6 years, and out of the 20-something songs we gave him on a cassette before he joined, he said he liked “4 or 5 of them,” so we were a little confused why we wanted to play with us, but he gave us some credibility in both the talent and artsy weirdness departments. Still, we had a periodic battle with him re. the exact direction of the band, as we didn’t really have the patience to practice up real prog rock songs, much as I was a fan of that, and he liked to sing his own songs, which… well… you can listen for yourself. He recorded an album of jazz instrumental guitar during out time with him and been in some trippy groups in various genres since then.

The song was written by Steve and was our most bombastic. It was modeled on The Rolling Stones’s “Steel Wheels” album, meaning it has kind of awkward “Rock! Rock!” lyrics, but it was actually describing a particular situation where Steve’s roommate had a thing for some woman. In some of the verses, Steve and I switch off lyric lines, and we harmonize in a somewhat out of tune manner. There was keyboard playing during this song, but the only thing I can detect is the occasional “ping!” sound on the first beat of a few phrases. This was actually the song that, after the fact, made said keyboardist quit the band, as I think he thought it sounded godawful, but we liked it!

A somewhat more technically correct version, still pretty spastic, was completed for the So Chewy album.

These are actual, multi-track studio recordings done with probably as much care as many of our actual album tracks, recorded as part of a demo to impress frats and fratty clubs and other places we should probably not have been playing as a sort of underground, Beatles White album-inspired somewhat psychedelic band.

This is the same band that recorded the So Chewy album, but before we did that, and probably before the first MayTricks album was completed, though I’m not actually sure about that. They were recorded at earliest summer ’92 and at latest spring ’93.

So, these are songs we really liked, as were most of the many cover tunes we learned to fatten our set list and soften our audiences for the hard-to-listen-to original stuff. We tried to avoid “Brown Eyed Girl” and other frat favorites so as not to be forced to suicide, and increasingly played goofier songs that we thought our audience would still follow like “Stayin’ Alive” and Devo’s “Whip It!” We’d occasionally, and with reservations, play something current (a fill-in guitarist got us to learn Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “All I Want,” which I rather enjoyed despite the cheese factor), but more often dwelled eight years or more in the past. We played them mostly straight so that we wouldn’t have to spend a lot of time figuring them out.

What’s the moral? What’s the point? Did these efforts distract from our creative efforts? Did we feel like sell-outs? Not usually, I think. I enjoyed playing “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Gimme Some Lovin’” and still do spend some time on similar things with my current bands. It was nice that we got to capture these, even if they don’t add much to the world.

Though they were recorded on 4-track, I didn’t try to remix them or even re-EQ them much (I did pull up the highs on Paint It Black), just bounce them from cassette and apply some noise reduction.

While I had always assumed this to be a traditional melody, a quick web search reveals no previous versions, so I hereby claim it. However, I note that “There was a little man, and he had a little can” appeared previously in a prohibition-era song called “No More Booze.”

How does the little man relate to the train? Is he driving the train? No, qua prohibition-era hobo, he is likely getting a free ride, violating not only the law but his own dignity. And what are his possessions? A can. Perhaps he realizes that “man” and “can” rhyme, and possesses the can just for that reason, making himself an art for the ages’ display. The next line gives us a stronger clue: the can was full of worms, which he then puts in a soup. How extreme is man’s degradation, to be forced to subsist on worms! Or is this a life choice? Is he living his life as an art, not only through living a rhyme, but in choosing worms, the replenishers of all life, which by eating corpses and transforming them to arable land themselves symbolize nature’s triumph over death. Is the man, in fact, dining upon his own death?

But the song offers more surprises, as the first of two “punch lines” springs forth (and think of the symbolism even in the term “punch line,” with its recognition of the essential violence involved in humor): it is not the man, but a chicken who ate the worms all up. Surely the man himself is not here being referred to as “the chicken,” that brave soul who would dare to defy society and eat his death, but this an actual chicken, a new and surprising player in our drama, whom the man could then eat, thus expanding the cycle of life to not only eat the eater of death (the worm) but to eat the eater of the eater of death. This master stroke would certainly put the song in the far reaches of greatness, but that is not all. As an ad lib, our prodigy songmeister gives us an extra treat, denying the reality of the whole scenario to say that the chicken does not in fact eat up all the worms but instead “he” (more on this choice of word in a moment) went “boop boop boodily oop.”

With this phrase, we see that all that is truly important transcends traditional language, that the only way to react in the face of madness is with seeming madness, with a defiant acknowledgement of the absurd. This interpretation is confirmed by the singer’s assessment of the song at the end of this recording, which can be clearly understood even though I did not at that time know the word “sucky,” nor had that word even been invented in its current use as of 1975. We create, and once the creation is out there, we denounce, we destroy. Such is the only sensible reaction to our own finitude.

Lastly, who is the “he” that emits such a liturgy, that throws the comic itself upon a canvas for our contemplation? Is it the man? Is it the chicken? Is it the chicken witnessing the man witnessing the worm witnessing creation? No, my friends. It is you, it is me, it is the eternal witness, whether you call it God or Brahman or Shmoomo. It is your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor’s cat, calling you out in your freakish ineptitude towards this thing called life, pulling the absurd before you for you to sniff and sniff and sniff until you need to scream or cry or wet yourself. Boop boop boodily oop indeed, my friends, for here comes the god-forsaken funny train that seals our fate!

I had some little music composition program on my Apple IIe that let me type in notes and play them back to me, and so I mapped out a bunch of variations of this little progression, only the simplest of which actually made it into the song. The introduction was inspired by some music from the movie “Something Wicked This Way Comes” that I’d seen on cable a few times, plus the cheesy wind and laser noises that were built in sounds on Brian’s Casio CZ-5000 (used to much greater effect in our later effort). The guitarist (Pete Catsaros) had never actually played guitar before doing this with us, and didn’t know how to play any chords; he just played the same riffs I played on bass, though not always at the same time, with the keyboard covering the chords. Then the lyrics… god, the lyrics are bad, and sung with a weird, quirky English inflection that can only be the 80s at work in me. I can’t imagine what inspired them other than thinking that the words themselves just sounded cool apart from any consideration of their meaning: “I have the indication it’s not infatuation. It’s a different situation that’s worthy of your station.” My favorite part is where I go “…for all eternity- he-e-e hee hee.” Just unintentionally f’in funny.

We didn’t know any drummers, but were referred to a guy a couple years older than us who was in the marching band (whose name I don’t recall), and he came in and was actually the most competent of the lot of us. He said my song was too monotonous and suggested the alternate chord progression that comes in in the middle of the song, so he gets a co-writing credit, not that he would want it. The song was recorded with instruments live to boom box, with no external mics involved, and then with one tape-to-tape overdub for me to do the singing and Brian and Pete to do some lame backing vocals near the end.

Our impetus here was to record a song to try out for the school variety show. We were not accepted. We met a few times over the rest of that school year to play some songs by The Cars and jam with a few different musicians, like the guitar player (whom I new as an accomplished cellist through orchestra) who dropped to his knees before his amp and wailed away the whole time… very much not our style. At one point, I tried to get the group to learn Billy Joel’s mostly a capella doo-wop song “For the Longest Time” despite the fact that I was the only one in the group who sang. We added my friend Sanj on sax, who could only play parts I wrote out for him (and I didn’t figure out the whole “you have to transpose for sax” thing until a session or two in) and a second keyboardist, but never another drummer. Finally Brian dissolved the thing as simply pathetic, and it didn’t start up until the following fall, when we put together the first group version of “Run Away” to try out for the 1988 variety show. In that case, we were successful.

I’ve previously blogged about this song, which is pretty cheesy, but pleasurable, I think. This version owes a lot to the keyboard programming of the last couple of albums by The Cars (my favorite band at the time). The story of The Backdrop, the band that gave rise to this, can be found here. The important point was that with this band, and the maybe four songs we programmed in this way, I had pretty much total control over orchestration, and in this case, this was the third studio recording I’d made of this with my keyboardist Brian Greenfield, and the fifth recording overall. Previous to this (and after all those four other recordings) we had put together a large group to play this at the school variety show, but for this version, I reasserted control, doing all the nine vocal parts myself and all the guitars except for the guitar solo (played by Mike Goldberg, which solo I complained about at the time as being too much like Chuck Berry and having little to do with the song, but which I like just fine now; I may have been responsible for putting it through my phaser pedal, but I’m not sure). The sax is by one of my best friends Sanj Ghogale, playing a part I wrote out for him.

We had a more elaborate drum machine program that we’d used for earlier versions; this version just leaves in the hi-hat and hand claps and a couple of other things. I think the plan was to have a real drummer overdub the rest of it, but we never got around to it, and I think I thought it was fine as is. Now that I’ve added a mess of noise reduction, it actually makes the piercing drum machine hi-hat sound more like a shaker, so I actually like that.

Some of this was actually recorded on the school’s 8-track reel-to-reel recorder, but then it got bounced to Brian’s new cassette 4-track for the last couple of overdubs. This makes it just about the only recording of mine from before ’91 that doesn’t sound absolutely terrible.

When we played this live (for the variety show in spring ’88; I forget whether we revived it for our one of our few other gigs, at the “gym jam” near the end of ’89 where we played covers by U2, Huey Lewis, R.E.M., etc.), there was some conflict in the band between the whole “Mark is the composer and gets to tell everyone exactly what to do” faction and the fact that I had two guitarists playing very simple parts and a drummer who initially was asked to play along with this drum machine part (later in the process, the drum machine was eliminated, but the synths still used a sequencer, so the drummer had to use headphones with a click track on them; very 80′s!). This taught me a more hands-off approach to arranging that I’ve since used with bands, and given that I don’t typically take 2 years arranging a single song now, I don’t have time for that kind of detail work anyway, but I’ve long wanted to get a real mastery of computer music programming now that it’s so much easier (i.e. software I currently possess but haven’t figured out how to use can do it) and do some really complex arranging. It’ll happen some day.

We (my band New People) recently played a very big show at Madison’s Brat Fest, on the “Quench Gum” stage, which I honored by inadvertently saying “quench” instead of “clench” during two different songs. The stage was huge, the sound was great, and we brought in a laptop to record the sound right from the board and my camcorder was set up in a great spot also next to the soundboard, away from chatty people.

However, we had not managed to get anyone not on stage to help us make sure that these things were working, so the sound didn’t record at all on the laptop, and the video was poorly framed, with our guitarist and drummer very small in the middle of the screen and me entirely off screen.

So, what I’ve posted is not that, but instead a couple of tunes from a show last August, our final outing with our drummer Julian, who by then had gotten mighty tight. On the whole, this was one of our best played shows, though the newer songs are stronger now that we spent time recording them (some rough mixes should be available for my posting w/in a couple of weeks). The video is pretty good quality, with all three of us actually visible and all the parts audible (though the bass is a bit low, at least where I’m listening to it). It was a great venue, but no alcohol, so our turnout (on a Friday night, no less) was pretty poor, and I’ve not bugged them for another show.

I’ve also posted there a great newer one of Matt Ackerman’s called “Lucky” (http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/1/qh3dByWYw9E). I’ll likely upload some more tracks from that show over the next few days; so check back to the channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer.

So, first, a very old (1988) demo called “A Little Feeling.” This is a piano tune, which was and is rare for me, inspired, I think, by Billy Joel’s “All for Leyna.” This is not actually a terrible song for my 17 year old self, and it was briefly added to the first-lineup MayTricks set but not revived after we lost our keyboardist, so this is it, unless I’m motivated enough to record a new version some day, complete with the free-form New Age piano solo in the middle and the echoing Pink Floyd-esque guitar I pictured.

Second, “Pakistan-the Complete Works,” a recording made using a walkman from spring 1991, maybe only a month after the MayTricks demo was recorded, when two of our members didn’t show up for rehearsal, so those of us left (me, Steve Petrinko, and our new rhythm guitarist Matt Diaz) all traded instruments (i.e. to ones we didn’t know how to play too well) and improvised three songs, pretending to be a garage band called Pakistan, which shows you my snobby attitude towards “garage bands” (i.e. many of our peers), whereas I saw us as usually playing intelligent, carefully orchestrated pieces. So this is me, with a hoarse voice, apparently, improvising lyrics that are supposed to be funny and sometimes are, though the whole thing is equally juvenile to “Girl.” Steve in turn adopted a persona of a demented individual named Bucko or Bucky, depending on the song.

There are three “songs” on here, but I saw no reason to break them apart, as the whole 14-minute experience is the thing, man: Baby (Don’t Look at Me), Swishy Boy, and Cram. The second, which I played guitar on, actually sort of sounds like a song, whereas the other two (where I played drums) are just chaos. I will admit that this recording is fairly dear to me, and makes me chuckle. And yes, a security guard did come and make us stop (we were playing in a dorm basement practice room, and there were complaints both about the volume and the foul language).

This was my first collaboration of any sort with Steve Petrinko, whose MayTricks material has appeared in this blog before. I should say that due to its foulness, Steve has been against this ever seeing the light of day, despite his bitchin’ guitar-solo and “bitch”-saying little sampling keyboard that we used. It was also my first, though very knocked off, co-writing effort, and I find it amusing that even for this piece of drivel, I was egotistic enough that I remember very clearly who wrote which lyric lines and felt the need to point that out whenever I would play this for anyone so that the lyrically inferior parts wouldn’t be attributed to me. I will resist doing so now.

If someone wants to post a comment re. the line between humor and misogyny, be my guest. Later, in 1997 or so, I wrote (purely in my head; no tape was stained by this idea that I recall) an Elvis-ripoff song called “Rape My Life,” which has irritatingly never left my memory. The joke of that song was that it was the opposite of euphemistic, meaning that whereas a euphemism expresses something offensive in less offensive terms that might not even be recognized as offensive by innocent parties, this song was making a bland, unoffensive point (about changing ones life for the better) by using over-the-top, needlessly offensive language. One of the verses went like this: “I want to rape my life, want to do it in the eyes; I want to f*#% that skull ’till it’s paralyzed. I want to rape my life. I want to rape my life. I don’t need a gun, I don’t need a knife, I’m the man, I’m the one, I want to rape my life.” (Procedural point: it’s OK to say “fuck” in a blog post, but not when it’s next to the word “skull.”) My wife pretty much cried (not in a good way) when I sang it at her, even with my explanation of the subtle and complex humor involved, so away it went until now. Lucky fucking you.

Some technical crap: This was digitized from cassette with some processing back in 1994. My work on this just now was applying my bitchin’ noise reduction plugin-in to it after bouncing it (along with a dozen other old recordings, some of which showed digital glitches and things) from my decrepit DAT machine, which I purchased in 1993 and looks like this:

It apparently no longer rewinds, so I need to open the little tapes and spool them back by hand (well, with a little screwdriver, actually). Luckily, most of my master mixes (I used this as the mix destination all the way up through 1998.) have already long since been bounced to PC (the DAT is digital storage, so it’s just a matter of transferring the data, though you still have to actually play the tape while hitting “record” on the PC program), but I still have a small shelf of these tapes. I actually keep the DAT machine in my active stereo setup as a pass-through digital-analog converter for listening back to my computer and sometimes for digitizing cassettes; it’s not strictly necessary, but it’s convenient, and it doesn’t require that the machine be able to rewind.

This is probably my single strongest collection of tunes. The recording quality is decent (i.e. digital 8-track, not 4-track cassette like the MayTricks stuff), and we put A LOT of time into the arrangements and mixing, though I of course didn’t have my current computer magic whereby I can fix things out of tune and/or time, so it’s hardly a professional masterpiece. It was also a transitional time for my voice between its nasally, unsupported origins and its current state of relative strength, meaning that people have criticized my singing on this. Still, it’s a dream compared to the older stuff, and the songs are, again, a bit stronger on the whole than what I’ve produced more recently, I think.

“The Fake Johnson Trio” was a band name I came up with because I wanted it to sound like a jazz or folk thing but with an obviously fake name, and actually using the name “Fake” was the most absurd way of doing that. This was my attempt, unlike the MayTricks, to do marketable “alternative” rock, conceived in 1994 or so when grunge was still alive and well. I would deny or at least subvert my sensitive side to put on a manly, jaded air and use big drums and distorted guitar and all that obvious, cliche stuff. This would undoubtedly make me the big bucks.

Well, it still turned out to be a weird niche band, but I like it, and it’s the culmination of the my first three or four years in Austin building up a tight ensemble, though the recording itself was not completed until said band had safely broken up, meaning that I ended up playing the majority of bass parts myself even though that was not my role in this band and we used a few different drummers, only a couple of which I’d played these songs live with, and I dragged in a fleet of singers to do various backing parts so it wouldn’t just be me singing against myself.

Note: Among the many session musicians on this is one Hal Thorsrud, who now teaches ancient philosophy at Agnes Scott college in Georgia.

I think these undoubtedly very talented music school players practiced this once together before coming into my class to try to get through this, and I put them through some mighty indignities including trombone parts written much too low and choreographed coughing. I see I’m going for a Gothic soundtrack kind of thing; I recall my TA telling me afterward, “If you have strings play chord clusters like that, they’ll sound like magic, but horns doing that just sounds like horns playing chord clusters.”

My guesswork regarding chronology is growing slightly firmer, though without actual printed evidence: This and Week 20′s entry I now think came from Fall 1991, with that project being the mid-term and this the final, but then again it could have been Spring 1992.

I’m playing electric bass here, and my roommate Sanj Ghogale (now a doctor in the navy) is playing alto sax. Sanj has been my friend since early high school and played in my high school band The Backdrop, whose small body of work I will eventually post. We recorded this on my 4-track recording, which gave us the advantage of being able to punch in a lot, which means that instead of playing the song all the way through, you just play a phrase (or more) and then stop, then you can punch in and do the next part. This is a totally routine way of doing things in the studio (for parts like backing vocals, anyway; it’s not so easy with, say, drum kit) and really lets you perfect your parts, or even make them up as you’re recording. In this case, I had sheet music written out, so this was merely a matter of us being able to get the recording created without having to practice very much. Still, I guess this is proof that I did start playing bass by reading music in orchestras, and this may have been the last time I ever really had to read a part written out on a staff as a bass player.

Is anyone actually enjoying these pseudo-classical pieces? I’ll admit that while I seem to treasure to the point of fetish even a lot of my old songs that were too crummy to have ever been recorded, I’d totally forgotten about this until I went just now through my tapes, and the same goes for last week’s entry. Listening back to this very loud on headphones, though, I kind of like it.

You may, if you listen to this tune, notice that it is really f’in weird. It uses a text that I believe I chose semi-randomly from a book I owned but had not read; by Googling I see that it was Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1956). The melody jumps all over the place and the rhythm has lots of odd stops in it, so the combined effect is of a mad poetry reading. Well, such were the expectations of what constitutes “serious” music in a music school composition class in the early ’90s (I can’t say whether this has changed since then). If you use regular tonality and rhythm, then you’re doing fake Mozart, like writing a poem where you only quote lines from other poems with minor variations off of them (which describes most rock lyrics, come to think of it). Think of tonality like a language; if you want to say something worth saying, i.e. that hasn’t already been said before many many times, then you have to put things together in different combinations, though you’re still using the same tricks in making it non-random than you would ordinarily: you (well, this is the way I did it, anyway) make things more major to arrive at a resolution, you use rhythms to convey energy level (even if in this case the energy is frantic and whimsical, like paint splashes on an avant garde painting). Unlike the extremes of 12-tone anti-melodic, anti-harmonic, mathematically determined music, this is still supposed to be expressive, though maybe not that fun to listen to.

So, anyway, this is the first time I’ve aired one of my six or seven music school creations (only a couple of which I have recorded; posting hand-written sheet music is probably not as fun for you readers). I’ve hung a lot of my “cred” on this over the years, i.e. that I was a composition minor (unofficially… I took a lot of music school classes), and so I had to actually write notes down and learn some theory and how to write parts for horns and strings and things. Truth be told, my exploration into that whole area was interesting and informative for me, but pretty limited: a matter of four or five courses writing two or three pieces in each, never for more than a few instruments, and I never got to the point where my brain was really connected to the notes on paper, enabling me to just write down melodies in my head without the aid of a piano or conversely to sight read or interpret scores with any particular effectiveness. Since leaving undergrad, I only recall one occasion where I actually used my writing/arranging skills: I got a chance to arrange a simple string quartet part for a song used in my wedding ceremony.

Nonetheless, other people may explain the complexity of their artistic world view through extensive experience with drugs; I had this instead.

Though this is one of the most stylistically derivative things I’ve ever written (if you’re familiar with late 70s Pink Floyd, you’ll get it), it was one of the longest lasting tunes in the MayTricks set list, one they even played a bit (I think) after my departure from Ann Arbor for grad school in Texas (the band changed its name to “Fingers,” got another bass player, and played for another year before they got sick of each other; strangely, I was acting as glue between these strange personalities). Yes, it’s dark, and desperate, and doesn’t have much of a beat to it, and so is really not appropriate for bar/party/dance situations. I still periodically think about making the lyrics less embarrassing, smoothing out the drum part and reintroducing it into the set.

I never particularly liked this demo version because of the general out-of-tuneness between the guitars and in the vocal, some rhythmic problems (which I’ve improved somewhat for this remix), and mostly because our fill-in rhythm guitarist of the day changed my main guitar part (the one that starts off the song) to what you hear here; the part on “So Chewy” is what it’s supposed to sound like. Still, the lead guitar and keys make it a more thorough Pink Floyd rip-off than our later version, which is the spirit of the tune, after all. The weird vocal effect throughout is caused by my singing while we were doing the instruments getting picked up by the drum mics, so you’re essentially hearing me double-tracked throughout. The giant vocal reverb washes that emerge a couple times during the song (e.g. going into the guitar solo) were on the 1991 version, not something I added now.

This is that band’s second album, and the most coherent, in that it presents our live show of the time, built up over the two years previous (instruments were in general recorded live, just as for the MayTricks demo tunes I’ve been posting here, with vocals, guitar solos, and other bits overdubbed; all on 4-track cassette). Many of the tunes had been written years before, some as early as 1987 or 1988 when we were in high school. I quote from the goofy, pretentious liner notes here:

“It’s natural in this country to be raised on cruddy, simplistic, obvious music, and so to start one’s songwriting within that style. It’s also natural to eventually rebel against these basic forms and search for higher ground. But when after doing this, you return to the old songs and have to sing them as yourself today, something sinister happens.”

The liner notes also state that “J.P. Sartre plays inaudible saxophones.”

I should mention that as far as a presentation of my songwriting in particular, this is about my least favorite project, with the album opener “A Call to Attention” (written in the summer of 1992, I believe) striking me (not just now, but not long after it was actually finished) as as particularly ill-conceived. Still, overall, the thing is very energetic and fun, and less lo-fi than you’d expect given the technology we were working with.

My most recommended tracks: “Without” (one of Steve Petrinko’s) is probably my favorite, with his “Wooden, Stone” also a great out-of-tune sloppy acoustic Rolling Stones kind of thing. Of my tunes, “The Like Song” is my favorite (featuring a kazoo solo). “Time” is also probably the best straight ballad I’ve ever written (from back in 1988 or 1989), though this is not the ideal recording of it.

So I want to ask about the futility of art vs. playing what people like, but the subject tires me and the question is, I think, ill-formed. This song was and is a highlight for me, and if it’s derivative, it’s blocked out for me what it might be imitating, and Steve’s hippie lyrics save it (for me) from the cringe-inducement involved in, e.g., the Spin Doctors, whose big album was released the summer after this recording was made. I buy the comedy here (whether it was intentionally comic or not), whereas for the Spin Doctors, I just don’t, but this just points to the fact that it’s hard to enjoy a band if the lead singer strikes you as a douchebag.

This is a song Steve wrote at age 17 about the Tiananmen Square massacre. Now I don’t usually write social protest (Steve doesn’t either), and the earnestness and some awkward bits in the lyrics always rubbed me wrong, but I still liked the darkness of the song and the power of the bridge, and I love the feedback-soaked Pink Floydesque thing that our guitarist Dave Roof did with it. Nonetheless, this was not recorded for any later album, so this is the definitive band recording, such as it is.

Rhythmically, the song is sort of a mess, but I actually did quite a bit of work in that respect, moving around some of the out-of-time drum hits (which are on the same track as the bass and drums) and lining up the keyboard (which was recorded too quietly in the initial live band performance and so was re-recorded on its own track) and the vocals so that they’re in sync. This likely doesn’t mean much to you non-musicians or people who’ve not seen what digital magic is possible nowadays in fixing up multi-track recordings, but trust me, this is a lot better than it was.

So, social protest songs… These struck me as disingenuous (at the time we played this; now my opinion is as always, both liberal and self-contradicting). Art, if honest, expresses personal pain, and unless the tragedy is happening to you, then you’re just faking it, and I’d be pretty sure that someone sitting in a high school classroom in Michigan is not going to have a clue what it’s actually like for protesters getting gunned down under a totalitarian regime. So instead of being about the event, it’s actually about one’s fantasy of the event, which to me seemed a weird thing to have a fantasy about. Discuss! (Note that I did eventually write a social protest song myself, a pretty oblique thing about the Iraq war and the Giuliani-type response to terrorism called “Lock Them Away.” I tried to make it about what actually made me depressed about the whole thing, not pretending to be a soldier a la Billy Joel’s song about Vietnam or something.)

During high school, I fantasized heavily about what a kick-ass band I was going to get going in college given the amount of talent that would undoubtedly be available there. During my freshman year I attempted to get an all-songwriter band going, and the only person who stuck out of that was Steve Petrinko, who became my co-conspirator in forming The MayTricks. The initial line-up of the band came together in our sophomore year and included two freshman, a guitarist named Dave Roof and a keyboardist named Josh Fielstra, both of whom were actually pretty great players. Those guys, along with a 26-year-old named Rich Stapleton who played with us for about a week, played the tunes on this demo, the instruments for which were recorded live to two tracks of a 4-track Tascam cassette portable studio. I recorded all the vocals myself after the fact, though some of the live singing bled through here.

This song in particular I wrote when I was 16 and was the first tune I ever recorded (by myself) and then performed, originally with my high school band The Backdrop. I made five studio recordings of the song in high school (it was one of only about three original songs the Backdrop had), then these two with the MayTricks, and I’ve got an unfinished, hi-fi version mostly recorded from 2006 just to give the thing some closure, which I’ll eventually post. The lyrics are total cheese dip, as is the 50s verse and the 1-4-5 chorus, but I’ve still always liked it, and I think this demo version, despite some rhythmically sloppy and/or out-of-tune parts of it, works overall better than the eventual album version, which featured only Steve and I from the original band, plus Geoff Esty imitating a synth with a weird guitar effect and also playing some classical and Brian Drake on rhythm guitar.

Philosophical thought of the post: To what extent can you enjoy the creative products of your naive youth? I’ll be honest: even though these lyrics are cheesy, they’re much better than anything I’d written earlier, and I could still choke them out without being utterly embarrassed.

I discovered Big Star some time in the year before that, which was an especially depressing/angsty time for me, when I was done with college but hadn’t yet started grad school, and it (Big Star, all 3 CDs of them… the 2005 reunion one is a different fish, though with some of the original charm, and the 1993 live reunion one is kind of a mess) was a kick in the gut for me. The combination of despair and snarkiness continues to inspire to this day, as does their version of the big guitars/nice harmonies model, which somehow they did better than others in the same vein. This gig took place I think soon after I met my wife, and this was a tune I’d play for her and make her cry.

So: death. My best friend from grade school, whom I’d only recently reconnected with after close to 20 years via Facebook and talked to once since then on the phone, died of a massive heart attack this year. One of my favorite artists, here, frustrating though he was with his recent, infrequently released 30-minute albums of mostly covers, has died now in his 60s. Not too far long before starting this podcast, I learned that my grad school advisor, Bob Solomon, had died since last I checked on him. All of my relatives’ pets seem to be dying of late, though my 16-year old chihuahua/dachshund keeps hanging on somehow, increasingly grumpy, deaf, and medicated.

How sad am I supposed to feel? I’m not even sure how sad I do feel. Of course, I feel abstractly very sad for the immediate loved ones of those listed, and bummed that I’ll not have more experiences with these folks, but they weren’t my immediate, current associates whose loss would devastate me. I make it a policy not to invest myself in tragedies that are not mine–Haiti, Katrina, Tsunami, 911–because if you’re going to be sad when something happens like that, you’ll always be sad, and your life will suck. Still, how much grief do we owe people, or does the question even make sense, and asking it just reveal that I’ve become way too disconnected from myself?

One of the tasks of this weekly routine is to digitize old cassettes, and this is a bit of “Mark’s Diary” from 1978-79, so I believe I was in 3rd grade at the time. I’ve edited it so as to keep it from being totally unbearable. Here I lament the current anti-artistic climate pervading current sleepovers and treat you to some musical comedy stylings. The straight man is my dad. I had no idea until listening back to this that apparently my “favorite song” of the time was an elevator music version of “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon and Garfunkel.

Written in late ’98 as my time in philosophy grad school was ending. Even as I entered grad school, I had a fatalistic “Nothing is going to come of this, and I’m just living for the moment doing reading I like and trying to get my band to take off, which won’t happen” attitude, and as I edged towards its endpoint, that became less funny, or maybe more funny, but in a gallows humor kind of way.

So, this tune is about facing that upcoming wall, maybe trying to figure out how to not completely destroy myself on it.

If you’ve listened to the podcast ep. 16, you’ve heard that Seth thinks that it’s boring when musicians interpret songs for you, so I won’t to that, and leave you merely to wonder what it would mean to be “bold enough to bend” and “cold enough to mend” or whether these are just rhyming devices.

This was written back in early 1994 during a period of pretty substantial emotional turmoil, where I still entertained the suicide fantasies of the very young, and this was a song I would play very late at night with my vision shrunk to a point boring through my wall and a harsh night calm set all over me, when it seemed like THIS WAS IT, whatever IT was. Music is nice at capturing one’s visions of personal Armageddon.

I started this particular recording (the only one of this song) in maybe 1997 and decided in 2000 to add it to the Simulacra album via my friend (and philosophy student!) Mark Doroba’s awesome trippy guitars (and drums… double tracked at the beginning for extra clickery by Armando Reyes, who played in my previous guitarist’s new band). I managed to record bass w/in the next year but didn’t get around to doing the singing and mixing it down until now.