5/16/2021 - 5/22/2021
5/16/2021
today was routine, all things considered. my friend michael and i have a ritual of doing a bunch of errands every sunday morning. it goes like this: pick up michael, get coffee, drop off orders at the post office, go to the recycling center, go to target, and then trader joes. very great. it always feels like an emotional reset.
michael is the guy that has shot and edited most of my videos lately, hope to have more with him brewing soon.
didn’t work on music today, but i may a bit tonight. at current i have 5 pretty strong songs started up, and there’s nothing i feel ‘iffy’ on about any of them, song wise.
one song i’m really leaning into right now is tentatively called “Bored, and Worse, Fine With It” which is a title I’m quite digging. I think I have it hammered down into its basic song structure…? ugh, idk. i have bi weekly meetings with aaron now to help me make sure the songs are the best they can be.
i wrote a bunch of lyrics for the song, and they’re pretty frank. here’s a snippet:
Bored, and worse, fine with it
I should trust myself
To know myself
To clearly know when I am not serving a life
That celebrates
The shit that truly makes me want to
Straight go nuts
Jeeze,
You’d think that I’d have a
Castle built by now
With all the certainty regarding
Who I am and what I need
But I still concede to basic bitch shit
a lot of my lyrics are stream of conciousness and off the cuff, haha, i really don’t do much ‘editing’. it can be great, but in truth i’m uuuusually unsatisfied by my lyrics. which is okay? but it’s something i’m interested in improving. i do like this passage, dunno if it’ll make it into the final, hah. it probs will.
5/17/2021
phewww. long day today. it’s funny, i actually spent most of it working on printerville. it’s an undertaking, but a fun one!
one thing that’s worth talking about: the music is just one thing. it’s the main ‘message in the bottle’. it’s the core of everything - it’s my voice, ideas - it’s connection with you. it’s what enlivens you as a listener and me as a creator and creates that weird unspoken connection.
BUT. it is just one thing. there is a whole world surrounding the sounds themselves - it’s the visuals, the websites, the cds, the shirts, the shows, the conversations, the musings, the interactions…it’s so much else!
don’t get me wrong - this is not a complaint. i love -every- piece of being an independent artist. but part of it is putting in the elbow grease and ground work at every. single. turn. i will never hand over bp to someone. not even patreon. and that means building my own patreon!
all that to say, it’s been a work day, and it’s been fun.
my ultimate hope is that all of this gets across to you. i spend lots of time building things that i think are exciting and cool, music or otherwise - but at the end of the day, i’ll never really -be- the listener. i don’t know what it feels like truly, so i sometimes wonder if any of this is at all wanted or what anyone asked for. you know?
all in all, i’m just hoping that you feel all of this effort!
anyway, after several hours of website building, I did manage to put in 30 minutes or so on that song from yesterday and I actually laid down something that really felt ‘right’. FINALLY. recording music is life living between those ‘aha’ moments.
it’s this weird choir thing that makes the ‘choruses’ super big, and then I was using it in sort of a sample-ish way. opening a lot of doors in my mind!
meeting with aaron in two days, i really think that will be the key to some definitive progress.
5/18/2021
So my meeting with Aaron got moved to today instead of tomorrow, which was honestly so needed.
The song I’ve been talking about the past two days? It’s gonna change a bunch. I mean, not holistically, but I’m going to write a lot more music for it.
Basically it’s all about this one chord progression - a lot of these new tunes have been about sprouting up a complex idea and seeing how long I can utilize it before needing to come up with another idea/passage to “relieve” the listener from it. (maybe)?
I’ve been taking this approach to writing - coming up with this beefy passage and looping it as satisfyingly as possible - but naturally it leads me into walls. and tbh? i get realllllly scared/hesitant when it comes time to write a new section.
So, secretly I’ve been kind of avoiding doing that for this song even though, deep down, I knew i oughta…
but, that’s why the aaron meetings are crucial. oftentimes, it’ll just be him saying “probably write another verse” and I’ll be like “ughhhh okay, i know, I’ll do it.” lololol.
Where we settled with this new song - I was like, “i’m LOVING this vocal melody, that’s the key for me” to which he said, then keep that the same and use that as an anchor to change things around it. mildly mindblowing in the simplest way.
So a lot about this song is gonna change, but when it’s reduced to such a simple prompt/exercise, it clears so much of the fear for me. pumped to keep going on it.
5/19/2021
man, today was pretty interesting musically!
the song I keep mentioning - basically what I tried to do in response to aaron’s suggestion was to try to toooootally change all the chords on the song while keeping the melody i love the same.
This way, I would have a second “chords” option for this same song while still creating a song with this feel I’m diggin, which is anchored by the vocals
i’ve never really done anything like this, and at a first past, the chords are weiiiiiiiird and pretty awkward at current. but, i could totally see how this could be shaped up into something really nice with a few tweaks. there are some pieces of this that really get me going.
super encouraging!
just in case you thought i was a musical genius - no no no no no. i am, all things considered, a very underwritten, underpractice, ignorant music-maker. which is -fine-. but aaron is mostly the one that pushes me to get more learned. doing one of these reharmonizations is pretty much the first time i’ve ever done this! that’s crazy. it was difficult and fun and I can see how this will benefit so many new tunes.
ya boy is Growin
5/20/2021
phew, today was honestly a bit of a non-starter.
we booked a shot at the 5 spot for august, and so that began the whooooole consideration with who to hire, how to run the show with all the new songs, etc. a lot of that got worked out and we have a vision, but step one was to go back into the fantastic wrist files and export them for a show designer i’m hiring (sal).
the trouble? some of the fantastic wrist sessions have literally 130 tracks in them. it was truly breaking my ableton to try to export all of the tracks individually. i got pretty frustrated, and i was underslept, so I decided to just call it a day and ended up watching rick and morty with my housemates.
i don’t often have give up days, so i may as well just accept it right? 🤷🏻♂️
5/21/21
tonight was fun - it wasn’t a work night, so i went to get mexican food and then the east room with my friends michael (video guy) and graci (very good friend who also makes music). we went to see lauren strange, notelle, and black moon mother. I played with black moon mother once before, and notelle is sooooo coool. but, it turns out we were pretty late arriving at 9:30 and only caught black moon mother! which i’m not pissed about, but apparently they ran the show super early as covid “clears up”, whatever that means.
it was actually a conscious process to remember how to talk to people in a sort of legitimate social capacity, haha. seriously. you kinda felt it on everyone. you don’t recognize people in masks, all of your slang is thrown off because you’ve been speaking to just 3 people in person for a year, etc.
nonetheless amazing to go to a real actual show with a responsible crowd and do real people things. inspiring. bmm had a cool show set up that is inspiring a bit with how i wanna do this next show.
5/22/21
figured out all the issues with sending the tracks to sal…and by that i mean, we decided to ignore the issues and make progress another way. i sent him the -whole- session files themselves for him to sift through. we shall see what he recommends.
tbh, i thought a -ton- of stuff would end up in the tracks for shows, but when i did a cursory glance of ‘tetris’, i realized that between keys, bass, guitar, drums, sample pad, and vocals, we should be preeeety covered, which is actually encouraging. it’s mostly the orchestral stuff in the tracks (which makes hella sense).
that aside, worked further on that tune i keep talking about, tentatively called ‘bored, and worse, fine with it’. i ended up rigging up another reharmonization. it became addicting, actually. whaddya know, you break down a barrier one time and suddenly that barrier’s not there anymore 🙄 i get in my own way a lot.
this is seriously such a breakthrough though, i feel like I could write chord progressions for days now. that was always my biggest issue. the progressions feel a little chunky and like they dip and out of key, but i’m learning. aaron is like the king of doing leading tones to make everything super fluid - case stufy = “cornell” if you’re curious.
anyway, bit empty day tomorrow which i’m pumped about.
ps i got a chocolate cherry shake at cookout.