Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
We performed three shows in a week and by the third show i hated all of our songs. As i type this i am humming some of our songs in my head to see if i like them and i dont really like them which is ironic because i wrote them. Is that irony? The difficulty i am having with this group is that i have no idea what our sound is supposed to be. It was easy with the Joiner Inners. It should all sound sort of like Guided by Voices or Superchunk or Pavement or Sebadoh or Chavez if we were feeling saucy. I dont know what this new stuff is supposed to sound like. I dont know what i want it to sound like. I really just want the songs to be good and i dont know if any but one of them are. there is a chance i am being to hard on myself and i can accept that. it just really bothers me that none of these songs are clubbing me in the throat with goodness the way the Buildup did and the way You and Yours and Combination of Things did. The old Three Way Duel stuff grew on me and i think all of the Joiner Inner stuff i great, even the stuff that is terrible i think it is all fantastic. I dont know about the Twas Windmills. Oh and if anyone has not yet heard my sure fire cure for a pulled muscle in your back then here you go, you can give your thanks at a later date: 12-15 advil in a 3 hour period, 3 beers (I drank 2 Harpoon Summers and a Michelob but feel free to experiment with whatever you like), play an outdoor festival show and then wheel your amp back to your car two blocks away. Next day when you wake up, no more back pain.
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Thursday, February 21st, 2008
I made a decision last night that this would be my last post about American Idol unless something really unbelievable occurs. There are probably 100,000,000 people that blog about their every thought regarding American Idol and that is not why i got this blog. So, my final thoughts on this years American Idol are as follows: a girl is going to win. They were pretty good last night, not great, i could do without most of them but a few showed that they had some vocal chops and some personality and thats all im looking for when i watch this show. I counted 4 out of 24 contestants who fit this bill and they are all girls. The rest of them cannot sing and are socially awkward. Those are two things that i dont want in my pop stars.
The name of this blog is “A Combination of Things” and while it fits my blog it is actually the name of a song that I wrote a couple of years ago but finally recorded with the Joiner Inners last year. Its a pretty good song I think. I have always thought that it had a kind of Replacements feel to it. I think its kind of shambley and rough, not rough like tough but rough like not clean, a little sloppy, all good things. I’ve got a red notebook next to me as a write this and its first 3 pages are filled, front and back, with things i want to write about in this blog. Ive broken them down into some simple categories that you can see over to the right there, yeup right over there. If you allow me to ramble some more ill get to my point. I bring up the song because, i never at any point sat down and wrote out a set of new lyrics for the tune, i never felt inspired to do so. I had already given it the name and one night, i think i may have been watching a baseball game, I’m a Mets fan by the way but we’ll get to that at another date, I started sifting through this manila folder I have that is filled with yellow legal sheets and scraps of receipt paper and envelopes and Chinese food take out menus, all of them containing ideas for stories and books and movies and lyrics written in my very distinctive chicken scratch. I have accomplished very little in the time i have already put in on this planet but these manila folders with all of my many years of accumulated notes and thoughts i think shows me that i have the potential do something pretty great, I’m talking about great creatively. I’m not going to be president, although I’m not sure how great being president is, and I’m not going to cure cancer and I’m not going to climb a mountain because I’m afraid of heights and people that climb mountains are crazy not great. The end of this story is this, I was watching a Mets game and i was looking through this folder and pulling out anything that i thought might make a good lyric. i was remembering where i was and what i was doing when i was making these notes. I had my guitar next to me and a fresh legal pad with “A Combination of things” written across the top of it. when i thought i had enough lyric ideas i started writing them down and after a little trimming and a little editing and a little revising and a little more of all of them, i had myself a tune. a pretty good tune. Not a great tune, because i think I’ve only written one great song in my life and i only think that because everyone tells me it is but Combination of Things is a pretty good song and I’m proud of it i guess. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is this, This blog is going to be just like that song. I’m going to take little pieces of myself that i have accumulated throughout my existence and I’m going to write about them and by the end of what I’m writing my views on them may have changed. By the end of reviewing a movie i might find that i didnt like it that much when at the beginning of the review i said it was the greatest movie i have ever seen. Maybe ill review a record after one listen and hate it but maybe ill listen to it while I’m reviewing it and the guitars on the fourth track will do something i didnt notice before and i wont be able stop listening to it for a week. maybe the drums start to shake out a beat that is impossible for one man to play but you dont hear the second man or that second set of hands and the record finds its way into the open slot in my top 15 records of all time. Little things that dont mean anything all of the sudden coming together to mean something. It may not mean anything to you and i absolutely respect that but i think blogs are kind of personal. The fact that people read them is almost secondary. You write for yourself and if you do it well enough and interesting enough maybe someone starts to pay attention but you do it, I do it, first, to put the pieces of myself into some kind of order, to archive them by date and category and if you’re honest with yourself as you go when you’re done you can show it to someone and say this is me. whether you agree with me or not, this is all that Ive got.
(click on the link “Combination of Things” in the Blogroll to hear the tune at my old bands myspace which i have renamed. i dont think i need to tell anyone what the new name is)
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