Stuff

In recent weeks, I've been rather busy with the writing I do for my day job (which is technical), and I haven't had much time to write about what's been going on music-wise. But I have a moment or two of down time, so I thought I'd so a little newsy "here's what's up" post.

1. Recording
   Not much to report. Since we had to cancel a session before the holidays, everyone's been too busy to schedule anything. My next big plan is to get the whole trio together with the producer and record "She Walked Away" (which, after all, is the main track for the EP), but that takes more coordinating than just me taking a couple hours off. We'll try to get that together by mid-February at the latest.
   


2. Songwriting
   I have been writing a lot of songs, or at least parts of songs. It's like a faucet I can't turn off: they just keep coming. Most of the ideas I have end up on the dust heap, or at best end up as half a song in my journal, something I'll look at later when I have time and see if there's enough there to develop. But I have written or rewritten a few complete songs that I'm happy with, so I keep tinkering with the live set list and re-conceiving the layout of the EP. Good thing we're behind on recording, I guess.



3. Shows
   Redlight Cafe, February 2nd. I'm really excited about this show: Years ago, when my band was "Adam's Cat," we played the Redlight all the time. It's still run by the same proprietor, and it's still a great music venue. If you're in Atlanta, come a little early (we start at 8:00) and let's have a great time!



4. New Site
   I was so tickled by the redesign here, I updated MediumLoud to more or less match. It's really a thinly-concealed blog, which makes it a bit easier for me to update and shifts the server load to Google. Hope you like it!
   



5. T-Shirts
   And finally, I've opened a T-Shirt Store over at Cafe Press just for the heck of it. The design is based on the poster I did for the Redlight show, and I just thought it was cool so I made a shirt from it. Of course, the advantage of CP is, I don't have to cough up any money up front for the shirts like I would with a screen printing shop. They use direct print technology, and it's really high-quality stuff -- not just a cheesy iron-on. Proceeds (such as they are) go to defray recording costs.
   

-Peace!

New Design

As you will have noticed, I bowed to the blandishments of new blogger layout tools, the complaints of a number of folks that they can't see the text on my blog very well, and my own desire to "turn on the lights." As part of the re-design, I changed the URL (it's a long story, but it amounts to making it easier for me to deal with and putting most of the load back on Google). So, on the off chance that you've linked to the old URL, please update to http://blog.mediumloud.com

Lemme know how you like it!

Update: I'm redesigning my main page too: MediumLoud.com It also uses blogger now (which means there's a little delay as it re-directs. Also, I'm updating this to get this back at the top of the feed because apparently I edited an old post and whacked the sort order. Grr.

She Cut Her Hair

According to my journal, "She Cut Her Hair" was the working title of "She Walked Away" in the early weeks of its life. I was playing on Billy Bragg's version of "Walk Away Renee" which ends, "And then one day it happened: she cut her hair and I quit loving her." The concept of the song, at that stage, was to portray the end of a relationship that would have no lasting effect on the characters involved. It's narrated from the male point of view (though not first person), and he's left standing there contemplating not the meaning of life, but trivia, such as "a taste in his mouth." In the earliest version, he wonders if the taste might be a new lip gloss.

The song continued in that vein, with the man's detachment growing as the literal distance increases between them. As he "feels himself forgetting" the little unexplained lover's memories -- "the museum, the parking lot, those jeans she'd always wear" (at one point it was "the museum, the ferry ride, those awful bands she loved") -- her impact on his life seems to be fading from his consciousness along with those memories.

Then came a clearly-defined turning point: I wrote in my journal about "listening to Graceland"; a lyric from that song changed my "She Walked Away" (as I was by then calling it). Paul Simon sang, "losing love is like a window in your heart: Everybody sees you're blown apart." And I realized what I was trying to write was a lie.

Or at least it was not emotionally honest to pretend that two people could just walk away without any damage. It might make for a clever song, maybe even an interesting song, but it wasn't the basis for a true song. The influence of the Graceland lyric is direct. The first change I made was to add the bridge:

Maybe they'll both feel the damage
Maybe they'll be blown apart
Maybe he'll fell so transparent
Like the world can see his heart.

The rest of the changes were pretty small. It didn't take much from there to suggest that the character is engaging in wishful thinking by trying to convince himself that it won't matter. But changing the tone of the song also helped a number of the images coalesce and provided the sense of disorientation I needed for the refrain -- "How should he feel?" and "He knows it's not real?"

I said above that before changing the song it wasn't true, yet I've said in an earlier post that this song isn't literally about me. So here's why that's not a contradiction. Of course I've had my share of "walking away" scenes in my life, and I certainly drew on bits of my own history for the song. Because of where and who I was in my life as I wrote the song, I think I had a lot invested in construing things as if those scenes had had no impact on my life, certainly no lasting impact. I remember hearing Bono years ago make a long, rambling speech upon receipt of some Grammy or another. He said writing good music was fundamentally about the decision to reveal rather than to conceal. Always seemed odd to me, but I finally understood it, I think, when I changed this song. I think he meant that it's not good enough to tell yourself, "this isn't about me" and write a bit of fluff. I guess, if you want to write a song that's true, you have to start by being truthful with yourself. To write this song, I had to risk a little bit of transparency; I had to be willing to admit that I had felt the damage, and that in some ways, maybe I still do.

Had a Post . . .

Big and strong /
Turned around and found my blog post gone.

(Sung to the tune of Jane's Addiction's "Had a Dad," if you didn't pick up the reference).

I wrote a very long, very personal installment in the "She Walked Away" series, but it fell through the crack between the bed and the wall. Or more precisely, it fell through the crack made by the upgrade to the new version of Blogger and its interaction with my post editing software. So I'm bummed, and I can't quite face trying to reconstruct it yet. So forgive me for being so tardy in my posting. It's not for want of caring about you, dear reader.

While I'm rambling, I might as well mention: I thinking I'm going to reinstate my old blog, "I Shudder to Think" to write about general music and songwriting things -- stuff not directly related to this recording project. I wrote a new song this week called "Voices" (which I'll probably play Wednesday at Java Monkey), so maybe I'll write something about that over there. We'll see. blah blah blah. I have a headache. Guess I should go back to work.


Technorati Tags: Jane's Addiction, blogger, headaches, boredom, she walked away