This morning was hot. Hot mornings are a warning sign of stranger things to come in my life…and I decided to paint the rest of my bathroom in non-paint clothes, and guess what? They are now the color of my bathroom.
I have moved. My new neighborhood is Loud-Quiet: the kind of quiet that is usually loud, but sometimes it’s quieter than it is loud; hence, Loud-Quiet. Yesterday was no exception to this general rule, however, among the rap that often blares from open home doors or cars, I heard a sample of Amelie soundtrack (one of my favorites) mixed among yet another rap song. My curiosity was piqued. I ran out the door and across the street to the group of guys (and one girl) sitting in their front porch. “Hello,” I said. They looked surprised. I wondered if they thought I was going to ask them to turn their music off or something. “My name is Emily. Do you know who this is?” They were friendly and informative: Kid Cuti was their answer.
“We saw you moving in. Where did you come from?”
“I moved here from Washington Heights.”
“You moved here from Washington Heights?”, they sounded surprised. (Wow… how do I answer that?!)
“Yes. I like it here.”
“Well, you’re welcome over any time.”
And now I have some new friends. Thanks, Kid Cuti.
(Of Note: A lady from the 4th floor of her building was just arguing with a guy on the sidewalk and threw a couple of bottles at his car right before he shouted some threats at her and drove off… home sweet home.)
Started it in the wee hours of the morning today (during the quiet part of the day). This is in its first phase: I thought I could clean it up, move stuff around, add some more stuff, make it longer, add some vocals…but I may not end up finishing it as I’m ho-hum about it generally. I had all my recording equipment boxed away, so I used my ear buds to record the voice and bells. Ear buds. Never a solid way of capturing sound. I slowed everything down once it was recorded. Garageband samples filled up the rest of it.
Also, The 80s. You may not know that I love the 80s.
Phew! This is the longest recovery time I’ve had to take after a tour… ever! (What am I saying, I don’t remember ever having to take recovery time. Bah!) But, here I am! And the 365 continues on!
Hello, dear friend! I have missed you, and I apologize for being away for so long! Let us not mourn lost time!
Lots of things have happened, but I am here now! When I started the 365, I swore to myself nothing would get in my way… and it worked for a long time, but I went on a tour that made posting impossible, and I fell behind. I am here to tell you that there are some awesome things in store, and, admittedly, I really needed that sabbatical, so I hope you are still here BECAUSE I AM STILL HERE! Let’s get going!
Today’s installment didn’t meet my expectations and gave me some big problems, but as a draft it’s ended up in an interesting place. I had a totally different vision for this song when I started it. I used several Garageband samples as a guide. The most helpful aspect of this song was how I constructed it. I had general outline of the song and its melody on paper and then built the percussion and beats around the skeleton of the song, using scratch vocals first, building the string parts and then doing final vocals. Sound familiar? Yeah. That’s how it’s usually done in the real world. I haven’t been using that technique to do most of the 365, so I enjoyed myself.
The main thing I would do differently is finalize the tempo BEFORE I try to change it within Garageband. I have changed the tempo post recording before and haven’t minded the weird distortion it creates, but this time, it bugs me, but oh well! The ending was totally different, and I had huge visions for it, but I had such a hard time managing it that I just cut it.
As far as the lyrics go:
These are various scenes which have occurred in real life (Note: the line: the Iron Door of the North Plain refers to the legend of The Iron Door from Malad, Idaho). The idea was about someone trying to locate a person who is of great worth to them but is always constantly one or two steps behind. I can identify a few events as directly happening to me sometime in the past, and there are a few sections that call out to a specific person. So, we’ll see if they can hear me! (I’m winking through my words to you…)
I saw Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Sharon Van Etten and tUnE-yArDs last night at The Rock Shop in Brooklyn. It was such an awesome show. I wrote an email to a friend afterwards describing the show, and I wanted to post a tiny bit of it here for you to read:
A friend of mine in grad school was getting his bachelor’s degree in industrial design. Late one night, he drew a graph on a napkin outlining zones of the following: boring, exciting, and scary. He argued that boring is where all appliances and household gadgets fall. They are comfortable, affordable, ergonomic. His preference was to create tools that bordered excitement and scary, never tipping over into scary completely, but allowing the user to feel the intensity of nearly reaching that limit. He believed people experienced more and learned more in this more “dangerous” zone.
This is how I want to create music. This is brave to me. I want to be brave. Let’s be brave.
West Coast
(headphones are recommended)
Did you know she burned your name into the sand on the West Coast?
There a tide, it took your shape deep underwater like a fine ghost
Did it feel like you’d survive; lungs both taking in their last hope
Sick are seas and martyrs made such easy prey with their own rope.
Soon, brother, soon
In a mount she hid her heart, the Iron Door of the North Plain
For a thousand years or more with rusted key, did you search in vain
Constant companion: horse of black and red with its sick brain
Ride until it died you did but seek her still again again again
Soon, brother, soon
From a window, does it seem to sound out?
Beat the glass in as if she could hear you
Only distant wind she hears and sleeps again
From where you are, is it like it sounds?
Can you feel the earth, it shakes again as it hears you
She will not, but lose her mind, oh what a strain just to undo
This cause of flux and shift when bodies ache as they come to
Your mind, the author, seals a kiss on lips as an adieu, adieu
UGGGGGHHHHH.... soooooo gooooood. So many pictures of this food...
This is near to be the quickest while at the same time being the dumbest (I mean, awesomest?) 365 song yet (the song has to be quick and dumb at the same time in order to qualify for this honor. It can’t be dumb first and then quick later or vice versa). Minute 1:47 is my favorite moment.
I grew up eating Kraft Macaroni and Cheese – None of this stupid homemade junk. What’s that?! Now that I’m grown up, when there is nothing to eat in my house, I usually crave it (though I don’t eat it now due to incredibly top-secret, very sensitive political and personal reasons.) If I’m really hard up, I’ll do a run next door and get some Annie’s Mac and Cheese which is a pretty good organic alternative, also knowing I should be eating the broccoli that’s just sitting there getting bad in the crisper.
Sigh.
What’s in your fridge that you should be eating? Want to write a song about it? There are no rules and there is no dumb.
It’s Lunchtime (And Against My Better Healthy Judgment, I Would Like Something I Don’t Have In My House)
I just watched American Graffiti for the first time yesterday. In the extras, we find out director George Lucas would do a few takes of a scene and almost always end up taking the scene that had the mistake in it. I thought I might try it. So, when recording this song, I left the mistakes in.
Also, Pirates. There are Pirates. (Jonathan plays the accordion.)
(I forgot to mention that I woke up out of a half-sleep with the words “I’m Bloated Belly Barb” in the front of my mind… so I finished it up… whatever happened to dreams about Johnny Depp?)
Bloated Belly Barb
I’m Bloated Belly Barb
Of course you can borrow my car
I’m the perfect friend
You’ll see in the end
I’m Bloated Belly Barb!
I’m Bloated Belly Barb
I’d love you to play my guitar
You can write pretty songs
And we’ll all sing along
Cause I’m Bloated Belly Barb!
Bloated (Bloated) Belly (Belly) Barb (Barb)
I’m Bloated Belly Barb
I’ll share my fine Cuban cigars
Smuggled in on the wings
Of flamingo kings
I’m Bloated Belly Barb!
Midi: Several tracks of treated beats and one track of treated grand piano
Vocals: treated (vocal transformer)
Finished track: slowed down 10 BPMs from original recording tempo.
Lyrics: Inspired from old set lists from other bands found at Hog Farm Annex when Pearl and the Beard played there last night. Jocelyn found three different set lists from nameless bands to use as scrap paper for our set, and, as we read through them, she mentioned they might work well as a 365 song. So, here it is an old set list put to good 365 use. The only rule was that I couldn’t change any of the words to fit the tense. I had to use what was there though I could combine them or split them up. In my original versions of this exercise (I did several), I used all the words, but for this song, I decided to cut a bunch out of it to simplify the piece as a whole.
This is how the set list I ended up using read… (if this is your band, or if you know who this might be: thanks!)
Label pills
El Gusano
Show Me
Ol Texas
Slow Shards
Super Vision
Acreless
Shot n Shot
Throw duck
Jet Fighter
Outside
Show Me Ole Texas
Show me ole Texas
The one we knew when we were younger
An acreless vision
Send me to El Gusano
A shot in the dark
I have super vision
She will see through me
She will see through me
Like your favorite dress
Show me ole Texas
Throw me a label of pills
We’ll drive through the night
Texas.
Pearl and the Beard is goin’ home tomorrow! It’s been a fun mini tour, and it’s been very relaxing. Thanks to all who made it out to the shows! See you soon!
(Pearl and the Beard on tour!) Tour is a relatively easy place to write a song, but really difficult to record and post…if it’s not finding a good place to record, it’s not being able to find proper internet to post. Here’s one for your back pocket:
For your listening pleasure, I offer up to you a two-minute and one second look into… I’m not sure, actually. Jonathan and I set up a challenge for ourselves: put together a song as quickly as possible (hence the rough edges and less than stellar mic technique) with odd references but without compromising the building blocks of a good dance song.
Used in this song: scissors, Jonathan, Emily, and the never-failing Garageband.
Encounters with a Drunken Landlord
“Wherever the spirit tells you to go, you go.”
“The system is down.”
“I’m in my underwear.”
“The system is down, man. It’s bringing me down. It’s bring him down. It’s bring us all down…Bring it back up. Yeah!”
Sometimes you just need to put some beats together, you know?
Total composition time: One and a half hours.
Instrumentation: garageband samples.
Perfect: No.
Fun: Yes.
I am including some pictures from Pearl and the Beard’s Rebus McEntour 2010 for your perusal.
Much love to you today.
Illegitimi Non Carborundum
EHP
Jocelyn brushing her leg hair (she is growing it out for a year to show support for me and the 365)
Kelly Neel showed us how to eat crabs in Baltimore. Jeremy's opinion of it was definitely mixed.
We had places to stay in almost every stop but Memphis and one other town. Here, you can see the sweet, sweet Motel 6 bedspread. And Jocelyn is trying on Jeremy's shoes and showing them to the camera.
In Austin, Jocelyn and I went to dinner and found a spaghetti place where you can ride a horse for fifty cents. I did partake, much to the chagrin of on-lookers waiting imaptiently to be called to take a table, in the bucking of the bronco, however disappointing. Rock on, Austin.
I feel as if that number has a lot of meaning for me, but I have no idea what meaning that meaning is… I’m so tired and I want to sleep so bad.
Pearl and the Beard just played in Greensboro for a Monkeywhale Productions sponsored show. It was awesome! People were so great, and we made some interesting, wonderful friends.
Next stop: Knoxville. And we are staying in the most amazing little apartment tonight. It’s great, and we will rest well!
Until tomorrow… as it is now 5 in the morning, and I haven’t slept at all. This is a song that’s more based on trial and error than anything else. It’s basically an experimentation on loudness and many celli just for the beginning. The rest of it is more of a scene descriptor… and it’s actually very much incomplete. Being on the road has it’s major positives and huge set backs. I’m slowly learning life is like that. Doing the 365 on the road is really challenging. We spend most of our day driving, and most of the night getting ready to perform. I’m having a hard time finding good places to record and the focus with which to do it.
Pearl and the Beard is leaving for tour TODAY (Monday, that is…) Philadelphia show tonight! Leaving Jonathan lots of food in the freezer… oatmeal cookies, and Green Tea Ice Cream (don’t know why, but he likes it… bleck…)
Title: I am not clumsy. I am “careless”. Or so Jonathan says. Or so Jeremy and Jocelyn from Pearl and the Beard say. I take things apart or they just magically break. And why not, I say?
Recording: My parents are funny and buy me funny awesome things. For Christmas, my mom bought me an Edward Cullenlunch box. It came with a thermos! (It leaks.) Tonight, I found some rubber bands hanging around the house. I took my lunch box apart and strung rubber bands on it. You can hear them break and snap and fly off in this song.
Do you remember Olive’s bells from a few days ago? They take a prominent role in this song. Olive’s bells are super cool because they are just colored bars on a wooden frame that aren’t held down by anything, so you can pick them up and put them in any order or whatever. You can hear me pick them up and put them down again, then pick them up into a little bundle and then put them down again. You can also hear me rub my hands in circles on them. I like this sound.
My bells: I first recorded them clean, but after listening a few times, I tried some effects and loved it. They have amp simulation and vocal transformer on them.
Vocals were a choice I wasn’t sure I should make actually, but I put them in any way. Since this was a deconstruction, I bent over, squished my diaphragm, crooked my neck up and shut off my throat for the first half. I used the vocal transformer on a second vocal track. I have been using this on my vocals lately, and I’m finding I really like the ease of this tool and what it allows me to do… though I feel it’s a little bit of a cop-out. In the last few seconds there is a tiny melody the vocals take on. I wonder why it’s there when this is a deconstruction? Maybe there is some light at the end of the rubble? I don’t know.
I recorded this song at 120 bpm and after all the tracks were recorded I raised it to 150. I did this because it was 1) getting too long and I was afraid you wouldn’t make it to the end of the song – maybe you still won’t, but I hope you do. 2) It needed that special something. It always freaks with the sound to try this. I’ve done it on one other song: I like it.
The frequencies were screwing with the mic, and it was peaking: both problems of which I am extremely annoyed, but it’s totally my own fault, but I didn’t want to go back and re-record stuff, so I’m going to deal with it.
You doing alright today? I hope so. If green tea ice cream isn’t your thing (which I totally understand), might I suggest a dreamcicle?
DAMN THE ENTER KEY! I pushed it and it posted an unfinished entry too early! Don’t be thrown off: it’s just my fickle fingers flying!
Good evening or good morning.
Writing/Recording: This mainly started out as an improvisational piece, and I guess it still is, in a way. This is hard to explain: I love rhythm. It’s just one of the coolest aspects of music and life. Though I love it, I’m no drummer: I feel like I have a good sense of natural rhythm, it’s just when I start involving other elements like singing or intonation, I get lackadaisical about it. So, I thought I might do a piece that involved mainly percussion or beats that I would play myself to challenge myself. I got out an older/new notebook and found the words on the first few pages. I’m not sure what I had done that day to write lyrics like this, but here they are. I started doing each vocal line separately, but I realized it would take me all day, so some of these lines are live, but most are using the pitch in garageband.
The original lyrics for the “chorus” were: “In a marvelous, decadent storm.” Too much! So I changed it.
c.1300, “miracle,” also “wonderful story or legend,” from O.Fr. merveille “a wonder,” from V.L. *miribilia, alt. from L. mirabilia “wonderful things,” from neut. pl. of mirabilis “strange or wonderful,” from mirari “to wonder at,” from mirus “wonderful” (see smile). A neut. pl. treated in V.L. as a fem. sing. The verb is attested from c.1300. Related: Marveled; marveling; marvels.”
My other Song-Study aspect was less commonly used intervals: perfect 5ths, perfect 4ths, etc. Though there are intervals in use here, they don’t generally fit within each other perfectly, which I find interesting. I like that there is really no central key to focus on, but also that this is kind of weird…I like that it’s not totally acoustic either, or natural. I like that so much of it is artificial and wandering and imperfect.
*I understand how this song may sound a bit like the vocoder, Imogen Heap thing… this wasn’t point and, honestly, didn’t even occur to me these might be related until I was nearly done.
There are a million things I considered doing with this- one of them was start totally over from scratch because the performances on all tracks seem too off (drums), but that would have taken forever. It was an interesting learning experience. I have this feeling this isn’t quite done- mixing and a few more additions to drum parts to accentuate vocal changes. I was less picky about its perfection than most others I’ve done because it was a study. Even studies start out as one thing and end up deviating. It’s funny: though this is about rhythm, the rhythmic aspects of this song are some of the weakest! Oh well!
So, here you go: I’m falling asleep as I’m typing… blah… goodnight!
In a Storm I Lost My Love
In a storm I lost my love
It was marvelous, marvelous
In a storm I lost my love
On a perch did I sit and I watched
From on high did I wish, and I mourned
In a storm I lost my love
That he, as an oak, would not swim
And drown in the sea as I hoped
In a storm I lost my love
It was marvelous
For my love was a ghost
A haunted reminder for me
In a storm I lost my love
It was marvelous, marvelous
“My soul,” did I say,
And I said it again,
“May you drown in the arms of the sea.”
In a storm I lost my love
It was marvelous, marvelous
