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!
