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.

A couple months ago there was an article in Pitchfork (I searched but can’t find it specifically; their site-search function is terrible) about musicians who are playing gigs in the Second Life world.  Second Life is just that; it’s like a massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game but with no explicit goals.  People use it to chat, shop, play dress-up, run their business, fight Halo-style, hang out, and now go to shows.

A show in Second Life looks like a video game.  The artist sits at their computer with a microphone, playing and sending the signal into Second Life and their onscreen avatar character.  Listeners navigate to the club to hear the music; they may even have to pay a cover charge to get in.

Pretty wild.  It reminds me of Pete Townshend’s original vision for the never-realized “Lifehouse” project; a science-fiction concert film in which kids would unplug from the ubiquitous “net” and gather for a real flesh-and-blood rock concert featuring the Who.  Songs for the abandoned film ended up becoming the Who’s Next album.  But in this case, kids are plugging in to the web, in order to have a shared experience that would not be physically possible.

Second Life, or what comes next, may never capture the visceral nature of live performance but it does offer some other things instead.  Like seeing a show by your favorite obscure artist, who only has 15 fans in your town, while standing between a pixie and Wilt Chamberlain and eating home-cooked organic fish tacos.

Killers in the Nebraska Territories = MASTERED!!!1111  Look for it in late October.

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h&s’ Summer’s End = lost in the mail.  ???  So Scottie still hasn’t heard anything from that day.  Once he does, we should have it out within days.  Apologies for the delay.

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My schdule = lots of shows with 5*C and moving the studio somewhere to track guitars for Sally M/S Ride’s It’s A Trap.  I hope to get howie&scott and Sally M/S Ride out, and then XMAS with a couple new tunes in December.

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Sorry for the short post, I’ve been out of town, check back mid-week for something more substantial.  -h

Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and the debility of the satiree. As such, we might conclude, in America, that its abundance suggests a normal balance of destructive yin and creative yang, a human need to view the most vexing frailties of a culture through the liberating prism of lampoon…

The appeal of such a mode of discourse to any vice-blighted age is understandable: it provides another means to editorial ends. And yet, more than merely editorializing, it also demonstrates a capacity for better behavior in human beings — our creativity, our subtlety, our panache. That so many people are responding to satire in the public square, and, indeed, that so much satire is thriving at a center usually held by more anodyne entertainments, suggests our hunger for the better — the better articulated, the better said, the better thought, the better done…

It makes me wonder what happens when the language of argument and the language of ridicule become the same, when the address of a potentate is voiced no more soberly than the goofings of some rube.

Read “My Satirical Self” by Wyatt Mason for the New York Times (link expires in 2 weeks – the article will only be available to TimesSelect subscribers).  It’s a wonderful piece.  Certainly it bears on our previous discussions of irony and morality.

I side with Mason in my tastes (the Onion, the Daily Show, etc.) but am an earnest enough fellow to wonder where all the lampooning leads us.  Some of us actually have to try, and mean it, even if we can also chuckle about our own efforts; those who consume or produce satire exclusively seem to be freeloading off the work of others.  Outsourcing the boring things like good governance and meaningful, original art to their neighbors.

The upcoming Sally M/S Ride record is much more satirical than Don’t Let Them Take Us ALIVE! is.  As Mason suggests the satire is commentary of itself, as well as tonic for some political and romantic earnestness.

If you have enjoyed any of the following – The Simpsons, The Colbert Report, South Park, Chapelle’s Show – I encourage you to read the article.  -h