And If You’re My Master

One of my favorite Rolling Stones songs has always been “I Just Wanna See His Face” from Exile on Main Street. For most of the song, there are no real lyrics, just a swirl of atmospheric voodoo (a production aesthetic nicked from the great Dr. John album, Gris-Gris, which had come out a few years earlier). As the song builds to its moment of catharsis, Mick and his backup singers keep repeating, “I don’t wanna walk and talk about Jesus / I just wanna see his face.” It’s a lyric that simultaneously longs for and doubts the divine. I’ve always been a total sucker for the lyrical perspective of the decadent rocker frightened by, obsessed with, and/or doubtful of God. Dylan went through his one-dimensional (albeit fascinating) proselytizing phase with Slow Train Coming and the albums that followed, but it was with Time Out of Mind that he confronted the divine with a mature, nuanced mixture of doubt, humility, resignation, and passionate love. (Thanks to the great derek becker for offering up this worthy interpretation of the album.)

With this week’s song, “And If You’re My Master“, I’m taking my own shot at the secular-spiritual-mystery pop song. I flirted with the genre in “Dynamite Explodes”, the last song on the first Baby Teeth album, but this week’s song is much more lyrically direct. The title is meant to suggest ambivalence and doubt about the divine, but as the song develops, it becomes clear that the narrator is longing to give up the notions of free will and absolute knowledge, and turn over the game to something bigger than himself.

Musically, it’s just a simple piano-and-vocal arrangement, and it owes a lot to the 70s balladry of Andy Pratt…. lyrically too, for that matter (“Finally I’m Yours”, etc.). But it still gave me fits. I recorded the piano take, as MIDI information, to a click track. I thought it was serviceable until I listened back and found that my tempo was all over the place. I spent a long time cleaning this up — moving one note at a time until the performance managed to sound rhythmically accurate and still sufficiently human. I’m still quite enamored of the whole MIDI universe. The piano sound is coolly trashed-out — a combination of reverb and the old Reason Scream processor.

I’m happy with this one; hope you like it too.

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.

Bass Is High

This week’s effort, “Bass Is High“, will be heard by some of you as a summer wipeout, a midsummer night’s scream, a palette cleanser. But not like lemon sorbet would be a palette cleanser… more like a handful of dirt.

To understand this song properly, however, you must hear it as a tribute to Baby Teeth’s great drummer, Peter Andreadis, who has spent the day enduring a vicious stomach malady. How is this song a tribute to Peter? First, he originally challenged me to take a small part at the end of one of my other demos (“Disco Dance Derby”, as yet unrevealed on this blog) and turn it into a song of its own. That small part has turned into the piano-guitar-drum loop that goes throughout “Bass Is High”. Second, Peter is one of the biggest Iron Maiden fans I know, and the song’s title, “Bass Is High”, is a pun on Maiden’s “Aces High”, a Baby Teeth tour van favorite. And third, the chorus of “Bass Is High” goes heavily into Cobain territory, and Peter is the only person I know (I think) who actually saw Nirvana live, back at Wings Stadium in Kalamazoo. Speedy recovery, Peter!

Nirvana aside, there’s a serious Stooges influence here too… “I Wanna Be Your Dog” features a single eighth-note piano octave that’s beaten from start to finish, and I bite that trick for this song. And the rhythm-guitar stabs are a tip of the hat to Spoon, whose new album, “Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga” (unrelated to Spank Rock’s “YoYoYoYoYoYo”, in case you were wondering) I’ve been listening to a lot. Spoon knows a shit-ton about arranging and recording… it will blow you away again and again. Like the Pitchfork review said, their new album is definitely a “grower”. But it gets you in the end… highly recommended by this blog-gist.

Anyway, I’m going on way too long, but one more point: these lyrics were loosely inspired by Baby Teeth’s show Saturday night at Schubas, where we got to share the stage with the great Andy Pratt. Thanks to everyone who was there… what an amazingly enthusiastic crowd. We’re lucky to know you. To me, Andy embodies the rock-and-roll archetype of the manchild, with the child and the man engaged in a constant struggle within, often producing great art along the way. The choruses of “Bass Is High” are about that struggle.

Let me just close by saying, I’ve heard a lot of people dissing the ProTools AmpliTube plug-in, but I positively live off that thing. You’ve just gotta turn down the treble, that’s all.

Thanks again to everyone for writing in… this is lots of fun for me, and I hope you’re enjoying it too.