Thursday, November 08, 2007

Vitamin B


Vitamin B

this here is a little gem from a band called the Garys, outta Ft. Collins, Colorado.. it was the band of Jon Paul Kronser (from Evil Alien Costume) before he moved out to Portland and started playing music with us. Emily and I were listening to the CD the other day, and this one really stood out - both as a nice little pop song and a nice little diversion from October Mountain, which is still under construction.

the Garys' version is a more pop-punk version.. faster and straighter and with some crazy drums on it.. but i wasn't too interested in just reworking it verbatim.. so we slowed it and swung it and orchestrated it a bit. nothing too fancy..

of course, October Mountain is still on the near horizon.. all the songs are very close to finished, but not one of the seven or eight are completely done, so that's a little disappointing. perhaps this weekend emily and i can round the corner and start putting 'em in the can. as it were.

ha!

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Erasure

this is where emily says some stuff.

there is a wine in my fruitfly. true story.
this song began while aaron was on tour and ended after he got back. the last things to go down (today) were the snare drum, electric guitar and trumpets. the bottom head of the snare was broken and i had to hold it for aaron while he played, as the stand was nowhere to be found. we placed several calls and journeyed by foot and uncovered keys and unlocked doors to get the trumpet. the guitar was textured with a caked spatter of aaron's blood. yeah, we should probably get that cleaned up one of these days. here is a picture of his post-tour fingers, all healed up:












Erasure


even if you wanna swim deep, you gotta come up for air once in a while.
you're floating on a liferaft with your face in the water, never taking a breath.

please put on your happy face. just hold your tongue and hold it in and hoist it back up.
pray for a swim in the river to erase these nasty thoughts with a contrived baptism.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

i leave to go on tour with the king hen tomorrow, so i'm leaving emily in charge of the site.. hopefully she'll be able to post some of the songs she's working on, fingers crossed if the creek dont rise.

here's a song from the brand new king hen EP that we're bring on tour.. one of my favorites, in part because i get to yell "we win! we win!".. ha.

bull in a china shop

here's the tour: a month out.. crazy.

Aug 15 2007 9:00P Neurolux Boise, Idaho
Aug 16 2007 8:00P 3 Kings Denver, Colorado
Aug 17 2007 8:00P Oleavers Omaha, Nebraska
Aug 18 2007 10:00P club underground Minneapolis, Minnesota
Aug 19 2007 10:00P the Klinic - ALL AGES SHOW Madison, Wisconsin
Aug 20 2007 10:00P Elbo Room - 9 pm Chicago, Illinois
Aug 22 2007 9:00P Kraftbrau Brewery Kalamazoo, Michigan
Aug 24 2007 9:00P Beachland Tavern -w/ JJ Magazine Cleveland, Ohio
Aug 25 2007 10:00P Gooski's w/Persona Grata Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Aug 26 2007 9:00P Kimballs Williamsport, Pennsylvania
Aug 27 2007 9:00P SPARK Syracuse, New York
Aug 28 2007 9:00P Bullfinch Yacht Club Boston, Massachusetts
Aug 30 2007 9:00P Trash bar Brooklyn, New York
Aug 31 2007 9:00P Lit Lounge nyc, New York
Sep 2 2007 9:00P Galaxy Hut Washington DC, Washington DC
Sep 3 2007 9:00P Pilot Light - PENDING Knoxville, Tennessee
Sep 4 2007 8:00P Murphys - w/Organ Thief, Rainy Day Manual Memphis, Tennessee
Sep 5 2007 8:00P Springwater lounge Nashville, Tennessee
Sep 6 2007 8:00P Checkpoint Charlies New Orleans, Louisiana
Sep 7 2007 8:00P day off somewhere in, Texas
Sep 8 2007 8:00P tba Austin, Texas
Sep 11 2007 9:00P Casablanca nightclub & lounge Phoenix, Arizona
Sep 12 2007 9:00P Double Down Saloon Las Vegas, Nevada
Sep 13 2007 9:00P TBA Los Angeles, California
Sep 14 2007 9:00P Scolaris w/Lebanon (Israel) San Diego, California
Sep 15 2007 9:00P Edinburgh Castle w/Paranoids & Ovipositor San Francisco
Sep 16 2007 9:00P Hemlock Tavern w / Lebanon (Israel) San Francisco, California

dont be shy.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Ash St Saloon

you know what i like? when the 'creative act' seems to just spill out, or snowball, or something.. i was sitting around practicing the guitar the other day and i wrote the music to this, and within moments had most of the lyrics to this little song, and with each line that i wrote down i got a little bit giddier and more amused. or something. it spilled out, and snowballed. i laughed and laughed.

it's not particularly deep or beautiful or poetic.. in fact, it's mostly inside jokes and lies. oh well. if matthieu was still in portland, he'd find it funny.

Ash St Saloon

so heather called it:
degrees don't count
and handed me the baggie of blow
but i'm a rock star i barely looked down
i took the stage and stormed the show
but all of this is make believe
i see reality subjectively
i even like to listen to myself sing

oh heather nailed it:
degrees don't count, is entertainment in your soul?
'cause as an artist, you're gonna end up homeless.
(as if i didn't know)
but all of this is make believe
and my illusions work out beautifully
we'll get that friday show eventually

so heather called it:
degrees don't count
it boils down to who you know
we traded emails, and i started to doubt
that we would ever play a show
but all of this is make believe
on the the road and playing constantly
and there's no place i'd rather be

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Night Time Coffee

the other day Said the Gramophone wrote a little thing about Rich Enough to Ignore It, which is awesome. i really like those guys, and its a pretty cool compliment.. it's a blog of really good songs, you know. ha!
i just sorta lifted this outta there.. hope that's okay.
thanks, Sean!

The Leaning Towers - "Rich Enough to Ignore It". In music, in art, the why-didn't-wes are rarely meted out like this. Usually it's dragging feet, dusty drums, a weary man hounded by flashbacks. Here: tambourine, tuba, synths, fanfare, and of course that golden guitar-line. The guitar never leaves the moment of open possibility; it curls back over and over it, like a life can always be remade. The song seems... happy. Resigned to its regrets, comfortable in its shoes. Nostalgic in a pool of warm tender sun. "Probably should be singing redemption songs / instead of filling out exemption forms."


and i wrote this thursday, 'cause i had the day off of work. emily says it sounds like Wilco, and the more i worked on it, the more it did.. ha!

Night Time Coffee

i really like the funny synth noise that pops up every now and then with the cool rhythm..

Thursday, May 31, 2007

The Eleventh Hole



this is what emily and i have been doing, amongst other things.. The Eleventh Hole. In which Amy and Mary are separated by an untimely demise, but through Amy's death a bit of hope is brought back to the living, as Mary and the Professor work hard to set things right.

or something like that.

1 - Le Professor (Du Babylon)
2 - This
3 - A Cure For Meat
4 - Rich Enough to Ignore It
5 - A Cheery Scandal
6 - Date to a Funeral
7 - You Can't Even Be Here

i'm not sure how podcasting reacts to multiple .mp3s in one post, so i'm only including one here, but you can find 'em all on the Eleventh Hole page.

and in the process of finishing up this album, i went back to what i consider the first album, Animal Teeth, that Emily and i put together after the first round of SongADay - i discovered i hadn't actually posted a few of songs.. some good ones, too, like Wet Glass and Your Ideas. neat stuff..

hooray!

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Detention & Febrezio

last weekend Erik Becker (of King Hen) needed a band in the studio to finish out a recording class, and Evil Alien Costume was lucky enough to do it.. it was an all day saturday sorta thing, starting around 8 am. wow. but it turned out pretty well, and it was all on 1 inch tape, 8 tracks, very minimal overdubs.. just the vocals, i think. erik, jon, jesse, trailerpark studios, we thank you.


Detention 2:39
Febrezio 6:29 (wow!)

all this, and Evil Alien Costume is playing a show tonight, Tonic Lounge 4/26/7 - which is probably the last show we'll do.

Matt has to go to law school, you know. he's gotta grow up and starting flying right. i hope he stays golden, pony boy.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Pastel Phallus

Pastel Phallus - 2003
1 Prologue
2 Whale Quest
3 Kathy Sandstorm
4 Kid Prince Yucatan
5 Bomb Shelter
6 La Bette
7 A-E-I Oh You
8 Red Wine
9 Leaves Steele
10 Ballerina Accidens
11 Egoid
12 Wasabi
13 That Force Has Got Fine Controls

i don't have any artwork for this Sons of Ja'rel album.. i barely even had the music, G. Tony was nice enough to email all the tracks to me.. ha! and it's a pretty good album, i think.. lots of neat psychedelic pop songs, including Kathy Sandstorm, which goes all the way back to Planck's Constant in Ft. Collins, i guess. wow.

Wasabi came directly out of an evening at the Mulgrew School of Advancement, a home-made sushi party spearheaded by Colae Johnson.. ahh memories. better than reality, often. in any case, you don't fuck around with wasabi.

in addition, i got this song from X=Object, called Talkin 'Bout Chairs which is the closest i can get to the song about chairs that James wants.. i think, in a super-rare bit of editing, we chopped the chair song down into this 30 second noise bit.. perhaps you can imagine how the three minute version went from this. it was probably noisy. i can't remember why we decided to do this.. it's almost an anti-Sons of Ja'rel idea, so it was probably for the best.

ironic that James would want one song from all of the sons of ja'rel catalog, and it doesn't exist. hmph.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Mazer Razor

recently i've been on a feverish run of sons of ja'rel enthusiasm, trying to track down and listen to all the albums and such.. it's quite an undertaking, but i think they've all been located. it looks like thirteen (!) albums in all, from 'Penpricker' in 2001 to 'The Mythmagic Special' in 2006.. pretty crazy.

Mazer Razor is possibly my favorite sons of ja'rel song of all time.. but that's kinda hard to say. g. tony has an iconic bass line on this song, which isn't represented on this original version, sadly, but i can hear it clearly...

it's on the album X=Object, that started out as a concept album about a comet that flies too close to Earth and animates the mundane objects.. like chairs, for example. it was recorded on 4 track, for some reason, at the 65th and Foster house.. i'm sure G. Tony was involved somehow.. he's definately a part of Backdoor to Heaven. . ha!




X=Object - 2003

1 The Comet
2 Drop Dead
3 Lonely Object
4 Locusts, Ha!
5 Talkin 'Bout Chairs
6 The Sultan
7 Celebrate (the earth doesn't)
8 Stranger Object
9 Pain and Being
10 Robots
11 Mazer Razor
12 The Procession of the Greater Trocanter
13 Summer Day
14 In Your Mind
15 Backdoor into Heaven
16 Outro

Sunday, April 08, 2007

I'll Change

portland is really gorgeous right now.. the sun is out, the flowers and trees are in bloom, the grass is green and the dogs are happy.. good times.

i've been working hard on all sorts of scattered stuff.. a lot of music in a lot of different areas, mostly writing and working on King Hen songs in preparation for a big end of summer tour, about a month long (!).. that'll be the longest i've ever gone out on the road. and it looks pretty promising, 'cause we're gonna try and spend the majority of the trip on the east coast, where i haven't spent much time. very cool..

in addition, i've been working on a bunch of little ideas for short films or a collection of short films or something.. a lot of learning about cameras and editing and digital media and blah blah.. not to mention scripts and actors and costumes and such..

all the while, i've been fooling around with songs of course.. this one is for Wes, who is out in Denver these days, i think. i got this little delay box thing working again, which can sorta oscillate the pitch of a repeating echo in a sine wave shape (i think).. which is really awesome, but sorta difficult to work with.. but i got pretty excited. in this song, there is a keyboard that comes in about halfway through that has an example. neat-o.

I'll Change

but it's much too beautiful to sit around writing nonsense on the internet.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The New Mexican Revolution

Wes came over last week for a few days and wanted to record a new little EP demo.. a few new songs and a few old ones, all of them great. and moreover, he wanted to be little more experimental with 'em, which i always appreciate. he probably had ten songs, but we ended up working on three or four to the exclusion of some others, emily and wes and myself. they ended up neat, i think.

Crooked Trees - this is typical of how awesome wes' songs are. and it's got a neat keyboard outro, something we wouldn't have done before.

Disaster Won't Come - this was for a short film, Jack Hankey's Disaster by Jack Gibson (aka tenlon's fort), but this is a different version than that one.

Lines & Waves - has been a tNMR song for a long time now, but never got recorded that well. i think it's real pretty, and emily wrote that last little ending bit, really awesome.

Los Santeros - has also been around a bit, and features Emily pretty heavily.. Wes entered this into a salon.com contest, and we never heard a thing from them. hmph.

Monday, February 12, 2007

so Emily and I got an awesome little write-up at the www.localcut.com.. it's pretty neat. i'm not too sure how long it'll stay there or anything. i'm not sure if this link will work, but we'll give it a try.

aaron and emily's article

i also don't know if it's okay to just grab this and use it, but i suppose i'll hear about it if it's not.


by Anika Sabin
Aaron Macdonald is one busy bee, or more appropriately, hen. Or alien. Navigating through numerous Portland band websites that list Macdonald’s involvement (Evil Alien Costume, the King Hen, the Leaning Towers, the Peabodys), he seems to be traversing a plethora of genres, as does his partner-in-crime, Emily (also of Evil Alien Costume and the Leaning Towers).

“Old Fashioned Weapons” surprised me. The transitions are quick and unpredictable with dance-y fits, soft piano breakdowns and pop-induced hooks. “It’s just a bunch of tiny things” Aaron sings in the song’s refrain. And, well, it’s true. The beats, rhymes and riffs are terribly cute and simple, yet when layered atop each other, a beautiful density emerges.

The Leaning Towers’ website (theleaningtowers.com) is a map of their well-documented experiments, and creations that Macdonald posted religiously (almost daily up until about a month ago). There you’ll see that “Old fashioned Weapons” is only three weeks old. The library is a bit overwhelming, with songs ranging from eclectic folk that echoes a living room’s softness to cold industrial landscapes of electronica. Even still, there are distorted-gypsy and power pop ballads, most of which actually works. I’m confused, but impressed.

Monday, January 22, 2007

Old Fashioned Weapons

i started this last night, just finishing it now after work.. and i gotta run off to Peabody's practice, zoom zoom. we haven't played in quite awhile, so that should be fun. unfortunately, i gotta carry all the drums everywhere. i'm so lazy these days.

Old Fashioned Weapons

rar!

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Normal Clock

today i recovered from the King Hen show last night.. which wasn't easy, with Wes waking me up at 10 in the morning and dragging me off to breakfast.. the bastard!

but i guess it's not all bad.. i was quite the layabout, watching football all day and sleeping in the living room, while emily went to toastmaster's meetings and took 10 key tests. naps are pretty great, and the colts came back and beat tom brady, which i was kinda rooting for. wow.

anyways, admist all that, emily and i put this thing together.. it started off as a kind of hip-hop flavored backing track, using this alesis keyboard that wes brought over. i was fooling around, trying out the built in string sounds and i think emily found some inspiration and the thing came together. nice.

Normal Clock

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Clumsy Seduction

the egg has to break itself.
shooting popguns at the stars,
the little pink elephant lies broken on the floor.

we don't have the time
to feed each other lines,
to look for all the signs.
we've got to revel in our lives.


Clumsy Seduction

emily and i had to work pretty fast on this one.. she wrote the music on the keyboard before we left for the store, i think.. and then started recording when we got back. i wrote some lyrics, and we sang a bunch, and then we started clapping and emily started beatboxing (she always does, eventually).

in any case, i think it turned out great. the King Hen tonight, yep. pretty fun.

aaronmacdonald.com

Friday, January 19, 2007

Keep Your Chin Up

they'll never bottle you
if you keep changing the place
you may never get settled
but if you keep moving
you might get away
but i bet you get tired
'cause everyone does
it's written in muscle and memory
and you've done enough

i'm gonna runaway
break through the sky
fragile's not good enough
i need reasons why
point all my guns at the man
i at least have to try

our potential may eat through the best of us
but i don't want to make peace
study the light and photography
keep pretending that's me
but i bet you get tired
'cause everyone does
staring at pictures and biting your fingernails
is not good enough


Keep Your Chin Up

big rock show tomorrow night at the tonic lounge (in portland, oregon).. which i'm very excited about. the king hen is gonna debut a few songs, maybe four or five, plus a few re-worked ones and such. that's a lotta new stuff, but it's all coming along really well. i think it's gonna be great - i just gotta be more careful about breaking strings.. and maybe have a back up guitar. hmm. big time rock show.

aaronmacdonald.com

Thursday, January 18, 2007

I Built A Black Box

i built a black box to call home with
i got talk to my mom one last time
we should admit that we're slowly folding
i wanna confess the things i did wrong
(why i never belonged)
i built a little black box to call home with
i built a band to remember my songs
when i quit they can keep going
but if they turn back i'll be singing along

you're not the boss of me
soon as i'm old enough i'm gonna leave


i should go to bed, but i'm very excited about this song.. i started it this morning, and basically worked on it all day except for when i left for tNMR practice... and now i've stayed up for hours finishing it up, working feverishly. yeehaw!

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Please Come Home

i think matt wrote these lyrics about colleen coming home from work one day while we were working on music.. he played the two bass tracks and sang a bit, and then i played all the other crazy noises and such.. i think the best part of the song is the odd structure matt set up with the main bass line, all D major with an odd phrase of A minor. it was a neat set up for the guitar with a bow. i'm getting a tiny bit better at that bowing stuff, but it's harder than i figured.

when you get home
we'll place our bets
take up our spoons
and feed our heads
when you get home
we'll go to bed
take up our spoons
and feed our heads


Please Come Home

aaronmacdonald.com

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Snow Day


i woke up today and the city was covered in snow. awesome.

emily and i went on a walk to buy groceries and such, and when we got back i put together this little piece.. i had been thinking about it for a day or two, and i knew i was gonna work on it today, but i didn't plan on finishing it. blah blah. i think Eb is the official key of snow. if you tap a glacier, does it ring? Eb, i figure.

i've been reading Genesis of A Music, the book Harry Partch wrote about himself and music and such, over and over.. i think it's driving me to despair. and Finnegan's Wake, driving me to the land of insanity and confusion. ha! and my cold isn't helping much.

Snow Day

aaronmacdonald.com

Monday, January 15, 2007

mondays

you fell into the room like sunshine
spreading shadows with a knife
though i hated you on monday
by tuesday i was begging for a slice
my legs were shaking
(i was nervous)
but you still took me for a ride
once we got where we were going
you knew i was yours for life

i exaggerate/exacerbate/conversate
for days

we're all going up and over
straight into the ground


mondays

i got this stupid cold.. and emily is having a hard time sleeping at night. it's quickly escalating into a form of torture. sometimes when i think of religious fervor, i think of a fever (mental and physical) and i wish i could burn the sickness out of my body and come out the other side healthy and new. a crazy donkey to cross the waters.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

kids don't care

this song is due mostly to jason, a good friend of jonpaul who recently moved to portland.. or back to portland, perhaps.

in any case, he brought over some toys the other day, including this little sampling keyboard. it's pretty cool.. i had played with it for a day or two not too long ago, but didn't get too much out of it, outside of it's nice piano sound. but jason knows how to use it - he did the beatbox stuff and played all the keyboard noises and the washy ocean noises.. pretty much the bulk of the track, and it's cool stuff.. he's been doing his own thing for a long time, under the name 'idiosyncratic routine'..

http://www.myspace.com/perfectangels

that's his myspace link, but for some reason my html stuff didn't work.. but you can find him there.

i think he has some of the same problems i do.. once you start getting an idea of what you want to do, it's much more difficult to work with other people. 'cause other people suck. ha! i shouldn't speak for him, though.. that's just how i think. but i'm glad he came over. hopefully he is also.

kids don't care

aaronmacdonald.com

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Oceanview

so i wrote this little guitar line one day, trying to come up with riffs for King Hen, but it was decidedly happy and major-key sounding, so it didn't quite work over there.. independently, i was working on this neat little chord progression with lyrics that i liked a lot.. so i changed the keys around and started putting it together, but i had already started working on it.. so part 1 is mostly the instrumental intro to the old version, which we saved, and part 2 is the new version in a new key. i don't really see a problem in just making it all one song, but it worked out so nicely as two bits.. i wanted to save that idea. the only problem i had, and i'm not sure how to fix it, is part 1 should be quieter than it is now, in relation to part 2.

oh well.

when the seas drag you under
you get an oceanview
the green and blue of the tv light
reflecting off of you
let the screen pull you under
there's not much you can do
you can't keep fighting your feelings
and expect to feel something new
one day the lies/walls will crumble
i hope we get there soon
'cause i've invented flowers
that need the truth to bloom

waves and waves of traffic
lapping at the curb
i'm drilling through the patterns
just looking for a cure
let the screen pull you under
as the days become a blur
just keep clicking for an answer
and stop thinking of her

you won't believe
the things we can see
what might have been
the love between our best friends
well i'm gonna join up with the runaways
the runaways


Oceanview Pt. 1
Oceanview Pt. 2

aaronmacdonald.com

Friday, January 12, 2007

The Saddest Song


woke up today, made some coffee, turned on the news.. it's 22 degrees outside! wow. which isn't that impressive if you consider my sister called yesterday and said the high was 5 back in colorado. sheesh.

this is a sad song.

The Saddest Song

we wrote it the other night at EAC practice, but it doesn't seem to have much future in that band.. it's very quiet, and has no trumpets or anything. luckily, i have songaday. and just yesterday, it was a veritable songaday party, with jonpaul, jason, matt and myself all working on a couple of songs for hours, (and playing scrabble) while emily studied accounting. great day.

aaronmacdonald.com

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Ants

they've been talking for months
about what they found at the dump
they threw it out with their old junk
its the only way we've found
when the alarm sounds
hide yourself down underground
we're gonna block out the sky
they got the ways and means but not the why
we might miss the sun, but we'll survive
i heard it on the news
go ahead and turn your radio on
go ahead and drop your favorite bomb


Ants

i like this song, 'cause it marks the first time i ever got to use the violin bow on guitar.. which is harder than i thought. the guitar neck doesn't have a curve to it, so it's hard to play just one string, unless it's the two outside strings. which is still kinda hard, 'cause the bow hits the body of the guitar and such.. anyhow, it was a good experiment and i'd been thinking about it for awhile now.
as for the lyrics, matt's been studying for the LSAT lately, and somehow there was a question/answer bit about ants taking over the earth, and how we had to create a nuclear winter to defeat them, logically.

lawyers are crazy, man. watch out for 'em.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

One Two Three

wes and i went out last night to the belmont inn, and we talked and talked about music and songs and cd reviews for awhile, drinking beer. the tNMR cd has been reviewed a few times, four or five, i think.. and they've all been sorta positive, but it's neat to see what other people think of your work and such. and the revolution has a show coming up, which hasn't happened in awhile, so that's good news..

One Two Three

as for the song.. matt came over a long time ago, before christmas, and we recorded this.. its about him getting fired from his last job. that main 'session' involved banjo and guitar and singing, but then it just sat there, for a long time.. i played harmonica on it, and organ, and then i sang those gregorian-esque harmonies on the chorus, and called it done. rar!

www.aaronmacdonald.com

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Airborn Ranger Marriage

from innocence to ignorance,
intelligence to common sense
the medicines you take for this
the reasons why you made the list
the bombs'll drop, from start to stop
a breathless morning looking lost
it's just a job, it's just six years
your lives/your loves
in structured tiers
through all the world
an idea swirls
a brand new math that only girls
are good at
can you believe that?
they wrote a book called 'landflat'
and in it's page, or so they say
a way to bend both time and space
a vortex made of steel and lace
we can get to mars in just one day

we are tomorrow what we start today
the sooner we destroy this world
the sooner we can get away


Airborn Ranger Marriage


My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-375d6f4e2a072c08a72251fa85a7c925}

as if i didn't freak out enough, i found new sources of anxiety the other day.. itunes and podcasting.

and part of the process is putting this podcast alley feed! in a post.. hmm.

but seriously, jonpaul helped me do all this stuff and i appreciate it. even if it does overwhelm me.
love.
www.aaronmacdonald.com

Monday, January 08, 2007

defeated, at last

this song started off with the long descending chromatic line in five, with all the odd percussion noises and such.. more of that acoustic blip-pop matt's always excited about, but pretty twisted around, kinda odd and exciting.. the chorus is also in five and has a big phrase of ten.. odd stuff, but pretty cool.

i feel sorta sick today.. i think it's mostly the drinking from last night's EAC show (which was pretty great), but i may also be getting a cold. my head hurts.

defeated, at last
i can sleep.
they say its a test
of words and deeds.
swell.
my throat is sore,
and i wanted more.

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Wait For A Better Moment

after EAC practice yesterday afternoon, jonpaul came over and we sat around working on songs, watching tv.. which is significant, 'cause terminator 3 came on last night, and it was perfect inspiration for this little song. i had recorded most of the music over the past day and a half, and jonpaul wrote the words and sang and such.. after he left, i rounded it out with keyboard synth parts and all.

when the machines come to take us
i will try to be brave
when the machines start their conflict
i will look at them and say
take a look at what your after
is it worth the fighting for?

in the future there's a failsafe
you can still try again
if you fail the first time
you can still try again

who wants to inherit
a post-apocalyptic earth anyhow?



Wait For A Better Moment

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Juliet Vespers

i borrowed jonpaul's moog the other day, and ended up having a pretty good time with it, recording for hours the other night.. and it sorta cemented this song. i also had a dream last night/this morning, about singing emily instead of juliet, but i thought that might be too much. the main acoustic guitar on this song is tuned in an odd open C major sorta thing, which was a little bit of a challenge at first but set up some nice ringy suspension chords. my cat's breath smells like cat food. Evil Alien has a show tomorrow at the tonic, so we're gonna have an afternoon practice in a few hours.. i'm not sure i've recovered from last nights King Hen practice.. i think we got done around midnight last night. whew.

Juliet Vespers

i threw out all her medals
hoping i'd forget her
i called up all her friends
who knew that i'd desert her
see juliet in vespers
you see juliet, it matters
she's on the wane
as promised, i'll forget her

i tore through all her letters
hoping i'd remember
i still can't sleep easy
our bed is like a splinter
see juliet in vespers
you see juliet, it matters
she's on the wane
and i'm the one who let her

Friday, January 05, 2007

Into the Skyliner Age

friday friday! freaky friday! brain swap.

i got a coffee grinder for christmas/birthday in the mail the other day, and i couldn't get it to work this morning.. i was so mad. mad mad mad. punching mad.

but then i got it to work, so i felt much better. yep.

i don't think i would be so into the coffee if i hadn't stayed up all night, working on songs.. i hit a little creative burst a few days ago, and wrote four or five new little bits, which is pretty exciting. some of it is sorta pretty and weird, which is my favorite stuff... lots of potential, i think.

Into the Skyliner Age

emily wrote the chords and structure to this a few days ago while i banged my head against the router.. then i played a few guitars, emily put down that awesome bass line.. whew. then we sorta stalled out, until emily wanted to put the 'sakura' theme up front.. it's from a little music box that jacob mills gave us years ago, and it's a gorgeous little japanese melody. it's a little swirled up front, but turned out pretty cool. blah blah.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

I Like Crystal Pepsi

i wrote the music to this a long time ago, probably a few months.. and i always liked it, the odd descending figure outlining this large phrase of Ab Cm Fm Gm. well, i thought it was cool, but it was way too bizarre to actually work with, but little by little i started to hear things in it.. the bulk of it are the aaron & emily robots talking, plus some singing and some noises and such.

i didn't think i was ever gonna do anything with it, but jonpaul heard it a few days ago and didn't hate it, so i started thinking about it some more..

sing songs of your missed chance
"i like crystal pepsi
and the promise of an animal wrong"
the senses aren't dead yet
horse screwed and (off)off(off) set
from anything that could possibly go wrong
"nothing could possibly go wrong"
so we rip free of the haz-mat
and stare at the eclipse
"go out laughing with trim sails!"
cannot be wrong
'cause we grew up right,
we behave
we just show our card and save
the screamers / the wild ones
"who could ask for anything more?"
the waves
we rip free of the life vest
dive into reflex
no(any)thing could possibly go wrong


I Like Crystal Pepsi

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Excited To See You

jonpaul and i recorded the chord progression and the verse lyrics to this the other day, but we didn't get very far into it.. until emily stepped in, and recorded everyhing else.. seriously. she wrote and sang and played accordions, guitar, chimalong, keyboards, we did some clapping.. all that stuff, she did it.
i just tried to stay out of the way.

you see my hair standing up
like i'm excited to see you
but i'm not
i just combed it that way

sometimes it seems
somethings there when it's not
you got to
know not to stare for
too long at one spot

Monday, January 01, 2007

Macabre Country

haha! happy new years peoples!

i had a good time.. and after getting home with emily, we stayed up a bit and watched some pbs television.. and it was this crazy flamenco guitar jam out thing, and i got sorta inspired by it, i guess..

i woke up kinda late, and did this little guy - pretty much just to play matt's nylon guitar a bit.. maybe a bit indulgent.

Macabre Country

and now emily and jonpaul and i are hanging out, playing guitars and talking about routers. network, that is.