Here’s another, earlier music composition class piece of weirdness: “Argument Leading to Death.” I’m thinking now that my week 19 entry was likely from the early spring of 1993, while this one was from late fall of 1992 in the previous semester’s class. I think I decided it would require less effort this time around if for the class performance I just brought in a tape of something I’d put down at home, and this was it.

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.

This week I’ve dived into digitizing old cassette tapes and waded through a couple of unlistenable options before coming across this thing that you might find interesting. “What happens in music composition class stays in music composition class,” goes the old saying, but I’m letting out some of the hell: a song called “Patriotism,” composed in (I think) 1992 and performed in class with me singing (my TA advised me afterwards that I should really use a real singer for these things) and a classmate named Jeanne (whose name I didn’t know the correct pronunciation to, and so never called her anything) playing piano.

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.

…Almost done polishing the turd that is this old demo. Here’s a Pink Floyd-y song of mine called “To Valerie,” written for a girl by that name in my second month or so of college (fall of ’89). I believe it was elicited when I went to knock on her dorm room and a male voice said “Go away!” so I went and recorded a demo of this by myself and delivered the tape to her room then and there, presumably with the guy (who was presumably her older boyfriend from before she started school, whom she would soon break up with, not that that helped my chances) still in there making out with her. Just pathetic.

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 week I give you an entire album from my murky past: “So Chewy” by the MayTricks (no, that movie had not come out when this band existed, so that name isn’t as awful as it seems, though it’s not so good, I think; any band name you have to spell for people is bad news). It was recorded in the summer of 1993, just after most of us had graduated college.

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.

Yes, another song not written by me, from the same 1991 demo as the last two weeks’ entries: “Wild Flower.” However, I did play this 40 million times and wrote the swell bass line and contributed to the somewhat out-of-tune backing vocals. The performance is actually pretty darn good, and the recording was only left off of the eventual album because we preferred to show off the later line-up instead. This song (also written by Steve Petrinko when he was in high school) was our crowd pleaser and set opener, and everyone got to do a solo (well, I don’t solo in this version, but there’s a bass solo on the album version that’s also linked there). Simple, fun, happy, cheesy. So why not just play this kind of stuff all the time and get many more frat party gigs? Not our ideology, I guess.

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.

Here’s “Wasted Youth,” a song by Steve Petrinko, also (like week 14) from the MayTricks 1991 EP, which I’m retroactively calling the “Happy Flowers EP,” as “Happy Flowers” was to be the name of the album that we started recording with this lineup shortly after making this demo (at least according to my decision; I don’t know that the band had agreed upon this).

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.)

One of my heretofore unmentioned projects for this blog is digitizing and mixing the original, 1991 5-song demo from my college band The MayTricks, so here’s the first tune: “Run Away.” I’ve also posted an mp3 of the eventual 1993 album version of the tune for comparison. I like the demo better, I think, though the album version has its charms.

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.

Not music, this time, but music commentary (sort of), a philosophy of music, if you will: “On Music Appreciation.”

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.

Another for the same album: “Not Too Late.” I added the vocals, acoustic, bass, percussion, and the big distorted background guitar all in the last couple of days, after not working on this since 2000.

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.

Another tune destined for the Mark Lint & the Simulacra album: “Night Before the End.”

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.

This week I mixed a demo from a failed 2000 collaboration: “Mush.”

One of the first musicians I met in Madison upon arriving in 2000 was Ken Labarre. “Mush” was a song he wrote for his previous band, and it rips on people who bare their feelings on daytime talk shows (not the kind of topic I typically write about, but if it’s good enough for Peter Gabriel, it should be OK with me).

I wasn’t fond of the lyrics (the previous chorus lyrics were: “Have I told you that I think you’re crazy; bag of bones hanging with your daisy; you talk so darn proud of the hurting inside; it’s MUSH.”), so I rewrote them and tweaked the melody to come up with this demo. Ken said he thought I captured the original intent well, but his wife Mel was supposed to actually sing it in the new band we were trying to form, and she didn’t like the faux tough stance (despite my already softening the word “shit” in the choruses to “bit”), so the two of them rewrote the lyrics again, in a way that I thought made it worse, so she quit the band, which led to the whole project getting scrapped. I started Madison Lint, and Ken (who for some reason likes being called “The Jammy Bastard” now) started a great band called Tangy, which apparently recorded part of some version of this, though I don’t know if any of the ideas I contributed were retained.

Despite this acrimony, and the apparent hurriedness of the demo (my guitar is out of tune, and this was recorded on my Tascam 4-track, which is what I HAD to record on prior to 1996 but at this point only used when too lazy to set up the more elaborate digital equipment), this song has been going in my head periodically since November when I digitized the original audio tracks (which had degraded quite a bit), so I used this as a test of my ability to make crappy tracks sound OK through heavy use of digital processing and effects. It’s a nice song, and it would have been nice to hear a full band version.

So, my question: Do lyrics matter? My biggest barrier in this and other cases to working with other songwriters is that I don’t like their lyrics. Most people write in clichés, or to be less harsh about it, they don’t write in a way that would feel natural coming out of my mouth, and this embarrasses me, despite the fact that listeners, especially in a live situation, just don’t care. Ideally, I like bands like Roger Waters’s Pink Floyd where the lyrics have a definite and consistent narrative viewpoint that goes across all the tunes, but at the very least, the different songwriters have to have compatible styles.

My chief means of songwriting collaboration in the past has, then, been my “fixing” other people’s lyrics, sometimes to their satisfaction, sometimes not. Collaborative lyric writing can be great, but should be argumentative, I think, to polish each and every line into something better than each participant could come up with on his own, and the respect and deference that you typically want to offer to someone else’s ideas when you’re working with them usually precludes this.

I think I’m less of an arrogant bastard re. this issue now, but that’s probably just because the other songwriters I currently work with usually don’t set me off, though there was a bit of the second verse to one of the songs we recorded on our last album that I asked Matt again and again and again to fix, and he just couldn’t think of anything better and didn’t like my suggestion… bah!

The first newly completed song from the “Madison Lint” album: “Cold.”

I’ve been singing this a lot to myself as I walk around this horribly frozen wasteland that is Wisconsin and thinking about when I wrote the words to this while wandering around the building of my crappy office job back in early 2001, when both the job and the city were new to me after leaving Austin.

Some bits of the music were born a few months earlier when I had a “professional” songwriter I’d just met come over and try to write some music with me. Now, I don’t actually work that well with other songwriters as a rule, though I appreciate having someone in the room forcing me to come up with ideas and not run off to watch TV or something. So I came up with most of the melody, and the other dude tried to wedge in some ideas that didn’t fit, and he got disgusted with the tune and said it wasn’t good enough to submit to his publisher in Nashville. I proceeded to expunge his contribution, simplify the chord progression into a Nirvana-esque soft then loud thing, and write all new lyrics. I’m still waiting to be sued regardless, as the dude seemed litigious.

The song became a staple for Madison Lint, the band I formed soon after, and was recorded for our initial demo in the fall of 2001. Several lineups later, we recorded this version in March 2004 for our full album project, which I then proceeded to abandon when the band fell apart a few months later. I don’t think I’d actually listened to this take between recording it and late 2009, when my crime was revealed: I had a pretty damn great recording of a sickly good band that I had not been responsible enough to finish up.

…But I knew that already, and the point of this blog is to address that sin among others.

You may notice that after about minute 3.5 when the singing is all done, the song keeps going and going, wanking about a la the Grateful Dead, repeating the same two chords as first the keyboard, then the lead guitar take solos, then the lead guitar keeps going while the drums get silly, then my acoustic guitar just won’t shut up, bringing the thing to over 8 minutes. This is not a feat I intend to repeat, and the tune may get edited down in the final reckoning, but trying to shove my style into a jam greater than I myself could personally manage as a solo performer was sort of the point of that band, and the groove is all right, so who am I to knock it?

It was my belief in forming my first bands (in the late 80s) that improvisation can never be as good as something thought out beforehand, but many years listening to jazz has convinced me otherwise. I do not believe that one’s soul magically emerges from one’s body to squirt around in a shower of glory during such a procedure, but the thing certainly did seem to gain its own momentum, and I felt excessive but gleeful about it at the time.

Here’s another new recording: “Ann(e).”

It’s a pretty old song, written I think late in 1991, back when I was in a psychedlic band called The MayTricks, and though the recording is entirely new (OK, I started the click track and the acoustic guitar back in 2000, i.e. this is another tune destined for the “Cheese Stands Alone” album), the ethic and even the recording technique are MayTricks, with my co-frontman from that period, Steve Petrinko, chiming in on drums and the heavy distortion guitar part. I experimented a bit on this, bringing back my cheesy 80s keyboard that hasn’t been operational in a while and recording my first electric guitar part in a long time, and some of the psychedelic effects plugins–on the vocals at the end and on Steve’s guitar and the keys–are new to me.

What is the song about and why does its title have parentheses in it? Well, this was about finding yourself attracted to multiple people of the same physical type, possibly the same type as your ex. The lyrics exaggerate the situation a lot from there. The verses somewhat embarrassingly play up the verbal similarity of various rhyming names (putting the “Ann” or “Anne” in “Dianne” as if this implied that one woman can stand in for another), and the chorus betrays the fact that I’d been reading too much philosophy:

Dim sentimental monism or an unhealthy grieving for the long gone
Or a mean, shallow way to use people or a fine strategy to move on
Or a general desire to capture the moment or a desperate attempt to feel secure
Or a vicious betrayal of the others and the self
Or religious sublimation, I’m just not sure

So there’s that. I’d put off recording this for so long because I wanted it to be BIG and didn’t really know how to do that, and I’m not sure I entirely succeeded here, but it was pretty fun trying, and certainly great to work (at a distance) with Steve again, who I’ll hopefully drag in for more of these new recordings.

More video this week: http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/1/u3nNXdV8tbQ.

The linked song is one of two I’ve just put up there from a 1997 gig by The Fake Johnson Trio. This was the very last gig for that band, and one of the few played as an actual trio: I switched to bass for a couple of shows for that incarnation. The song is “Retrogress,” a cheery tune with lots of little arrangement nuances to screw up the band. It’s about not letting yourself get pulled back into moldy old modes of feeling.

Also now on my channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer) are songs by two different line-ups of Madison Lint.

Both of those bands (FJT and Madison Lint) had a good deal of turnover, which brings me to my topic: how much ownership do you have to have for an artistic project for it to feel fulfilling? From a young age, I was always someone who had to either lead the game, or I wouldn’t play. So though I’ve flirted with being “just a sideman” in bands, it would never stick: I like playing my own songs. I do enjoy my current situation as co-frontman, though; I am able to feel good about filling out my fellow New Peoplers’ songs, so long as that isn’t my only role.

So I’ve fundamentally never understood the sidemen I’ve played with. Why are you here? Why would you put up with being in your situation for very long? Well, they don’t. For some (drummers, mostly), playing in a band is like doing a sport, like intramural soccer or something. Few would SUFFER for a commitment like that in the way that is routinely required to play in a band (i.e. driving a lot, hanging around dingy clubs with bad sound, small crowds, long hours in the studio). Clearly, these guys were doing me a favor, and in return, I, the leader, was obliged to set up situations for them to enjoy themselves, which usually involved getting lots of good shows, which I was–through ineptitude or lack of patience or simply facing tough odds–seldom able to do, so of course these awesome musicians would wise up and move on for the hope of something more stable and rewarding.

…And, like a VH-1 Behind the Music special, I’m supposed to say now that that’s all behind me, and I’m in a good place, playing with people who do not see themselves as sidemen and so will not quit. So that’s what I’m saying. All is right with the world… for the moment.

As January draws to a close, I made good on my determination to upload some more gig video, with a couple of songs from 1/16/10 New People show from the Alchemy Cafe. The song of the two by me currently visible (though I hope to have more up shortly) is at http://www.youtube.com/user/MLinsenmayer#p/a/u/1/_-9pPUESKN4, and from that URL you should be able to see the other I just uploaded (a tune by my cohort Matt Ackerman) and a few earlier posts (be sure to check out the “Love Is the Problem” video if you’ve not already).

The song in question is “Little Mina,” written mostly in 2003 when my daughter was a mewling shrieking biting baby, so the “Don’t bite me” is not a metaphor, or not merely a metaphor. The song morphed into something about trying to impart wisdom to your kids and how none of the really important stuff can be put into words.

But, I realize that the sound on the video is low quality and you likely can’t understand the words anyway, so let me rant instead about the absurdity of gigging.

A great concert in my experience as a spectator, for a band playing original music, is one where I already know most of the songs in advance, and where I can show up and clearly see and hear the band playing these tunes, with more excitement and spontaneity than what’s on the album, sitting with other people who also love the music.

As a performer, this rarely happens, first because venues usually either have a crummy sound system where you can’t make out the lyrics, or they crank it so loud that it’s unpleasant to be there (and you still can’t make out the lyrics). More importantly, the only people in the audience who know the songs will be friends that I or other band members have personally indoctrinated. Bar owners have long understood this: going to a friend’s show is like going to your kid’s school concert; you MIGHT enjoy it, but mostly you’re there to provide support to someone you know.

So, despite the fact that I’m supposed to be entertaining, i.e. providing a service, audience members are generally doing me a favor by being there, supporting my selfish desire to perform and my empty hopes of “making it.” Club owners recognize this, and typically see letting bands play there as an opportunity to have their dead nights filled with musicians’ beer-buying friends. Some clubs seem to go out of their way to ensure that no one that you didn’t personally bring to the show will possibly see you, and that the only way you can play in a time slot where people you didn’t invite might show up is if you can prove that you can bring in 100+ people in on, say, a Tuesday night at 7pm (or 2am) all on your own. It’s a sucker’s game.

As an adult, I’ve for the most part tried to avoid these situations and accepted the fact that the best I can do is to provide a pleasant place for those friends who come to indulge us a nice place to hang out and a convenient time slot, which means playing out less frequently (very few friends want to come to one of your shows every month) at places with no built-in crowd, but who will give us shows on Saturday nights, have decent enough facilities where we can make sure that the sound quality/volume is tolerable, and who don’t particularly care how many people we bring in. It’s like putting on a piano recital, except louder, usually with booze (though in Austin a couple of coffee houses became our preferred venues after a while).

The venue pictured in the video is a slight step up, in that it has a built-in crowd and (for our last show anyway) the sound quality was not TOTAL mush, and we seem able to play multiple Saturday nights there (this was our second show there in three months), so there is hope that with perseverance and an accessible show, one can incrementally move forward toward the Platonic ideal gig. …Or maybe I’m still just a sucker.

This week’s entry is an entirely new recording: “Came Round.” On one or two days in the summer of ’99 I wrote and recorded maybe five song fragments with nonsense lyrics that featured dual-vocals throughout the whole thing a la the Byrds. I was contemplating starting a folk duo that would feature collaborative songwriting and wanted to have some material that was purposely unfinished, with lyrics I had every intention of changing, so that the collaborative process could then polish them into songs. Well, of course I never ended up doing the folk duo, and my collaborative attempts in the future never made use of these. Still, I found the process of writing music with carelessly terrible lyrics and no obligation to finish developing the song idea very liberating and easy.

The first song from that batch proved to be something that really stuck in my head, with its bad lyrics intact: “You came ’round; I saw your shoes. You came ’round, and I felt used. You came ’round; I smelled your breath. You came ’round, I felt my death.” Well, at least those are a little cute, but the lyrics I had over the chorus were much worse, rhyming “crossing” with “lossing.”

Fast forward to the present, when the song has become one of the first things I play on my acoustic as a fun finger-picking exercise. How could I turn this cliche fragment with goofy lyrics into a full song? I determined while playing through it a couple of weeks ago that it should have a loud part in the middle starting on a G chord, but that’s as far as I got. Well, in the day before recording this, I wrote the bridge lyrics, wrote another couple of verse lines, decided to have the choruses be just instrumental, and, finally, figured out something to play under the loud part, which I’d originally envisioned as less repetitive chord-wise, but just kind of fell into being what it now is.

…and this brings me to my topic, which is related to last week’s: manufactured inspiration. Since completing this last week, I’ve gotten some comments that this is one of the best things I’ve come up with, that the intense part in the middle is especially rousing, which (quoting one friend of mine) “probably had something to do with the time I wrote it.” But here’s the thing: there’s nothing personal going on with me right now (i.e. when I wrote that part), or in 1999 for that matter, that justifies the level of passion I put in there. The lyrics draw on a couple of sentiments exaggerated from those I’ve either had in the past or have imagined someone else having, and I definitely was looking to recapture some of the magic of my last full acoustic album, “Spanish Armada,” recorded back in 1993 when I was young and angst-filled in the throes of unrequited love and loss and all. …But I’m not really feeling any of that now; instead, this was just fun and cathartic.

This is perhaps not such a great discovery. When an author puts drama in a book, or even more telling, when a filmmaker goes through the painstaking process of getting some emotional moment up on the screen, it’s not as if he or she is, through the many grueling hours required to do that, all choked with emotion about some personal tragedy. It’s imagined, and then manufactured and dressed up to get the imagined emotion out there, but with songwriting, we expect people to be writing passionately about their personal experiences, which in turn leads to the feeling that as an older person in a settled relationship and a generally happy situation, I should have nothing much interesting to write about, and for sure, my output and slowed tremendously now that I don’t need so much songwriting as therapy. So, unless I just want to be writing music as humor or social commentary or expression of the inevitable vague dissatisfaction that comes with living, then I have to make stuff up, but based on this song, at least, that seems to be a viable strategy, the “truth” of the matter be damned.

This week I’ve finished another tune from the same project as “Write Me Off,” namely “Once in a Great While,” which was originally called “Therapy Song #141.”

The song is one of several I’ve written about inspiration and its masochistic character. What I want from moment to moment is a feeling of warmth, of involvement. When I finish a great movie or book or come back from a great concert, “real life” feels naked and cold by comparison, and you want to fill it. When you’re at peace, there’s no reason to write a song.

I’m overgeneralizing, of course. You can be inspired by another work, like I’ve on occasion written some songs (lyrics, at least, and maybe the rhythm of the melody) basically while listening to another existing song over and over, so that what I come up with is essentially a child of whatever it is I’m listening to, even if no one else would notice that listening to the two back to back.

But I don’t want to talk about inspiration and its many varieties here, but only the kind where you’re amped up with emptiness, probably late at night when all around is quiet, maybe walking the dog, which is in fact how I’m pretty sure I came up with this tune, walking around my neighborhood in Austin on a warm evening in 1999. While the emptiness is vertiginous, it’s also exhilarating, and is probably the kind of productive sort of suffering that Nietzsche was always on about.

Like the previous tune, drums and electric guitars were recorded back in 2000, and I put down the bass that summer, I think, shortly after moving to Austin. I was surprised that Mark Doroba the guitarist, who recorded all of his parts on his own at his house onto my recording equipment, had not really recorded a lead guitar part on this one, and I pictured getting some really good classical player to do it. Instead, of course, I, just now, ended up doing it myself, which involved a lot of punching in and overdubbing, as it inevitably does when I play lead. I also recorded all the vocals just now, mostly very quickly, though I was somewhat lost for a bit as to how the whole key change near the beginning was supposed to work (I’m not sure what made me do that originally and likely wouldn’t have included that now.) I’m pretty sure that there was supposed to be more of an instrumental break instead of quite so many repeats of the choruses, but I’m pretty satisfied with how it sits now.

This week’s newly finished recording is “Write Me Off.”

This is part of the “Sinking and the Aftermath” project; the story of my utter irresponsibility in not finishing these songs (from 1999-2000) earlier is told here.

This is one of my favorite songs of those I’ve written, and it’s gone around my head quite regularly in the 10 years since I wrote and partially recorded it. Why did I not finish it? Why is this blog even necessary? Well, perfectionism, for one. It’s easy to find excuses not to finish things when, in this case, you envision a full choir singing the goofy “ba-ba-ba-bah” backing vocals. I also only recently got a steel-stringed acoustic guitar in my house this year (and still don’t have a really adequate electric setup, though I’ll try to overcome that for one of the next weeks), and my classical just wouldn’t cut it on this one.

The other reason is also the main theme of the song, i.e. frustration with the absolute (or, OK, relative) indifference of any substantial number of people to whether any of my music gets made or not. Like most of my songs, the lyrics to this express some momentary, extreme sentiment that I captured and wrote down in all its snarly, pathetic glory. And yet, one of the reasons it’s been so resonant with me is the number of times when something like that sentiment recurs. Just like there’s a canon of philosophers and I feel like people look for any excuse with a newly heard-of figure to disregard that person so that they don’t have to expend the energy learning about him, the same thing goes on in popular music, and even I am no exception to this celebrity culture mindset.

What remains when you try to get past insecurity about the quality of your creative output is first, pleasing yourself, which is great and necessary, but doesn’t necessarily consistently motivate the great effort required to have a constant creative stream running over the majority of your life, and second, sharing with others: The immediate impetus for this song was discovering that a CD (that I’d worked my ass off to create) that I’d given to someone who I know was into music and whose approval I apparently sought had been sitting in his drawer unlistened to for like a year after I gave it to him.

Ultimately, the song is about whether you care what other people think of you or not, and as independent and self-assured as you’d like to see yourself as, it’s still pretty galling to be written off in the face of your best efforts. So there you go.

Per my immediately previous post, feel free to download and listen to the song “Space;” it’ll be at the very top of the visible window when you click here. Then come back here and read this post. (I’m not linking directly from these posts to the audio files to avoid their being sent out as part of the Partially Examined Life podcast feed.)

This song was written in 1997 or 1998 smack in the heart of my Texas grad school tenure. That’s what the reference to “Every day I get up about three hours late” is about; I tended to sleep until 11am in those days.

This is a song that seemed too sappy, simple, and uncool to do with any of my subsequent bands, and it in fact was the proximate cause to one of my band mates not wanting to work with me any more (he’d already quit the band earlier but was considering jumping back in to help us finish recording the album), with the sentiment “all Mark writes any more are goofy songs for Kim” (i.e. my girlfriend, now wife of over a decade).

Still, it stuck in my head, and was on the list of songs to record for an aborted solo album “The Cheese Stands Alone,” and I had the first drummer I played with upon moving to Madison in 2000 play this part against a guide guitar. The tape then sat and sat and sat along with the many other tapes that are the reason I needed to start writing this blog, but is something I have commonly played when screwing around on my acoustic guitar and whose lyrics I had almost entirely memorized without intending to, so it’s good to hear it now “done,” though I suppose it could still use a plunky lead guitar part to round it out if I end up sprucing this up for the revival of the “Cheese” album.

What is it about? Well, it’s a love song to someone who isn’t there, whether at the moment, or at all is left unclear. Maybe she’s dead. Maybe she left him (i.e. the narrator, who is not exactly me though has stolen my sentiments, as per my normal technique). Maybe she’s just at work while he lies around the house not working on his dissertation? What’s clear is that the environment is imbued with her, and that’s a good thing.