Category: News

Below is the poem “An Autumn Psalm” by Clyde DeWitt, who I knew through St. Peter’s.  The poem, published in his funeral bulletin, inspired the song “Make Our Sound” on Ventura.

Omnipotent and omniscient God
who alone can truly comprehend time and space without end;
We who are in the autumn of our lives on this tiny planet
give thanks for the gift of what to us
has seemed a long and fulfilling life.

We give thanks for the chance to see the beauty of nature –
the earth, the water, the skies, the trees, the flowers –
and to observe nature’s creatures.

We thank thee for the gift of love
reflected in the love for us from those here
and from those parents, kin, and friends who have gone before us,
and the love we have for mates, for children, for their children, and for friends.

Oh Lord, let them feel this love as the autumn of our lives
becomes the winter,
and even when our bodies turn to dust.

Lord, grant us the wisdom to live our autumn years with grace,
being forever grateful for the joys of life
we have already been granted.

May we share with others the bounties we have been given
and our fleeting insights into your wonderful wisdom.
Give us the courage to face the aches and infirmities of these autumn years.

And let them never keep us from beaming with our thanks
for the great joys you have bestowed upon us;
and when our mortal time draws to a close
let us depart with grace,
knowing it is simply a part of your holy plan,
and that the spirit of life and love will continue without end.

Amen.

Coast & Plains

They say that everyone feels a certain way
About the place they grew up in; they either hate it or love it
And every time you try to leave, it pulls you back
Like a lover who’s untrue, you try and leave and it kills you

Back home; the place that you came from

You left the uptight coast behind for the great midwest
What you thought you wanted, but the good life was haunted
And then you get this idea floating around in your head
Home wasn’t so bad, but you know that you can’t go

I’m one person leading two different lives,
Trying to make the coast and plains coincide

Back home; the place where you belong

Large’s Garden State

Sam, you know that you’re too cute
Strobe lights and unexpected shakes
Never got the best of you
My week back home’s been shot
Every which way but loose
You’re the weak link that broke addiction’s hold

(more…)

Ventura has been 10 years in the making.  It was written as the second Sally M/S Ride record, after Don’t Let Them Take Us… ALIVE.

Before I started recording it I got fired up about the 2006 elections and the Iraq War, wrote some stuff that seemed more time-bound, and went ahead with It’s A Trap.  I was living in a basement apartment underneath my landlords (no drumming allowed), so I moved on to the basic guitar and vocal tracks for You Have To Wear The Boots.  Got the carriage house, Mars Lights was set up for the Sides EPs, and so I had Matt do the drums for There is Something and not nothing while the gear was in place, and that ended up coming out before we finished …Boots. * So, in early 2012, I finally got serious about recording Ventura.

Trying to track down when specific songs were written (my legal pads aren’t dated; maybe I should start) has been a trip.  Mostly, I’ve dug back through the blog for early mentions of “Ventura” or song titles.

In November 2005, there are two mentions of a “Ventura EP,” which would have included “Coast & Plains” and possibly “Large’s Garden State.”  Then, by April 2006 I was blogging about it as an album.  It wasn’t 100% finished, and two songs slated for it at that point were eventually dropped.  “I Want To Know” was re-worked and ended up on …Boots as “Harvest Moon,” and “You Do What You Want” remains an unfinished tune of Cory’s.  “Green Christine” was added later, but it’s pretty weird how early the songs, and the sequencing (!), were set.

Here, to the best I’ve been able to figure, is when Ventura’s songs were written.

1. “Market Stress” – 2003 December.  I have an incredibly clear memory of being packed in the back of a bus in Ghana, going from Cape Coast or Winneba to Accra, half-dazed with the heat, exhaustion, and dehydration, and the chorus – chords, melody, lyrics, and marimba figure – just arriving in my mind from a daydream.  There was no Ventura at this point; there was, and remains, a set of five or six tunes I wrote while in Africa that are unfinished, and “Market Stress” belonged with them for a time.
2. “Coast & Plains” – 2005 July?  Again, a clear memory of sitting on my Mom and Dad’s front porch and showing Cory these chords, and he came up with the melody on the spot.  I think the lyrics were finished a week or two later.  I think it was July 2005 because I was probably in the process of moving from Minnesota to Kansas City.
3. “Large’s Garden State” – Fall/winter 2005/06?  Jessie loaned me Garden State, and I liked it but thought the ending was too neat, so I wrote what I thought was a less-Hollywood epilogue.
4. “Lee’s Summit” – 2006 February.  I remember writing the lyrics to this song on a visit to Grandma, in Gibbon, NE.
5. “While I Was Moving About Flyover Country.” – 2006 February.  Took a walk around the park at Gregory and Blue Ridge in Raytown on an unseasonably warm day, came home and immediately wrote these lyrics.
6. “Were In Love” – by 2006 March.  I played it at a coffeeshop on a trip to Ventura (the actual city) with Cory, and forgot the second verse, and thought to myself “Ack, I always forget the second verse to this.”
7. “Make Our Sound” – by 2006 April.
8. “E Harbor Blvd” – by 2006 April.
9. “Car Chase” – by 2006 April.  I only know about these three due to the post linked above.
10. “Green Christine” – 2008 June.  Finishing this song is also mentioned on the blog.  Note the two-year gap, after busting out the eight core songs of the album in less than 12 months.  I’m really grateful it arrived, though; Ventura was feeling just a hair slight until “Green Christine” filled it out.

* Sally M/S Ride album sequence:

Order written	Order released
1. Don’t Let Them Take Us… ALIVE	1. Don’t Let Them Take Us… ALIVE
2. Ventura	2. It’s A Trap
3. It’s A Trap	3. There is Something and not nothing
4. You Have To Wear The Boots	4. You Have To Wear The Boots
5. There is Something and not nothing	5. Ventura

Ventura can be just a bunch of songs, and I’m 100% cool with that; it’s by design.  It can also have some themes and stories that connect the songs together.  The strongest one might be the idea of moving, particularly moving from east to west (with a lot of time spent in the middle).

I made a Google map for you to explore, with the quasi-location of each song marked.

East-to-west can also stand in for other directions, like younger to older, and west connects to classic American themes of freedom and opportunity and their less-classic shadow sides of alienation and brutality.  Not that the record leaves you in that place; rather, it starts to mix those things in as you move through it.

…or want to visit, I suppose, you’re welcome to stop by my house any time after 5:00 tonight to celebrate the release of Ventura. I’ll have wine and hummus, and you can bring anything additional you’d like. Call/text/email ahead, please! -h

We’ll be at FOKL in Kansas City, KS on Friday, June 20, with Expo 70 and Quadrigarum for a free, all-ages show at 9 PM.

Jamming some La Otracina this morning, check it out.

I’m committed to releasing Ventura this month.  Maybe even next weekend.

Besides supporting the artists who make it:

“What does it mean if your own personal music is being stored in a platform that’s hard for you to access, hard for you to download, has source code you can’t tweak, you can’t port it to something else if it gets bought by Murdoch’s tentacles?” The word “cloud”… acts as a form of linguistic wallpaper masking the fact that digital copies of “your” music are in fact somewhere amidst vast server farms in places like Maiden, North Carolina; Ashburn, Virginia; Singapore; New South Wales, and Victoria, Australia; and Dublin, Ireland, subject to the terms of impossibly long end-user licensing agreements and to disappearance without notice.

From Station to Station: The Past, Present, and Future of Streaming Music by Eric Harvey. Opening quote from Jace Clayton (DJ/rupture)

I would be heartbroken to lose albums I love to a platform or ELA agreement; it’s not worth the risk of that, to me, to move to any kind of streaming service.  I continue to buy music (on CD, even, for albums I know I like and will want to hear in high fidelity).

In addition to these reasons, I have a lot of material that’s not available on streaming services.  That includes things I’ve recorded myself, files I’ve recorded from vinyl, and tons of local music.  Google Play would address this issue, but it’s the only service I know of that would, and the other issues remain.

(The quote above is just a small part of a fantastic article that covers many facets of the streaming phenomenon, both positive and negative.  Read it if you can!)

Have you tried, or switched to, a streaming service?  If so, how do you like it?  If not, why not?

If so, contact Will via Bentley Guitar Studios in Parkville.  Recently I gave him a bunch of trouble with my amp, and he provided good advice, fixed the problem, kept me posted throughout, and gave me a fair – actually, generous – shake on the price.

Plus, downtown Parkville is nice on a Saturday afternoon, with some restaurants and shops in a very walkable area.

It should go without saying, but doesn’t any more, that this recommendation is genuine and I am not being compensated in any way for it; I just had a great experience.

We took a lot of boots out of her apartment this week.  She liked boots.

I don’t remember if I cast her as Mae in …Boots (the album) before or after her diagnosis.  It was around that time, either way.  In the story Mae has died, offscreen, before the story really starts.  So it was a little weird to have Mary singing the part in the context of such sickening news.

But it would have been weirder to change her part just because she had cancer.  It was the right part for her voice, we both knew it, and damn it we were going to make this record the way it wanted to be made.

That’s kind of how it’s been with the whole thing, near five years of watch and wait and drugs and doctors and travel and work and friends and family.  The odds were always long; long enough I knew she didn’t want me to look them up, and I never did.  They caught up with her last Thursday.

It would have been weirder, and worse, to change our relationship around the cancer than it was to mostly carry on.  She built a life she loved and needed to continue, and I embraced my role in making that happen.  We kept up the relationship we would have had without it, just keeping tabs on it occasionally.

When I hear her sing Mae as I am now I’ll think of her bravery, but without making a monument of it.  She, quite consciously, did not battle cancer; to fight would have been to fall to its level.  She brazenly asserted the reality of her experience – hardworking, fancy, full of friends, loving, rooted in Nebraska, transplanted and thriving in Chicago, maybe somewhat calculating or brusque to some (she had no patience for those who would waste her time),* sparkly, ethereal – over the terrible fact of some small gene gone rogue.

* As her brother, I can’t let you think she was perfect or anything,** and it’s certainly a pot / kettle / black situation

** But she was close

One of her medical staff told me that she’d had someone dear to her diagnosed with cancer, and she never saw them again, though they had lived for two more years.  They became their disease.  She said Bear had pulled off the reverse, in a way she’d never seen before; in her love, her friends, her work, she became more and more herself.

I’d have given her Mae on …Boots in any case.  But I might have mixed her voice a little higher than I otherwise would, knowing that one day – a day I hoped was farther in the future than today, but feel lucky didn’t come a year ago, or two, or three, as it could have – I’d be listening to it as I am.  With gratitude and heartbreak.  Loss, and good memories.

She’d hate that I’m writing anything about this.

I hate that I know that, and I’m writing anyway.  That she’s not here to not return my calls for a few weeks, while she deals with the embarrassment I’m causing.  To hear Ventura and the Mars Lights LP and tell me about Sarah and Al and Ben and projects in Africa and what she’s listening to and where she’s going next.  Words fail.

“Into the Fire” has come on.  I’m not ready to hear it.

I will always love you, kid.  -h

Thanks to Cari Ann, Drew, Kate, Charlie, Matt, Jess, Jill, and Tim, who provided a combination of gang vocals and logistical support, we finished the final tracking for Ventura last night.  (And had a pretty good party, to boot.)

Mixing is well underway and sounding great, and it will be easy to slide these parts into the mixes along with the singing the Lincoln crew did a couple months ago.

Get ready!

When you listen to as much music as I do, you acquire your preferences.  Preferences that, in turn, can become annoyances when they’re not met.

Here are two of mine.

1. Double albums that aren’t long enough to need the second disc

Example offenders:

Baroness, Yellow and Green (runtime: 74:59)

Arcade Fire, Reflektor (runtime: 75:12)

Hammers of Misfortune, Fields/Church of Broken Glass (runtime: 70:53)

I like all three of these albums.  But, why?  Why are these double-disc releases, when all of the music would obviously fit on one 80-minute CD?

Art, schmart; vinyl LPs were sequenced to sound good around the break required to flip the record over, and we do just fine when they’re on one disc.  (Hell, my copy of Exile on Main St. is a single disc for a double-LP! Four whole sides!!)  Your sequencing is not too good or too special or too important or a damn CD.

Baroness, you’re the worst of this bunch.  Not only is the second half of your project on a separate disc, it has a four-and-a-half minute introduction to boot!  If you’re going to do this, at least do us right, like Foo Fighters, who put more than 80 minutes of music on In Your Honor I & II.

There must be some industry rules or accounting that explain this.  I hope so; otherwise, the level of artistic pretentiousness required to put a completely unnecessary second disc in everyone’s copy of the record is just too irksome.

2. Songs that fade out

I know some of you love fade-outs.  One person told me that when a song fades out at the end, they feel like it “goes on forever.”

Not for me; it goes on my list of bands who were too unimaginative to come up with an ending that added something to the song.  There are so many options: have a tight ending, an outro with a new part, a solo, everybody back off playing and fade naturally, or fade just some instruments (the drums, or everything but lead guitar) and let that instrument end it.  Those are just off the top of my head.  Do something, don’t just give up 90% of the way through your song!

You want something that goes on forever?  Put a locking groove at the end of your side of vinyl.  (Expo 70’s done a great job on this.)  That is cool, and it does something interesting in that it makes you, the listener, actively stop the record instead of it coming to a stop on its own (cassette, digital, vinyl) or starting over at the beginning (CD).

What gets your goat musically?

The three I’ll talk about would be great for all kinds of recording.  I have plenty of experience getting the most out of a few affordable mics, and if I were starting over building a home recording rig, these would be my first three.  Let my experience save you some time, money, and headaches.

Electro-Voice RE-320 – This go-to dynamic mic sets a solid baseline sound for almost any sound source – vocals, amps, acoustic instruments – and is my favorite kick drum mic (with the EQ switch engaged) to boot.

 

 

 

Sennheiser e 609 silver – Drew and I love this dynamic mic on guitar cabinets and snare drum.

 

 

 

MXL R144 – I confess; my experience with ribbon mics is limited.  However, it’s the bang-for-your-buck on the R144 that vaults it onto this list.  It provides a detailed, live, balanced sound, and the figure-8 pattern is handy in the studio.  There have been some concerns about quality control regarding the affordable, mostly Chinese-manufactured ribbon mics that have come onto the scene, so while my experience has been really good, be aware of that.

Here’s how I’d typically use these mics for all kinds of sounds:

Vocals – Set up the RE-320 and R144 side-by-side at the singer’s mouth level (standard positioning) with the diaphragm and ribbon in line (i.e. the mics in phase), with a pop filter and the singer 12-18 inches away.  In the mix I’d start with the levels about equal, though I’d experiment with bringing one or the other forward to see if that worked better.

Drums – RE-320 on the kick opposite where the beater strikes the batter head, 6-18 inches from the resonant head.  e 609 on the snare, however you like your snare close-mic’d.  R144 in a drummer’s shoulder, overhead, or front-of-kit position, whatever sounds best and gives you the level of ambience you want (shouder = least ambience, front-of-kit = most ambience).  You’ll be amazed at the full, detailed drum sound you can get with just these three mics; much better, I think, to spend your money on the EV and MXL mics than get one of those sets of six or more cheaper drum mics that let you close-mic everything, but with lower quality.

Electric guitars – e 609 close up on the speaker cabinet in your favorite position, R144 three to six feet back, centered on the speaker configuration.  This combination will give you a great guitar sound, and you can mix the R144 up or down to affect the presence and space of the guitar in the mix.

Acoustic guitars – Play with a combination of the RE-320 and R144 in different positions (watch phase!), though either one on its own will do a good job, too.  Emphasize one or the other in the mix.

Bass guitar – Put the RE-320 on the speaker cabinet, and also take a direct line in from the bass.  I use the 320 as my main sound in the mix, and bring in just enough of the direct line to support the mic sound.

“Wait, what about the Shure SM57?!!”

It’s a workhorse, I agree, but both Drew and I prefer the e 609 for the classic ’57 applications; snare and guitar cabinet.

“Not a single condenser mic?!?”

I love condensers.  My go-to is a Rode NT-1 that I’ve had for a long time and am happy with, so I’m not super up-to-speed on what’s out there now, and I might make a different choice today if I were buying a first condenser mic.  But for a small, affordable mic locker to do the best job possible on all the applications above, I’ve found the RE-320 + R144 combination to be superior to anything we can do similarly with our condenser mics from the same price range.