I can tell you what you’re doing is predictably sad
And point out all the wasted potential you’ve had
Believe me, I won’t point the finger any which way but out
I may as well go ahead and turn South
I’ll go on about the secrets that you’d better learn quick
And I’ll scoff if you suggest a method other than logic
Nobody’s impressed with what I’m talking about
I oughta go ahead and turn South
I’ll swear there’s something good in the alternative
I’ll bluff so hard I’ll claim that I don’t mind if I live
I don’t believe in all the shit that’s coming out of my
mouth
I’d better go ahead and face South
~~~
In terms of the album's concept, "Turn South" represents an early peak in conflict--it's about overconfidence and ego. By the time we've reached adulthood, it seems we are secure enough in the way our minds behave (and in the relationship between our minds and our brains) that it becomes just "the way things are" and there's no need to question that there may be other things going on behind the scenes that the conscious mind is unaware of. In this state, our elective preferences and opinions dominate to the point that ego becomes a caricature. Of course, this is a personal song with some scathing self-assessment. The phrase "turn South" relates to my much-explored interest in Daoist writings and classical Chinese religion--it's said that when the emperor achieves order in his kingdom and harmonizes the way of the human world with the way of nature and heaven, as a natural next step, he'll "face South"--as in, "attain perfection." Naturally, here it's used sarcastically (time to add the ever-popular self-loathing tag!). Along with "The Knack" and "Chrysalis (In Three Verses)," this makes up the hubristic peak from which a fall is inevitable.
Musically, this is another example of what I'm short-handing "ITC (intuitive through-composition)," where one part is through-composed and the others are subsequently composed by ear to fit together as a sort of sloppy puzzle. Differently from other songs, though, this one doesn't really have a "lead" guitar part--there's the acoustic (trivia: the very first part I tracked over a year ago...talk about an ego-destroying experience), then the Telecaster (which plays a rhythm part in low-register octaves that somewhat overlap the acoustic) and finally the ES-335 (the last guitar part composed, which plays smaller intervals of thirds and fourths in the upper register). You'd better believe that things get contrapuntal.
This being one of the first songs I started working on, it's interesting to revisit because I had so many hypothetical goals and ideas about how the project would play out--for instance, I was hoping to avoid bass guitar entirely for the album, replacing it with bass clarinet and synthesizer where appropriate. Obviously that didn't work out, but this one has low register Moog and no bass guitar, which contributes to a sort of (attempted) "warped indie rock" feel. Also contributing to the "indie rock" feel is the eighth-note focus (so many staccato eighth-notes in indie rock...so many) and the absence of lead guitar. The verses modulate chromatically, which was easy to write on paper but you can bet was a bitch to record vocals for. The horn arrangement is another interesting thing to look back at--though it changes harmonically, the placement of the parts doesn't change, and I think it's one of the arrangements that fits best and most audibly in the overall mix...guess I got lucky early on, since not all of the parts work out as successfully. In the studio, this was the second song Drew recorded drums for, and the first really weird one. At first I was directing him to go "dancy," which turned out to be obviously not what I was hearing in my head. After a few false starts and a quickly-internalized lesson in communication, we settled on "jazzy" and Drew basically figured out that he could do whatever he wanted, blasting out some ridiculous fills in the song's ending (a show for which I was privileged enough to have front row seats). And so proceeded the rest of the drum tracking...
As promised, here I am introducing some material from Cheap Seats--it's
my plan to talk about one song per week. This is indeed a concept
album about the human mind, and though there isn't a specific "story,"
there is something of a narrative progression to the track listing. "An Unsettling
Preposition" opens the album, and while I won't be proceeding
chronologically with these weekly updates, this song is the perfect
place to start. Lyrics are listed below, followed by some thoughts about the song's place in the concept as well as some info about the words and music. Please take my introspection with a grain of salt; it's there for anybody who wants explanation or is interested enough to learn more about the details imbued in this work, but also as a tool for myself in moving forward artistically for my next projects.
You’ve been on the understanding where the way is by the
will
You say you use the fundamental features, not the flashy
frills
It’s within reason’s pungent sound you sail without a doubt
Though you were once upon a time so short these tools you
were without
But I recall
I’ve been in and out of context enough to lose the feeling
I by no means know the meaning of a life without this
ceiling
It’s been a while!
But I recall
We’ve been under these assumptions since I thought they’d
keep us dry
You say we both agree that I am you and we are I
You’re so sure!
But I recall ~~~
"An
Unsettling Preposition" effectively sets the scene--amongst a lot of lyrics and poems that deal with duality, an anxious sense of questioning
and explorations-posed-as-dialogues, this song opens the proceedings with a
one-sided conversation directed at the complacent, passive,
comfortable (perhaps willfully ignorant) self of routine--the "me" that most of us experience, most of the time. The
speaking voice comes from a corner of the mind with a nagging sense that
certain day-to-day assumptions ("In conjunction with my brain, 'I'
consciously choose to act, then my physical body acts;" "Logic is a
clear map I use to determine and decide the course of my actions;" "My
reasoning mind and my physical brain are one and the same, always acting in
accord with my conscious free will;" and finally, "It's always been this
way") are perhaps not quite representative of the entire
picture. I think we forget that there was a time (childhood) when our
brains were soaking up sensory input like sponges--before we really had
any congealed sense of selfhood or the ego to behave with confidence
about it. Once this system is firmly in place and running like a
well-oiled machine fueled by memories of cause and effect, life is an
easy enough plate to keep spinning--but have you ever wondered about how
much sensory input (present and past) your brain is ignoring because it doesn't fit into
the framework whereby you've been routinely living your life for the
past decades? The lyric also posits that the "me" that sits comfortably
in routine and the "me" who questions and balks at such an anemic mind-life
just might not be co-existing quite as peacefully as the automatic mind would
prefer.
Lyrically, I had a lot of fun with this one as a
sort of word game--the verses are built from prepositional figures of
speech treated as if the locations in question were actually physical. There's further punning happening with some homophones and imagery tied to the fact that I was looking out across the water from the Ballard Locks to the Olympics when writing the words.
Musically, the song serves as an apt introduction for the rest of the album, displaying a concise structure (a much-abbreviated traditional verse/chorus structure with a brief breakdown and an even briefer sort of post-second-chorus bridge). It's a three-guitar arrangement, with one guitar (my ES-335 though a tiny 4-watt Hawaiian guitar amp that belongs to my friend Nick, complete with "mother of toilet seat" turquoise case) laying down rhythm riffs in the lower register and two other guitars functioning in tandem and a sort of "intuitive through-composition" (this ends up happening enough across the songs I'll go ahead and start calling it "ITC") in the upper register, where the Telecaster plays two-note chords, and the Firebird plays more of a liquid, distorted, single-note lead. This approach has allowed me considerable freedom in terms of partwriting where I'll attempt to to create detail-rich parts with minimal repetition that can be followed individually by the listener but also fit together as parts of a more singular whole. There's a sort of pleasing (to me) chaos in the fact that the parts can either fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, call and respond, blend harmonically, or be saying different things entirely at the same time, and it can all change from one bar to the next. So far I've achieved this by sitting down and writing one guitar part, taking care to leave at least some space rhythmically, then composing the second by ear, using the first as a general map of inspiration. Needless to say, it's an exacting, painstaking process and it's an enormous bitch to reproduce in the studio without extensive rehearsal (which I mostly didn't have time to invest in) but to the ear, the results are pretty unusual sounding with that sort of nearly-falling-apart groove that's been another big goal with the project. The track really came alive when Russ tracked his drums, handling the odd-metered grooves and tempo shifts of the chorus section with aplomb. Moving forward, I see challenges in developing the ITC aspect so I don't end up continually repeating myself (though by its fluid nature it may take a while for that to happen), as well as in general arranging--there are bass clarinet/alto sax parts, backing vocals and some piano in the final verse that are only marginally audible--this may be partially a mixing issue, but it's certainly in my mind to pay attention to how many elements can exist in an arrangement before they're obscured by the others. * Yes, the YouTube videos have ads. Why? It's expensive to make music
independently...if my music is being played for free by YouTube users
and there's a way for me to make a tiny pittance in return for my
self-funded creative content, I'll take it.
Here's a video of one of my new-ish songs, the uncharacteristically politics-focused "Come November." Lyrics (there are a lot of them) and more info over at the song page, but I'll add that there's a brief melodic quote from a classic American folk song. Which one?
Tree, trough, trunk
You thunk too little
You whittled well past the middle
a brittle busted paradiddle
You piddled on petals
You pedaled with paddles
You addled your glad hull with gas-leaking barnacles
when grass-beaking tabernacles require
a subtler approach
Surefire settler roaches saw, till, encroach
Crotch thinking splotches out a single blinking eye
It sizes, it sighs
Its size matters--flatters
Bladders overfloweth, wind bloweth, shingles clatter
Stunted growth conserves matter
Till tail-eating snakes
(full of themselves)
try taking just a few more inches
The last three months have been almost all poetry in my notebook--stuff that probably won't be set to music, but more importantly I've been attempting to focus even more on the aesthetics of the words themselves and have a bit of fun--lots of abstraction, alliteration, even more fluid rhyming, puns and surrealism. This is one of my favorite of my new poems for its succinctness and the fun I had writing it. It's an example of how some of my word choice is based on how the words sound and feel in the mouth as much or more than on what they mean, as well as one of the first poems that experiments with what I've been calling (in my head, of course) "block rhyming," which shows up more in some later poems. In general, this poem deals with the idea of taking too much as well as self-destruction...maybe. Finally, I'm including videos with these poems because they're meant to be both read (on the page) and heard out loud--read before you watch the video or along with it and some of the pun and rhyme-type elements might be more apparent, as some are aural and some are visual.
OK--I've finally got some content up on the video page; a couple of songs I recorded in my parents' house in April--unfortunately the mustache is long gone! They're my first attempt at creating a video (I used Apple's iMovie) and also at uploading a YouTube video, not to mention that they're fairly rough takes. Just when I felt like I was starting to get comfortable with having to hear my own voice over and over again, now I get the distinct displeasure of watching myself play too--yikes. It's hard not to squirm watching myself but it's been quite challenging trying to promote myself these last few months as a solo artist while still writing new material--I'm trying to access as many different avenues as I can. While I'm not exactly hoping to give Rebecca Black a run for her money, YouTube is another place to go. The arrangements on the videos I'll be putting up are simple and close to how I've been playing my songs live--just a guitar and vocals, without the multiple guitar parts that are pretty integral to my recorded compositions and my full vision for my songs. While I wish I could have a bunch more guitar, I hope that each song can still stand as a complete entity when stripped down to mostly rhythm guitar and vocals, though some of the blank stares I've experienced playing out so far have tested my resolve. The pressure is on to hone the delivery, and now that I have to watch myself play I guess I can work on my stage presence a bit--especially when I start uploading vids of the poetry I've been working on lately. No guitar to hide behind!
