Author: h

Cooky

I was wrong, you were right, you can spell it how you like
Common sense be damned, full speed ahead
Conventions never were your thing
Type those pretty thoughts into the night
Talking hard
I used “proscribe,” you called me out
You know I love to argue, babe
I don’t take prisoners but I’ll fight you fair
Maybe I’m the lunatic you’re looking for

I don’t need to win, don’t ever walk away from an honest debate
Hey, it doesn’t matter, doesn’t mean a thing
When did we stop having fun in here?
My heart, I’m yours
And your sketchy spelling doesn’t change a thing about us
Trust me when I tell you

She doesn’t know your name, I didn’t tell her who was
Talking like a cookbook from the fifties
I just said you were a friend
Anonymous as ever at my job, slacking off
Can we sharpen wits without it being hurtful?
God, I hope so
Kid, I need to feel we’re cool with repartee
Holding back holds us apart

(more…)

I was on KKFI 90.1 Kansas City Community Radio this morning with Mark Manning and the Wednesday MidDay Medley! You can listen to the show here but only for the next couple weeks, they don’t maintain a full archive, so click now. My part starts at about 1:02:00.

We also covered Fight Songs on The Long Play Listening Party. Part 1 is in your podcast feed now, or you can watch here.

Plus hear one more song, “The Last Last Time” featuring Cory over at Bandcamp!

A little coda for Only Mostly Dead, these were recorded in the basement after I tore down the OMD setup. They were still done in single takes with no edits or overdubs, though I used a looper pedal for “Stuck On You” (the intro is the loop, and it comes back at the end).

The first full set of Fight Songs masters are rendering now, and I’m going to listen to them tonight. They’ve been a long time coming. Pretty psyched. All the guest spots are in. Mixes are good, if not quite done.

Fourteen years in the making, at least. I thought I’d done a post where I traced out when each song was written as best I could, but maybe I’m thinking of doing that for V for Voice. “Cooky” was new in fall 2008, at a minimum.

It wasn’t planned this way, but I’m almost getting the record out for the 10th anniversary of my wedding to the person most of them are about fighting with!

Following up to my compression explainer post, here’s a short video that explains signal compression extremely well and makes zero mistakes! Watch if you’re new to compression, or if you have any questions about what compressors do.

The nearly ten-year-old demo to “2013 March” (working title; now “Let’s Get Out Of Here” from Fight Songs) came up by accident – almost by mistake – in my workout mix on Tuesday. I’d used some weird genre tags to group the shaker demo/Fight Songs material, and this track happened to get tagged as 90s rock.

It had a great energy, something the full studio mix seemed to be lacking. I played it again and realized that in arranging the song for a full band mix and electric guitars, I’d lost the spark that came from bashing away on the acoustic and the harmonic complexity of the chord voicings in the demo.

So I recorded an acoustic track for the real mix, and bam; now it rips like it should.

I’m very lucky to have stumbled over my demo when I did. “First idea, best idea” is often true, and always worth checking.

Did an episode of the pod about my beat tape. All major pod platforms available here.

Here’s two songs from my SP-404 SX project, the first featuring legendary Lawrence artist Approach.