XMAS ’06 is nearing completion, with Scott’s sax added now to “O Come Thou Dayspring.”  I hope to get it out this weekend, and what happens tomorrow has a lot to do with that.  I also discovered a track recorded last year and saved, which I’d forgotten, called “What’s My Baby Want’n?”  So the new tracks will be:

5. O Come Thou Dayspring – howie&scott
6. What’s My Baby Want’n? – Tape/echoes
7. Jingle Bells – DJ Josh-O
8. Silent Night – Tape/echoes

Then, Sally M/S Ride in another week or two.  Ack – Do you get sick of constant updates to the schedule?  Or is it cool to know where we’re at?

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The best non-pumpkin-pie part of the Thanksgiving holiday was drumming with Ben (and Scott, and others who lent a hand: Nick, Kay, Mom…).  We circled up in the evenings in my living room with traditional Ewe drums, and just started in.  Sometimes Ben assigned rhythm parts to a few people, others times we just jammed.  Scottie got the sax out and did some improv, which was a big hit – I’m guessing Ben (my music teacher and choir-leader friend from Ghana, West Africa) had never heard anything quite like it.  We sang a couple traditional songs that I know/learned.

We also sang some hymns, some with drums and some without.  When the German Bremen missionaries first visited Ben’s area of Ghana in the 1800’s, they brought their hymn book and translated over 200 hymns into Ewe language.  Having grown up in churches, and being currently empolyed by one, many of the tunes are familiar to me.

You’ll be able to hear a little bit of all (traditional African music, new stuff inspired by traditional sounds, and hymns) on Sunday, January 21 when Ben is our guest artist for the morning at SPUCC in KC MO.

It’s late, I’d love to explain the title above (from Ben) or more about how Sally M/S Ride / XMAS sound, and I will soon.

For now, just this; Katy did a brief analysis on the harmonies Cory and I sang for “David S. Addington and Your Democracy,” and it turns out we’re bitonal at least, maybe polytonal.  Which puts us in the company of some compositional greats.  Interpreted into Rock, that means “backup vocals so weird and awesome your brain will probably explode.”

Coming Soon to the internets near you…

Cory and I recorded his parts for Sally M/S Ride today.  It was rad.  We moved FuriousSound over to Jody’s attic (aka Where The Barbies Live) this morning, ran his guitars, then his vocals, then figured out what the hell to do with “Cause 2 B Uneasy.”  Cory’s ideas were amazing and added different colors to the songs.  It’s a rowdy, gnarly mess and we’re super stoked about it.  Serious mixing will begin after Thanksgiving and I expect it to go pretty quickly; we’ll have this puppy out before Christmas, I promise (and mean it).

This is the first time ever we’ve completed a recording project (meaning just Cory’s parts) is less time than planned – we’d figured on working tomorrow afternoon, but will be at Waldo Pizza instead.

Off to the Hurricane for 5*C late show TONIGHT (one hour, about). -h

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This is Cory please help.  Howie (“Master”) made me play “musik” all day and I only have so much time and please send help.  My fingers are all bloody and ruining his computer.

Seriously though, I really need the police to come to arrest us FOR MURDER BECAUSE WE MURDERED THE CRAP OUTTA THEM TRAXXXX.  I will say that the mixes right now are out of control, but in a good way.  I mean, some of the crazy stuff will get toned down and maybe smoothed out a little bit but not too much because my fingers fell off.

All for now!

Forehead Typingly Yours,

Cory Alan

First, a short PSA:

THANK YOU to the gracious, kind phone-answerers at apartment complexes across the KC metro over the past two days.  I am humbled by your patience with my efforts to extract information from you, offering no immediate benefit in return.  As long as we share such courtesy with each other, there is hope in the world.

Howie, C******* Real Estate (this week).

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I was flipping through records at a thrift shop in Raytown last week, and was struck by the sheer volume of Christmas albums.  Probably 1/3 of the vinyl in the crates was holiday-related.  Why do artists make this music?  Why do people buy it, then get rid of it, in such great quantities?

And why would Mr. Furious even think about crashing that party?

With the release of our XMAS 2K6 fast approaching (three new tunes from Tape/echoes, DJ Josh-O, and howie&scott) I recognize that our effort may be in need of a defense.  Or justfication, at least.

Despite the superabundance of Christmas albums, the official holiday canon is restricted to about 30 old chestnuts, which is A) stifling, and B) threatens to strip these great tunes (Bing Crosby, etc.) of their meaning and effect through repetition.  XMAS is our attempt to create some diversity in your yuletide listening habits (but that’s the goal of every other record, too).

It’s hard to find “blue” Christmas music, sounds that express the sadness, loss, and darkness that accompany the season for all of us one year or another, if not always.  XMAS doesn’t shy away from that.

Most important to me is the contrast between what I percieved in the record bins as artless commercial product, and what I hope we can create – which is 100% free, in no way a commodity, and as artful as we are capable of.  I’ve written before about how being a netlabel, a “free record label,” changes something fundamental about the concept of “pop” music (which is necessarily commodified).

That’s the real meaning of XMAS.  Scraping away the commercialism, the religiosity, the cliches and the tired chords and the sentimentalism – salvaging and recasting a few of the old signs, and forging new works out of our own, true, experience of Christmas.  -h

Don’t forget Sally M/S Ride’s It’s A Trap Preview – click “|>”

From Ric Ocasek’s interview with The Onion A.V. Club,

AVC: It’s hard to pinpoint any hard influences on The Cars besides old-time rock and maybe krautrock. What were you listening to then?

RO: As a songwriter, oddly enough, my influences were people like Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and Buddy Holly. Some psychedelic stuff, too. Back then, there wasn’t a lot of press on bands. There was Creem and Rolling Stone, and that was about it. There certainly wasn’t the Internet. You would stay in your basement and create something and then come out. You didn’t have anything to rub off on. You didn’t know what the band down the street was doing, because you couldn’t look it up, and you couldn’t see it on TV. I think people tended to come out with things that were different because they weren’t influenced by their environments as much. I find these days, you almost have to force yourself to stay in a vacuum to become different; if you really want to be different. Maybe you have to have something different inside of you as well.

I recognized something of myself, and of MFR, in what Ric is saying.  As much music as I listen to, I’m very isolated from the pop/rock of the moment – I’m six months behind on indie stuff at least, plus I listen to a lot of older music.  I’ve never been immersed in a scene, save the Crete scene which was only us.  And I my two experiences of real musical vacuum, in Ghana, were highly formative.

We were talking about folk music a while back, and there are some ways MFR functions as a tiny culture with its own indigenous music.  When it comes to Tape / echoes shows, I certainly treat it that way, mixing songs from all our artists AND their non-MFR projects!  Especially Cory and I, working together and also separately (but in parallel & conversation) – I think we’ve written and recorded ourselves out into a sort of vacuum; a bubble in which we have our own aesthetic dialect of pop/folk/rock.

That’s maybe what I most dig, and am most proud of, about this wild beast.  -h

These are rough mixes. Hope you enjoy a peek behind the curtain; I didn’t have anything worth saying this week. The clips are “Lookers,” “Holy Moses,” “Baby Bells on the Warpath For Profit,” and “New Slow Sea.”  Criticize gently.

-h

Sally M/S Ride / It’s A Trap

1. Lookers
2. Cause 2 B Uneasy
3. Holy Moses
4. Baby Bells on the Warpath for Profit
5. “Organ”
6. Loose Lips Sink Ships
7. David S. Addington and Your Democracy
8. New Slow Sea
9. People Won’t Stand
10. Back in the Fire

Twice of late I’ve had moments of clarity about myself and my music.  As I keep up this adventure, I thought these were worth sharing and hearing back from you on.

The first happened at a traffic light as I was driving back to Raytown from packing up the studio from the Sally M/S Ride sessions at Matt’s last week.  Under the red signal, I caught myself thinking “I’m a different person than I was two weeks ago when I started this.  I feel noticably different.  Older.  More complex.  Like I’ve been on a journey somewhere completely new.”  As I recognized that thought, I realized that I always feel that way after making a record.  I’ve also felt it after closing musicals in high school, and big concerts that I’d spent a lot of time preparing for.

On the heels of that realization was the Something New; that transformation is why I make records.  It’s the reason.  Not the finished product, not recognition (obviously!), not even for the sake of art.  Before it all, I make records because it changes me, and I always want that.

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Last Friday night, I played a set of Tape/echoes stuff for the church conference I was at; a late-night “afterglow”-type event.  Joe Rowley joined me on djembe, dropping his rhythms behind complex songs he had never heard before.  If you’ve played with me before, or seen a friend coping with my changes for the first time, you know Joe’s brave, and he killed.  The set was five or six Ventura songs, followed by a cover from every decade of the rock era (’50s – present), and closed by “Where Did I Go Wrong?,” “Race Car Driver,” and two more Ventura tunes.

After the show, as we were packing up our instruments, Joe told me that he could really see my “true self” in the Ventura songs (the “true self” language relates to the main speaker at the conference – I might like the Quaker “inner Light” even better).  It took his outside (but now partly inside!) eyes to show me how true that is.  Not that my other music isn’t “true” – but Sally M/S Ride, h&s, and other things have all been more like parts of me blown up or put under a microscope.  That works, and I like it.

But Ventura spilled out of me unbidden, and as I sing the songs back I’m a little shocked at how true they are, in the sense that they represent, and require, my whole self showing up to write and perform the songs.

I ought to do more playing like last weekend.  Because of busy schedules with 5*C and recording as quickly as possible, I can’t say that it will happen.  When I’m 35 and spent (hopefully not, but it’s a fear), at least I’ll have this record of my inner Light speaking its truth to love, loss, life, death, and a trip from New Jersey to California.  -h

Weekend-before-last, I packed up FuriousSound and took it to Shawnee, KS, to Matt’s house (Matt drums for 5*C).  I started straight in on Sally M/S Ride guitars that afternoon, using a different guitar pickup than usual and cranking out a nice, Midwestern, Tom Petty-sounding tone.  For a few days I just went song to song, putting down whole takes and doubling a few parts.

As I got close to the end, my amp developed a nasty, breaking distortion sound that wasn’t intentional; I think after eight months of semi-abusing it with my synth, I’ve torn the speaker up a bit.  Consequently, the planned album closer, “Goddamn,” was never recorded.  Right now Cory and I are thinking we’ll work the b-side, “David S Addington & Your Democracy,” into the album track list and still have a full ten songs but no Furious Instance.

Vocals, beginning last weekend, have been about the same; line them up and knock them down.  It took a couple sessions for me to kind of back off and remember how to sing properly in the studio.  The past three days, I’ve gone over for a few hours and done 3-4 songs, whole takes, sometimes the first one.  There are a few punch-ins with the vocals, but not many.

The whole album has a more 70’s feel than I expected, but I’ve tried to go with it.  The programmed drums are really working I think, and that juxtaposed with the guitar tones and songs themselves will be pretty unique.  When I work with a project for so long, I can forget how different it will end up sounding production-wise from most other pop/rock music.

Kibler and I are currently conniving on how to get his stuff down.  It’s going to be pretty wild; stay tuned.  -h

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Here’s a bunch of new (to me) music I’ve been listening to;

From the internets:

Common Like Water For Chocolate
Sigur Ros Takk
Mos Def Black On Both Sides
Elliott Smith XO
The Cure Pornography
Sonic Youth Rather Ripped
DragonForce Inhuman Rampage

From Half Price Books – all from the >$3 rack except Songs of Faith and Devotion:

My Morning Jacket It Still Moves
The Lemonheads Come On Feel The Lemonheads
Soul Coughing El Oso
Depeche Mode Songs of Faith and Devotion
Depeche Mode Ultra
Pete Yorn Musicforthemorningafter
At The Drive-In Relationship of Command
Batman Forever
The Crow
Matthew Sweet 100% Fun
Oasis (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
Nine Inch Nails The Downward Spiral

I basically knew what I was getting, so everything is pretty good.  Depeche Mode, especially Songs…, has been incredible.  I wasn’t indie enough in the 90’s to listen to Soul Coughing, so to me it sounds like really weird Mike Doughty b-sides (instead of his original band & sound, which it is).  Common’s older record is a little dissapointing, but compared to Be anything is I guess.

On the other hand, Mos Def has been banging pretty hard in the car.  Imagine that for a second.

It’s not midnight yet where I am…

Forgive my lack of blogging which is due to recording Sally M/S Ride!  As always, it hasn’t been what I expected.  As I always hope, I think it’s something good.  I have a last chance tomorrow afternoon to do extra takes on any vocals I’m not sure of; after that, it’s tracking Cory’s parts and mixing/mastering.

I’ll be back very soon with details on the It’s A Trap sessions and what I’ve been listening to of late.  -h

Last night’s gig with Tim Gillespie’s Mirado Quartet was a ton of fun, and went pretty well as far as I can say.  Tim does jazz standards with Ryan and Mike, and they needed a drummer for this show, so I’ve spent a few evenings practicing with them.

I played some jazz drums in high school, which was really just big band music, and I never progressed beyond a swing or shuffle beat and some fills.  A couple months ago, Tim did a couple cool sax tunes for church, and I used a hi-hat and bongos for that.  So when I started with Mirado, I was legitimately concerned I was in over my head.

The guys were very patient and good about counting off tunes and saying “this is a swing number, this is a latin tune,” etc.  I discovered I could kind of play jazz!  And the first set last night killed; I was much more expressive than in practice, and just felt it all over.

The second set…  well, you can’t nail them all.  I told Tim that jazz drumming is much more likely to be in my future now than it was before Mirado.

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I spent the afternoon today doing demos of four new Five Star Crush songs.  We play tonight in Topeka, and tomorrow here in KC (all-ages!).  Three are kind of new territory sonically, and one is right up our alley.  Two came from practice jams, and two I basically wrote (though one of those has a riff stolen from Danny).

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After this weekend, 5*C has a schedule break so I fully expect to move FuriousSound to Matt’s house tomorrow or Monday and begin guitar and vocal work on It’s A Trap.  Feels like it’s been too long.  Still, consider that Don’t Let Them Take Us… ALIVE took four years to write, and was released only last November.  And we expected it to be a one-shot deal.  Instead, Cory and I will have a second album done within a year of the first, and we’re partway into writing a third.