Singer/Songwriter Promo Video
(courtesy of Monte Krause)
Back to Rockwood
We’re heading back to Rockwood this Thursday at 9pm. Had our first rehearsal in a few months last night and it went quite nicely. The set continues to evolve. Slowly but surely. Little bits and embellishments here and there as old songs take on new forms and new songs begin to grow.
It’s an interesting thing because about half the set now is a group of songs that I wrote many years ago, taken off our debut record. And at some point, it’s not just me that is looking to do something new or different with them, but I imagine the people that have been coming to see us live for awhile are now ready for some new things and some new sounds.
But, then again, we’re not U2 and we’re not on the radio, and I bet many of the people come like hearing those old songs because, if anything, those are the ones they’re going to know. And, truth be told, songs like “Broken Bow” are great songs and can have a permanence in the set for a long time to come.
And then on the other hand, there’s a whole batch of other songs that have been written over the last year plus and at some point we want to start arranging those and figuring out how those will sound.
So, again, the process is taking the older tunes and working with them and breathing some new life into them. An organ intro for “Broken Bow”, a bass solo for “Burning a Horse”, a stripped down vocal chorus for “St. Marys/Vicodin”, an extended outro for “Hold My Heartache”. An off-mic vocal coda during the instrumental section of “Colorado Drugs”. Those kinds of things.
And then beginning to introduce new tunes into the mix. ”Life Is Hard” is basically an old song at this point. But a great example of a song that has grown. We’ve added the horn/string bookends at the beginning and end of the song and given it that resonance. The lyrics are starting to sit in one place a little bit.
Last night we worked on this song called “Everyone Is From Somewhere”. I wrote it in my head over Thanksgiving. Driving down to Virginia. On 495, the Beltway, outside DC, there is a sign that says, “Northern Virginia”, and I thought to myself “everyone is from somewhere”. Which basically means that everyone has their baggage and their past and their history and nobody comes into any situation free of issues or free of their past and, in some ways, we’re all beholden to the things that have happened before us, and, in our own manner, culpable for the things that befall us. At least as far as relationships go.
We played the song for the first time last December and it was okay but you could also tell that the song would grow as we performed it and that it would achieve more resonance and we’d figure out parts for everyone in the band and the thing would evolve. So now we’re playing it for a second time this Thursday and, true to form, it’s somewhat bigger and we’ve got more definitive sections and the it sounds lovelier in many ways. Funny how those things work out.
We’re also going to playing a tune that rips off Digital Underground for the chorus. Another song that is currently in the process of achieving whatever form it will finally achieve over the next period of time. It is still becoming. It has not yet become.
So we’ll see you at Rockwood this Thursday. Should be a good thing.
Working in a Vacuum
I’m working with my friend and producer Nancy Hess on two new songs right now. The mini-single/EP/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is called “Singer/Songwriter”. There are two songs. One is called “Singer” and the other is called “Songwriter”. We’re maybe 2/3 of the way through the first tune.
It’s a 7 minute aggressive dance song. It’s about escapism and fantasy and about romanticizing delinquincy and all these fables we tell ourselves about running away from our problems and how everything will be good if we can just and, of course, as Gus McCrae says in Lonesome Dove, “life in San Francisco is still just life”.
So this is a somewhat new stylistic direction from the last officially recorded and released thing we did which was the debut record produced by Paul Brill and in a genre that I call “landscape pop” which is in the vein of folk-rock. This is pretty much straight-ahead electronic dance music with the points of emphasis and differentiation being my voice and my singing and a little bit of acoustic guitar. But the whole thing is pretty aggressive and dark and messed up.
Part of the experiment is that I am trying to resist the temptation to send the songs around to a bunch of people before it’s done. That’s what I usually do. I start floating rough mixes to people and it’s really just insecurity. It’s me needing/wanting to hear back “Wow this is great!”. For this thing, I don’t want anyone to hear the songs until they’re completely finished. Until they’re ready to start hitting the blogs and getting pushed by Team Clermont (assuming they want to work on the project) and until the thing is completely done. Until then, I don’t want people to hear a lick.
Why? I guess because I’d like to see what happens if me and Nancy just completely trust our own judgement and intuition and proceed apace and continue to work and tinker on it until the two of us feel it’s finally and completely done.
But the flipside of that is that insecurity inside of me begins speaking with a somewhat louder and more persistent voice. The outside voice. It says, “What if this thing is terrible?” and, “What if nobody likes it?” and “What if people just think it’s bad dance music and not anything particularly interesting?” Those are some loud voices. But part of this whole endeavor is to see if I can shut out those voices and just relax and think and use my own judgement and Nancy’s and if we can build something beautiful that we love without needing feedback or reassurance from anyone else.
Again, the drawback is that there is a potential that we could put in so much time into this thing and so much effort and then release it out into the world and hear nothing back or hear negative things back or feel like we failed in some way. And, you know, you can feel the same way about anything, I suppose. But, again, this is slightly and subtly different.
Should be interesting.
Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction
Next week, we’re playing our first gig at Piano’s on the Lower East Side. I’m not sure what the sound will be like but I do know that it’s a great club with a great atmosphere. As part of that gig, I decided to do something different and, rather than just get up there and play a show, incorporate a little theater into the show, and perhaps more broadly, the idea of the show.
To that end, we’re calling this next group of shows “An Autumn Symposium”. At first, that’s all it was going to be. Just a little branding mechanism. Something to link the show that we’re playing next Wednesday and then the subsequent gig that we’re playing at Rockwood on Thursday, December 3rd at 9pm.
But then I was remembering that Bronwen, one of the singers in the band and a teacher during the day, had spent all this time a few months ago putting together a course reader for her students and the beginning of the school year. And then I was remembering the old days when John used to work at The Copy Shop and you’d go there or to the book shop above it to pick up your course reader for class and how you’d have all these photocopied pages in your hand, excerpts from books and articles, how that experience felt cool and home-made and like your teacher or professor had spent some time actually thinking about things and was leading you on this strange photocopied path through some place new.
So, anyway, I decided to make a course reader myself and I decided on two lessons for these two shows and the first lesson is going to be “Heroism and Autobiography as Fiction: Themes from Saul Bellow” and I got in touch with noted cultural historian, Frederick Pettigrew, to write an introductory essay. We had coffee on the Upper West Side by Columbia where he teaches. And I told him I was looking about some of the ideas that I had and that I was looking for some kind of introduction to the whole thing, maybe like Nat Hentoff wrote on the sleeve of some Bob Dylan records I remember. You remember those essays that people would write on records in the 60s and 70s. They’d be all beat prose and poetry. Rambling run-on sentences and you’d imagine some horn-rimmed glasses guy with a fuzzy goatee, smoking cigarettes and drinking and sleeping with his students and he’d be a person that people referred to as a “cat” and he’d frequent the jazz clubs and his apartment would be very messy and there would be books everywhere. He’d have written one great novel and then years later a spartan little book of poems and then he’d be working on some translation of an obscure German writer that you’d never heard about and your heart kind of sank when he told you that was what he was working on because it was the same old story, as they say and as you know. That story being the story of squandered youth and unrealized potential.
Doctor Pettigrew understood what I was saying and he wrote this great little essay that you’ll get to read later. And the point of the whole thing is both silly (me being weird) and somewhat serious. And it really does relate to notions of heroism in fiction and what it means and how maybe we misrepresent things second of all and first of all we tell stories to make ourselves the hero. Because we are working our way through life with this concept of heroism which is also about mortality. It’s about meaning. It’s about, “There must be a narrative here that has me doing something heroic at its climax and ultimate moment and that must be why it’s okay that I’ll die and evaporate or dissolve into the earth one day.” And then some older people reading this will perhaps scoff or laugh. Maybe a small chuckle. They’ll say, “Geez, Sam is really dark and a downer and why’s he got to be so darn melancholy.” Which is maybe true but, of course, missing the point. I’m not saying it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not saying, “It’s so sad that we’re going to die.” I’m saying that people have these concepts of narratives and they give their lives stories and stories have protagonists and the reasons are because the time is finite, not infinite, and we want there to be a story to our lives and a plot.
And in the midst of that are storytellers – singers and songwriters and writers and producers and creative people and also everyone – and we tell big stories and weave in larger narratives and try to make big human truths from these things and the other point of the idea, and specifically pulling from Saul Bellow, is that there are always more sides to a story than the one being presented. And life isn’t neat and doesn’t fit in boxes with brown ribbons up on the shelf in the hall closet. You can say, “Oh, that’s my youth” or something to that effect but that’s now how it works in reality. And when you do say, “Oh that’s my youth” or something to that effect, maybe you shouldn’t be trusted. Because, whether it’s a book or a song or a film or a bunch of people sitting around the metaphorical campfire, you’re still presenting just one side of that story. And it’s not good or bad. We’re all just being human. It just is. And it is and is and is.
So, anyway, that’s what we’ll be presenting in this course reader next Wednesday and there are excerpts from books I’ve been reading. One of them is Becker’s “Denial of Death” that my friend, Mary Ellen, gave me. And then others are from the Bellow books I’ve read this year. And then some stuff from Rilke because that’s always good and, as cliche as it may be, the guy dropped some very beautiful knowledge and reality in his letters. And a few other things. And the first 20 people will get a copy for free and they’ll be strange and weird and you probably won’t read all the way through but you’ll maybe pick up one or two things and then it’s also art and it will have traveled its way into your life somehow.
Enjoy yourselves, mates.
Interview: John Patrick Hastings
Today, we released the Processor Remix of the song, The Mayo Clinic, by John Patrick Hastings. Hastings is an LA-based experimental composer and musician. As part of the remix project, I’m going to do short interviews with the remix artists to give people some background on the song and the music. I didn’t do one for Nancy Hess but I’m going to and then we’ll get to Alex Lauterstein and a bunch of the other artists that are working on these tunes.
Interview with John P Hastings
1. Describe your background and how you came to be working in music?
I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area and starting playing music when I was 13 years old. I was initially influenced by punk music and the D.C. scene and eventually started my own band in high school. That band played and toured throughout my college years before breaking up about 8 years ago. I drifted about, playing in other bands and such until realizing that playing rock and pop music, while certainly enjoyable, was no longer what I was really interested in. I went back to school and began studying music again and now I primarily compose longer form music to be performed by various ensembles.
2. Who are your primary influences?
What sparked my initial move into different realms of music and music making was Brian Eno (as he is for many musicians). Just from him you can move to so many different places, his work with Bowie and U2 obviously, but also Krautrock bands such as Neu! and Harmonia, minimalists such as La Monte Young and Steve Reich, and even to modern art and design. So he was a biggie for me. And since going back to school two composers have influenced me in a big way, James Tenney and the previously mentioned La Monte Young. The influence of Young is music as life, literally. He creates tonal environments, these sound spaces that people’s lives move through. With some of his works lasting 4 to 6 hours you really are experiencing your life in a musical fashion. James Tenney, who died in 2006, was someone who created music conceptually wound into the physical properties of nature. His influence has instilled in me a sense of logic and structure that might not have been there before.
3. What ideas were you working with on this remix? What story or stories or images were you evoking or conjuring?
Pitchfork
Every once in awhile it’s important to point out something that might be obvious. Actually, maybe it’s not but I figured I’d do it anyway.
Ryan Schreiber and the folks at Pitchfork are the Rolling Stone of the Internet generation. They are a defining cultural force and, as flawed as some elements of the site are, the fact is that they have created something very very special and, in some ways, represent all that’s good about the Internet and about modern music.
Think about it.
