The Go Ahead And

Is xmas capitalized?

Anyway, I’m inches away from finishing my big Christmas album. I keep editing, and I keep making it a little bit better. I know I’m gilding the lilly, but I’m also learning a lot with every song, and then I have to go back and use what I learned on songs that I formerly thought were as good as they were going to be.

So, on I edit. Honestly, the songs are at 92-93% right now. I want to get them to 96-98%. Those last four or five percent take forever.

The last two songs I did are really good. I was stalled at ten songs for two months, and couldn’t get anything started. On my hard drive I have six different nearly-finished versions of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”. Then, I got back on track, and did the last two songs in a couple of days.

No matter what, I’m going to be finished on November 20. No more editing after that.

I remember a month in the 1990s when Smashing Pumpkin released sixteen or seventeen albums.  It was a joke then, because it seemed so ridiculous how many new albums they put out all at once.

On the other hand, Paul Simon puts out an album every six or seven years.  Steely Dan puts out an album every seventeen years.

Earlier this year, when I got down to business and made “Babies Don’t Have Hands” it took about three months of continuous work to finish.  Also, most of the songs were already written, so it was mostly production, arranging, and overdubbing.  By the end of that process, I was moving really quickly, and my production had become very efficient.  If I’d continued in that vein, instead of moving on to marketing the album, I’d definitely have another twelve songs finished.  And then I’d have TWO albums out that aren’t selling!

Instead, I decided to make my Christmas album.  I’ve had ten songs finished for months, and I’ve had hundreds of false starts on the last two.  Recently, I’ve made progress on song number eleven, and currently have 1:40 of it radio-ready.  So it will be finished soon.

Unfortunately, it’s getting cold, and my fingers are losing their speed and flexibility, making it hard to play keyboard.  So that’s a environmental difficulty to finishing.  Yesterday I put a space heater on the table right in front of my mouse hand and blasted heat directly on it, which made working possible.

Now that I’m nearing the finish line on the Christmas album, I’ve been thinking about The Go Ahead And’s next album, and I think it’s going to be all originals, like the last one.

So, I don’t know if this is supposed to be a place for political stuff, but that last Palin thing was something I felt like writing.  She’s just so ridiculous.

I’ve been working on a couple of projects.  I’m still finishing up my Xmas album.  I have ten solid songs, and want two more that aren’t coming to me.  So that’s stalled.  I’ve been working on a stage show in town.  I am the “sound designer” but actually the director just made a list of sounds he wanted, I made them and put them in order, and then a sound guy is playing them at the correct times during the play.  The great thing is that I did it right the first time, so it all worked out–I still had to watch the show a couple of times in rehearsal to make sure everything was kosher, but it all worked out, which is great.

I’m starting to get more work which is good and bad.  Good because I get stable money for a while.  Bad because I don’t have as much time to make music.

I just don’t think ten songs is enough for the xmas album.

It’s about 38 minutes right now, and I really want to get 46.  So I need two more four minute songs.  They’re just not coming to me right now.  May be I’m not desperate enough.  Great things come from desperation.

It’s also starting to get cold, and when it gets cold it gets harder to move my fingers (which is necessary to play piano).

Oh, another project I’m working on is a TV show called “Late Night Saturday” which is on the local CBS affiliate.  I’m Paul Shaffer.  We film every other Thursday, and I make mostly transitional music for the show.

I’ll admit that I’ve become a Palin-News-Junkie these last two weeks. I’ve been reading all the Palin news articles and op-ed pieces and watching all the Palin videos online with the same fervor that I usually reserve for “The Girls Next Door” and “TMZ”.

The only website that has proven to distract me from my Palin-centrism has been www.break.com which has an amazing assortment of videos of people being concussed in the head with various objects.

I sure that I’m as big a fan of watching train wrecks as anybody, and watching a distractingly large proportion of the United States population lose their minds in support of this woman (and her running mate, what’s his name), is the most pervasive and embarrassing national spectacle we have right now. Can’t you just feel the news reporters hungrily waiting for the inevitable Palin scandal? They tried to make “lipstick-gate” into something, but even the Republicans quickly shut up about trying to make the illogical leap that when Barack Obama mentions lipstick he’s insulting Sarah Palin. And we almost had a scare when it was revealed that the sixteen-year-old daughter was pregnant.  I, for one, can’t wait for a more meaty scandal to emerge, and I know it’s coming.

Even dumb people ought to realize that picking Palin is a hail-Mary move, a decision that has much to do with the campaign to be president, and little to do with actually being president. And this, from a guy who continually asserts that he doesn’t play the game of politics. Speaking of that, if John McCain is “Maverick”, does that make Sarah Palin “Goose”?

Despite the “Bush Doctrine” gaff that’s been getting all the coverage, my favorite part of the ABC interview was that it took ten days for her to grant one, and then, during the interview, she kept relying on the same obviously coached answers. It reminded me of that pageant video from a couple of years ago where the pretty blond girl imploded when asked why 1/5 of Americans can’t find the U.S. on the map: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and uh, I believe that our… ed-education like such as uh, South Africa, and uh… the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., err-should help South Africa, it should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future…”

Columnists are trying to identify the perfect metaphor for Sarah Palin. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times calls her Eliza Doolittle to McCain’s Henry Higgins. John Heilemann in New York Magazine says she’s more like Dorothy, “the girl swept up in the tornado, lifted suddenly out of her black-and-white world, deposited in a Technicolor Oz.” I’ve heard her compared to an American Idol winner, presumably because of her from-nowhere rise to fame. To me, she seems like a mediocre actor over-committing to a mis-cast role, like Keanu Reeves in Dracula or Much Ado About Nothing (or Dangerous Liaisons), Cameron Diaz in Gangs of New York, Madonna in Evita, or Whoopie Goldberg as Jar Jar in The Phantom Menace.

I’m reminded of that now-famous image of McCain and Palin at the Republican convention where she’s holding up her fist like “Go Team!” But the expression on her face says: “What am I doing here?”
The Republicans keep touting how well the country is relating with Sarah Palin because she is just like us, or close enough–as long as we’re all hockey moms who shoot guns and overuse the word “blink” as a justificatin of behavior. But just because the Republicans have spun her to seem just like us doesn’t mean that she’s Presidential or Vice-Presidential material. It’s like plucking the chair of the PTA to be the Vice President of the United States. It’s like making your mom Vice President.

If you flip the ticket on the Democratic side, you get a perfectly acceptable combo: Biden-Obama, but if you flip the Republican ticket, you get something entirely unacceptable.

Yes, it took balls to pick Sarah Palin as VP, and if you want to call that decision being “a maverick”, then fine, McCain made a decision that no other person would make. He made a decision that no other reasonable person would have even considered. It’s as though by choosing Sarah Palin he was consciously showing America just how INDEPENDENT he is, and how prepared he is to make BOLD DECISIONS. I wonder if, back in his flying days he used to “buzz the tower” and fly a 4G inverted dive two meters from a MiG-28. I really wanted to hear Danger Zone played during the Republican convention.

Seems to me that there might have been other opportunities for McCain to demonstrate his independent decision-making ability that wouldn’t potentially put someone so inexperienced a (72 year old) heartbeat away from the presidency. Something like…disagreeing with the Republican party on anything. Something like…keeping his word about running a “respectful campaign” (like he said in Alexandria, Virginia April 1, 2008). Something like…committing to breaking America’s oil dependence, instead of being wishy-washy about offshore drilling.

I’m going to go back to flipping between reading the latest news about Sarah Palin and watching videos of people getting hit in the head on www.break.com.  Come to think of it, there isn’t much difference.

My friend Mike and I have an old sort-of-joke, it goes like this: “Hey have you heard about the new [blockbuster movie] coming out this weekend?  I bet it will make at least a hundred dollars.”

So it’s been six months since “Babies Don’t Have Hands” was released.  In that time it’s made “at least a hundred dollars.”  To be exact, it’s made exactly a hundred dollars.

I haven’t listened to the CD for a few months (I rarely drive anymore because we moved to a walking city) but recently I had to drive a bit, so I popped my CD in and gave it a listen.  It was still good.  I’ve been educating my ears lately, by listening to lots of different bands and genres, and also viewing the waveforms of classic recordings, and playing with effects to achieve similar sounds.  I could probably do a little better now, six months later, than I did back in late May, but not by much.  

It’s not as funny as I remember.  But it is more “Not-Serious” than I remember.  I don’t want to analyze that distinction right now, but it exists, and it’s readily apparent if you listen to the CD.

I’ve been working really hard lately to make sure that my recordings are “punchy”–by using specific effects in specific ways.  And “Babies” is definitely punchy, so I’m happy with that.

I’m being kicked out of the coffee house right now, so I guess that’s the blog entry for today.

I like to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows pretty frequently, like two or three times a year.

I know this behavior is kind of odd, because of the amount of senseless work that it requires, multiplied by the amount of “Not-Actual-Work-Being-Done” as I go in and repartition the drives, format, reinstall the OS, and then go about the arduous task of reinstalling all of my software, which is a vast collection.

But I enjoy reformatting and reinstalling because every time I do it, I do it more efficiently.

Usually I do a reinstall because I feel like it.  Sometimes my system is slowing down due to OS bloating, or I feel like I just have too much crap on my drive.

The fact is I love the feel of a fresh install.  Everything just POPS.  The computer starts faster, shuts down faster.  All the programs launch quickly.  Everything works perfectly, smoothly, and transparently.

This time my reinstall was triggered by a virus.  This almost never happens to me, and ironically I got hit with this virus a week after installing antivirus software.  It was a very clever little virus that immediately locked me out of the computer.  So, I went in through Puppy Linux and backed up all my user files–I was able to save the ten songs that I’ve been working on these past months–and then do the reformat et cetera.

Now, the clever thing I did (and I’ve been plotting this for quite a while but didn’t have the technology) is to do a fresh install, with all my programs all happily planted in their little sunny plots on my hard drive, and then make an image of the drive in this pristine state, so that next time I want or need to do a reformat, I can just load in the image file and away we go.

So, instead of making music, that’s what I’ve been up to the last couple of days.  Now, back to the music.

“Working Hard To Be A Hipster” is at 999 views on YouTube!

I have eight songs for the Christmas CD finished.  I’ve been working steadily for weeks on this project, but after the eighth song, I’ve had days and days of false starts.  I have many minutes of music that just isn’t usable for a number of reasons.  Most often, it just isn’t working.  It’s interesting how obvious it is when a song is or is not working.  Other false starts are abandoned because they are not consistent with the tone of the album (synth pop), or because they are sounding too new-agey, and I’m really trying to stay away from the Mannheim Steemroller sound.

One problem inherent in the project itself is that I’m reworking hymns into synth arrangements, and that means that the same song has to be repeated over and over–the way hymns are repeated in church.  However, being an instrumental album, my arrangements don’t have the added interest of different verses every repetition.  And these songs are really short.  So I have to find ways of taking these short songs, and repeating them over and over, while building interest and complexity, while at the same time making sure the hymn remains recognizable.

The other day I was at the end of about three days of false starts, when I just started playing around with Silent Night.  I’d worked with it before for a while as an accordion bossa nova with hints of tango.  But this album is intended to be all synthesizers, so I knew I had to switch to more synthetic sounds.  I had recently downloaded a freeware mellotron synth, so I loaded that up with a mellotron string patch, and recorded a minor version of Silent Night.  After a few takes, I got a nice loop of the song, and then started finding other weirdness to cloak upon that core loop.  Deviating from my intention to only use synthesized sounds, I decided on a really nice acoustic bass patch for the bass.  But everything else is synthy.

I could go on and on about how I built up this song, but the point is that it’s really good, and its creation was pretty much an afterthought.  I was just playing around.  And it turned into a song that’s definitely different from all the rest of the tracks I have so far, and might be the strongest of the bunch.

So what did I learn?  Trying too hard to make tracks doesn’t work.  Trying to conform to a rigid set of rules for a project can lead to frustration and blockage.  So, play around more.  Don’t take it too seriously at first, then, when you finally get something interesting, then give it the serious attention it deserves, but not in the creation stage.

Thinking about it now, I’m reminded of something I used to tell my English students.  It’s something that apparently I forgot, or didn’t think to apply to music.  I told them to always write with two pieces of paper: one to write on, and one to write ideas on.  That way, you won’t lose an idea that came to you early in the writing that may be useful later in the writing.  Essentially, you need a page that you aren’t taking very seriously, a page where you can play.

I moved from Atlanta to Vermont about seven months ago, and packed up all of my beautiful synthesizers, effect boxes, samplers, microphones, and cables.  All of my precious and hard-to-find music making apparatus has been packed up in boxes.  I’ve been making all of my music using software synthesizers and plugins “in the box”.  In fact, all of the sounds except the guitars on “Babies Don’t Have Hands” were played through virtual instruments.

Yesterday, I decided to finally clean up my new music room and to unpack all of my musical devices.  Now, my music room is quite pleasant to walk into, but also looks as though perhaps a mad scientist lives there.  I have a lot of synthesizers and effect boxes, so many that it’s probably time to ebay many of them.  But, it’s hard to get rid of musical instruments, firstly because it took so much time and research to acquire them in the first place, and secondly because to me, musical instruments are somewhat alive.  What I mean is that they don’t just sit around like a vase or a painting.  Musical instruments are alive because they make sound, because they have personality, because they have utility, because they have voice.

So, I’m making a Christmas album, and using this project as a platform for learning lots of new ways of arranging and composing electronic music.

My original concept for this Christmas album is “Synth and Variations,” meaning that each song would start with a simple melody and then repeat with different iterations becoming more complex and independent of the main theme (while retaining harmonic structure), and then returning to the simple theme at the end.

What happens during the arranging of these songs is that each song gets treated to four or five different variations—so essentially, I’m switching gears very frequently in each song.  And with each variation, my options for future variations are both getting more limited and more abundant: limited, because I don’t want to retread ground that I’ve already covered; abundant, because I’m forced to find new sounds and new possibilities in the arrangement.  I have considered the idea that I’m making songs for people with really short attention spans, including myself.

The big breakthrough that I’ve discovered is the use of ugly sounds.  I’m finding that when I’m stuck in an arrangement, and not finding the right sound for a lead line, that usually the answer to my problem is an ugly sound.  Just last night, I replaced a very pretty orchestral section with a froggy sounding granular synthesis lead line, with a distorted oscillator sync sound for the countermelody.  I’d worked very hard on that orchestral section, but the froggy synth is so much more interesting, partly because it’s so unusual sounding, and partly because it’s a sound you wouldn’t expect to hear playing the melody of We Three Kings.

There is, of course, a place for pretty sounds, but I’m getting very attached to my new secret weapon, ugly sounds.