blueyed blog

Things that make me say "hell yeah" right now

2010-09-29T21:08:00.004-04:00

Big Boi's new one.

Jeremy Rifkin:

This week's Village Voice cover story, White America Has Lost Its Mind.

Matt Taibbi (the greatest journalist working today) on the tea party.

jesus christ.

2010-08-18T21:40:00.001-04:00

jesus christ, howard dean.

thoughts on politics.

2010-06-15T17:38:00.013-04:00

one of the reasons i started this blog was not just to document the process of recording my own music; i also wanted it to be a place where i could periodically dump my thoughts on other matters, even if just to track the evolution of my worldview and thought processes.

so, if reading about a musician's political point of view is not your idea of illuminating blog material, this probably isn't the blog post for you. i promise i'll get back to music business with the next entry.

i've been thinking pretty hard about this recent bubble of self-described libertarians that's been rising in american politics over the past year or so. one might even trace it back to the 2008 campaign of ron paul (which happened mostly in 2007, of course), but since obama's election, and certainly since the debate on the health care bill began last summer, there has been a very loud minority (and for a laughably enormous percentage of them, it is literally the only sense in which they can be described as a minority) asserting that obama's economic policies represent nothing less than an end to capitalism and the free market system.

the "tea party" movement was launched by cnbc commentator rick santelli on february 19 of last year, and flogged on the fox news channel virtually every single day after that, particularly around the time when fox news organized nationwide "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties" (i'm not sure how it is that a news network can organize rallies on behalf of any one political party, but whatever).

everyone seems to have a theory on the tea party. it's been fascinating/embarrassing to witness the media "observe" the tea partiers, studying their strange codes and customs like anthropologists deep in the bush. the pundit/reporter/gossip class was convinced for a while that tea partiers were the children of the gingrich revolution, and we were about to see 1994 all over again. many seem less convinced of that as time passes, but that seems to still be the general view--the tea party voters are angry about deficits and long for smaller government, goes the logic, and in november, the democrats are in for a bloodbath, etc. i think both of these conclusions are understandable but lazy.

at first i dismissed the tea party phenomenon as a purely astroturf affair -- a fake grassroots movement ginned up by out-of-work, out-of-power republican operatives, inflated by breathless coverage in all the old familiar places (fox, rush, drudge, etc). the rallies seemed to be a short-term temper tantrum by folks who were used to their team running things (and not a small number of angry sarah palin supporters obsessed with darker conspiracy theories about obama). i still think it's mostly that, but short-term it's not. i now feel like it's the inevitable byproduct of the current historical moment, and it's somewhat connected to obama's election, but is actually a result of forces that have been building for some time.

i'm no political expert. but, i'm not uninitiated, either. i did some work in democratic politics for a while, and even landed a gig as a speechwriter on howard dean's '04 presidential campaign (and that's the last time i will namedrop that guy, i promise). i still keep in touch with many of the people i met during that period, and have never lost the passion for the political arena, even as an observer, though it's been years since i worked on an actual campaign. my strength has always been discerning the "big picture" -- the slow, generational swings that occur back and forth between our two political poles. political change doesn't happen in a vacuum, and it doesn't happen overnight, either; it tends to be more like a 30- or 40-year cycle. roughly, as i indicated above, the span of a generation.

every two years, the voters want something slightly different. this not because they're fickle or uninformed (though plenty are); it's because every two years, you're literally talking about a different set of voters. some people have died. others have just turned eighteen. some people have immigrated here. others have moved away. from one election to the next, it's sometimes hard to see the movement, but when you're talking about the long view, you're talking about a very different set of people voting today than the set of people voting 30 years ago, with a different set of shared cultural experiences, and most importantly, a very different set of conclusions drawn from those experiences about how the world works.

in my view, the presidency of george w. bush came at the tail end of a generational political cycle that began with nixon, peaked with reagan, and breathed its last gasp in 2004. there are similar figures in history, but we really only have two in the modern age -- herbert hoover presiding over the collapse of the republican coalition that ended with the great depression and the election of FDR (which admittedly stretches the definition of modern) and lyndon johnson trying to hold together the crumbling new deal political coalition amidst the shock waves of inner-city riots and the tragedy of vietnam. both analogies have their usefulness when it comes to bush, and the hoover analogy has certainly been made elsewhere, but i think it's worth examining the johnson presidency for clues as to what it looks like when a political coalition that has held for decades begins to self-destruct. it is a long, painful process for everyone involved, especially when it's not precipitated by one big event like the crash of 1929.

the New Deal coalition was, in its way, a historical anomaly, made possible by stubborn conservative southern voters with a reflexive hatred for the republican party (which was at that time still associated with lincoln and reconstruction). roosevelt and the new deal coalition basically built 20th century america, but the coalition couldn't hold together forever; politics is just people, and eventually, different groups of people who once had aligning interests will start to diverge. what held them together from 1932 to 1968 wasn't just the force of FDR's personality, though that helped; it was a shared sense of accomplishment and pride in the national effort to overcome the depression and prevail in world war two. government not only worked; it was capable of doing big things. government wasn't scary; it was a safety net. it certainly wasn't treated with the same mistrust reserved for unscrupulous businessmen who were accountable to no one and had driven the economy off a cliff; government, unlike business, was the "people's voice," and could be kept in check and held accountable by voters (again unlike business).

in the 1960s, though, huge cultural changes were afoot, and the biggest one was television (which unleashed all the others). suddenly, the public couldn't just ignore the civil rights workers being beaten on edmund pettus bridge; it was in their living room. so were the watts riots -- for four straight days of uninterrupted live coverage. so was vietnam. so was the kennedy assassination, and oswald's shooting. seen in the magnifying and distorting mirror of television, the unstoppable U.S.A. appeared to be falling apart. government couldn't control it. soon enough, life imitated television, with race riots occurring in over a hundred cities and the vietnam "conflict" hemorrhaging at breakneck speed. the economic base of the cities was collapsing as the televised images of black rioters drove millions of white people to the suburbs, where their televisions reassured them for the next 40 years that the world outside their door was a dangerous, dangerous place. the social safety net, one of the new deal's most proud and lasting accomplishments, began to be viewed as little more than handouts to undeserving minorities (a misconception that was only exacerbated when a series of impressive civil rights bills and a "War on Poverty" seemed only to inflame the inner city riots even further). so, when people talk about the 1960s as having shaped our country and our politics for many decades hence, this is what they mean -- the 1960s, far from ushering an era of liberal freedom and harmony, did the opposite: it set the stage for a 40-year period primarily dominated by reactionary racial and economic politics and a deep suspicion of not only government itself, but of the enemies within -- liberals, communists, atheist schoolteachers, welfare queens, city dwellers, black people in general -- who always had their hand in your pocket when they weren't pointing a gun in your face. we became a suburban nation with suburban values: high walls, locked doors, layer upon layer of insulation to protect each one of us from the reality of other people. the "american dream," in other words. in 1961, kennedy urged us to ask what we could do for our country. by 1981, we were back to asking what our country could do for us.

when a coalition falls apart like this, though, it's messy, especially for those people who had internalized the values of the previous coalition. in the 1960s, young people in particular became more and more hostile to the idea that american society wasn't what it had been promised to be -- namely fair, inclusive, moral, just. some of those young people became radicalized and acted out, often in ill-considered ways, especially in the case of groups like the weathermen and the black panthers. these extremists, far from achieving their goals, became a 30-year lodestone around the neck of any democratic politician trying to get elected. even bill clinton, in 1992, had a suspicious hippie past. (hell, even barack obama had to disassociate himself from former weatherman bill ayers, who apparently shook hands with obama a few times, and who many conspiracy theorists believe is the secret author of barack obama's memoir.) because the truth is, when an ideology is pushed into extremism, it is because that ideology is dying, at least for the foreseeable future. the 60s radicals raged against the american system when it became clear that the american system no longer shared their values. the less revolutionary-minded among them simply dropped out of society completely.

today we have another coalition that has collapsed -- the reagan coalition of evangelicals, businesspeople and national defense hawks. there are many reasons for this collapse, having in large part to do with the "people" factor (old people dying, young ones turning eighteen, minorities growing as a share of the population, etc.). but the precipitating crises were both foreign and domestic--the Iraq war and the housing market crash--and they both were a direct repudiation to the core philosophies of the reagan coalition itself. in reality, the demographics had been getting tighter and tighter for republicans since 2000, when a center-left majority appeared in the combined vote totals of gore and nader, which hadn't existed since, well, johnson. 9/11 artificially inflated the republican bubble for a bit, but the total dismantling of the regulatory state under the bush administration, along with an invasion of a huge country under false pretenses with no plan for stabilizing said country in the aftermath, led to a series of self-inflected wounds that caused a majority of voters to lose confidence in the republicans as a competent governing party. it wasn't just the housing crash (which was itself a cruel joke played on those who placed too much faith in the suburban american dream), and it wasn't just the wall street meltdown; it was enron creating an artificial energy crisis in the state of california, it was the outdated levees in new orleans, it was the bridge in minnesota collapsing; the philosophy of no government, no regulation, no investment in public works, no aid for newly homeless hurricane victims, no answers to the worlds problems other than military aggressiveness abroad and tax cuts for the wealthy at home that led to the end of the age of reagan.

but like the end of the age of roosevelt, the transition isn't a peaceful one. like the young hippies who felt burned by reality, the reagan-inspired radical individualists who are now being confronted with crises large enough to require collective action are very angry. this is understandable; believing for 30-odd years that the world operates in one way, and then being confronted with a wildly different reality, is incredibly unsettling. i'm fascinated by how closely the tea party movement resembles the hippie movement (minus the cultural and creative output, obviously). they are even self-consciously emulating it -- witness the planned "Tea Party Woodstock". (i have far less sympathy for their cause, of course -- a 50-year-old upper middle class man protesting a 3% tax increase doesn't really carry the same moral heft as an eighteen-year-old facing the vietnam draft -- but the similarities between the two groups are fascinating.)

one thing it's not, though, is the dawn of a new republican or libertarian era. demographics, recent events, technology, self-inflicted wounds, and finally the embrace of extremism will put the republican party out of power for a long, long time. sure, there may be an eisenhower down the road, just as there was a bill clinton during the republican era, but like eisenhower and clinton, they will govern by accepting the new political reality, not by trying to upend it. this november, the democrats will lose some seats, and they may even lose the house (though i doubt it), but the republicans who are fantasizing about 1994 are dreaming. it was literally a different set of voters that was voting at that time, and they had plenty of southern democratic holdovers from the new deal era just waiting to be picked off; in a way, 1994 was the completion of the reagan realignment. this year, though, republicans don't have a gingrich. they don't have a contract with america. they don't have a campaign. they don't have a leader. voters don't just vote for the other party by default (the democrats spent years learning this the hard way).

which is not to say that it will be a big victory for the democrats. we've just had two democratic "wave" elections in a row (2006 and 2008), and the democrats are very much due for a haircut. but in the 2012 republican primaries, the republican dilemma will become painfully clear. it was the dilemma faced by democrats throughout the 1970s and 1980s -- namely, that no one will be able to win their party nomination without taking unacceptably extreme positions, in order to satisfy the only base voters they have left. hell, this is already happening -- rand paul and sharron angle are the new face of the republican party. and therefore in 2012, the most likely nominee is sarah palin -- not only because she is by far the most popular figure among what's left of the republican party base, but because she can win big in early primary states like iowa and south carolina. there may be an "establishment" challenge to her in the person of mitt romney, but the republican "establishment" ain't what it once was. palin has fox, she has rush, and she has her facebook page; meanwhile mitch mcconnell, the most powerful republican in washington, can't even get his guy elected in a republican primary in his own state of kentucky. but even if somehow palin doesn't win, whoever the nominee is will be forced to pander as hard as possible to the base, and will be saddled with the baggage of a party that quite visibly lost their shit for the past four years or so.

no, we are at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another -- the republican base is shrinking, and in doing so, is being forced to take more and more extreme positions to satisfy the ideological purity of their base. this posture has already led them into another historic blunder--this one in arizona, where their mean-spirited immigration law has become a national symbol of racial divisiveness and has almost certainly driven hispanic voters into the arms of the democrats for a generation. it's almost pitiful to watch, this slow-motion train wreck that is today's republican party.

UPDATE: I rest my case.

revolution (take me in...)

2010-02-16T14:56:00.004-05:00

well, holy shit. i was experimenting with latin rhythms the other day, and this song came out.

this could be the most exciting song i've ever recorded in any genre.

new band devoted to exploring this sound coming soon...

new things!

2010-02-08T14:14:00.008-05:00

been a long time been a long time been a long lonely lonely...

here are some new things!

i'm working on an alternate album cover that i like a lot more, which contains a description of how i've been thinking about the music -- "American Country" combined with "African" rhythms:

download a new version of "Leave it all behind you," now with much more rhythm inspired by the continent of Africa.

download a new track, "Brand new heart attack," featuring cassie singing beautiful/creepy background vox.

i am looking for musicians to fill out my band.

and, download a new (final) version of an older tune -- "The first time" -- which now has a more fully-produced sound (and, more rhythm elements to drive the beat forward).

more new things to come!

artists, labels, singles

2009-11-17T23:04:00.005-05:00

just saw this over at mbv -- a discussion of record labels and their role these days. this part gets at something i've been thinking recently:

Carrie Brownstein: Are we in the age of dabbling?
Gerard Cosloy: Dabbling? Definitely.
Mac McCaughan: You're right.
Gerard Cosloy: And the churn factor is severe; the public burns out on supposed faves very, very fast these days.
Mac McCaughan: To a certain extent, at Merge, we know all this but try to pretend it's not happening -- the churn factor -- seriously.
Carrie Brownstein: Are there any of your artists in particular who have suffered through this churn factor?
Gerard Cosloy: I'd rather not say. But I think it is fair to say that anyone who is making a second record is about to contend with it, to some degree.
Portia Sabin: Dudes, we are in the era of "I like everything," which translates to whatever is on the radio/on the iPod, which has always been the majority of music fans, in my opinion.
Chris Swanson: I feel like full iPods are an illustration that a large part of the population now consumes music like they did in the '60s. It's primarily singles-driven, or track-driven. It feels like a jukebox culture with iPods so ubiquitous. People are generally more into songs right now than bands, albums or labels.
Gerard Cosloy: Right on, Chris.
Chris Swanson: If it sounds great, people love it.
Mac McCaughan: I like songs, but I hate that trend.
[Robb Nansel from Saddlecreek Records joins the conversation at this point.]
Chris Swanson: Lots of folks still want to take it deeper, but I don't think it's necessarily a sign of a corruption of taste that people are stuck on a good song right now.
Portia Sabin: That unfortunately doesn't translate into careers for artists, though.
Maggie Vail : Yeah, I would say it's not new -- it's just in our world now, too.
Gerard Cosloy: Portia's right; it has always been the majority who thought that way. The difference is, there's no longer any cultural nudge-nudge to get anyone to think differently.
Maggie Vail : Yes.
Gerard Cosloy: Not on a mainstream level, anyway

lots of interesting things in here, but my first thought is that the imminent singles-driven musical culture that they all seem to be wary of is definitely where things are going, and my second thought is that this is going to be great for indie music, to be honest.

pop music is in such a weird place right now; the labels are all freaking out and sticking to the same types of sounds they've been pushing on us for the last 15 years or so, and i don't blame them, because they're running a business and when sales are down you stick to old reliable. this has only compounded the problem, of course, because as people get sick of hearing the 99th Nickelback or Avril Levine (or however you spell that), they seek out alternatives. there have always been people who sought out those alternatives, of course, but now they have a place to talk to each other and share information and self-organize, so the cat's much more out of the bag, and the labels haven't made really any effort to adapt.

(also, there's the rougher, more existential problem of the labels not really being needed by the artists anymore, what with online distribution and cheap recording technology, so the artists with antennae for this sort of thing are steering clear of them, thinning the already-lean major label talent roster.)

so. we have this whole historical moment happening, where the traditional pop merchants are eating out their own insides, the public listens to more music than they ever have before in goddamn HISTORY, and there's this "indie music" universe-thing that's gained all this momentum over the past 10 years or so because of the explosion of the internet culture, not to mention the fact that the largest generation in american history is all coming of age and consuming music faster than people can create it -- you can probably guess where i'm going with this.

the pop music industry is collapsing, and the indie artists are clearly poised to stage a full takeover of pop music culture, at least for a minute or two. but, in order to do that, the indie artists are going to inevitably start making their work a little more accessible. they're going to have to, really. "hits" are going to be a necessity. but, a "hit" is a broad category; indie music has been at various times conflated with strong antipop, anti-"mainstream" feelings, but there's no need to be afraid of a song or a video going viral. there's not a band or artist out there who wouldn't welcome that kind of juice.

and the listening public is curious. there's been a lot of buzz about this "brooklyn" thing, this "pitchfork" business; how many people have wandered over to pitchfork but been daunted by the scope of the indie ecosystem? how many people out there want to plug into this new scene, but have no idea where to start?

fellow indie musicians, listen to me, because i am so serious about this: we need to bring them in with pop songs. it will be good for everyone involved.

the 60s were mentioned above by the panelists, and it's a telling reference. is there a decade more associated with the marriage of pop music and musical and recording experimentation? the Beatles are everyone's touchstone, but the Beatles knew how to write pop music. they had to - otherwise people would forget about them; newer artists popping up every day. i personally think that the Beatles' understanding of pop music in all its forms and various genres was what made their songs so culturally monumental. when artists are forced to sort of "earn their keep," pop culture-wise, it keeps them from sitting around all day with their heads up their asses, for lack of a better way to say it. having to constantly write songs that will connect with people -- it keeps you honest. it's humbling, because for a pop song, there's only one goal -- for the song to be popular. the metrics are much harder. and ultimately, to keep making "hits" you have to be, on some level, in touch with the current moment.

but the good thing is, the future of pop is wide open, and there are no big bad labels to force artists to write these pop songs. rather, what's going to happen is, some artists are going to inevitably start filling the pop void, but on their terms. Animal Collective's "My Girls" and Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" are good examples of what i think is going to start happening more and more -- experimental indie bands slowly drifting toward a bigger, more accessible sound that doesn't compromise any integrity of the artists but instead merges old genres with new rhythms to create something people haven't heard before. we don't have the infrastructure yet to propel a song like "Two Weeks" into Billboard Singles chart heaven (or whatever the future equivalent is), but bands and artists are also going to have to come a tiny bit further in meeting the public. there is a new standard pop language that is going to evolve in the coming years, and it's going to probably be a teeny, tiny bit less obscure than those songs i mentioned above, but not that much more, to be honest. the two worlds are so close they're practically kissing right now.

"The Zero Years" album cover

2009-11-03T01:56:00.002-05:00

headshots

2009-11-03T01:46:00.005-05:00

cassie took some great headshots of me today; here are the best two:

last night @ The Local 269

2009-10-04T10:44:00.003-04:00

great show last night -- cassie took some really nice pics:

come see me at The Local 269 this Saturday, October 3

2009-09-29T11:20:00.004-04:00

Come out this Saturday -- The Local 269, 269 East Houston Street (at the corner of Houston and Suffolk). Show starts at 9.

Gonna be playing the new track...

new track - "Leave it all behind you"

2009-09-29T11:11:00.004-04:00

this one will be the leadoff single and opening track on The Zero Years LP (set for early 2010 release).

[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND YOU" ]]]

"BLUE EYED SON" up at amazon

2009-09-18T10:56:00.002-04:00

Blueyed Son "BLUE EYED SON", aka my debut EP, is up at amazon. the album page is here; you can order it on October 28.

as Navin R. Johnson once said, this is the kind of spontaneous publicity that makes people.

the original painting

2009-09-16T21:46:00.003-04:00

this is David's original painting, where the album cover came from:

"BLUE EYED SON" out 10/28

2009-09-16T20:52:00.004-04:00

Available in all the usual online places on 10/28/09.

Cover illustration by David Drymala.

titles

2009-09-11T00:56:00.003-04:00

i'm obsessed with tinkering with titles; that's pretty obvs. the title of my forthcoming EP (i love you, Alan Douches, but fucking finish up with that mastering already, my friend) was going to be "Broken Homes in Bexar County", and every day i'm less interested in that title.

my brother just finished artwork for the album cover, and i haven't seen it yet, but i asked him to put "Blueyed Son" in the painting, in kind of a late 60s early 70s album cover way. except, i don't know if he's clear on the way i spell it, so i realized he most likely did it, but spelled it "Blue Eyed Son".

so i started thinking about it, and i realized that Blueyed Son: "Blue Eyed Son" would be a really cool debut EP title. so i'm scrapping all that broken homes stuff, i think, and just going with "Blue Eyed Son" for the album, while still calling myself Blueyed Son. i like that it's just a tiny bit self-aware, but not annoyingly so. "Broken Homes in Bexar County" is also just so damn depressing.

another gig at The Local 269

2009-09-11T00:54:00.001-04:00

i loved playing at Local 269 recently, and they just asked me back. i'm playing on saturday this time, which is great -- October 3.

playing The Local 269 on Thursday, September 3

2009-08-27T02:23:00.002-04:00

come check me out at The Local 269 at 10:15 on Thursday, September 3.

it's actually my first Manhattan gig after playing out in Brooklyn for a lot of this year, so i'm pretty psyched about it. it's a new-ish venue and i have the last slot of the evening, which is a good sign i think.

The Local 269 is in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, at 269 East Houston St. on Houston and Suffolk.

"the walls are tumbling down"

2009-08-27T02:16:00.002-04:00

from the forthcoming LP "The Zero Years".

[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "THE WALLS ARE TUMBLING DOWN" ]]]

my first LP -- "The Zero Years"

2009-08-27T00:25:00.004-04:00

as i put the finishing touches on my upcoming EP "Broken Homes in Bexar County" i've started to work quite a bit on my next album, which will be a full-length. the songs i've posted more recently -- "the first time" and "the restoration of the western shoreline" -- will be on it.

a little while back i said i was going to call it "heard scenes", which is ok i guess, but i've been thinking about a slightly different direction for it. most of the songs are shaping up to be about the events of the last decade or so, and even the ones like "the first time" that are more upbeat are tinged with a little bit of longing for lost innocence or whatever, so i'm going to call it "The Zero Years", which i think is a pretty cool name and struck me as being a good label for the 2000s, especially for those of us frustrated with the bush administration and the harsh and often hollow culture that existed in the country at that time (and still lingers even while there's been a little bit of daylight recently).

i've talked a little about this before, but i'm approaching the recording much differently than i approached "Broken Homes". for one thing, i used a lot of virtual instruments and digital processing on the "Broken Homes" stuff, and while the slightly synthetic nature of that sound gave the EP a weird vibe that felt right for those songs, lately i've been trying to work with only sounds that i record myself. i've been mixing field-recorded samples with an acoustic folk and early rock-n-roll sound, and i'm getting excited about what i've been able to come up with, so i think i'm getting close to nailing an aesthetic for the album that i'm making.

it looks like, realistically, "Broken Homes" won't be on sale until at least mid-September, and i can't decide if it would be cooler to release "The Zero Years" at the very end of 2009 or at the very beginning of 2010, but i'll probably do it in early 2010 anyway just to give the two releases a tiny bit of breathing room.

where's "broken homes"

2009-08-27T00:22:00.002-04:00

where's my upcoming EP, "Broken Homes in Bexar County", you've been asking yourself. well, i'm finishing some mastering but it's almost here; just waiting on the mastering studio to put a few finishing touches and then i'm gonna put it right on tunecore, which will export it out to amazon and itunes and all those places.

dude

2009-08-27T00:19:00.001-04:00

dude. haven't blogged in a while, but that doesn't mean there's not much going on -- i have a bunch of stuff i've been working on and my first manhattan gig coming up.

more details in a bit...

whoa

2009-07-13T00:53:00.003-04:00

M. Lamar, who i last saw at Goodbye Blue Monday serving me a PBR on friday after my set (he's a bartender there), is also tearing it up as a confrontational falsetto-twisting deconstructionist diva whose most well-known song dishes out the chorus "white pussy for sale".

and he was just written about in the fucking New Yorker!

dude, you are an inspiration to us all. viva Goodbye Blue Monday.

pics from Friday's gig

2009-07-12T13:21:00.005-04:00

taken by my hot photographer fiancee.

come to Goodbye Blue Monday tonight!

2009-07-10T16:16:00.003-04:00

i'm playing at 9.

info on the venue is here.

playing The First Time live for, uh, the first time. i guess you could say.

cool

2009-07-10T15:44:00.003-04:00

my song "the first time" is on the front page of Bushwick BK today.

"The First Time" mp3

2009-07-07T15:41:00.005-04:00

new song...i'll be playing this at Goodbye Blue Monday this Friday. gonna be on the LP, not the EP.

[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "THE FIRST TIME" ]]]

just got a last-minute invitation to play the 4th of July BBQ at Goodbye Blue Monday

2009-07-03T16:51:00.003-04:00

come by tomorrow if you're free -- it starts at 4pm and there are a bunch of great acts on the bill. i'm not on the schedule yet but the guy who books said he wants to sneak me in somewhere, so i guess that's a good sign.

info and directions are here.

also, i'm still playing there next friday night (one week from today) so come check me out then as well if you're around.

come see me play at Goodbye Blue Monday next friday (july 10)

2009-07-02T16:55:00.003-04:00

got a gig at brooklyn's awesome venue Goodbye Blue Monday on friday july 10. they have a new outdoor space that features music in the summertime, so i'm pretty excited to be among the first artists play it. i go on at 9pm.

the info for the venue is here.

the restoration of the western shoreline

2009-07-01T17:29:00.004-04:00

new song, going to be on the Heard Scenes LP. i may add a thing or two to this one, or i may not. pretty angry tune, but one of my better efforts i think.

[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "THE RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN SHORELINE" ]]]

"Heard Scenes"

2009-06-09T13:09:00.005-04:00

i want to talk a little about the album i'm starting to work on, which will be my first LP and will follow my release of the Broken Homes EP. it's going to be called Heard Scenes, and it's going to be built with acoustic guitar, vocals, and samples. i recently bought the Korg MR-1 and i'm going to collect samples of sounds from all over New York, using them as everything from percussion to pitched "instruments" to ambient noise. basically, i want to capture the different noises around town and make music with them. i have a few songs that i'm sketching out already for this album, and i'm excited to take the rhythms of the city and make them into something new.

i'm hoping to be done with it by September or so.

cool

2009-06-09T11:21:00.007-04:00

Jack White's planning a solo LP.

i have to say, i admire his devotion to the White Stripes aesthetic. he's clearly felt constrained by it at times, but confined his musical sojourning to outside projects because he wanted to stay true to the idea of White Stripes as a totally stripped-down two-person garage band. it indicates a real seriousness about the music he's trying to make.

i'm sitting here listening to Veckatimest as i type this, an album made by similarly serious-minded musicians who are trying to hone their aesthetic more with each release. i've been thinking about how the artists i'm most drawn to, like Grizzly Bear and White Stripes and Jack himself, are self-conscious about their artistry. by which i mean, they believe themselves to be artists, and they believe that there is an audience for artistry in rock music, and their music reflects those beliefs.

music (and art in any medium) is ultimately an expression of the values of the creator. with any decision that any musician makes, something else is NOT chosen. the chords a musician chooses, for example, may seem to reflect only the taste of that musician, but there is usually more to it than that; we choose sounds and notes and chords based on how they make us feel, what we may associate with those sounds and feelings, and ultimately, how much those sounds and feelings represent what we want to put out there and express to the rest of the world. this is everybody, from Justin Timberlake to Jeff Mangum: Justin's first solo release was full of sounds that evoked early Michael Jackson, even self-consciously so ("Rock Your Body" and most of the Neptunes' work in general on that LP), and similarly, Jeff Mangum chose sounds on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea to self-consciously evoke everything from Bob Dylan to Nirvana to punk music to amateur musicians making music in a local living room As They Did In The Olden Days. with all these choices, the artist is saying, these artists and sounds represent ME. the cultures they evoke are the cultures i identify with. because the truth is, we like music for all kinds of reasons, and many of those involve culture. when we talk about mixing genres, we should really be talking about mixing cultures, because that's what musicians are really doing. so, someone like Jack White believes in the values of the music that he is trying to emulate, if that makes sense. he believes that the garage aesthetic is important, and he believes in the culture and values surrounding the garage band movement. he also seems to believe that in creating music for people who are similarly serious about that culture, he couldn't just turn round and make White Stripes into a band with another set of values. think about what happened when Bob Dylan -- another artist who made self-conscious choices about the values he wished his music to express -- went electric. the part of the folk culture that believed in acoustic music written in older styles as an aesthetic which represented their personal value system were pissed off. he seemed to anticipate this, and took his famous licks for it, but his picking up an electric guitar was a values choice as well: he's said that he thought rock music wasn't serious music when he first started performing; obviously, he began to take it more seriously at some point and wanted his music to reflect that. (he wasn't wrong: the 60s rock pioneers are currently inspiring a 2nd wave of 60s-style art rock from the aforemetioned Grizzly Bear and a ton of others right now.)

this post got a little rambly, but it's something that i've been really pondering lately with my own music: what values am i communicating with my music and the artists that i am emulating? why am i drawn to those values? what are the cultures surrounding the artists and sounds and genres influencing the musical choices i'm making? why am i drawn to those cultures? why do i want to be identified with them? what do those choices say about me and my values? how can i make sure to effectively communicate those values, and how do i identify those parts of my music that conflict with the values i'm trying to express? when an artist trying to think about Who They Are As An Artist, this is really what is meant. if Jack White put Pharrell-style synths in Get Thee Behind Me Satan, for example, a different set of values and cultures would have been evoked. that's an extreme example, but even the little choices make a difference. recording just a vocal and acoustic guitar is a values choice. adding a bit of slapback delay to that recording is a values choice, and changes the cultural association that the recording draws upon. adding a drum machine as opposed to a live drummer would be a cultural and values choice. trying to capture a "human"-sounding performance is a values choice, as is using Auto-Tune in an overt way. and on and on.

h/t to stereogum.

also

2009-06-01T12:52:00.001-04:00

you know what's fucking great? the new grizzly bear CD. shaping up to be my favorite release since 808s.

who's a bad blogger?

2009-06-01T11:17:00.004-04:00

i am. i haven't been blogging at all. but i've been writing a whole lot, and honing my guitar playing and singing into the sound that i want. i've re-recorded some vocals, added acoustic guitar to quite a bit.

i'm going to release BROKEN HOMES as an EP (only 5 tracks) because i'm already working material for the next album, which WILL be a full-length and is going to be a much bigger project that i'll detail in a bit. i'm going to use West West Side for my mastering still, and i'm going to play some more gigs soon, mostly with just me and my acoustic guitar.

for now, check out this new version of "Long Way Off" with acoustic guitar added and a new vocal performance. and a better mix all around.

[[[ DOWNLOAD "LONG WAY OFF" ]]]

mp3 -- "The Lonesome Death of Pablo Aguilar"

2009-05-04T15:07:00.002-04:00

unmastered.

i just can't quit the dylan influence i guess.

[[[ DOWNLOAD "THE LONESOME DEATH OF PABLO AGUILAR" HERE ]]]

acoustic guitars

2009-05-04T14:50:00.002-04:00

one of the things i learned from my gig at Matchless the other night was that i needed an acoustic guitar, at least for venues that are intimate the way Matchless is.

so, i bought one a few days after the show, and i started playing around on it quite a bit. i recorded that new song i debuted at the gig as just an acoustic/vocal track, and i'm not even sure if i'll add anything to it.

now, i feel like i want to add acoustic guitar to many of the existing tracks to fill out the sound a bit, especially "long way off" and "bexar county". i also want to lay off the vocal effects a bit; the more i listen to my voice with the effects on it (the slap delay, the light distortion, the light reverb) the more it sounds a little insecure, like i'm trying to hide behind the effects. i might redo those vocals with a more high-and-dry effects mix as well.

pics from RESONANCE gig

2009-05-04T14:28:00.002-04:00

taken by my girl.

gonna debut a new song tomorrow at the gig

2009-04-21T22:52:00.002-04:00

so check me out:

Resonance
Wednesdays
MATCHLESS
557 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn
No Cover
7:00 - 10:30PM

Resonance (n): A deep, mellow reverberation of sound; something that evokes a strong emotion.

Resonance is a weekly night featuring four lo-watt bands and songwriters, for free. Previously known as the Songwriter Showcase, this event has been host to many of New York’s top singer-songwriters and acoustic bands for over four years.

April 22, 2009:
7:00: Brett Saxon
7:40: Blueyed Son
8:20: Aunt Martha
9:00: Colin Steel & Wiretaps

my first gig -- next wednesday, april 22

2009-04-14T11:49:00.004-04:00

well, this is nice -- i submitted my music for the Resonance series put on by JezebelMusic.com way back in February, and i just got an email inviting me to be a part of Resonance on Wednesday, April 22.

this is a huge honor; they have a great showcase and i was honestly surprised that they responded to my email, since i figured i needed to have a little more of a following to get their attention.

anyway, here's more info about their Resonance series. it takes place every Wednesday at 7 pm at Bar Matchless in Greenpoint. i'm going to be checking out their show this wednesday, so if you end up there as well, look out for me.

laid off.

2009-03-30T15:33:00.001-04:00

just got laid off. i'm gonna have to postpone the release of my album until...well, we'll see.

dolly has a blog

2009-03-25T10:47:00.003-04:00

and you damn well better check it out, unless you're okay with missing gems like the entry of 2/4/09, which begins "Boy, I really am busier than the one-legged man in a butt kicking contest."

mastering

2009-03-25T10:35:00.004-04:00

i'm going to go with West West Side Music for the mastering of my debut LP. last night i had a really terrific conversation with the owner and chief engineer Alan Douches; their rates are incredibly reasonable and they seem to be as artist-friendly as you please.

they've also done a ton of great work; their credits read like an indie band high school yearbook:

Sufjan Stevens, Nile, Brand New, Animal Collective, Fleetwood Mac, Mastodon, Everytime I Die, Clutch, Ben Folds Five, Converge, Galaxy 500, Beirut, Midlake, !!!, Shadows Fall, The Promise Ring, Against Me!, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Sepultura, Dalek, Yes, Fallout Boy, Hole, Thrice, Ted Leo, The Rapture, Superjoint Ritual, Hatebreed, Fat Boy Slim, Run DMC, The Misfits, Hot Water Music, Sick of It All, Black Dice, The Wrens, Les Savy Fav, My Morning Jacket, Cave In, Buzzcocks, LCD Sound System, Atreyu, Rupert Holmes, Panda Bear, From Autumn To Ashes, The Dismemberment Plan, Luke Temple, Snapcase, Martin Denny, Trans-Am, H2O, Hot Rod circuit, The Chemical Brothers, Luna, Monster Magnet, Rye Coalition, The Slackers, Glen Burtnik, Radio 4, Burning Airlines, Kramer, Alakaline Trio, Jets to Brazil, Her Space Holiday, My Brightest Diamond, Girls Against Boys, A Static Lullaby, Maritime, Danielson, Dave LaRue, Def Jux, Oneida, Burning Brides, Cap'n Jazz, Jackie Gleason, The Liars, Train, Paul Schwartz, Saves The Day, Pete Townsend, Maya Angelou, Low, Human League, Mice Parade, Sworn Enemy, Damon & Naomi, Burnt by The Sun, Gym Class Heroes, David Berkeley, Comeback Kid, Grand Master Flash, Strike Anywhere, DJ Soul Slinger, David Shire, Killswitch Engage, Kool And The Gang, Locust, Youth of Today, Between the Buried and Me, God Forbid, Smoothe Da Hustler, Pedro the Lion, Symphony X, Bad Brains, Earth Crisis, Channels, Olivia Tremor Control, Bayside, Twilight Sad, Murphy's Law, Oakley Hall, Lifetime, Unearth...

i'll report back here on how well they end up working out for "Broken Homes in Bexar County" but i'm very optimistic.

i don't know if i'd quite go this far

2009-03-25T10:31:00.003-04:00

but the baltimore band Celebration is going to give all their music away for free from now on, forever:

We as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture's need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us...Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license, all of our new music will be free to download on our new website. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is--laid bare.

they have a whole manifesto on their website.

h/t gvb.

hipster runoff, i wish i could quit you.

2009-03-24T14:04:00.002-04:00

carles drops some science.

mellencamp on the music biz

2009-03-23T15:27:00.003-04:00

John Mellencamp wrote a nice, insightful essay in huffpo today about the record companies and the dire straits they find themselves in. he paints a convincing picture of an industry that became more concerned with the trends in stock prices than trends in american music:

During the late 80s and early 90s the industry underwent a transformation and restructured, catalyzed by three distinct factors. Record companies no longer viewed themselves as conduits for music, but as functions of the manipulations of Wall Street. Companies were acquired, conglomerated, bought and sold; public stock offerings ensued, shareholders met. At this very same time, new Nielsen monitoring systems -- BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) and SoundScan were employed to document record sales and radio airplay. Prior to 1991, the Billboard charts were done by manual research; radio stations and record stores across the country were polled to determine what was on their playlists and what the big sellers were. Thus, giving Oklahoma City, for example, an equivalent voice to Chicago's in terms of potential impact on the music scene. BDS keeps track of gross impressions through an encoded system that counts the number of plays or "spins" that a song receives. That number is, thereafter, multiplied by the number of potential listeners. SoundScan was put in place at retail centers to track sales by monitoring scanned barcodes of units crossing the counter. A formula was devised whereby the charts were based 20% on the SoundScan number and 80% on BDS results. The system had changed from one that measured popularity to one that was driven by population.

"read" the "whole thing", as they say on the blogweb.

just came back from sxsw

2009-03-23T13:13:00.001-04:00

it was awesome. made some contacts. next year, by hook or by crook, i'll be performing there.

5 Minutes With The Glib!

2009-03-16T16:14:00.003-04:00

my podcast debut.

these guys do a podcast in which they spotlight one band or musician who has requested them or messaged them on myspace. usually to make fun of the band. but they were pretty cool about my stuff!

"keep your eyes peeled" for blueyed son, is what they said. i'm just quoting.

reviewing an album in 140 characters or less

2009-03-13T10:48:00.006-04:00

i guess this was inevitable:

I'm going to once again plug my Twitter page 1000TimesYes, where I'm reviewing 1,000 of 2009's new releases by the end of the year. In the tiny gasps for air in between Idolator posts, I am planning to review the new ones from Kelly Clarkson, The-Dream, Richard Swift, Bob Mould, Animal Hospital and MF Doom!

that's christopher r. weingarten of idolator speaking. i guess the lesser-known artists should be grateful for the thousand reviews a year, though! i hope i have the honor of having an album's worth of work reduced to a tweet with a numerical score at the end. (check out the actual twitter feed of the 140-character reviews -- it's incredibly depressing if you take music seriously.)

(also, if you're going to follow someone's tweets, follow mine!)

my podcast debut, yall

2009-03-12T15:51:00.003-04:00

i just got the best news i've heard all day - i'm going to be featured in the podcast 5 Minutes With The Glib on March 16 (that's next wednesday). so go subscribe to their feed and check me out! apparently they're going to play a track and then talk about the music in a glib way. so we'll see. it could be a dubious honor.

Mahler's 9th

2009-03-10T11:31:00.003-04:00

i realized last night that "little lucy" has a whole lot of the first movement of Mahler's 9th in it, especially the main melody and some of the arrangement (especially when the horn comes in about 2/3 of the way through, after the bridge). take a listen:

i've listened to that piece of music probably a hundred times, but it's been many years since i gave it a spin. and yet, the influence is unmistakable. i am endlessly fascinated at how these bits of musical memory rear their heads during the creative process.

dreaming of the second enlightenment

2009-03-09T16:43:00.004-04:00

i don't know how to write this without sounding like whoever/whatever it is that hipster runoff is parodying/imitating ("what kind of 'moment' do yall think we r 'in' right now?"), but this is something i've been thinking over for the past few months.

i don't think anyone would argue that we're going through a large shift in consumer attitudes and taste, which is coinciding with an explosion of at-your-fingertips independent art/music/video. these two phenomena are caught in a sort of feedback loop, and for the moment, it seems to be great news for everyone other than the entertainment dinosaurs who were built to make money in the pre-internet age.

like any other human, i seek historical precedent when it comes to understanding and interpreting current events, but modern history ("modern" = anything after the birth of radio, in my mind) doesn't have a true precedent for the great cultural scramble that the internet and its billions of contributors have unleashed.

the dawn of the television age isn't a useful comparison, i don't think. television is a domineering medium, perfect for fascists -- that is to say, it tells you and shows you, and you must watch and listen. you can turn off the set, but in doing so, you're making a conscious choice to reject the culture that everyone else is embracing, and that mass mega-culture had no real alternatives (until the beatniks inspired the folkies and the folkies inspired the hippies and the beatles got involved and the counterculture exploded, but that's what happens when you have a crushing monoculture and a bumper crop of privileged kids, i guess). anyway, the point is, television is one-way, the very opposite of a democratic medium.

the internet is, of course, the very model of a democratic medium. we've never really had one of these. well, that's not true -- there is historical precedent, but one has to reach way back across the centuries to locate it. the closest i can think of is the explosion of printed materials in the renaissance following the invention of the printing press; this democratization of words and ideas (most crucially, scientific, philosophical, religious and mathematical ideas) was directly responsible for the revolution in western thought known as the Age of Enlightenment.

is this happening again? i like to hope that it is. the availability of information and opinions from unlimited sources and viewpoints can't be anything but a cultural benefit. from what i've observed, certain communities (left-leaning blogs, say) begin trading information and insights very quickly, forming groups that are collectively more intelligent than the sum of their parts. this is happening globally, across every culture, within every category and clique that people choose to identify with.

music (and entertainment in general) is/are being democratized so rapidly that it's nearly impossible to keep up with everything--new music breeds new blogs breed new readers breed new musicians breed new music and on and on. it has the earmarks of a bubble, i suppose, but human creativity isn't a business, and the human creative capacity is without a foreseeable limit, so i don't see any reason to worry (unless you're a record company exec of course!).

massive cultural shifts don't feel so massive when they're happening, but in 20 years time, and certainly in 100 years time, i wonder if people won't look back on this moment as a global renaissance of sorts -- a renaissance not just of music and art and entertainment, but of science and ideas and self-actualization. during the first renaissance, and the first enlightenment, ideas were accessible, and so was art and music and all the rest -- but these were far more accessible if you were part of the landed gentry (that is, if you had a ton of money for leisure and study). the internet has the potential to remove virtually all impediments to human advancement, if one believes (as i do) that exposure to new ideas and new cultures is the starting point for any such advancement.

anyway, it's an incredible time to be alive.

"treetop flyer"

2009-03-09T12:38:00.003-04:00

interesting - i heard from someone whose opinion i respect, telling me that "little lucy" reminded him of "treetop flyer" by Stephen Stills. i hadn't heard it before, so i checked it out -- on the surface it's quite a bit different, but i think the lyrics are what touched off that association. it's a great song, though:

coincidentally, i just saw Ray LaMontagne on saturday night live, who i'd heard of a few times but never gotten around to listening to. i liked what i heard - i've been sort of concerned that my voice was a little unusual sounding in today's musical landscape, even for an independent artist, but his voice is not too different from mine, and watching his SNL performance gave me confidence that i'm on the right track and that my music and vocal style have some sort of a reference in the current ecosystem.

so, i'm browsing LaMontagne's wikipedia page this morning, and i notice that he was sort of a normal guy in his twenties with a family in Maine, until he heard a song that made him want to become a musician. the song? "treetop flyer" by Stephen Stills.

interesting, i thought.

finally fixed

2009-03-07T09:56:00.001-05:00

blueyedson.com finally redirects back here.

to celebrate, watch this extraordinary example of how to make a great music video for no money.

Winter Gloves - Let Me Drive from Paper Bag Records on Vimeo.

f.u. godaddy

2009-03-06T17:17:00.003-05:00

a word to the wise: don't use Go Daddy for your domain hosting, and especially ESPECIALLY don't use their shitty site builder "smart space". use them to purchase domains if you must, but in the future i don't think i'm even going to do that. for the past two days i've basically lost control of the www.blueyedson.com domain because of their infuriating, confusing products. i can't even get a domain that i own to redirect back to this blog, even after consulting their IT people and following their explicit instructions. i bought that domain name; it's mine. it should point where i want it to point, and for some reason, it still doesn't. i made the tragic mistake of trying to upgrade my site by using their services, and now i just want to storm their offices with a chainsaw.

new mp3 hosting

2009-03-05T15:25:00.005-05:00

since i joined taxi.com a few weeks ago, i realized that i could just link to the mp3s that i host there instead of constantly fucking with slow-ass zshare.net.

so i fixed the links in the original posts so that the mp3s can be downloaded super-fast and without redirecting to zshare's crappy pages that make you wait for 60 seconds before the file starts downloading. i'll still post unfinished work-in-progress tracks to zshare, mainly because i don't want to clutter up my taxi.com page with all that stuff, but the final mp3s will be secure and easy to access.

i'm also publishing the links here in case anyone wants to catch up. in current track listing order, here are the songs i've completed for "BROKEN HOMES" thus far (and it's worth repeating that these are very good quality, but still unmastered, so some are at different volumes than others, some might sound better on some speakers than other speakers, etc.):

"COCAINE COCAINE" (UNMASTERED)
"LONG WAY OFF" (UNMASTERED)
"HOLD ON TO MY HAND" (UNMASTERED)
"BEXAR COUNTY" (UNMASTERED)
"LITTLE LUCY" (UNMASTERED)

good times

2009-03-04T12:05:00.001-05:00

i'm not certain, but i think the odds are about 50-50 that i'll be laid off in two weeks.

"Little Lucy" (unmastered)

2009-03-03T19:00:00.006-05:00

here's the full version of "Little Lucy". this recording is probably as good as anything i've ever done.

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "LITTLE LUCY" (UNMASTERED) ]]]]]

"Bexar County" (unmastered)

2009-03-03T18:56:00.003-05:00

full version of "Bexar County". sounds great, i think.

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "BEXAR COUNTY" (UNMASTERED) ]]]]]

still waiting

2009-03-03T12:32:00.004-05:00

still waiting for the radiator to shut the hell up, so here's another instrumental. i'm really, really proud of this one also. this song is called "little lucy".

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "LITTLE LUCY" (INSTRUMENTAL) ]]]]]

the worst thing about recording vocals at home

2009-03-03T12:23:00.004-05:00

is that when the radiator is hissing, you just have to wait for it to finish.

i'll post some instrumentals in the meantime.

i know i haven't posted anything on the blog in a bit, but it's mostly because i've been getting a terrific amount of production done, and i'm thisclose to having everything laid down other than the vocal tracks (which are coming along nicely as well).

here's the instrumental track for "Bexar County" -- it's one of the best i've ever done. the full band sound is pretty incredible.

[[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "BEXAR COUNTY" (INSTRUMENTAL) ]]]]]

the other blueyed son

2009-02-24T16:34:00.003-05:00

i realized something last night.

the main catalyst for this album (this whole undertaking, really) was a trip to Texas over the Christmas holidays of 2008. cassie and i visited my younger brother, who had just been released from prison but was already back in the state hospital for a drug relapse (this encounter is described rather completely in "Cocaine Cocaine" so i'm not going to elaborate on it too much here).

you never really know why you do the things you do, but i realized last night that it probably wasn't an accident that in the opening song of the debut album of my band Blueyed Son, i refer not to my own blue eyes, but to my brother's. i didn't have this in mind at the time, but it's becoming clear to me that this band and this album is as much about him as it is about me, and that even the name of the band is a reference to him as much as it is to myself.

listening to yourself

2009-02-24T10:53:00.003-05:00

i've been listening back to that scratch recording of bexar county that i made a few days ago and it's pretty obvious that i need to work on a few things in my performance.

first, i was really using my throat a lot to scream, which i don't normally do -- i used to be pretty disciplined about pushing air up from my diaphragm when i needed more vocal power on higher notes. i don't have a problem singing the healthier way when it's just me and a mic, but when i also have a guitar around my neck i guess i revert back to old bad habits. so that's something i need to be aware of when i'm performing.

i also think my timing could be a lot better. my timing is pretty good with piano, though still not amazing, but the timing on my guitar playing -- which i'm just now re-learning how to play -- is pretty sloppy. i'm not that interested in being a great guitar soloist, but i really do want to play rhythm guitar well, which is much more difficult than one might think. so i'm going to be practicing these songs for as many hours as i can in order to get the fingering clean and the timing right in the pocket.

ray kurzweil "transcendent man" trailer

2009-02-24T10:03:00.003-05:00

he didn't just invent electric pianos, people.

via ryan.

photos of me recording the rough demo of "bexar county"

2009-02-23T15:55:00.004-05:00

pics by my sweet girl.

this one's ready for mastering

2009-02-23T12:59:00.001-05:00

the final version of "long way off". i finally got it right, i think.

[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FINAL (UNMASTERED) VERSION OF "LONG WAY OFF" ]]]]

follies

2009-02-23T10:09:00.006-05:00

did anyone catch that weird production of Sondheim's Follies on TV last night? hugh jackman was a pretty good ben i suppose, but sofia loren did the creepiest version of "i'm still here" that i've ever seen.

"bexar county" (live take -- guitar and vox only)

2009-02-21T16:44:00.007-05:00

before my little beer opening incident i was promising a new track. well, here's the raw version, just guitar and vocals, both recorded at the same time, all one take.

i wanted to record a "live" version of me playing this song, or as live as i could get, so this is what i did. i also had cassie take some pictures of me doing it - i'll post those when she's done editing them. but, this is pretty live; i didn't do any overdubs (though i did cross-layer my "whoa" shouts in the bridge but only by using existing material from this take, just to make sure i was extra lars von trier about the live-ness).

i really like the sound effect that was created by my vocal mic picking up my guitar strings being played - it created an electric/acoustic sound that i'm going to experiment with more. whenever my vocal gets louder, though, the "acoustic" sound gets drowned out though, so i want to record the guitar and vocal tracks separately at some point for the full band arrangement of this song.

i guess this is the beauty of having your own home recording studio - you have unlimited hours to experiment with the sounds you're able to record.

i know i won't leave long way off alone, but i have a feeling that this electric/acoustic sound is going to show up in long way off as well. it's what i keep trying to achieve with the electric sound with the constant new versions i've been doing.

[[[[CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE LIVE TAKE OF "BEXAR COUNTY" (GUITAR AND VOX ONLY)]]]]

all the music is written

2009-02-20T17:05:00.003-05:00

i've finished writing all the music for "Broken Homes in Bexar County".

the lyrics are about 2/3 finished, with 6 songs fully complete (out of 10 originals, not including the one cover song i'm doing). i have partial lyrics or sketches for all the other songs, except for the final track on the album, which i'm going to save for last so that i can make sure it serves as an appropriate thematic end to the rest of the album.

i have titles for all the tracks except the last one, though. it's going to be 11 tracks - 10 originals plus "patience".

blueyed son on "the deli" open blog

2009-02-19T10:40:00.004-05:00

i blogged "cocaine cocaine" on the deli's open blog.

if you're coming from there, welcome! thanks for clicking through.

download more mp3s here.

be friends with me on myspace here.

add my blog to your RSS feed here.

ok, that didn't work

2009-02-19T10:37:00.002-05:00

dear "long way off":

i promise not to fuck with you anymore. i am leaving you alone after trying to change you last night. you don't want to be changed. i am ok with that.

yours v. truly,
joe d

switching from writer to producer

2009-02-18T10:19:00.002-05:00

to add a little more to my post below: one of the most difficult things to do when trying to play this DIY game is to take off your creative writer hat and put on your creative producer hat.

the creative writer in me adores every syllable that comes out of my weird brain. my creative writer side hears each phrase, each melody and harmony, as an expression of some thundering river of emotion, loaded with truth and potency. the creative writer hears nothing but how incredible the song could be, and works hard to fulfill that potential.

but at some point, after you have a draft of a finished product, it's time to stop listening to the potential of the song, and listen to the song itself as others might hear it. in my mind, there is nothing more difficult.

anyone who knows me can tell you that i hate, hate, hate, HATE to hear criticism. i've never been good at it, and i know it's one of my faults. so i've developed a habit of being as aggressively critical as i can of my own work once it's done, trying to listen with the most jaundiced, unwelcoming ear possible; that way, i can anticipate criticism from others, and work beforehand to try and fix any problems or weak spots that might stick out to other people. my fiancee cassie knows this routine well: i listen to something over and over, trying to forget how it sounded when it was a work in progress and trying to view it as a whole composition. then, i turn to her and say, are you sure this doesn't sound too x, y or z? she usually looks at me like i'm nuts, since these self-critical listening sessions most often chase ghost problems that don't exist, but every once in a while i hear something that's real.

thinking like a creative producer means being willing to kill my favorite children, if that's the price i have to pay to make a song better. it means keeping perspective and realizing which songwriting goals are important and which are not. it means hearing my own creative expression in a dispassionate way and figuring out which moments are successful and which are getting in my way. it's my least favorite part, because it flirts right on the edge of self-doubt, which can be the beginning of a crippling death spiral for a writer in the middle of writing something. but, i know that if i want this album to be great -- not just good, but great, like anyone who pops it in and listens can't fail to hear that it's a significant piece of writing executed with a clear, consistent vision and impeccable craftsmanship -- i have to be as self-critical as possible, and not settle for songs or lyrics or melodies that are "pretty good". there are too many great, great artists out there doing the same thing i am, trying to punch through in the same way i'm trying to do. if i want this to be a breakthrough album, i have to earn it. otherwise the gap between ambition and execution will be apparent to every listener.

part of the reason i write this blog is to sort of rev myself up to do the more difficult things, like rewriting a song i already like. the more i type these things out, for all the world to see, the more i commit to doing them. so now i'm all in with this rewrite, and i know it has to be better than the original, but that kind of pressure is usually great for me; it always has been in the past.

so, look for a new song in the future, probably called "wait", that will be a rewritten (and improved) long way off.

rewriting "long way off"

2009-02-18T10:03:00.002-05:00

the more i listen to it, the more i think the lyric and the melody for "long way off" could be stronger. now that the arrangement is evolving, the lyric and the melody have to go with it, and they're still stuck in an old idea of what the song is. i love how the arrangement is shaping up, but it's so damn big that if the lyric and melody don't match it, the song falls apart.

more problematically, the chorus is especially springsteen-esque. now, i don't mind displaying my influences, but i'm not trying to do parody or pastiche or whatever. i can't write a great bruce springsteen song; only one person can do that. i can write a great joe drymala song, though, and i haven't done it yet.

the strongest part of the song -- the part i'm most likely to retain most or all of -- is the pre-chorus ("i know it hasn't been easy/ you drove all this way just to see me" and "had dreams but they all ran from me/ just look at how the years have done me"). i wait for that part of the song every time, but then the chorus is disappointing in my mind.

the chorus sounds like backup vocals to me. the hook isn't "hook"-y and the lyrics don't grab me. i have in my mind a situation where i keep those vocals, though -- bringing them in for the second half of the second chorus, where they would fit beautifully -- as backup vocals to the main melody that i'm working out right now.

the new song is probably not even going to be called "long way off" -- i'm playing with a new hook. i think the song is going to be called "wait". the theme is going to be pretty much the same, but i'm going to try and dig deeper with the lyrics, and try to make both the lyrics and the melody push the song forward in a way that i feel they don't, yet.

"patience"

2009-02-17T11:02:00.003-05:00

i wasn't going to do any covers for my debut LP but i was playing this on guitar last night (no bar chords = playable even with sliced thumb) and goddamn is it a good song. the lyric is so tender and restrained. i decided that i'm gonna cover it and probably put it as the 2nd to last track (everyone's official home for the one cover track they do on their album). it also fits really, really nicely with the album arc that i've been envisioning.

fucking hell

2009-02-15T12:30:00.002-05:00

i sliced my thumb open last night when a beer bottle broke while i was opening it. maybe i've just become freakishly strong, like nadine from twin peaks, but it was probably because i was using a paint can opener to open a bottle of beer.

so i can't play my guitar right now. i was planning on recording my new song and posting a guitar/vox version of it this weekend but that's out. in the meantime i can still twiddle around with knobs like i did last night.

my fiancee got me these from the drugstore and i highly recommend them if you have a decent cut but don't want to go get stitches. it's basically a wax pad (i wrapped it around my thumb) that forms a medicated sealant around your cut and makes the healing process happen way faster. it's like i have a skin around my thumb. so i'm hoping these pads will do their magic and heal my shit in the next couple of days so i can record this song already; i'm chomping at the bit to do it.

also in the meantime (new mix of "Long Way Off")

2009-02-14T20:04:00.005-05:00

i keep getting closer to my ideal on "long way off" where the guitar keeps drifting toward an 80s metallica sort of sound by the time the chorus kicks in. i ugess that makes sense since 80s heavy metal was the first guitar sound i tried to emulate. it's a little more distant than someone like metallica though.

i was also listening to U2 live at red rocks -- an album i listened to hundreds of time as a teenager but haven't picked up much since. i realized that the drum sounds in long way off are completely inspired by larry mullen's drums on that recording.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW MIX OF "LONG WAY OFF"

in the meantime

2009-02-12T10:58:00.002-05:00

watch this

via brian beutler at yglesias from super bowl sunday.

new song coming...

2009-02-11T10:15:00.000-05:00

...i'm writing a new song that's going to be a real houseburner. i'm going to record it this week or this weekend at the latest.

HOLY JESUS

2009-02-11T02:02:00.003-05:00

[UPDATE 2/14/09 -- even better mix of Long Way Off here]

i just figured out something crucial about using distortion. holy fucking shit.

those other songs i posted under these same titles were a fucking joke, and you can hear why when you download these.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "COCAINE COCAINE
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "LONG WAY OFF"
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "HOLD ON TO MY HAND"

Spursblogging

2009-02-10T16:17:00.000-05:00

Yglesias:

Yes, they’re "only" 34-14, but Tony Parker’s missed ten games and Manu Ginobili’s missed thirteen. With them back in the lineup, San Antonio’s been storming forward. And Manu’s only been playing 27 minutes per game, which he can surely step up in the playoffs. Then of course there’s Tim Duncan who’s been totally brilliant. They still look like underdogs, I suppose, but the Spurs always seem to get forgotten just before they start winning again and then everyone forgets how they managed to forget about them in the first place.

yep.

"fuzzed out Springsteen"

2009-02-10T12:59:00.000-05:00

i just put that descriptor of my music on my myspace page. i think long way off and hold on to my hand are getting closer to that garage anthem ideal. i want to put a little more mic distortion on cocaine cocaine but it probably won't change all that much.

new "Long Way Off" (Unmastered)

2009-02-10T02:47:00.000-05:00

i lied -- i couldn't stop messing with it. i re-recorded the guitar and put a whole lot more distortion on everything, including the vocal. everything is pretty clear sounding though, fuzz notwithstanding. this is much closer to what i always envisioned the song should be. the guitar needed to be more in front and the sound of the vocal needed to be more raw and exciting. to be honest, that original recording of long way off that i did with the cheaper mic made me want to hear more mic distortion on my voice. i think it also reminds me of being 14 years old and hearing my voice through a practice amp for the first time, distorted and loud and awesome.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEW "LONG WAY OFF" (UNMASTERED)

my "sound"

2009-02-09T09:57:00.000-05:00

i'm really happy with the way "hold on to my hand" turned out sound-wise. this is the third song i've recorded, so it makes sense that i would start to zero in on what "sound" i want the album to have right around now.

this is pretty normal for my writing process -- i like to think that i can envision large projects in their totality before i start, but it never works out that way. instead, it usually takes me a fair bit of writing and listening and tweaking and absorbing before the overall tone of something starts to crystallize.

my good friend and sometime sound engineer Mike Nirenberg was telling me the other day not to do any final mixes early on; he said it's very common to mix something in january that sounds nothing like what you mixed last august or whatever. that makes sense to me; i already hear huge differences in my sonic goals between long way off and hold on to my hand.

i'm probably going to revisit long way off; i've tinkered with the mix for hours and hours though in the past two weeks and i'm sort of sick of that song right now. so i'm just going to put it on the back burner for a bit while i work on other things.

i've also been thinking about production. it's really difficult to keep perspective on how something sounds when it's your own material and you're also not entirely sure what the final, final sonic end point is going to be. i've been thinking about eventually working with a co-producer who has an ear for the kinds of sounds i'm trying to experiment with. i have approximately zero dollars to do this, though, so i might just solicit the help of friends whose taste i trust, unless i can find someone to team up with who's willing to work for a percentage rather than a fee.

"Hold On To My Hand" (Unmastered)

2009-02-08T23:37:00.001-05:00

[UPDATE 2/11/09: this is the new and improved mix with a little more noise and a lot more power.

[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "HOLD ON TO MY HAND" ]]]]

***********************************

here's the full version of Hold On To My Hand, probably track 3 of broken homes in bexar county.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "HOLD ON TO MY HAND"

2-track of "Hold On To My Hand"

2009-02-07T18:08:00.000-05:00

i just wrote this song yesterday and recorded a 2-track version of it today with guitar and vocal only. i'm going to probably add much more to it but this is the skeleton.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "HOLD ON TO MY HAND" (2-TRACK)"

"BROKEN HOMES IN BEXAR COUNTY"

2009-02-05T16:21:00.000-05:00

i think i'm going to add to my original title idea of "BEXAR COUNTY" (the word "Bexar" is pronounced "Bear" -- the X is silent for some reason).

the new working title for the Blueyed Son debut is BROKEN HOMES IN BEXAR COUNTY.

HIPSTER RUNOFF responds

2009-02-04T15:43:00.000-05:00

this village voice interview with Carles, the anonymous guy who writes HIPSTER RUNOFF, is pretty fascinating. carles responds to the shit he apparently stirred up with the Animal Collective post, and outs himself as an aspiring musician who is going to put out an EP soon. guns are trained on you, dude.

ryan j davis blogs as well

2009-02-04T15:22:00.000-05:00

and he blogged me. you should check out his blog if you haven't already -- he could tell you ALL KINDS of shit about me.

"BEXAR COUNTY"

2009-02-04T12:11:00.000-05:00

i've decided i'm going to call the first Blueyed Son album BEXAR COUNTY, which is the county i grew up in. it encompasses san antonio and some of the the surrounding hill country.

Long Way Off (Unmastered, w/ new mic)

2009-02-04T12:07:00.000-05:00

here's the second track, Long Way Off. the new mic was really crucial for this one. i also improved the mix and redid the guitar.

[UPDATE 10:47 PM: I've been listening to it and just did a new mix of it that's much less harsh sounding. my monitors have sucky low end so i have to try it out in a few different locations to really see if a mix is working. so i deleted the old link and added a new one to the new mix.]

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LONG WAY OFF

Cocaine Cocaine (Unmastered, w/ new mic)

2009-02-04T12:02:00.000-05:00

i just re-recorded the vocals for cocaine cocaine and long way off with my new mic yesterday; here is cocaine cocaine. i think i'm going to make this the first track on the album.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD COCAINE COCAINE

one more thought on african and irish music

2009-02-02T16:17:00.000-05:00

i wrote here about my belief that practically all "american" sounding music can be traced to either irish immigrant music or african slave music.

it occurs to me that there is one genre that is set up as a hybrid of the descendants of these two musical traditions, one that blends african american blues sounds and rhythms with irish-inspired folk and country music chords and melodies. this genre is at its best, i think, when it achieves a balance between these two dominant musical strains of americana.

(i'm talking of course about rock and roll.)

my weird journey back into the arms of rock and roll

2009-02-02T12:22:00.000-05:00

i was 8 when my parents divorced; my father ended up remarried to a friend of the family. she was a guitarist and a singer who led song worship in Catholic Mass, and her two sons ian and chris were something like 7 and 10 years older than i, which put them in late high school and early college respectively. at age 10, i was convinced that they were just about the coolest guys i could hope to meet. they were aspiring musicians, and they had a massive 70s and 80s rock collection. all cassettes of course -- i remember the homemade cassette holder that chris told me had been salvaged from a neighbor's garbage. the house was small and the neighborhood was rough but i loved going to my dad's house every other weekend for the music.

i remember chris and ian inviting me into chris's room to hear "something scary" -- it was Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil". "this song will give you nightmares," chris promised. this was back in the days when cassette dubbing was what it was all about. soon i dubbed all the great zeppelin tapes, the great van halen tapes, the great pink floyd tapes, the great ozzy tapes ("I Don't Know" from Blizzard of Ozz was one of the first songs i figured out on guitar, and the "Crazy Train" lick is still one of the greatest guitar licks of all time), and tons more that i can't recall right now. they also had a drum kit in the garage and a few guitars laying around at all times. they were always watching MTV and turning the tv set way too loud. i remember ian pounding out the beat to "Bullet the Blue Sky" on the drums one afternoon. fucking magical. i remember copies of Rolling Stone laying around everywhere.

around this time, my mother remarried, and we moved into my new stepfather's house. he had a son, aaron, close to my age -- a little older, but close enough -- and an older post-college son who was pretty much cut from the same cloth as chris and ian; he was a rad, rad guitar player with a Gibson Explorer (James Hetfield's guitar, y'all!). aaron and i became obsessive rock musicians.

my first instrument, besides piano, was a drum kit. my mother and stepfather bought me a pretty nice Pearl 5-piece and regretted it immediately. aaron was starting to noodle around with an electric guitar, and our first successful jam session featured him playing one riff over and over and over AND OVER, and me keeping terrible time and mutilating the sides of my drumsticks by pounding the cymbals on the sides rather than the tops.

drums, though, felt limited to me; my brain kept coming up with notes and chords and melodies, and i soon switched to guitar as well and began writing rock songs. aaron and i probably wrote hundreds of fragments of songs and dozens of actual songs. we learned hundreds of songs. we bought Guitar World every month and read the tablature to our favorite hits. Eddie Van Halen was our god. we began to get more into prog rock -- i swear to god, there was a time in my life when i considered Queensryche to be the best band ever recorded. aaron hated Guns 'N Roses -- he thought they were rough and anti-intellectual or something -- so i listened to them privately but obsessively. i was also becoming a pretty good singer; my mom had me audition for musicals in community theater productions since i was a kid, and aaron and i soon formed a band with myself as the frontman and him as the lead guitarist. i would practice my chops by belting out every track from The Joshua Tree through my cheap mic and practice amp. (i would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Ms. Guthrie and to the Hillers, our neighbors on either side.)

i had already been bathed in the music of the 60s by this time, but modern rock and roll seemed exciting, and it also seemed very, very serious (the deep conversations aaron and i had about Operation:Mindcrime are too hilarious to recount here, so i'll spare you). so, aaron and i formed a band, and eventually, by the time high school rolled around, we picked up a few more members, including my friend paul on bass. i swear to god, the first band name we came up with was "Whisper". not even kidding. aaron eventually had a better band name idea -- "Failing Nations" -- and we stuck with that for a while. we played around San Antonio in some cheap, terrible dives; someplace called "Showcase" and someplace near my house that i can't remember the name of. we were pretty young for that scene, but we thought we were the greatest band ever.

at some point, aaron and i outgrew the other members of Failing Nations and we wanted to go off on our own, and we formed a new two-person band. our parents had moved us into our own little house off Harry Wurzbach which my stepfather owned as a rental property. we got a terrific funk bass player named mike and became a total Dream Theater-esque math metal band to the absolute extreme. we called ourselves Requiem Eternal. we had huge, 10-minute compositions. aaron had purchased a pretty good Korg keyboard by this time and i played it while i sang. we got a drummer with a huge, 20-piece kit and we practiced and practiced. we also hooked up with Levann.

i don't know where Levann came from, but we'd seen him play for other local bands. he was a huge, 6'5" muscular African American rock guitar player who convinced us that he was a rock guitar god known all the world over for his monster shredding ability (which was totally real -- he could shred at least). he took an interest in aaron and began to "groom" us to tour with his band in Japan. we were suspicious about the fact that he always needed us to pick him up in spite of his boasts about his dozen sports cars in some other city, but his rhetoric and his playing ability made us look the other way on that stuff. Levann started to come to all our rehearsals, motivating us, threatening us, complimenting us, even challenging poor Mike to a fist fight at one point. we got pretty good...but we never played anywhere. Levann kept telling us we weren't ready. and at this point we were pretty afraid of him. we were still in high school.

eventually we realized that Levann was just a talented local guy with a big mouth and too much time on his hands. it wasn't clear what he got out of rehearsing with us day after day and pretending that we were headed for Japanese superstardom; maybe he just wanted to feel important. it took us a while to face facts but when we did, aaron and i were pretty much devastated. we felt like we'd wasted years of our lives, which doesn't make a lot of sense in retrospect but things seem bigger when you're 17. fuck rock music, i thought.

around this time, i'd begun to participate in more community theater, and i got interested in the musical storytelling in some of Sondheim's work. i was in a pretty cool local production of Assassins that got attacked from all sides (San Antonio is pretty conservative -- a mostly military town, really). i began to get disenchanted with rock music. it seemed to be a dead end. the new rock music that was coming out -- the big Seattle explosion of the early 90s -- seemed really cool, but began to recycle itself by the time i started to retreat from rock and roll. i wanted serious music. i began to listen to only classical music, along with the more adventurous musicals of sondheim and leonard bernstein. 88.3 was the only station on in my car. rock and roll seemed like lifestyle music; the chords and the rhythms and the lyrics seemed too simple; my math-oriented brain hungered for more complex patterns.

when i was 18, i submitted a new musical i'd written to a young playwright's festival in los angeles. to my surprise, they picked it and ran with it, taking it beyond the initial festival and giving it a full mainstage production. it felt great.

i ended up at berklee shortly thereafter (aaron was attending, and it seemed cool), but the pace of the classes was pretty slow. i was kind of a bad fit for the school -- it's really set up to accommodate instrumentalists, jazz musicians, studio musicians, professional engineers, those types of people. of course, i was trying to study classical composition. i tried to get money to produce another musical i'd written at the school, and got pretty pissed off and self righteous when the administration wouldn't give it to me, since i thought that if i were a jazz sax player organizing a music showcase i would have gotten help with no questions asked. i left berklee for new york city. i was 20.

flash forward a few years; i'd been exploring fusions between classical music and theater music, getting more and more into John Adams and minimalism in general, and i tried to incorporate his style into a theatrical setting (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) with the next two musicals that i wrote. all dead ends. maybe i hadn't found my calling after all. i grew disenchanted.

in february of 2003, i moved to vermont for a year to see what the world of politics was all about. all i knew was, i wanted to write speeches for a presidential candidate. howard dean caught my attention. i started as a volunteer and ended up as his primary speechwriter (which sounds more exciting than it was; howard dean hated giving prepared speeches, and most of my work was entirely theoretical). it ended up being probably the most significant experience of my life.

i met ryan j. davis on the dean campaign. he was a theater kid from new york as well, and we drove from burlington, vermont to iowa together in a snowstorm. we listened to hedwig and jesus christ superstar and outkast and almost killed ourselves driving through snow. we resolved to hook up again in new york after the campaign.

after the iowa caucus disaster, and the infamous scream, we came back to the city. ryan worked with me on one of my John Adams-esque musicals for a bit, but soon he had a new idea: he wanted to do a bleak satire of pop music and propaganda about a white supremacist teen pop band, based on the real-life preteen group Prussian Blue, sort of recalling the prince/sondheim experiments of the 70s. i immediately was interested. i came up with the title White Noise, and i began to write songs like i hadn't written since i was a teenager: pop songs, rock songs, country songs, three minutes and thirty-three seconds. i was good at it and i felt inspired again.

i'd also recently purchased an MBox, which is an inexpensive version of the professional music studio software Pro Tools. there is no piece of technology aside from the piano that has had such a profound influence on my understanding of music. Pro Tools laid out music like i'd always pictured it -- as a series of shapes and structures that changed over time. i had just broken up with my girlfriend at the time, and i began to experiment with Pro Tools every day.

White Noise ended up being a pretty big hit in the NY Musical Theater Festival, and even got optioned for a Broadway run, though i doubt it will ever end up there for real (the production is still pending, as of this writing). i kept exploring pop music. i heard Late Registration, and it blew my mind. hip hop had never sounded so musical, and pop music had never sounded so full of possibility. i dove into hip hop.

i was abusing my computer on a daily basis with Pro Tools sessions far too large for the poor machine to handle. i got into the Neptunes, Timbaland, Just Blaze, Madlib, and any other hip hop producer that piqued my curiosity. what was thrilling to me about hip hop was the abstraction of the elements of pop music. a snare could be an actual snare drum, but it could also be a popping sound. it could also be a blip. it could also be a burst of white noise. it could be a noise made with one's own mouth. it could be a combination of some or all of these. this blew my mind. the most exciting producers were abstracting the instruments themselves, creating new sounds that suggested old ones but were informed by the modern world. i discovered The Grey Album about 50 years after everyone else. i shocked even myself when i started to write and record r&b and hip hop, since my early queensryche-loving days were so far removed from that vibe, but i figured what the hell and just got to work playing around with new sounds. i began to record the tracks for a new musical, Street Lights, which tells a sort of modern day civil rights story about an inner city high school and the students who are trying to save their music program. i'd always hated the sound of theater music, so it was my intent to make every track sound like it could credibly be played on Hot 97. the first full track i ever produced, "Not Enough," was a Timbaland-inspired pop song that i still am proud of to this day. i felt like i was becoming an honest-to-goodness producer, beginning to form a clear picture of all the elements in a pop song. but i knew nothing about the "indie rock" scene.

i have to confess that scenes have always intimidated me. i've never been good at playing a character, which is part of why i shifted more into writing and composing rather than performing. to become established within "indie rock," whatever that means, seemed an insurmountable task and besides, my rock and roll days were over. but a friend directed me to Pitchfork, which i'd never heard of. my now-fiancee Cassie has pretty incredible taste in music, and she kept feeding me new sounds that were blowing my mind. Franz Ferdinand! White Stripes playing Jolene! Beta Band! TV On The Radio! i got wind of a little band called Arcade Fire. i devoured Pitchfork's free mp3s. here was an entire ecosystem of music, musicians and critical appreciation that i was completely unaware of. it had its own historical touchstones and musical lineage. the music was new, it felt vital, but it wasn't synthetic; it had a seriousness of purpose that i hadn't recognized in rock and roll before. i bought a Les Paul.

at this point i was still producing weird pop-ish tracks with the intent of selling them, or producing a pop artist, or i don't know what. in reality, i was just experimenting, finding my voice, not really caring what happened to the tracks after they were done. i began to produce nearly a full song a day. at some point, i recorded something different. i felt like it should have a rougher, dirtier sound. i bought Speakerphone, which is a completely excellent plug in that i recommend to all producers and bands, especially DIY types like me. i put my piano sound through a guitar amp sound. my world opened up. i realized i was writing a rock song. well, what the hell, it's not like i'd never done that before. i picked up that guitar i'd bought, but had barely played so far. i kept writing. i realized i wanted to not only write these songs, but perform them. i hadn't sung, or played an electric guitar, since i was 18. i thought those days were over, but i guess i was wrong.

and now here we are in the present. rock and roll doesn't seem dead to me anymore, the electric guitar doesn't seem obsolete to me anymore. rock feels as vital, as alive, as the first day i jammed with aaron on my drum kit. (aaron and i no longer speak for reasons that i won't go into here, but he was my first musical collaborator, and whatever else happened between our families, i can't deny his influence on my life.) storytelling in rock music, which once seemed to me to be a relic of the past, started fueling the fire for a new collection of songs that i began writing and recording on my Mbox.

this is going to sound sentimental i guess, but here goes: i believe in rock music. at its best, it pulls from our shared musical and cultural heritage and creates something that tells us who we are, who we were, what we're trying to become, and encourages us to sing along. i used to be embarrassed and self-conscious about the way my favorite rock songs make me feel, but those days are over i think. now i just want to create the kind of music that i love to listen to. that sounds pretty simple i guess, but it's the hardest damn thing to get right. anyway, that's what i'm going for with Blueyed Son. it's weird how i spent a good fifteen years learning how to write songs from other people's perspectives only to find that the most difficult perspective to write from was my own, but that's how these things go i guess. so i'm back where i started, making rock music and trying to capture that lightning in a bottle just like i was when i was 14 years old.

worth a read

2009-02-02T11:21:00.000-05:00

village voice writer and former pitchfork critic Nick Sylvester talks about hipster runoff's mockery of Animal Collective here. i enjoy hipster runoff; it helps deflate the sense of self-importance surrounding the indie music scene and "alt" culture in general. but...Sylvester is right on the money with his takedown of HRO's post and the site's jaundiced worldview.

i admit that Sylvester is not exactly the perfect messenger for a defense of authenticity, but this post shouldn't be overlooked: it's something of a cri de coeur in defense of musicians who work for years and years to capture something other than a major label record deal:

But I was really inspired by Merriweather Post Pavilion. These guys are only a few years older than I am, and the urgency of striking it big when you’re young is super intense, especially in New York. Yet they were patient. They knew they were onto something, but... They knew they would only get to this point if they worked hard. I echo every fawning praise for this album, which aims to re-imagine popular music, and the way it can sound, and the structures it might take, and the games it might play.

Step into the music, the lyrics, and you realize this album is about three thirty year-olds trying to figure out how not to become grups. They are fundamentally different from the parents, living totally different lives--and yet they love their parents, probably respect the jobs they did on them, want the same for their own. The clash between knowing how screwy life is, being relatively set in your ways, and yet still wanting to remain wide-eyed--open to new possibilities the way you were at age 9, 19, 29—this is what I hear in MPP. A big vulnerable theme, and I admire them not for their answers so much as their bravery to just fucking go for it like this.

Sylvester then goes after HRO itself:

The comedic engine of HRO is this, then: Nobody really likes something on its own terms. Tastes aren't one-way, they're reflexive--or rather, the things we like are reflective, mirror-like, ciphers in themselves. Most people out there aren't interested in the things themselves, or incapable, so much as what it means for them to like these things. Carles doesn't exclude himself from this predicament--he's just the only one telling it like it is. There is a lot of bullshit out there and yet people like it. Most people are (ta-da) hipster runoff.

then, sylvester tears carles apart:

There is nothing more annoying than people liking music for the wrong reasons? Not to pull a Chuck Eddy, but are there wrong reasons for listening to music? If blasting DMX out your Wrangler as you're pulling into some high school girl's driveway makes you feel awesome, makes you feel like a fucking bad-ass, is that wrong? If listening to metal makes you feel tougher, less insecure, is it my job to tell you that you are an idiot? You know when some people say "music is like a drug for me", this is what they're talking about: the simple act of listening to music makes them feel good. Imagine someone saying "You're enjoying heroin for all the wrong reasons." Are there right reasons? Is ‘empirical knowledge as to the effects heroin has on my body’ the right reason? I don't think so! Regardless of the myriad horrible reasons that might lead them to it, people probably do heroin because it makes them feel good.

I have this relationship with music. There is this cold and dizzy feeling that overtakes me sometimes, when a song or a passage of a song happens to gun it to my heart. And I am addicted to this feeling--I seek it out, sludging through days upon days of music, much of it very objectively "good", for those moments capable of the cold and dizzy. There are all sorts of biochemical and culturally normative/dictated reasons for what comprises these particular moments for me--but their deconstruction doesn't take away from the fact that they still happen. Their deconstruction doesn't cheapen them, at least not for me.

So you can understand my frustration with a blog that posits everything as "just" a pose, "just" a biochemical and culturally dictated" reaction. One of us is happy, the other is angry because happiness is just a construct, there is no happiness, there is no spoon, etc. But like I don't know this already! Like I'm the lesser man for seeing what you've torn apart, but putting everything back together again.

i've probably already excerpted too much; if you've been following all the heat surrounding Merriweather Post Pavilion, you should check out the rest of Sylvester's piece. Animal Collective is exploring a very different sound than i tend to gravitate toward, but the album is undeniably a piece of rich, mature sonic exploration put together by serious artists trying to forge new musical paths without a care for radio accessibility. their work is clearly resonating with listeners; they were goddamn number 13 on the Billboard 200 last week, which is crazy for an album full of compositions that don't fit any conventional definition of the word "song". anyway, it's always thrilling to read passionate musicblogging, and for that reason alone, you should check out the Sylvester article.

African and Irish music

2009-01-30T13:07:00.000-05:00

this doesn't have to do with much of anything, but i've been thinking more and more lately that indigenous "american" music all pretty much is descended from irish music (country, folk, most of the "white" half of rock and roll that's not from england) and african music (this needs no explanation -- pretty much all the rest of what we call "american" music).

what's interesting is that these were probably the two most historically downtrodden groups of americans struggling to assimilate (ironically, these two groups have clashed time and time again throughout american history, competing for that precious second-to-last rung of the american social system). the third group that i can think of -- jewish immigrants -- has had a profound impact on culture as well, although the impact of traditional jewish music on the american songbook is far more limited; most jewish american songwriters gravitated toward african music (gershwin) or irish music (zimmerman). the cultural impact of jewish immigrants is felt far more in literature, a result, perhaps, of the emphasis in judaism on the power of the written word versus the oral and musical cultures of irish and african laborers.

i'm a quarter irish, but as far as i know, i don't have any jewish or african ancestry.

Cocaine Cocaine (Unmastered)

2009-01-29T11:35:00.001-05:00

[UPDATE 2/11/09: don't download that other shit below. i mixed them down before i understood anything about anything. this is what the song is supposed to sound like:

[[[[ CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMPROVED "COCAINE COCAINE" ]]]]

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this recording of Cocaine Cocaine was made with my old mic. the sound is raw, which i like, but i feel like i could get a more complete vocal spectrum with the new mic i just bought. this song was actually recorded a couple of weeks ago as a scratch track the night i wrote the song; that's part of why i like this recording -- the emotions are still really, really close to the surface.

[UPDATE 2/4/09: here's the new recording with the new mic i bought: CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD COCAINE COCAINE]

my intonation is also off here and there, and i'm not going to use any pitch correction software on my vocals (probably ever, though i should never say never), but when i do the next few takes i'll probably try to aim a little more for the center of the pitch. i'm going to re-record the vocal and see if i like it better that way, and i'll post the result when i'm done with it.

this is a pretty self-explanatory song. if my future mother-in-law is reading this, though, i want to make it clear that although each character in these songs is drawn from personal experience, the first verse is not about my financee (although the second verse is about my actual brother; if you want more details on his situation, read the Long Way Off post).

the "drum" is me smacking my open hand against my chest. the synthetic choir at the end is a mellotron choir sound, which i am frankly a little obsessed with, and will probably show up on almost every track on this record.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "COCAINE COCAINE (UNMASTERED)"

obama

2009-01-27T15:06:00.000-05:00

this isn't a political blog, really, so i'll keep most of my obama love off of here, but i just wanted to mention how notable this is, via Nate Silver. Obama has over 60% approval rating in places like Alabama and Kentucky.

i guess racial resentment in America is never as strong as the fear of losing money. you know the old saying: a liberal is just a conservative who's been mugged by reality.

new mic

2009-01-24T11:13:00.000-05:00

i didn't like the mic sound i was getting so i just upgraded to this. i bought it used off craigslist and have yet to try it out. i'll post a new Long Way Off when i re-record the vocal. i was also plugging my guitar directly into pro tools and putting digital effects on it -- and i hate the sound. so, this mic is going to be useful in recording a live guitar sound as well.

don't be boring

2009-01-24T10:56:00.000-05:00

this is pretty much the prime directive of all art, isn't it? people will keep watching/listening/following as long as you keep their brains interested. the problem is, our brains are smarter than we think they are, and they can see patterns coming a mile away. so a writer needs to make sure everything is interesting -- lyrics, chord changes, each instrumental line, the song subject matter, the orchestration, everything. but, there must be SOME pattern to follow -- so much of our joy in listening to music involves our brains learning pleasing patterns that are built into the structure of the music. we like for our expectations to be fulfilled along the way, but we also want our expectations to be subverted. (Daniel Levitin, who wrote This Is Your Brain On Music, expands on this idea in his excellent book, but i must have read it elsewhere before i read the Levitin, since i've been boring my friends with this fulfilling/subverting talk for goddamn years.)

now ain't the time for your tears

2009-01-24T10:46:00.000-05:00

interesting piece in the New Yorker about william zantzinger, and the truth versus myth behind the Dylan song. zantzinger just died, apparently.

realness

2009-01-23T15:55:00.000-05:00

i've been pretty immersed in the hip hop world for about the last two years, and one perennial source of friction within the community is the debate over "realness". is a rapper/producer/commentator "doing it for the streets," or is the artist in question a sellout, a "ringtone rapper" (or whatever derogatory term du jour you prefer)? roughly, this is the same conflict found in the indiemusicblog community, and probably every artistic community since the dawn of creative expression: is your art authentic, or is it tainted by commercial compromise?

this debate, i think, misreads the history of art and culture, and becomes more obsolete as communications technology continues to scale the knee of the exponential curve (speaking from an evolutionary standpoint). i happen to be of the -- and call me naive if you will -- but i happen to be of the opinion that in this day and age, if you are creating music worth listening to, and you are willing to put some effort into getting it out there, you will find an audience. how large of an audience is almost entirely dependent on cultural factors beyond any writer's control, but in this day and age, if your music is capable of connecting with people, and you are serious about seeking out those listeners who might be receptive to it, your music will find an audience to connect with. the music business has never been, and will never be, a true meritocracy, but at this particular historical moment, we are as close as we are likely to come to that ideal. the concept of "selling out" contains powerful emotional appeal, but when it comes to music, it's not clear what that means. does it mean being featured in a car commercial? at this point, very few would agree that having one's music featured in a car commercial is the mark of a sellout. however, most of us (myself included) would agree that letting business or marketing interests rule the day when it comes to the creative process is the hallmark of "selling out" (which is what most major labels are set up to do, business-wise).

HOWEVER...that doesn't mean that the artist should create music that people don't want to listen to. that misses the point entirely. music is about communication, connection, shared experience, whether in the intimate setting of one's own living room or in the collective experience of a concert in a large arena. what an artist should avoid, however, is any "creative" input that changes the intent of the piece.

it also doesn't mean that the musician should be an enemy of marketing or commercialism. i myself am a ruthless self-promoter when it comes to work that i'm proud of, but it's important to separate the two processes: make the music first, then figure out how to sell the shit out of it.

i am a songwriter. songwriters write songs to communicate with other human beings. Leonard Bernstein (one of my artistic heroes) once described the artistic impulse as pure longing for connection with others: i have felt this way, says the artist; haven't you felt this way too?

Bernstein's definition of art has always hewed very closely to mine. this, i think, is the ultimate "realness": a self-described artist presumptuous enough to make an attempt at describing the human condition, as honestly as he or she can.

but what is "the human condition"? and what is an authentic description of it? are some artists more honest with their expression, and do other artists seek to cynically exploit our emotional or cultural hot buttons? this is where the debate lives. it's not a simple one to untangle, as it is wrapped up with subjective reactions to musical and cultural phenomena that may or may not be temporary.

here's the deal: music is tricky. science is still unable to explain its effects on our emotions. simply put, we know that a resolution to a major chord sounds "stable" or "complete", and we know that a resolution to a minor or a subdominant chord sounds "unresolved" or even "melancholy", but what the hell does that tell us? we're only describing our emotional reactions to sonic events. the human brain clearly has some standard musical templates that it uses as a starting point -- the major scale, the 12-tone series, and the basics of tonal harmony -- but just about everything else is based around a series of decisions that are almost entirely cultural. different harmonic patterns and chord changes go in and out of style. different elements (rhythm, harmony, melody) are emphasized depending on the genre and on the era. the music we listen to today is entirely dependent on the music that came before it, just as tomorrow's music will be either a building upon or a reaction against the music of today (most likely the latter). the music in 30 years will loop back around and reference the music of today, just as the music of today parallels the music of 30 years ago (i have more thoughts on these 30-year cycles, but that's for another post).

the point is, our judgments about which music is cool or uncool, which music is authentic or inauthentic, which sounds are current or dated, are hopelessly influenced by our own subjective cultural experiences. i believe the only way to really write "real" material, material sprung from that Bernstein ideal, is to write the kind of music you like. that's it. it's not magic, but it's also not easy. but, if you have the talent to put together a piece of musical expression that is very, very close to the kind of music you personally love, then chances are, other people will personally love it too. it's as simple as that. we're all in this cultural moment together, after all.

so, when it comes to debates over realness and authenticity, my stance is, i'm going to create the music that moves me the most. after that process is complete, i'm going to do my best to make sure every single person in the world has the chance to hear it -- you never know who is going to connect with your music. musicians and artists shouldn't fear success; on some level, all lasting commercial success is an indication that your music is resonating with millions of people. because of the internet, we now have the power to control our own music and still market it to anyone in the world, all by ourselves. the distinction between realness and ringtone is vanishing, at least for the moment.

Long Way Off (Unmastered)

2009-01-18T15:03:00.006-05:00

UPDATE 2/23/09: Here is the final, final mix of the song (unmastered):

[[[[[ DOWNLOAD THE FINAL "LONG WAY OFF" (UNMASTERED) HERE ]]]]]

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UPDATE 2/11/09: IGNORE THOSE OTHER VERSIONS OF THE SONG. they are all a fucking joke, only worth listening to if you want to hear how lost i was before last night's breakthrough.

[[[[[ DOWNLOAD THE REAL "LONG WAY OFF" HERE... ]]]]]

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UPDATE 2/10/09: i still wasn't happy with the clean sound on this song, so i re-recorded the guitar with way more distortion and i put way more fuzz on my voice as well. this sound is way more alive i think. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE NEWER "LONG WAY OFF"

UPDATE 2/4/09: i bought a new mic and re-recorded the vocal. it sounds much better. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD LONG WAY OFF

i'm going to post the rough versions of these as i finish them. this is the first track off the album, Long Way Off.

i started these lyrics thinking the song was about a man and a woman who had an affair a long time ago but it got screwed up, and now their lives didn't turn out like they'd hoped, and the man was begging for another shot. the way these things usually go is, you start writing about one thing and you realize that you're writing about an entirely other thing, so at some point you need to surrender to that thing you're actually trying to say because it's going to fuck up whatever your previous plans were anyway.

this is a roundabout way of saying that i realized this song was about the fact that i fled my household as soon as i was able, and it's only recently that i've been trying to reconcile my way back to feeling connected to my family in spite of a lot of water under the bridge.

i am the oldest, or the eldest, as my mother would say. my sister and brother are younger than me, closer in age to one another than to myself. we have a pretty common sibling dynamic, i think: i was the striver, my brother was the problem, and my sister was in the middle.

my parents had a rough time of it. they divorced when i was 8, and my mother settled into a pretty serious drinking problem, but more than that, she was on a self-destructive path that she thankfully tried to shield us from as much as possible. my mother has struggled with depression her whole life, and our house was a very sad place. my mother was also working three jobs to support us, and i remember her car (an old Yugo -- remember those?) breaking down nearly once a month. things seemed hopeless. various men moved in and out of our lives; one of them was a heroin and speed addict who stole many of my mother's few remaining valuables. social services visited our house a few times. i was also a rebellious kid at this point, acting out and playing with fire and breaking windows and generally being destructive. i was 9. after she put us to bed, my mother would listen to one depressing album after another, and drink cheap wine until she passed out. i remember hearing Dire Straits' "Why Worry" (off their classic Brothers In Arms) as my mother quietly cried and cried, thinking we couldn't hear her. at some point she prepared us for the worst -- we were being evicted from our house and would have to move into a homeless shelter. at the last minute, a friend of my mother's took pity on us and invited our family to move into his family's house in the country near Leon Springs, out on I-10 just west of Boerne. this situation was a little rough as well -- the other family didn't mingle well with mine, and the older brother knocked us around a little bit and the mother beat us with a belt a few times. their house was where i first began to teach myself to play piano, though, so i will always be grateful for that at least.

soon, my mother remarried, and at first times were a bit better, but something turned at some point, and after that my mother and stepfather were always swamped with debt. i remember the irs agents coming by the house, snooping around each room and treating my mother and stepfather with utter contempt, as if to find evidence that my mother and stepfather were tax cheats, and not just hopelessly behind on all their bills.

so, my household (and by extension, my hometown and home state) was a place that i knew i had to get away from. and i did. my mother missed me, but she also gave me plenty of space throughout my twenties to work out exactly what the hell i thought about everything, and i'm grateful for that.

and then there is my brilliant, troubled brother. he picked up painting from my mother, who was an artist herself. he and my mother were a volatile pair, though, and it soon became clear that their sicknesses were exacerbating one another. when he was a teenager, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is a mental disease doctors are still struggling to understand. his condition grew more serious after high school, and became more difficult to medicate. he turned to crack and began self-medicating, which culminated in his involvement in a robbery in an attempt to get drug money.

while in the texas justice system, he was routinely denied access to his medication; this happened almost every time he was transferred to a new facility. he was having an incredibly hard time with his mental anguish at that point; the voices in his head grew so loud at one time that he tried to take out his eye in order to stop them (his self portrait at the bottom right hand side of this page visually describes this incident).

finally, after my father lobbied extensively to the judge and to the state legislature, david got treated a bit better and was relatively stable. in the meantime, his art had developed into something quite profound and wrenching as he struggled with this sickness that will be with him his whole life.

there are no easy answers; my brother has a hard time even under the best medication. he slips into addiction easily, seeking to kill the pain if he can't quiet the storm.

for a long while in my twenties, my brother and i didn't speak much. i didn't know how to handle his sickness, and i told myself that i was working so hard at my own success so that i could afford better treatment for him as the family breadwinner. this was part true, but of course only part.

but now he and i are speaking to one another again, and it feels good. i admire him so much, and he has known troubles that i couldn't begin to fathom. my mother and i are becoming closer as well, and my sister (who has struggled a great deal with her own family demons) is finally building a stable life for herself with a pretty terrific guy and a job that she is passionate about. we are all slowly putting things back together, i think.

so, Long Way Off is about reconciling with my family again after many years of trying to figure out what exactly happened when i was growing up, and how those things have shaped me into the person i am today, for better or worse.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD "LONG WAY OFF"