Category: Blogging About Blogging

Nerding Forth About Time Signatures, Time Machines, AI, and The Future

A few weeks ago I experimented with a Ska pattern in 7/4 time. It worked spectacularly and I loved the result, so completed and published it as Inside the All Night Ska Disco at Area 51.

Just yesterday I started messing with a ska-adjacent pattern in 6/8 meter, and it got very tropically islandy shangri-lala delighty, so I am eagerly following through with that.

By humorous coincidence, yesterday I came across a ridiculous, probably AI-written, “summary” of Ska music, in the increasingly rotten Inter-mess. In this garbled splutage, it was stated that Ska music is in 4/4 time. Fie, unimaginative robot!  Ska music is usually in 4/4 time, get it right. It IS in 4/4 until someone does otherwise, and I am sure plenty of earlier examples do exist before mine.

“The future is unwritten,” Joe Strummer reminded. Good thing to note, generally, and why especially now, I would think.

So far my attempts at creating a magic sci-fi time machine to put every eligible voter back to Nov. 4 2024 for a make-up exam have failed. We certainly shouted it from the rooftops last year, said loudly and clearly what will happen if that election goes south. It. Is. Now. Exactly. As. Predicted. Whoopsiebears, now they mad. Wiser persons than I may understand it.

I did manage to fashion a 1983 time-capsule, that was fun. Orwell said there might be trouble, and, well.

Good morning!  I’m sipping a nice Peet’s French Roast, brewed in an old-School drip coffee maker from the before time. We’ve probably had this trusty machine since the ’90s, ever faithfully delivering its oh so important yield at the start of each day. Obsolete it is not.

Driving a Chevy Bolt, and GLAD I never got a Tesla. Horrified, that what has been one of the leading EV-makers is now so irrevocably tainted.  It’s not fun times for Tesla owners, as drama ensues, and presumably used models are not fetching “Blue Book” as the brand plummets straight to hell.

What next, we wonder?  I dunno, Joe, the Future is full of Uncertain Tea. But as you say, unwritten.

I’ll keep recording new original songs whenever the inspiration strikes me, and post them here or here per my whim. Whims are good for artistic direction, I find. These tunes are also in the big ol’ streaming world, including now YouTube, so, find ’em anywhere – Pandora, Apple Music, DEEZER, Spotify..  As the pipelines get flooded and polluted by AI-generated content, I’ll be among the artists creating our own material. For what it’s worth, and I don’t know what it’s worth, but it feels right. As long as it feels right, I will do it. One small part of the vast human discussion. The cats seem to enjoy it.

Audio Journal Of A Music Curator

In 2017 I started working as a contractor for Pandora Radio in Oakland. Pandora was working on creating their on-demand streaming service, integrating it with their classic radio service, and I joined a team optimizing music metadata for this launch. I took to it right away, loved the work and the people there, continued on, and they eventually hired me full-time.

After a year or so, I started adding little by little to what is now a 230 song playlist. Most of it is songs I’ve come across while doing my work as a music metadata specialist and catalog curator.  Sometimes a track really stands out to me in some way, and I add it to this personal playlist,
Din’s Pandora Picks.

In the last few days, I’ve been listening back to it anew, and frankly I’m blown away by the quality of so much of it. It’s extremely eclectic, genre- and era-agnostic, with the only common thread being that this is all stuff that rocks me in some way.

It happened that The Specials, on my shortest short list of favorite bands, released their ENCORE album around that time.  The song that inspired me to start this playlist journal, was track 2 on that album, B.L.M. It was a brilliant return, and I found it so right on.

By contrast, No One Sleeps When I’m Awake by Canada’s The Sounds is a stunning rocker with a unique mood, great vocals and guitar work, and brilliant production. As a songwriter I wonder with great fascination about the possible story behind the song, and wish I had written it.

The set runs roughly chronologically from there.  Songs I found recently are at the end, with my earlier discoveries nearer the beginning. A great majority of the selections are in the proverbial “long tail.” Some started there and then got much more popular, and a few are old favorites I arbitrarily added along the way cos they rock me.

At this point, I’m pleased about the whole playlist and quite delighted to share it publicly. Tooooo many favorites to call out, but that’s why it’s a PLAYlist! And you may play it.

Hop on in, tune in, turn up, rock out. I’ll continue to add to this as time goes on, whenever the inspiration strikes. 

 

Self Care, Care Self, Caturday Musings Selfie

A friend of mine posted on Bluesky yesterday, “my self-care skills aren’t up to this.” This summarized concisely and eloquently what I think many of us are wrestling with presently.

I seem to renew my commitment to taking good care of myself often, with varying results. Today it means waking up early and reading and writing a bit as the cats do their pre-dawn romp, and preparing to learn to play Pickleball. Indeed Pickleball. A fast-growing social sport easier to learn than tennis, and, social.

Reading and writing and listening a bit. The amazing wealth of good material at our fingertips, should we care to curate the experience actively, that Internet of yore, still exists to a degree. In the late 1990s I was thrilled by the possibility that somehow there wouldn’t be a “mainstream” anymore, in terms of culture and music, or just about anything.

I was a huge fan of Google, when they first popped up. For me, their original simple site was ideal, and really it was the first Search Engine (remember those fancy words?) that actually worked for me. Their web-crawling text searching gizmo delivered desired results consistently, and they pretty much blew the competition in that space away, pretty quickly.  I remember finding websites and then later blogs, while these were new emerging forms of communication and creativity, and immensely enjoying the sort of decentralization of it all.

As a musician and band guy, the whole world changed when I was introduced to the MP3 file, I think in ’97. Boom, level playing field for access and distribution, you can send a song to a friend or share it out as widely as you please, and I was all-in, let’s go.  The UpTones had in 1995 released a live CD from a 1989 performance, and around 1999 we made MP3s of a couple of the tracks,  started uptones.com and shared ’em up.

At the time I was part of a startup company called MP3 4U, with Matthew Kaufman and some fellow travelers who believed great things were afoot, a renaissance brewing for both music fans and music creators. And during that time, I watched the stats closely, from our website activities – who was listening, where and for how long, which songs etc. – with these reports I generated from downloaded server logs. It was a great nerdy time, and I loved seeing this view of things.

One UpTones live track, Get Outta My Way, not surprisingly a sort of signature song for the band, started getting an absurd amount of downloads, starting in the Bay Area and then far beyond. I remember the rush I got seeing downloads from Tokyo one morning, it was exciting, we were there, without being there, our music was distributed and available, and we did it ourselves. It was free, of course, we made a loud point of that, buy the CD if you want to, but have an MP3, on us, thanks for listening, right? So eventually that MP3 had a million downloads, and we toasted the occasion at Brennan’s, the storied hofbrau in West Berkeley near our office at the time.

Sipping said beers, the question arose, why not an UpTones show? We hadn’t played one in twelve years by then, and we’re getting emails from kids who have the live CD or MP3s saying do a show already. So we did. Put together a crew with as many original members as poss (6, I think it was!), auditioned some horn players and in walks Jeanne Geiger fresh from her Hayward State music degree and a new chapter of UpTones began. We played at iMusicast. That was a great all-ages venue, silly name and all, and we did maybe five gigs there in the early to mid 2000s. It was a case of one thing leading to another, and I don’t think any of that would have happened if Beserkley hadn’t released that one live album, and the subsequent MP3 adventures.

Things have funneled in the strangest way, now. It seems social media sites with all their promise have really rotted, most acutely Twitter, of course, my god, how hideous that pile. Its dumb new name, its Nazi twit, ugly, ugly ugly. FB which was my jam since 2007, started with a lot of fun and joy and sharing music posts and political fundraisers and random thoughts, oh and kitty pictures. Tons of ’em. But, as things went, the joy eroded from my experience there, slowly over time, to the point where it had become just a habit. Even the pages I maintained there, for Berkeley Cat Records and for the UpTones, lost relevance as FB required payment for “boosting” posts just to have them visible in the feeds of people who had actively chosen to follow said pages. Bait and switch, standard procedure, I guess, but I’m out.

So what do I do now? Well, I blog here, and maintain these little outposts on the Interwebs, sort of like the olden days. I make every effort not to purchase anything via Amazon (100% successful of late). I am having a little bit of engagement on the aforementioned Bluesky, hoping it continues to grow in healthy ways. Healthy. Health. Self-care. Really just saying aloud I need to triple down on that, focus, remind myself, not let this encroaching dark age in but rather simply be aware of it as I live my own renaissance.  Aware of it enough to know I don’t have my head in the sand, but not following the “dailies” – to use a moviemaking analogy. I know them, I voted to prevent this and I know what it is.

“Corruption is just Tuesday, now” I said, in this bit of wordplay, and look, the head in the sand thing!

That was a one-off, and looking at the date.. Wow, January 29, 2024. One year ago. How much has happened in that packed year.

To quote my departed great friend Luke,

All love, soon forward,

Caturmonday Musings

Drove to Gilman yesterday, picked up my music stand, which I had loaned to a fellow artist last week after my caterwauling. On the way to and from said venue, I listened to some of my own records and my, I like them! People make records for many reasons I am sure, and me? I seem to make records that I want to play, for entertainment, for me. Self-centered? Why yes, by definition. Success is enjoying them, and yesterday, I enjoyed them very much.

I wouldn’t be happy being toooooo predictable, to myself or to anyone observing, when it comes to my artistic output. I s’pose if being marketable were a priority I’d have stuffed myself into a category long ago and tried to be understandable as a public entity. That just seems boring, to me, best left to others who may enjoy that kind of thing.

I’m leaving behind a little legacy of songs, recordings, posts, podcats’s’s and mewsletters, as part of the human record, my small voice in a giant field. Why? Because I choose to, because it feels right to do, because I want to. Free will, what a thing.

There’s a song by XTC on their Oranges & Lemons album which used to haunt me a bit, in particular this repeated line:

He’s always saying what he’s gonna do

The song is One of the Millions by Colin Moulding. The whole album is great, heck everything by XTC is great.

In my youth I was often a frustrated artist, a frustrated boyfriend, a frustrated bandmate a frustrated bandleader, a frustrated person. I had plans but not the means nor skills to implement many of them, yet I strived constantly, continued through my frustration and indeed, said what I was gonna do. I heard myself saying what I was gonna do. And like Colin Moulding, observed this with a certain wariness and dread.

In my youth, if I wanted to record a song and make it into a record, there were a number of hoops to jump through. Gatekeepers to pass. The traditional route for many, back then, was something like this: Record a demo of a song, then teach it to a band, record it properly, then the feloniously dull “shop it around.” To record labels or managers or whomever, OTHER people, gatekeepers, people who are not me.

To be an artist is to be your own gatekeeper. Choose your own path. Make your paintings and hang them on the wall if you like, maybe to find relevance to other people, maybe not. To be an artist is to not be concerned with how a piece is received. To be an entertainer, sure, you need to care about that, and that’s fine, I’ve done a bit of that too, but approaching the end of my sixth decade, I’ve learned I very much prefer the agenda of the artist. Which for me means to make it up as I go and do whatever I want.

This journal style of songwriting, self-producing and self-releasing my own product, CONTENT being the hilarious catch-all term, god, it is so liberating. Demo, nothing, I just make. In fact, some of the songs I have produced in recent years, started as demos lonnnngggg ago when I tried to go the old traditional route. On Top Of The World, for example, man, I demo’d that on a Tascam 4-Track cassette recorder in like, 1991 or so. Couldn’t quite get it to sound the way I wanted to, lyrics not quite complete, couldn’t quite find the right collaborator to help finish the words, band and producer at the time didn’t quite know what to do with it, and it.. died. Well did it? Ah, but no, the idea was still appealing to me, and I remembered it and one morning felt inspired to go for it AND! Now I know how, and have the tools at my fingertips, and, I made the thing, finished lyrics and all, and, I like it. Success.

Lunacy abounds. The world will do its thing. I read yesterday’s email newsletter from Bernie Sanders and bless his great heart, he nails it right on, yet again. Mr. Sanders and Heather Cox Richardson and some other brilliant voices I choose to listen to, and I choose actively.  Much of the Internet and social media today seems focused on feeding content to users, analyzing our habits as dispassionately as if we were laboratory animals, and feeding us what statistically they determine is likely to keep us engaged.

To actively and intentionally curate our own menus of information and experience has always been an essential skill, and I think this has become somehow more complicated of late. Quoting myself,

The feedlot backlit and I am split

from People I May Know. I’m fond of that line, and feed lot can be stylized either as one word or two, it’s a clear double-meaning. I love the image of grazing on the content that is fed to us, in our feed, and the lot – the lot is also a double-meaning, as in “you lot,” or, the space in which we feed.

Quoting myself again,

Tomorrow is a day
Yesterday was one also
There have been some before
Presumably there will be more

I love that! Thought it was a throwaway, really, when I came up with it – an afterthought, nothing remarkable, and intentionally not remarkable due to its place it a rather absurd song, but then, when I hear or read it now, it has considerable meaning, and it makes me smile. Makes me smile.. isn’t that one good aspect, one possible good result, of a piece of art?

They’ve been going in and out of style,
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile

– The Beatles, of course. And what a gorgeous sentiment, what a lovely invention, their imaginary band, led by a Sgt. Pepper, of all things. A pure work of the imagination. Perhaps a bit weary of all things Beatles by then, they invented and inhabited this whole other world, and gave it to us.

But getting back to my previous quote, that chorus is from a song called Derogatory Matrons, and this title, and the main verse, I came up with when I was about 14 and had only just learned of the existence of punk rock and new wave music like, minutes before. Enthralled I was, and in fact, the words “derogatory” and “matrons” had only just entered my vocabulary, and I in fact was not entirely clear what either one meant. But! I liked the way they sounded together, whilst pogoing.  AGES later, odd thing happened, my friend Roger Clark (AKA Little Roger!) asked me to contribute a song to a project he was working on, and I made this track, which didn’t exactly fit the bill for his thing, sooooo, it was mine to mess with aaaand, it reminded me of Derogatory Matrons – the idea and vibe still living in its little song-place in my brain cells that held it for however many decades. So I made the track. It found a happy home on my Sensible Comments album. All very sensible indeed.

So, what IS in a name?

Liking my name, this morning, in a peculiar way. Names, rather. Funny thing about “Eric” – I’ve never disliked the name, nor given it much thought, it’s my given name and I kept it. Had this odd moment this morning of actively liking the name. I like the sound of it, the two-syllabled simplicity. So, right, finishing my sixth decade of life and suddenly realize I like my name. Thanks, mom and dad, for the cool names! Names? Well yes, Roy being my middle name. Named after a buddy of my dad’s. Very rock n’ roll, that name, innit? Not only because Roy Orbison but also the sound of it. You can sort of rock the “Roy,” with a certain twang, or drawl. Dinwiddie, now we’re in the deep water. I love this name, now, but had to retire it for a time in my youth for a few distinct reasons. 1. Misspellings! Of every imaginable sort, routinely, comically. 2. Spelling it out loud for people over the phone, spending precious minutes of my life ‘splaining “No, there’s no L, that’s an I at the end, I am not Din Widdle! I mean I could be, but I am not. 3. I had this nickname, Din, which really started as my initials on guitar repair tickets when I worked at Subway Guitars in the late ’80s. There was another guy there with the initials E.D., so I just wrote Din to disambiguate myself. This took with my workmates and friends, and so Din and Eric Din I became. Only many years later, after my father passed, did I start to regret that a little bit. I don’t know if it bothered him or not, probably not, but losing him was quite a thing, and the surname, as something we share, gained some unexpected meaning for me. Surnames, surnames, I think if I were to do it again I’d be Kretzschmar-Dinwiddie, do the hyphen thing including my mom’s family name. Eric Roy Kretzschmar-Dinwiddie, now that would be fun to spell for people over the phone, wouldn’t it?

Amusements continue. I can’t get back into my FB account because the good gatekeepers of same say they can’t confirm my identity. Isn’t that so 2025? I’ve been on that platform since 2007 you see, as Eric Din, and when I sent my ID to confirm my me, they correctly observed that the name on my ID does not match. I don’t know how much time I care to spend trying to fix that, we’ll see, but I haven’t felt greatly motivated yet. Perhaps in part due to the many horrible aspects of FB and corporate electronic social networks generally, and what they have done to society. I left Twitter the day whatshisname took over, and I wished everyone else would. Now being in FB exile, I guess, my feelings about it are a little complex. I miss some folks there and indeed, some I will likely never again interact with in this life, absent that venue, just because it’s the only place where we were connected. So that’s real, and I don’t love that part. But at the same time, I’m sort of savoring this abscence. Odd as it sounds, FB had become something of a chore. I mean, as a recording artist and for my record label I want to have reach there, right? Well that’s harder than it used to be. Many of my music posts in recent years would fall flat, no response or very little, leaving me to wonder, is this just that people aren’t into my work, OR does it mean FB is not showing my music posts to my friends in their FB feeds? And being an emotional person, I have emotions around all that, and they are not entirely pleasant emotions, and I think, am I getting paid for this unpleasantness? No, they are. The UpTones’ page on FB still had some reach, but in the last few years we played live, we had to buy a “boost” for our gig announcements, whereas earlier everyone who had followed us there would see our posts organically. Waaaay into the weeds on this I am, so I’ll step out. It’s a weedy thing, this dystopian hot mess. And somewhat shocking to me is how much the social networking fracas has influenced my songwriting. Quite a many of my songs over the last ten years or so are directly informed by these conflicts and contradictions.

Michael Valladares really nailed it some years ago, when he said regarding an early social network (Friendster, was it?), “Let me tell you about my me.” As sort of a catch-all for what a social profile is, for a person. My Me. I found this delightfully funny, and it stayed with me even though I don’t remember the exact context of our conversation. Let me tell you about my me.  Well social networks go kablooey eventually it seems, and here I am, back in my faithful WordPress site, saying let me tell you about my me.

Here’s some photos, of me, at Gilman this last Saturday, caterwauling at Peter Montgomery’s b-day bash. It was rad, the whole event.

As for my names, I’m keeping all of them.

Photo creds: Larry Lynch

A Journal Entry Of Sorts

I do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Some have called this the definition of insanity but I prefer to see it as dedication.

Now then, making records. Berkeley Cat Records has a slogan – a tag line, if you will –

We’re from Berkeley. We are cats. We make records.

And it’s… TRUE!!

By gosh we do this.

I have some webby updatings to do, on this and a few other webbysites.  To bring my archive up-to-date. Been rather prolific, this year, and I’m pleased with my output. Each track is unique and different, so in this regard I guess I lied earlier. I do the same thing, that is, I get up (early, wow, very early these days) and make Peet’s coffee (various blends, current fave is Big Bang, no they don’t pay me to say that, it’s a Berkeley thing), and some days, some mornings, the light bulb over me head says, hey, here’s a track or a song idea! And I go there. Expecting what? Why, Petunia, I just don’t know.

Trying times, trying times, what a cliché that becomes. 2024, what the FUCK?! OK damn, my great friend and confidante, my career counselor and living Buddha Garden rock star beautiful human being Luke Kreinberg, died by suicide earlier in the year. It hardly feels real and if I start in talking about it I’ll write a novel, so let’s call that a headline. Grief sets in long and slow as comprehension of this slowly forms in my dumbfounded and stunned heart and mind.

Politics, another headline, shall we?   Biden, the drama, then Kamala, the campaign! The energy, the enthusiasm, the embrace of good values, decency and the rule of law, the rejection of all that is horrible, and then.. The most staggering debacle. It tests my optimism.

Optimism. I have lived most of my life with an intentional, deliberate optimism. Even in difficult times, in my personal life or career or through difficult events in the world around me I have chosen through and through to be optimistic. Part of it is calculated. I’ve found that pessimism can lead to the expected (bad) results and optimism can seem to help to lead to good outcomes. You get the result you imagine, to some degree. It’s not magic or hocus pocus, I think the current popular word for it is intention, setting your intention.

This year, yeah, it’s been tested a bit, this willful optimism of mine.  And becoming aware of that, becoming conscious of this inner struggle, certainly informed some of my songwriting and creative efforts.

A month after Luke’s passing, I went to see a psychotherapist. Private, expensive, several sessions, somewhat helpful. Smart fellow, wise and doubtlessly expert in his field. Younger than me, by at least ten years. After the 3rd visit I thanked him and canceled. You know, making records costs a bit, too. And I found, that the process involved in telling this gentleman, this professional, my stories and trying to understand myself a little better, is not wholly different from my process in writing and recording my own songs. Things are revealed, things I like and sometimes things that surprise or even disappoint me. In short it helps me work on myself, to hopefully become a better person. Well, funny thing – I even at one point some months ago said I was done making records for a while. Ha! That didn’t fly, so, well, I decided I can afford one or the other – record-making or therapy.

To become a better person. Now that is a worthy goal. And it’s one worth saying out loud at this time in our world, I believe.  Because there seems to be, among our fellow man, an embrace of values which are indecent. And I chose every word in that sentence. Our fellow man. Yes, also in women and in humankind more generally, but in men, I speak of men, men who have lost their sense of honor. Who have somehow been influenced, or brainwashed, if you prefer, to celebrate and reward simply the worst possible traits men can have. That is a mistake, and a dire one, and I doubt any good will come of it.

Meanwhile nature bats last, and she’s at bat. Instead of focusing our considerable human genius on dealing with the climate crisis intelligently, with the sort of organized focus which landed men on the moon, the human race is instead fighting wars over territory, power, religion, oil, water and vengeance, dumping more carbon into the atmosphere than ever before.

So how’s my willful optimism doing? Well, surprisingly ok. Because after all, it is willful.  What am I doing, with my time? Well, continuing to make art, for one thing. NOT making “art” with generative AI (I laugh out loud as I write this), and striving to be the best version I can imagine of myself. And I know, I know without doubt, that my friends and colleagues, and untold millions of good people whom I don’t know personally, are similarly striving. And THAT realization changes my optimism from willful, to easy and natural.

Our capacity for self-invention is considerable. And that’s some good news.

A Week Ago And Only Once

HERE is a scan of the set list I played at Ivy Room last Sunday. Blogging it as a memento, as it was a fun slice of life. Funny detail? I’ve started to use non-cursive print lately, along with my usual BLOCK LETTERS. With a pen, mind you, these ancient instruments.

I’m scheduled to play a set for Peter Montgomery’s 60th birthday party, at Gilman, in January, with a luminous cast of luminaries. Here’s the flier for that, as created by Peter himself:

And good morning

Bah Bah Blog Sheep, Have You Any Green?

When teh Inertnets was a widdle baby, I visited a “colocation” site where companies and individuals could rent space to host their webservers. “Servers” made me think restaurant, but these were “boxes” – that is, computers, some of them not unlike the one eventually ravaged by Angry German Kid. Linux was newish, Windows NT was overlording and Apple squeaked from a distance “We’re not dead!” Startups and investors roamed the valley in search of meat as the words “dot com” caused money to rain from ice sculptures. In the colocation building there were cages, each cage padlocked from the outside, LEDs within blinking furiously, whirring of hard drives and thousands of cooling fans created a soothing yet deafening hum. Oh, this is it, I thought – the whole William Gibson, Philip K. Dick business – souls in these electron-streams, experiencing reality of a sort, invisible except in there, in those caged boxes among each other. What did it mean to me? What was my relationship to this lunacy? I didn’t know yet but I was attracted to it, attracted and repulsed, as to a great fun drug with unpleasant side-effects, and still today I am. The boxes are smaller now and “blade” shaped, racks upon racks filling untold acres of energy-devouring computing power, keeping the light flowing so I can “like” a pic of PKD and his adorable kitty.

Another Truckload Of Animals And Prizes

I recently purchased a little scanner, an Epson ES-50. It’s quite tiny, unlike the giant hulking scanning machines of yore. Remember how they emitted bright white light as the works crawled the page, placed face-down on glass? You’d cover the thing and it would do its mysterious work, whirring and clanking. Now this little tiny machine makes almost no sound, emits no light, and efficiently passes a page through producing.. voila!

I was delighted to find that page recently – I had forgotten I had it. The drawings Jesse Michaels sent us when we recorded our Skankin’ Foolz Unite album. The doggie on upper left won the audition, and landed thusly:

This ^ is also a scan, using said spy-scanner. I fancy it a spy-scanner because it’s like some James Bond shit that Q gave him to scan secret documents but I digress. I have not secret documents, nay, but plenty of pages of handwritten lyrics and assorted photos and drawings from friends and sooooo, I like my new scanner spy thingy.

Speaking of exciting top secrets, Shannon Wheeler is drawing a cover for my EP release of I Changed My Mind. I like my homespun cover art for the single – in fact I purchased said spy-scanner precisely for the purpose of making this. I simply printed out the Berkeley Cat Records logo, wrote on it with a Sharpie, and then scanned it.  Voila indeed.

What ever shall we scan next?  I love a new toy.

So, as evidenced by evidence, my attempts at NOT making records have utterly failed.  I’ll accept this about myself and continue.

A long time ago, a post-UpTones band I had with Ben and Paul and drummer Tom Pope, did a lot of touring on the west coast of these Untidy States.  The band was called HOBO, which mystifies me somewhat, but it made sense at the time.  We had a lot of fun gigging and recording an album and.. well, we were going to call our second album Another Truckload Of Animals And Prizes. I mean, I wanted to, but the idea never took flight, and the band turned into something else and didn’t make a second album and.. Well, now I am going to make Another Truckload of Animals and Prizes. I think the words were lifted from a circus truck we saw on the road somewhere, but googling around I can’t seem to find it. Maybe we made this phrase up?  Anyway, who wouldn’t want another truckload of animals and prizes? I must have it. I must make it. I must and I shall make and have it.

Good morning.

Musing about Songwriting about Deciding and Dancing about Blogging

Made a song. Published said song. Below is a scan of the lyrics as originally scribbled while composing and arranging the track. Once the songwriting was done, I typed the lyrics out in ALL CAPS and printed them out large, so they’d be easy to read.. Taped that to my wall, set up a mic and captured the lead vocal in one pass. It was smooth, efficient; In ways that jumping back onto a plane or bridge may not be, one presumes.

…all of which ends up being: