Rob and DK live at Wolf & Lamb!

It's been a bit since my last post because I've been juggling a new job and working out some details for my first live gig in a while. My buddy DK and I are playing a "bluegrass" (really folk, but management couldn't be convinced otherwise) gig at Wolf & Lamb Steakhouse, tomorrow 2/18 from 7-9. Please come out if you can. Their food is amazing. Our songs will probably be okay too, but don't taste as good.

Wolf & Lamb Steakhouse
8 E. 48th Street (between 5th and Madison)
tomorrow, Wednesday February 18, 7-9
no cover (but you gotta sit at a table and thus, eat)

Meanwhile, this song is plaguing my existence. In the very best of plaguey ways.

felix felicis

Yesterday: got a job, booked a music gig, and had an awesome busking experience wherein I met a kindred busking soul.

I've been looking for jobs for nigh on two months, after being, quite frankly, given the runaround by my former employer, Apple. Unemployment came to the rescue (for the first time....I'm cautious about things that could be mistaken as "freeloader" activities), and I've been busking on the side to get some extra green stamps though it's been too cold to do it often.

After weeks of polite harassment, the Chess Shop in the village hired me yesterday at a rather low salary, but heck man, it's chess! I love chess. And just by virtue of working there I'm gonna become a chess superbrain, right? I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Plus, it's going to be a job that's fairly easy and entirely enjoyable. Me don't do restaurants. Anything resembling soul-selling kinda turns me off.

I auditioned for a performance gig at my girlfriend's restaurant two days ago, and found out yesterday that I booked it! Yes, Rob, there is a Dollar Claus. He just likes to ignore you for months at a time. I'm not sure if this place (a Kosher steakhouse) will exactly "get" my amateurish spin on american folk music, but why not give it a shot? I mean, I LOVE pickles.

As the final move in a day filled with luck, I decided to go busking, presuming my good luck would pay off in spades and I'd make a king's ransom in singles. Instead, I couldn't find an available station anywhere between 145th and 23rd streets. Yoink. I started heading back uptown, resigned to make tea and play video games for the duration of the eve, when I saw a guy playing Dylan songs at 42nd Street. He was around my age, clearly had enthusiasm for the material, and....I dunno. I was feeling ballsy. So, after first going to 59th (no dice), I came back to 42nd and asked him if he'd mind me accompanying him for a little while. He replied that his night was almost over, but he'd give it a shot.

He started up "Blowin in the Wind" and I played along with my mandolin and harmonica, flubbing a little here and there on solos (par for the course). He asked if I knew "Suzanne" ("sort of" was may response), and we went through that and then "SO Long, Maryanne" as per request. Honestly, it was a blast. This is what busking's supposed to be like! Chance meetings. Music no matter what! Woody Guthrie woulda been proud. I think.

Anyway, at some point I introduced myself to Jeff, and him to me. A few songs later he peaced out, but we agreed to meet up again soon and play. It was instant gelling, no denial. I was glad I hadn't wussed out and kept my lip buttoned when I first saw him.

I stuck around for a while and played solo. There were some really nice people who told me I wasn't far from being on American Idol (do they have folk episodes of that? if so, I'd do it), and got an Eric Clapton request. Wish I knew some.

I made pretty good money for only playing around an hour, and I have to say that I musta drank some luckjuice yesterday because I haven't had a day that serendipitous in a long time.

rubbing one out

I put off busking all day for mini projects, both real and necessary, and imaginary and a waste of time. Planning which variety of tea I'll drink next? Yep, I definitely spent a few minutes on that. Restringing mandolin after not changing them since October (purchase date of mandolin)? Slightly more necessary. But 8 strings doesn't equal 8 times the restringing fun. It equals 45 minutes.

Around 1 am on my way home I decided to step off the train and busk. Luckily, my mandolin found its way into my hand (busking with my skin flute has become increasingly difficult in the cold). However, no one found their way into my station, so I hopped back on a train one and a half songs later.

It was good, though. I was feeling musically pent up, and it was good to sonically ejaculate all over the Museum of Natural History murals in the 81st Street subway station, then dart back into the night cackling and counting my zero dollars.

I'm again struck by the fact that I wasn't invited to my five-year high school reunion. I mean, do these people READ THIS BLOG?!

Erroneous Rock

This is a random post no matter how you look at it, but it's especially random when you consider that I haven't updated this site since June of 2008, and then only to write an ode to Weezer/my dog.

I was away in CT for a few months this fall doing theater and writing a bunch, and I've busked from time to time since then but haven't felt the need to blog about any of it. A feeling of same old, same old kept me away I guess.

But no more!

Here's a new song that's a collaboration between my buddy Jeb Heil and myself. He wrote the lyrics, I wrote the music (earlier tonight, actually). It's a little haphazard and a lot ugly, but I've been wanting to make something careening and unsightly. My part was written in about fifteen minutes, so I'm not gonna judge it too much.



butterflies, butterflies
beautiful butterflies
chocolate covered and bite sized
a pound of them is the grand prize

skinny men and fat women
walk around holding hands
do they love each other?
well i guess they do, but don't we all?

oh i guess we don't (x4)

advertise, advertise
subliminal advertise
sell you looney tunes neckties
hold back my desire to modernize

shit water, piss water
we'll put through this machine
and we'll drink it
will it make us sick?
well i guess it will, but aren't we all?

oh i guess we are (x4)

seeing red

On this, the most glorious eve of Weezer's latest release, I turn my gaze back to my favorite band's body of work, which has both inspired and enraged me through the years.

You see, my dog died recently. Yogi really was this man's best friend, and she represented both stormy times and painfully new and bright times in the last 12 years of my life. She came to as a present in Christmas of 1996. "A boy should have a dog," I remember my mom saying. We'd picked her out a few months earlier from an accomplished Basset breeder who lived up a precariously steep and muddy hill, akin to the Grinch's peak. At the time, Yogi was too young to leave her own mother, so mine assured me that my present would be present by February. And indeed she was. I remember marveling at how huge and cumbersome her paws and ears were (they seemed to remain at that size while the rest of her struggled to catch up to their advanced growth), and the white question mark etched in her fur, just above her tail. She was beautiful. And mine. The first thing I'd ever had that required responsibility. And certainly the only thing I've ever had that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility.

I had moved to North Carolina a few months before from Ohio in the wake of my parents' divorce. I've been told that I use the word "miserable" to describe far too many things in life, but I can't quite think of any other term for how I felt then. My dad was half a world away. My friends were that same distance (and later further, when some of them left Ohio, ensuring that no matter how much we said we would, we'd never meet again). I was in a hick town that didn't know culture from q-tips. On top of everything, I had no idea how to express any of the things I was feeling. My brain was throbbing in a hot bath, stoked by my tear ducts, and my mouth had all but sank away into a third cheekbone. Part of me shut down in those days.

As the school year began and I slowly made friends, Yogi was the one constant, however new she was, that kept me anchored and focused. I was never as nice as I could have been (she may have been scolded a bit too harshly for messing in the house a few times, or kept out from underfoot by being locked up in her kennel too often during that first year), but I can scarcely think of any relationship I've had that came close to how much we loved each other. This is good, because I was socially (miserable) during high school. Girls hated me, I confounded myself with how I behaved around them, and my friends were all in the same boat. I needed someone to confide in and be myself around. Yogi was the perfect listener.

I didn't know much about music during the first half of high school, a fact which I lament to this day. However, towards high school's end, I'd picked up quite an eclectic taste of music, ranging from progressive rock to trance, from musical theater to japanese pop. I began writing music and discovering how to externalize the sordid soup of emotions I felt internally. It was my own little renaissance, peaked by my discoveries of Devo, They Might Be Giants, the Flaming Lips, and others.

Finally, as graduation loomed, my best friend Funk spoke of a band he'd mentioned before, only this time I listened to him. They hadn't had an album in 5 years (for a contemporary band, I knew this made them practically off the map of the known universe), but a supposedly triumphant return was to come soon. He loaned me their first two albums so I could try 'em out, presumably in hopes that I'd take to them and be psyched and prepared for their third.

Maybe it was the carefreeness of those last remaining days of high school...feeling those few surviving responsibilities and ties slip away before a summer of assured debauchery and cavorting settled in (seemingly for good). Maybe it was my growing understanding of what makes music good, and what I most enjoy from it. Whatever it was, when I heard the Blue Album and Pinkerton, my mind dug its teeth into the heart of Weezer and never let go; I'd found my soulmate.

Here, in this music, were melodies that paled everything else. Here was emotion that would have blown my heart's mind if I'd heard it two years earlier! Here I was both rocking out and emoting like a loser because I was finally realizing that those aren't mutually exclusive concepts! These guys wrote about Dungeons & Dragons and being an outcast as well as talking like they were King Shit but still admitting that there was no hope for them to ever find a woman. They wrote melodies that sounded like they broke straight through the roof of my little split-level NC home, and built layers of burning guitars that felt like they scorched miles and miles of land in a radius around my stereo. I was alone, in a broken home, listening to music that felt more like it came from me than from 4 guys named Rivers, Matt, Pat, and Brian.

Yogi was in my car recently thereafter for a second listen (coulda been the first, but I'm doubtful). Following the breakup I went through right around the same time, Weezer began to represent my heartache and I found myself writing more and more, and wanting more and more to express all the guts that were swirling around inside me. And Yogi was there.

When the Green Album was released, summer was just beginning. Funk and I whisked around parking lots in our cars, blaring "Don't Let Go" as if it was just as good as "Why Bother," though I think deep down, we knew it wasn't. Yogi was there, in the back seat, slobbering on my window and getting knocked off balance when I made a turn too sharply, and listening along (albeit perhaps begrudgingly).

Then college. Maladroit came out at the end of my first year in Boston, and I was on cloud 9. When I went home for the summer, Yogi and I spent even more time together than usual, the weight of all those lonely months crunching us closer when we were finally together. We swam together in the river off the field in my neighborhood, and spent daylight hours chilling out at home while I waited to go to my dreaded night shift at the axel factory (4 pm - midnight). My friends all worked other jobs that had decent, human hours, so we rarely brushed shoulders. When I switched to the morning overtime shift at the Volvo plant (6 am - 4 pm), I was too tired to see my friends, so Yogi would curl up beside me on the futon as I drifted off to sleep. In the few waking hours I had at home, we would play together and I'd ceaselessly excavate the internet for Weezer videos and interviews from their heyday, as well as download bootlegged tracks and outtakes from their more recent work.

Around this time, I realized that my thing with Weezer was never going away, and that it was so strong an attachment that it made me sad...someday, Weezer would cease to make music, or otherwise cease to exist in some form. Their music had had such a profound effect on me that I couldn't bear to imagine what it would be like to know that there would never be anymore of it.

Bookending things as they seem wont to do, Weezer released Make Believe around the time I graduated from Emerson. I remember joyfully drinking in "Perfect Situation" and "Hold Me," and having rabid conversations with Funk and my friend Matt about how much better this was than anything on Maladroit. I had recently begun seeing a girl named Molly, and I distinctly remember cleaning my apartment before she came over, "Haunt You Every Day" thundering all the while. I brought the CD home with me to North Carolina when she came to visit, and we spent several afternoons taking Yogi around Hendersonville with Make Believe serving as a soundtrack. It was all too brief, however, as I had to stay in Boston for the summer to make money before beginning Urinetown and the impending move to New York. We had a few days with Yogi.

Rivers released his solo album of home recordings just in time for Christmas this year. I flew home Christmas Eve (Work not being very understanding about granting time off for this particular holiday), and left the morning after Christmas. It was my shortest trip home yet, and therefore my shortest stint with Yogi. My 12-year old Christmas Present, though as beautiful as she was all those years ago, was visibly old, and, I think, visibly sad that I was not around for long. We spent as much time together as I could manage, and I even put off listening to River's album until I got back to NYC. I sometimes regret that...I think she should have liked, "Superfriend," most of all.

When Weezer released the "Pork and Beans" single two months ago, my mind very nearly suffered a cardiac arrest all over again. It was a single that harkened back to everything I loved about Weezer's golden age...a beautiful melody, blistering guitars, hilariously goofy but sincere lyrics, and a general mood that doesn't match anything else on the radio. I called my friends immediately to see if they'd heard it, and followed up with each pre-album single release they had. When the Red Album was officially announced (and pushed forward), I freaked out. All I wanted to do was have it in my hands, feel the jewel case...read the liner notes and the lyrics..and cruise around North Carolina listening to the album, a cream soda in my hand, and Yogi in the passenger seat, her ears flailing out the lowered window like muddy comets.

But I got the call from my mom on wednesday. Geez, almost a week ago. My family's out of town in Europe. Yogi's cancer seemed to accelerate overnight. The kennel owners tried getting her to the vet's to put her down. She didn't even make it in time.

Yogi died without me there. Without me telling her how much she meant to me, how much I care about her, and how good a dog she'd been. Without me singing, "Longtime Sunshine," a song we found together, to her. She died. And she died alone.

The days immediately afterward were a dark blur. I was so overcome with guilt that I rapidly descended a path of depression that I knew wasn't called for, but that didn't steer me off it. Yogi was gone. My connection to overcoming those 12 years of pain, awkwardness, loneliness, as well as my tether to the good times, was gone. I was cut loose, lost in some frothy sea that bore no resemblance to the waters I'd been sailing only hours before. North Carolina began to sound less like my home. Everything began to sound less like my home.

Then I thought back to Pinkerton. Nothing comes close to the way I feel about that album...I don't think there's anything more cathartic or perfectly crafted than Pinkerton, and the fact that this type of music has since been absent in Weezer's output has made me depressed, no joke. But just because it hasn't continued doesn't mean it's gone. And even if Weezer dies off, or becomes a poppy abomination that no self-respecting Morrison or his dog would listen to, their older music is still alive. It really is. When I listen to the "god damn" mental breakdown of "Across the Sea," I feel just as anguished yet full of hope as I did when I first heard it in 2001. And although I wish I had discovered Weezer sooner, it doesn't matter when I came into my own with them. It's music. It behaves the same if I listen to it ten years ago or tomorrow. It's unconditional. It's me who isn't built that way.

But I did come to treat Yogi better. She was the best friend I'll ever have, and nothing can take that away. Even when her dogbowl is thrown away, and when we take down the length of red zipline she ran along, and when the last bit of her remaining fur is swept away; when all the last traces have been erased of the first thing I had that required responsibility and that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility; when all that's gone, she won't be. I love Yogi, and she loves me. She knows how much she meant to me; I could see that even in our brief moments together this past Christmas. She was loved, and she recognized me as clearly as the long, wet nose that hung down below her brown eyes. She represented a huge chunk of my life, and just because she's left doesn't mean my connection to those days is gone. At midnight, when the Red Album downloads into my computer, she'll be right beside me listening to it. I don't feel silly saying that...it's just the way it is. I can't imagine it any other way.

Life is a mystery, as the question mark by her tail suggested way back when. But she wasn't. She was beautiful. She was my friend. The mystery is what did I do to deserve such a present?

"I've got your letter,
you've got my song."

i've had her, she's nothing

So. Tonight.

I spent an hour or two memorizing a few songs at home, then busted out to busk at the good ole 23rd Street Station. There were a few Phil Ochs songs in attendance, as well as some fragments of my own that are in progress, and I was really pleased by how well-received they were. I made a couple bones, always a good thing given that my college loans are a little past due. But aside from the obvious boon of a roll of singles, it was really great to see people enjoying the music. Some poorly misguided by very kind lady told me my voice was "angelic." A cluster of women who I presume were tourists videotaped me from across the platform on the downtown side. And there were the usual nods of recognition when I played a Dylan or Neil Young song that someone approved of. I'd forgotten how nice it feels to do this.

I wasn't feeling the harmonica much tonight, so in place of it, I guess I ended up scatting. Not sure what else to call it. There's some scat-stuff in "Hands & Knees" anyhow, and I guess I've been going more and more in that direction. There are just some vowels sounds I'm obsessed with, I've realized. I couldn't probably explain it, but there are sounds that I'm big on, pet sounds, and whereas most people might cite clarinet licks or backwards-recorded guitars as pet sounds (not that I don't), I've become increasingly obsessed with the shapes of these vowels, and with letting loose on them, abandoning words. I think these particular vowel sounds are prevalent in folk music, too, which is maybe where this comes from.

Still working on my new song. There are of course several now, as I can't ever pin down one version of what I'm feeling, so inevitably it family trees outward into too many bits that risk incompletion. I think I'm gonna have at least one pretty nice one in a few days.

In the meanwhile, here's a great Phil Ochs song. The last stanza's chilling.


The night air is inviting you to walk out on the trail
You will not fail,
You will not fail
And by the beach, a lady sails a ship without a sail
And you reach out for her,
And you reach out for her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

Down the cliffs you clamber and you tumble to the shore
The warm waves roar,
The warm waves roar
And on the reef a mermaid siren screams, "one perfume more"
And she shouts to you,
Through the foam, she shouts to you
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The players at the party are prepared to take a chance
They drop their pants,
They drop their pants
In the corner, she's so crystaline no one dares to ask a dance
And she calls out to you,
And she calls out to you
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

In the prison of your broken bed, you dribble in a dream
And find a queen,
And find a queen
But your sleep is sadly stolen by the face that is a stream
That's flowing out to you,
She's flowing out to you
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The vision of the seven veils are racing down the road
Signs are slow,
The signs are slow
But beauty is the mistress and the beauty you've been told
You'd speed the route for her,
You'd speed the route for her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The fog has changed the city to a friendly frightened fawn
The shades are drawn,
The shades are drawn
To posess her misty madness, you would gladly duel the dawn
And fade out to her,
And fade out to her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

The circus clown, he hides a tear beneath his pained smile
And charms a child,
And charms a child
While the dancing girls and prancing horse blows kisses down the aisle
You'd roll about for her,
You'd roll about for her
But, I've had her,
I've had her
She's nothing

All alone, the flaming field, your fairy love is spread
Your time has fled,
Your time has fled
Now the only way to touch her is the gun beside your head
Now there's now doubt for her,
Now there's now doubt for her
But, I've had her
I've had her
She's nothing

planets are getting demoted

How do you get over something that's eating at your brain? Nevermind that it's something stupid, something that is taking up your time in a most frustrating manner, something that doesn't give a hoot about you no matter how much you invest in said something. (Yeah, you probably know what I'm referring to by now.) Nevermind those things. It's buggin' ya, and ya gotta kick it.

So you write. Well, at least I write. I've been spending my free time the last few days writing the first song I've really been able to get enthused about since Novemberish. In fact I've been writing so much that the song is way too long. I've been almost literally sleeping on it (the old trick where I reread it right before bed so my dreaming brain can hopefully continue working on the weak stuff). On my break today, I purposely left the lyrics at home and attempted to rewrite them from scratch, hoping the stuff that counts would reappear and the bits that could stand to improve would get lost in the shuffle. Not sure if it worked; now I like both versions.

Ah well. Brian Wilson says that a masterpiece is something you water daily. Not that this has much chance of being one of those things. But I do intend on tending to it as such.

Lyrics and recording to come.
Mucho Oblique Strategies and risks happening currently.