I improvise, when cooking or preparing food, much as I improvise while creating music. At this moment, I am eating a toasted garlic-sourdough slice adorned with my own riff on the basic tuna salad. Tuna, mayo, a smooth German mustard, chopped onion, sweet pickle relish, some chopped avocado, chopped tomato, and dashes of salt and coarsely ground black pepper.
Delicious Caturday fare, and of course, the actual cats take an immediate interest. Not eager to give them too much tuna (the good veterinarian advises the mercury levels can cause problems), but not wishing to exclude them from this activity (and run the risk of their ire), I separate a chunk of the fish before mixing with other ingredients, and provide it to the felines in their proper eating area thereby satisfying them just long enough for me to have time to complete the hooman-food preparation unmolested.
In another life I am a chef. In this life, I also cook music. Of my recent outings, I am particularly fond of some instrumentals. Being a wordy lad, it’s been satisfying for me to just make some enjoyable music rabbit holes for a change of pace. In reverse chronological order, these tracks I created entirely at home.
One might argue that the latter two are not strictly instrumental, for they involve a few words, more spoken than sung. These I find loosely in the tradition of The Skatalites‘ treatment of Guns Of Navarone, where the title is the lyric, and it’s said a few times and the rest is carried by the band.
In the WORDY department, one of my wordiest, the epic Push the Better Button has a new remastered single out on Berkeley Cat Records, and I’m frankly a little giddy about it. See, unlike the above 3, Better Button took a lot of time and effort to create. Not a quickie tuna-salad on a Caturday, nay, it involved weeks and multiple revisions and wranglings to create an actual functioning all-purpose Better button.
The Button became track 1 on my 1st solo album STREET PARTY, and yes, I was pleased with the outcome, but by that point I was also exhausted by it. Not in a terrible way, though – I learned a LOT about my own processes, both technically and emotionally, working on that song, and collaborating on it long-distance with some of my UpTones musical brethren.
That was in 2020, and here about 5 years later, I’m releasing a smashing remaster of it, by audio masterblaster Leo Frappier. It’s very gratifying for me to hear this track with fresh ears, I do love this remaster, and I hope you might press the button yourselves, in the name of bettering.
And now, cats and hoomans fed, despatches sent, I’m going to practice some tunes on the acoustic guitar, for to sing next Sunday at Ivy Room opening for Psycotic Pineapple.
What else, after that, then? Oh, I suppose I’ll make something up.
-Eric Din
