dirty medicine

i'm getting hooked on the whole lower-case too-cool-for-school approach to typing. this has been my approach in word documents since forever because it makes lyrics look a lot more simple and non-pretentious to me (also the method i employ in handwriting), but i think it may have the opposite effect on the rest of the world.

I have a new song! Check out "Down to Earth" on my .mac page for downloading and general fandom. The song itself is pretty disjointed, seeing as the music is two years old (probably close to the day) and the lyrics just kinda fell out in one sitting, less than a week ago. Still, it's not awful. I dunno. Gimme feedback, yo.

By the weekend, I should have "Insect Angel" and "Hands & Knees" up as well. I've been procrastinating in case of lyrical changes, but it's pretty lame to let that get in the way, I guess.

over break, i gave a lot of my unfinished recordings a good listen and thought: holy crap. my music's really sad. like.....all of it. there aren't really any uptempo songs, either. it all SOUNDS sad in addition to actually BEING sad. geez. am i really that jaded? i don't think of myself as a gloom & doom disciple, but my writing seems to reflect this outlook pretty consistently. and that's really not something i feel good about. sure, it's been an awful year and life is hard and whatever....but this has to stop. i'm going to blitz through the rest of the songs i have in my pipeline just so i can focus on writing something that could at least pass as "content."

and now, sleep.

a view from the bed

Be it a matter of too much partying or too much work or a lethal combination of the two, the end result is the same: I'm so sick I literally can't get out of bed. It took every ounce of strength I had to get my iPhone from across the room, meaning I had none left to procure medicine. I might try again in a few minutes.

It was certainly nice to sleep in, although my dreams were nothing but me interacting with customers. Exotic, right? I think I'd prefer the persistent nightmares I was having earlier in the summer.

Figures that on my one day off, I've got such a sore thoat I can't get any recording done. I'm really not sure when I'll get a chance to work on any of it; this weekend is nothing but training and performances pretty much nonstop. I'd like to hammer out the guitar parts at least, but this fever's got me so weak I can barely muster the energy to play. This whole thing is a flashback to my wonderful bonding time with mono back in high school. I don't think I could get that again, though.

All right, I gotta psych this cold outta me so I can go to my improv show tonight without playing an invalid in every scene.

an ambulance can only go so fast

I'm considering turning this blog into a dream rant. Lately my dreams have been so remarkably visceral that I expect to wake up with a prominently-featured object from one of them forming a suspicious lump beneath my pillow that demands investigation involving mouths falling agape.

In other news, writing is going really well. I've written five or six songs in the last two weeks, though only two are in a finished state. All in all, the pulling-lyrics-out-of-a-hat method has worked really well not only in and of itself, but as an approach that makes me more aware of instances that could benefit from other practices. I may need to edit that sentence later; it doesn't make any sense.

My most recent dream was basically my subconscious' version of Eraserhead, with the added presence of Dog the Bounty Hunter as my mom's lover, and customers from the Soho Apple store who were impatiently waiting for me to bring them a dead baby shaped like a match.

Speaking of which, I watched my first episode of Gray's Anatomy last night. Too sad. Can't like things that are that sad. Must....not....like....show....ALL RIGHT, okay, it
was pretty good but it's still too sad. I mean, mommies dying all over the place and people crying like it's the coolest new fad. Newsflash: It's not cool. Play more Futurama.

My new mics have arrived, but as I'm in training all weekend, I have no clue when I'll get a chance to set 'em up, let alone record my new songs. Additionally, I have an unfinshed piece about a Dickensian street urchin that needs to be redrafted and completed for my solo perf class on Monday. In short, things are looking grim for everyone's hero.

Ghost

I wrote a song last night. It came out of nowhere, but I think it had been lurking around for a while, like some vapor that invisibly fills up the room, and all too late you realize someone's run a tube from an exhaust pipe straight into your unsuspecting home and lungs. Who knows why such a thing would happen. Let me have my analogies, damn it.

Yesterday was possibly one of the most stressful I'd had in a while, so I guess it was inevitable that I'd need bloodlet in song form. Funny how that kind of inspiration only leads to new material. I could've stood to finish about six or seven older songs that are now looking as insurmountable to me as my outstanding college loan balance. Ah well.

It's called "Hands and Knees," and I'm actually really happy with it. I spent an hour or so on it tonight, tweaking chord progression and the outro, and I think it's halfway decent. Like most spur-of-the-moment songs, the whole thing was written (lyrically) in about 15 minutes, with the music taking an extra 30 maybe, excluding my work tonight. Why can't all songs be that easy?

I've been working on this semi-epic, semi-free-association piece called "Insect Angel" for almost two months, and something's still not quite right. I think I need a writing partner. My lyrics feel like they're getting better most of the time, but my musical output hasn't grown up at all. I actually feel like I've regressed from the stuff I was working on for my album last year.

Feeling like I needed to record this stuff, and getting sick of my condenser mic drowning out my mixes with gross guitar, I made a whim purchase of a new mic set. One of the mics is actually made for instruments (gasp), so I'm hoping it'll make this stuff sound clearer. Well, sorta. If it sounds too good, I'll want to rerecord all my songs, which will be Sadsville. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Not much busking lately, thanks to the MTA being a bunch of douches and killing off the local trains at night (or, as is the new weekend standard, all trains at my stop). Lord help me if I ever encounter an MTA employee in...a game of GoldenEye. He would get hurt.

I'll probably post "Hands and Knees" and "Insect Angel" sometime this week, soon's I get this new gear. Keep your eyes peeled if you're interested.