One Poor Correspondent

Back from NC, and ready to make-a the mon-ey!!! Tonight was a pretty good outing, considering I was only busking for 2 hours. My sister and I are kinda obsessed with the America song "Sister Golden Hair," so I hastily learned it before leaping out into the wide world of free entertainment. If you don't know that song, you're seriously missing out....apparently the main riff was inspired by the one in George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" (an equally good song), but I can't hear it. It's total mudslinging on the part of some weirdo Wikipedia journalist who strangely has it in for one of the tamest 70s rock acts ever.

Tonight I got that super "on" feeling, like I didn't have to push or anything; I was just so happy to be performing and bringing music to people that I could just feel raw energy chortling through my veins. Yes, I know chortling means laughing. That's what it was doing.

I'm not the world's greatest guitar player, but I had a surprisingly decent solo on a cover I did of Eels' "Railroad Man" tonight. I'm not sure what it was....I played with Funk a bit over break, so I think that just got me in a jammy mood. Apparently, I got an elecxtric organ for my birthday over the summer, and completely forgot that I had it. When I came home the realization hit me like a ton of bricks and I basically didn't leave it for the first day of being home. My piano skills are far worse than those of any other instrument that I act like I can play, but Funk and I had a pretty decent jam session nonetheless. You gotta love a piano that can make its own reverb. Which is basically what an organ is.

Surprisingly, I miss home just as equally as I love being back in New York. They're like the most completely polar opposites, but I love them equally. Let's not even add Boston into this equation...But at the end of the day, I can't really busk very well at either of those choice locales, and since that's where the cash is coming from these days, New York will be just fine.

Puritanicalypso

No amazing busking stories tonight; I'm in North Carolina for the holiday, an area sorely lacking in subway stations. Nevertheless, my indefatigable comrade, David Funk, has once again assisted me in a creative endeavor.

I know that the throngs have been ravenous for some Rob Morrison tunage for free download. And I for one am sick of ye olde myspace song limit of 4. Thus, through Funk's wondersome website, Sheer Will Power 2, you can check out 11 original songs of mine, 7 of which have never been online in any form previously. I know. You haven't been this excited since the theatrical re-release of the original Star Wars Trilogy. But try to contain your joy, if you please.

You can check out all 11 songs here.(there's no link from the main site yet). That's right: they're all free! Do with them as you will. Listen to 'em. Sing along with 'em. Convert them into holograms somehow and entertain folks at parties with 'em. Also, I'm going to add some links to the songs on the handy-dandy index to the right of this and every entry for safe keeping.

This Thanksgiving, I wish to extend a kind-hearted salute to David Funk and his brigade of programming Java gerbils. Danke.

The Father Orb

I hustled out of my apartment around 4:00 today to try cramming in a few hours of busking before hustling off again to run box office for Laughing Liberally midtown. I'm heading home to NC tomorrow for T-giving, and am in dire need of money for the journey (I inevitably spend much more than I should when I'm with my friends back home...the guilt usually hits me about a week later when I question how badly I needed those RC Colas and honey sticks). Tonight wasn't bad, and should at least pay for my cab ride to LaGuardia tomorrow.

Throughout the 10 and a half month existence of this blog, I've written about everything from the perils of busking in the summer to the annoyances of drunken back-up singers. Busking is weird. And not many other people are going to unpack that for you, so it may as well be me. There is one strange nuance of busking that I don't think I've mentioned yet, however.

Tonight, right as a train arrived, a 20-something girl scurried over to my guitar case and dropped in a dollar. I paused in my singing (albeit, at an awkward point in the music) but continued strumming, and thanked her as she began to move toward the train. She bashfully said something to me that I didn't make out at first -- it seemed like maybe she was apologizing for stopping me, or something along those lines. I told her, "no, not at all!" Then about half a second later, as the sardine-can metal doors shut behind her, I realized that she had said, "you really sound good!" Ugh.

When people donate, I -- for some reason -- am reluctant to really stop what I'm doing to thank them for long. Part of the reason for this is that I think it would embarass them. It takes an odd kind of courage to give a busker a buck, and I don't want to call too much attention to someone kind enough to help me out by stopping the song and allowing them to start up a conversation with me. But sometimes people do want that. There have been a few instances in which I could tell that a donor wanted to talk to me about something after they'd plopped their money in. You can just tell; they hover a little. Usually it's in regards to a request or a question about who wrote the song I was playing. And I definitely don't mind talking with people.

It would be ill-advised to stop playing every time someone tosses me a dime only to stand quietly as they walk away from my case. Awkward. It would suck equally to not stop playing and miss out on meeting Scarlett Johanssen in disguise in the New York subway. Alas. No perfect solution. At any rate, consider this entry my apology to the nice young lady who complimented me only to get an incongruent reply.

Oh. Roy Orbison's been on my playlists a lot lately, so I finally attempted to play "Crying" tonight with modest success. It's hard stuff, but about as cathartic as it gets.

DS Hell

Maybe I make myself out to be a victim too much. Could be. I think people have OD'd on the whole "it's not my fault that I spilled the coffee on myself....it was too hot!" approach. In the same breath, I hate Verizon wireless and the mockery they have made of my obviously, previously pristine existence.

I went out busking last Friday for about 5 hours, by far the longest sitting (standing, more accurately) I've ever attempted. My voice got tender around the three-hour mark, prompting me to be extra careful which resulted in an artistic epiphany wherein I found the perfect, healthy amount of support that my voice needed within the acoustically-depraved 23rd Street Station. I encountered tons of amazing people while I was out, debuted my new song, "Bitten By a Brown Recluse," and managed to barely repeat any material at all. Oh, and I made mad green stamps.

There were many more interesting stories to tell of this epic night of anti-social, pro-free-music antics. But I've forgotten them. Because fucking Verizon wireless' DSL connection in my apartment went dead for the umpteenth time after it took a month for them to get off their asses and connect two wires together and install the thing in the first place. Thus, this blog took over a week to be published and my memories have faded into the mercurial sands of time, never to be retraced.

Thanks a bundle, V. Now millions of people will never be able to know what social and musical barriers were climactically broken and what performance hurdles were overcome and what artistic milestones and zeniths reached.

Pitooey!

Add-verse Conditions

Writing bulletin!

I'm now about half-way through tooling and retooling songs for what I'm foolhardy enough to consider my next album. As you may know, I have never released any album. That hasn't stopped me from making a double album, however. Even if it never sees the light of day, its existence alone is important simply because I can consider my current project, "my next album," making me sound pretty cool and seemingly confident in the realm of sticking music on a tape. We'll see.

Anyhow, in typical Rob Morrison fashion, I've ironed out most of the musical aspects of the album to a pretty definitive point. It's all written! But where are the lyrics?! Ack! That's right: I always put off writing lyrics. Call me crazy, lazy, or just plain bad at it; I'm not sure of the cause, but I'm pretty tentative about lyrics. Part of me loves to rewrite and revise, and the other part loves to quit milling over a song and hurry up and record it already! The latter typically wins. Only he doesn't really because I get noncommital about the whole thing around that time, and the song I'm working on is completed six months to a year later. Sheesh.

That's a habit I'm stomping from here on out. But there's a hidden danger to nixing that sense of censorship: I can't stop. I started writing a song last week that consisted of five verses and clocked in at 7 and a half minutes. A tad lengthy, yes. Tonight I unearthed my notebook to revise a couple lyrics, and voila: now it's eight verses and surely over 10 minutes. Yikes. No one writes songs that long. Well, they do, but probably not when they're trying to get signed to a folk-friendly label. Oh well. Better add another verse and an mellotron solo and hope that some Prog label will want me.

All was not quiet on the busking front this evening. In fact, it was downright rocking with good times. Some lady sang along with me to "Mr. Bojangles" and another patron told me it was the perfect song for the subways, citing that it brought back a lot of memories. As I mentioned several posts back, I love that song. It's an incredibly sincere slice of Americana that dates back a ways and has been covered by everybody who's anybody. That's right -- me included!

After a rendition of "Sad Eyed-Lady of the Lowlands" (talk about a long song), a guy walked up to me and proffered up a Scooby Doo lollipop. I was pretty content with that alone -- hey, if it puts off dinner for another hour or two, great! -- but he also donated some free insight. Apparently the lyric regarding "the kings of Tyrus with their convict list" was not a good idea to cite because in his words, "a lot of ex-cons live around here." I informed him that the author of the song was Dylan, and that I didn't play it with any intention of getting a rise out of a demographic that's more likely to shiv me with a payphone than quietly grumble as they board a subway car. He nodded and wished me good luck.

And that was the evening as it was.

Wheellock Quickdraw

It's on. A rumble. A knock-down, dragout skirmish spar destruction-o-rama beatfest. I might even go to the gym for this.

The last three times I've gone busking, I've either been forced to go to another station because this way-too-smiley asian guy playing a two-string fiddle is paying rent at the 23rd Street station he's there so often, or because a crazy drunken homeless lady takes up residence near me while accurately shrieking out the author of the song I'm playing, effectively frightening away anyone who actually wanted to contribute to my dinner fund (I mentioned her awhile ago, I think). Long story shot, I keep relocating to 28th Street. Which I don't like as much.

Tonight was not so bad, however. Despite being out for a brief time, I did all right, and I even managed to attract a fan! A nice woman skipped probably five trains just to stick around and listen to me...she even told me that I was very talented and that she couldn't believe how bad some of the people are on American Idol when there was someone like me in the subway! I was definitely flattered...I've had one or two people skip a train before (I say that as un-egotistically as possible), but this was a first. I'm grateful that it happened...I guess everyone has a day or two of self-doubt, and I'm smack in the middle of it. It's always nice to get a compliment.

But I'm still really pissed at that fiddle player and that drunk lady.