Steve and George

This week’s song, “Steve and George“, has been running through my head for months now, and while this version is probably not definitive, it at least gets the song out in some form. I initially perceived it as a grand, hyper-produced affair, but due to time limitations, it became what we in the biz call a “pocket epic.” As Lou Reed once said, “Between thought and expression, there lies a lifetime.”

Lyrically, we are in classic Gemini territory: a split personality, a set of twins. Who are Steve and George? The song starts out with some praise of an imagined pop group called Steve and George, and then it sketches out the life of one of the group’s fans, a working stiff sucked into a job that’s taken his soul. Every time he gets too deep inside his work (wondering how the dollar went down — lifted from Bowie’s “African Night Flight”), he begins to dream of escape, living his romanticized ideal of the musician’s life (racing back home just to make his own sound). At every turn, he’s too consumed by self-doubt to act on his impulse: he slams on the brakes and turns around. By the end of the song, we’re wondering whether Steve and George even exist outside of the desk jobber’s own feverish imagination.

This song might strike some of you as very proggy, but I really don’t even like prog music. I guess the song does have lots of parts, slammed together with great force. I could see it being maybe twice as long, but then again, there’s something perverse about having each part come and go so quickly. Showcased prominently here is the Mellotron emulator that I got recently (part of the Reason 3.0 extravaganza). I love the tape noise that it makes…. very cool. I’m glad that I waited forever and a day to record this song, because I think it really benefits from the Mellotron.

As Is

This week’s song, “As Is“, is different from the rest.  It’s almost entirely instrumental… yes, I very nearly succeeded in “shutting my stinking trap” for a full tune. Why? Well… first of all, I’ve always had a hard time writing love songs, and as this is one, I trusted my music-making instincts more than my word-making ones.

Another reason is that my MIDI guru, Mr. Ron Warner, taught me the ways of Reason 3.0 this week, and I wanted to experiment with some of the tones, as well as the extent to which the MIDI world allows endless manipulation and “perfecting” of one’s performance. As you might remember from “Hustle Beach”, I had an intial tendency to want to quantize everything. This time around, I tried as best I could to leave human or naturalistic touches in there…. harmony parts that didn’t quite end at the same time, extra notes that got hit on the way to a final destination, etc. I still quantized a lot of stuff too. But the final product breathes better than did “Hustle Beach.”

Where are the musical influences here? I’m not sure, really. I started out at the computer with no real idea… I just sat down and started playing around. I know that that’s standard operating procedure for lots of people, but it’s rare for me. I hear a little bit of bad early-90s jazz-rap production there at the beginning, like Us3 or something like that. Then there’s that low sax stuff, which reminds me of Morphine. And the “chorus” section has some touches that seem Brazilian to me… I have been listening to a lot of that stuff lately, but I don’t know that I could claim to know enough to deliberately Brazilianize a track.

If you can’t decipher all the lyrics, it’s because some of them are in Hindi. Yes, that’s right. My lovely girlfriend is spending most of this month teaching at a primary school in Dharamsala, India, and she left behind a book that’s either called “Learn Hindi Through English” or “Learn Hindi in 30 Days”; I can’t tell. I took a few lyrics from a chapter called “Sentences of Three Words”: “meri bat suno”, which means “Hear my words”, and “ap ko dekhne aya”, which means “I came to see you.” Stay tuned for next week’s post, in which I will use such phrases as “raghu roti khayega” (“Raghu will eat bread”) and “ram mujhe dekho” (“Rama, look at me!”).

One quick shout to our great friends in Iowa City. Baby Teeth had the pleasure of playing there this past weekend, and man do we love that town. We’ve started working one of these blog posts, “I Hope She Won’t Let Me”, into our live set, and there were actually people singing along, just from hearing it on the blog and liking it. That is totally gratifying; thank you so much!

The Organ-Grinder

I really do crack myself up sometimes. I go and start this blog, announcing to all comers that I plan to post a new song every week, while I conveniently forget that, for weeks at a time, I avoid home-recording like the plague, considering it the last way I’d choose to spend my free time. Ah well, fortunately for weeks like this one (and last week… and two weeks before that…), there’s The Vault, from which we draw this week’s selection, “The Organ-Grinder“.

This song is one of the few I’ve written that I’d genuinely consider driven by lyrics. Appropriately enough for a week of creative rut, its first two lines paint a gloomy portrait of self-loathing: “I got an organ that don’t work / A Plain Dealer in my hand.” Take it for what you will, friends…. I was just trying to write about an organist who lives in Cleveland!   Even though, as most of you know, I can never resist the chance for a Borscht Belt one-liner, this song was initially inspired by the tale of Harvey Pekar, as told in the great film American Splendor. Harvey spends his entire life cocooned by the notion that he’s an unappreciated genius, only to find that his discomfort intensifies once the wider world recognizes his talents. He was more content before he’d achieved success. A classic tale of life in the entertainment industry… and one in which I should take heart!

Sonically, I turned to my old pal the Roland JX-8P, a keyboard of 80s vintage that I bought the week that I moved to Chicago in October 2000, and which served me faithfully for three years in Pearly Sweets and the Platonics. It is getting somewhat senile, which makes it only more likely to churn out some genuinely weird and delightful sounds.

Finally, the particularly shrewd among you might recognize the recurrence of my obsession with clowns, also evident in “All That I Can Do”.

The Accomodator

This week’s track, “The Accomodator“, represents another “one from the vault”. It’s actually from last year. I’ve always been intrigued by 80s tracks that are sonically paranoid, even though they might have a banal or sentimental lyric: Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”, or Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night”. Actually, scratch that second one: now I’m watching the video for “Sunglasses at Night,” and it is way more paranoid — both the song and the video — than I remember from my youth. So I guess my point is a little spoiled…. but anyway, I’m shooting for the same kind of synth-string driven paranoid anthem, in which the protagonist finds himself in some kind of quasi-fascist state, either politically or domestically. This is a song that Baby Teeth have messed with but haven’t really come to any decision upon. Kiss it or diss it?

And here’s another question: What do you think of Aimee Mann? We recently got her album “Bachelor No. 2,” and I’m kind of baffled by it… I completely respect the craftsmanship of everything she does, both lyrically and musically, and yet I can’t help feeling like I’m the victim of some L.A. production scam, wherein I’ve been target-marketed as most likely to succumb to certain musical and lyrical tropes. Every chorus is either 4-1-5, or 1-5-4, or some other combination of the digits of the San Francisco area code, and yet it’s so right that I can’t just intellectualize it away. To borrow Aimee’s own phrase, “At least you know / You were taken by a pro.” Indeed.

Hustle Beach

Here are some facts either directly or loosely connected to this week’s song, “Hustle Beach“:

1. Thanks to my pal Ron Warner, this track represents my boldest step yet into the world of MIDI recording, in which you record not sounds, but rather data that you can manipulate to your heart’s content as the days go by.

2. While I like to think that the new system made the rhythm track a little tighter, I fell victim to a common syndrome of MIDI novices: I quantized everything, and as a paradoxical result, things sound probably more rickety than if I’d left them alone.

3. In other technical news, I discovered Half-Speed Recording on ProTools, which enabled me to do the entire song as a duet with a charming and attractive chipmunk.

4. I attempted a perverse merger of a laid-back genre (reggae) and setting (beach) with an extremely uptight subject (my neuroticism surrounding the notion of hard work, work ethic, etc.).

5. The lyrics represent my attempt to write more directly. Every line was scrutinized to make sure that I could understand what it was about. This is how I’d like to write from now on, so any feedback about the lyrics would be extra-appreciated.

6. Like David Foster Wallace’s essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” the lyrics deal with the dark side of resort culture (employees sick of plastered-on smiles, heart-attack victims washing up on the shores of all-inclusive resorts, etc.).

7. The chorus rips off three songs at once. They are, in descending order of theft-size, “Victim of Love” by the Eagles, “Finally I’m Yours” by Andy Pratt, and “Martha My Dear” by the Beatles.

8. Similarly, the background vocal at 2:53 is lifted from “Soul Sister” by Allen Toussaint.

9. While I conceived of this song a few months ago, it was probably M.I.A. who inspired me to do it now, via her new song “Hussel”: “Hustle hustle hustle / grind grind grind / Why has everyone got hustle on their mind?”

10. The Cubs are in the playoffs!!!!

11. We joined Netflix this week. So far the best movie of the experience has been “The Thin Blue Line”, an Errol Morris documentary about a wrongly-accused cop-killer from Dallas. With a creepy score by Philip Glass.