It's "SUMMER" here at Mp3 of the Week! So this week and the next (AND THE NEXT??) will be all Summer related!
From Wikipedia: Sumarr, a personification of summer in Norse mythology.
Interesting, huh gang?
So anyway, this is an old demo for a song called "A Summer Song." It was written for my side project Sally, where a female sings the songs, currently female-less at the moment (story of my life!) It's basically about a summer fling that ended, and now everything is bleak and empty! Yay!
Here are lyrics:
Where did every day go? I don't really wanna know. Summer's over and I'm not over you.
I threw out my calendar Cause every single time I check it It's the day after the last, and I can't handle that.
Where did every night go? Where did all of our fights go? Now it's all too quiet, and a cool breeze has transpired.
No more June Goodbye July A black and white August That was us.
This week's mp3 is "Unzip", a sleazy instrumental that I made after meeting this girl back in 2002. I was fairly inexperienced and innocent, and this highly sexual girl kind of seduced me, and it freaked me out a bit, and I felt very much like...well, how the instrumental sounds. Sleazy and kind of gross, kind of "adult", and also kind of awesome/manly/confident. I tried to capture all that in 45 seconds. And then I called it "Unzip", which you should be able to figure out for yourself.
This mp3 also exemplifies something that I hope people are following, which is that although they are short instrumentals, they are pretty much like diary entries. Very specific diary entries.
Hello! It's been singy songs for a few weeks, so let's hear an instrumental!
This is a nice full length ditty called "We Will Take A Trip." I don't have much to say about it that won't sound like self love -- I like the horn section nonsense that keeps interrupting the nice sounding song, which I then reversed for the end. I like the subtle climbing scale bass line, the fake fuzzy electric guitar riff that comes in towards the end, and the general feel of the whole thing. Just a bass drum and hi hat for percussion, which leaves a lot of empty space for other things to happen. Hope you think it's nice.
Jumpin' Jesus the weeks are going by fast! This is freaking me out! I feel like I just posted "Folky Song" yesterday.
This week's song is "Stumped", a live performance from September 3rd, 2004, at the Sidewalk Cafe in NYC. This was a "new songs" show, where I only played...new songs. If we do the math (math is fun!), this places the song about 18 months into my relationship, where the problems were really starting to weigh me down. It's a purposefully minimalist song about not knowing WHAT THE HELL to do when your girlfriend seems mysteriously upset all the time. You blame yourself ("are things that bad?"), you try to distract her ("it's time for a movie, then you won't be sad"), you HATE yourself ("why am I stupid?") and you even get angry at her ("why can't you feel good?") Ultimately, it leaves you very very tired ("we should just got to sleep"), and...stumped.
This was kind of a potentially dangerous song to play at a live show in front of her, but I think she was absent at this particular show. I would have played it anyway. I think it's healthy to confront these things, with honesty and humor. Especially in front of lots of people who clap after you do it!
This week's mp3 is "Folky Song", which is a lame title, because I never thought of a good one for this song since it has no repeating phrases or chorus.
I like this song. It was based on a very specific night. I had seen a guy do songs similar to this, then came home and wrote how I felt all night. Which wasn't too great. I also like the performance in this live demo. Hooray for me! It's slightly underdeveloped, there's a few guitar noodlings and touches that I hadn't though of yet. I'll post a later version some other week! I like the line about "not being vicious." Sometimes you have to be vicious if you want to have a good night.
This week's mp3 is "I'm A Happy Dog", a feel good full length instrumental from 2004. A very obsessively worked out instrumental that took me a million years to record. I went crazy arranging the bass line to fit intricately with the drum part, piano thingies, when the acoustic guitars come in and out, the percussion, everything. I'm pretty damn proud of this. It was a big lesson in learning when to drop instruments in and out, to prevent everything from sounding too cluttered. And of course the lead melody line is my ACCORDION. Say hello!
If you turn it up incredibly loud at the quiet part about 1 full minute in, you can hear that it was raining outside! That may not be true, but I remember it being true. You can also hear that I used my lamp for percussion.
This week's mp3 is dearly special to my dear heart. Me, Matt Koff and Tim Deery got together one day and made up songs on out of tune instruments and taped it with a video camera. I made mp3s from the videotape. We called ourselves "Three Lonely Guys."
This was a song where, as you can hear, we made it up one line at a time. The old Exquisite Corpse game put to music. The song is a bit SILLY WILLY but you won't hear an mp3 anywhere else that has more unrehearsed and genuine joy. There's plenty more where that came from too, many songs are featured on our myspace page, and more will be popping up on this blog!
Hello. This is a small instrumental I made in 2003.
I imagine a judge banging on a gavel, laughing hysterically, so hard that his face is red and he's crying, because something hilarious happened during the trial, and nobody can regain their composure. ORDER IN THE FUNNY COURT! HAHAHA.
Woooo doggy! Here we go. This week's mp3 is a live solo performance of "Back Of Your Mind." This is from January 24th, 2006, at the Sidewalk Cafe in NYC. I quite enjoyed this particular performance.
This is a fun, short, but special song for me. It was based on a time I asked a girl out, she said yes, then brought her boyfriend along on the "date." It was a whole new shade of uncomfortable. So I wrote this song, the idea being that I'm saying how horrible and cruel her boyfriend is when I don't even know the guy, and for her to call me up when he dumps her. One of my many (many many many) lovingly misogynist songs where I care deeply for a girl for the wrong reasons.
THEN SHE DID CALL ME. Over a year later! She called me out of the blue one day, the first thing out of her mouth being "I dumped my boyfriend," and we had a date. It didn't work out, for reasons I won't go into here, but...the song actually worked! I stayed in the back of her mind!
The famous CAT GENIUS performs for you. A hushed auditorium watches as he rubs his paws together, steadies his sheet music, and sits up on his piano stool. His tail whipping and bending with each note.
