Seattle is currently under a sheet of snowy ice! The back door to my house is literally frozen shut and I've been housebound for three days. Luckily I have soup, grilled cheese, a couch-cushion fort to keep away the ice weasels, and the new Kin to Stars single cookin' up. We're performing our third-show ever at the newly-relocated Wayward Coffee in Seattle on January 28th. Details are here on the Facebooks. Hopefully we'll all be thawed out by then.
In other news, I'm promoting snowgnarok as an alternative to snowpocalypse and snowmaggedon, which are both totally played. Please help draw attention to this campaign by changing your Twitter avatar to a light shade of completely white.
I've decided that I don't hate the new Van Halen song and video. The song is 100% not-great VH but all the familiar elements are there, except for maybe Wolfgang.
Beyond the fact that I couldn't stop singing "sexy dragon magiiic!" under my breath for a few hours, this song and video had very little impact on me, other than what I expect from any other viral media thing. I consumed it as I do all media these days: in front of a computer screen, with headphones on. I watched, I was amused, I moved on.
I was not sitting at a computer screen with headphones on when I first heard Van Halen's "Summer Nights." Instead, I was in a car with my high school buddies, on one of the last days of the school year. It was almost summer, finally warm enough to go without a jacket, and we were cruising around the sticks listening to FM radio. Van Halen had just released 5150, Sammy Hagar had replaced Diamond Dave and we were all LOSING OUR MINDS over it.
And when my buddy Jeff jammed the cassette of 5150 into the car's stereo and the opening chords of "Summer Nights" started playing, we pulled up alongside another car at a red light and Pat began rolling the windows down so the occupants could see us stick our heads out just in time to shout out in goofy fist-pumping unison with Sammy:
UHN!
And then peel away, rolling the windows up like nothing happened.
I'm holding out hope that as digital music moves to mobile, away from screens and headphones, there'll be more chances for things that are momentarily interesting to become really awesome moments for someone.
"During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as 'undeliverable,' and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost."
As the story of Lakhdar Boumediene's experience at Guantanamo winds its way across the internet, all I can think of is everyone who told me that if people were being held in that place, there were probably good reasons for it, because if there weren't they wouldn't be in Guantanamo. How ridiculous to think so.
A long time ago I got called for jury duty and spent two days hanging around a city courthouse. To my surprise, I got selected for a trial. During the voir dire phase of juror selection, the defense and prosecuting attorneys took turns asking us questions intended to determine if any of us were unfairly prejudiced, crazy or just extra unhappy to be there.
The defense attorney singled me out. He gestured at the defendant. "Obviously he's done something wrong, or he wouldn't be here, right?"
Of course, the answer to this is no -- in fact it is his right to be here, to have a trial at which to plead his case. Because, allegedly, that's how we roll in the US of A, no matter how sensationalized your story has become. The defendant had probably spent a single evening in the county lockup that previous night, and I could see it in his expression: thank God I am here.
It's pretty easy to get a gig. If you live here, there are hundreds of coffeeshops, open mics, art galleries, restaurants and other venues that will let you work your craft in front of an audience, without expecting you to pack the place. You might be competing with an espresso machine and people might have their noses in their MacBooks and regular books, but if you're content to be background music while you work up your chops, you won't be lacking opportunities to play.
The locals are still proud of the grunge thing. When I moved here I was hesitant to even mention "grunge" to anyone, figuring most locals would be sooo over it. I'm happy to say that's not the case at all. Those who grew up here in the 90s remember how exciting those days were, when the city was the heart of a new musical groundswell. I haven't met any locals embarrassed to still be Pearl Jam or Soundgarden fans.
It's more tribes-y than clique-y. Every scene has its inner circle, but I don't think you can buy your way in with expensive equipment and stage clothes. Despite Seattle's reputation for being chilly, its musicians are some of the warmest, friendliest people I've met (that goes double for the native sons and daughters), and they tend to form tribes and small communities which are not impenetrable to anyone who puts in a good faith effort to know them. (Best way to do that? Join a band.)
It's isolated. It's three hours to Portland OR, four hours to Spokane and forever to anywhere beyond that. Unlike anywhere east of the Ohio River, where an hour or two in any direction gets to you to a considerably populated metropolis. This leads to a kind of self-containment, where a band from Portland might have a hard time finding a gig in Seattle because there's no shortage of local acts to choose from. This also works in reverse for Seattle acts trying to land gigs outside of Seattle. A challenge all around.
It's not all indie folk. There are thriving hip-hop and metal scenes, a resurgence of indie funk and soul, and we even have an upstart rock orchestra. KEXP might be our most famous FM station, but we've also got major triple-A in KMTT, hard rock and metal in KISW, and more than a few country, pop and dance stations. We're home several independent electronica festivals, and the annual Folklife festival draws thousands of spectators every year. (And yes, we do have quite a bit of folky stuff at the moment, thank you. Guilty as charged.) Whatever you're into, there's a niche for you here somewhere.
Despite entering my eighth dark, miserably rain-soaked Seattle winter, this place still tops my list of favorite places I've lived.
Last weekend I experimented with GarageBand's built-in guitar amp modeling. My god. I could not believe the sounds I was getting, and just from default settings! I don't know if Apple's amp modeling is done in-house or not, but it certainly rivals anything I've heard from Line 6. I did some rock demos that to my ear sound like they were cut in Butch Vig's garage, and I didn't use a single microphone.
Apple software is amazing. At some point in the past few years, Apple figured out how get the software out of the user's way and just let you make stuff. It goes beyond the user interface stuff and deep into the product itself.
For example, iMovie comes with a limited set of filters and transitions, so you can add special effects to a clip or make fancy jump cuts. But here's the genius: you only get a handful of filters, but those filters are nearly perfect with default settings. If you're a knob-twiddler you won't appreciate this, but iMovie is not about knob-twiddling, it's about letting you make a damn movie on your laptop.
This tendency toward ease, toward letting you make something, is even more evident in GarageBand. There's no "mixer view" like you'd get with Logic or ProTools, but who cares. The stock instruments actually sound good, and while you can tweak the settings of plug-in effects as much as you like, the default settings of the various reverbs, compressors, EQs are so good, you can almost sense the hand of some anonymous Apple engineer who had the good sense to say "hey, how awesome would it be if whoever uses this thing doesn't have to mess with it?"
And then there are those guitar amp modelers. It's almost comical.
I'm a late, reluctant Apple convert. I had one of the first iBooks and grew to hate early OSX, nothing seemed ready for any serious work. I tend to view computers as I do automobiles. For some people, a car is a lifestyle expression. For me, a car is a chair on four wheels that takes me where I want to go. I've only owned one new car in my lifetime, and I chose the basest base model I could find because I truly do not give a damn. Likewise, I never cared that my main machine was a beige box so long as it let me do the stuff I wanted.
For me, the switch to a MacBook was not for fashion-forward reasons but because I just wanted stuff to work, good lord why can't this stuff just work instead of requiring me to don scuba gear and go cave-diving into the Settings menu, scanning ad-laden messageboard posts for out-of-date clues as to what this ASIO error means and why that driver doesn't work because it's not ported to 64-bit yet and suddenly it's two or three hours down the drain and I really wanted to record vocals tonight but now I'm tired and I have to be at work early tomorrow and screw this, I just want to make this one thing, why is all this stuff in my way?
This is how the world ends, not in fire or ice, nor with a bang or whimper, but when everything can be done satisfactorily on a MacBook Pro.
Last night I watched the Cameron Crowe Pearl Jam documentary, Pearl Jam 20. Some thoughts:
in hindsight, Mother Love Bone was a lot more glam than I remember.
I had forgotten all that crazy climbing Eddie did during concerts. The shots of Jeff looking up at Eddie hanging overhead were great.
there's an early scene where Stone (I think?) talks about returning demoralized from LA and considers giving up on being a rock musician. It seems to me this is a common thread in a lot of rock docs, with one person on the verge of washing out completely but deciding to give it one last go.
the scenes during the Ticketmaster hearings where various committee members admit an ignorance of "grunge" and "alternative music" are as cringe-inducing as the recent SOPA hearings.
I never really bought the whole "we hate being famous -- ohh, the spotlight, it burns" shtick and I still don't. Equally cringe-inducing. Although if the doc is to be believed, that was mostly Eddie.
Confidential to Mr. McCready: you look badass with grey hair.
the whole doc is comprised of footage shot in the 90s so the whole doc feels like an unearthed episode of MTV's 120 Minutes. I think I've seen the future of Instagram filters.
the "drummer story" bit was cute but unfortunately that was the part I most most wanted to hear about!
Drummer and good pal Josh Williams is moving to Boulder this week, thus leaving Explone to carry on without him. Patrick has written some words you should read about Josh over here -- they've been friends for longer than I've known either of them and have a lot of shared history. Josh and Pat were Explone for the debut Crooks album, which I first randomly discovered via MySpace and it was Josh's high-precision drum work that drew me to that record in the first place, long before I came aboard as bassist.
If you listened at all to Dreamers/Lovers or Crooks, you know that Josh isn't content to just hold down the pocket. While tracking the new Telescope and Satellite EP, Josh's criteria for what made a take worth keeping came down to what he thought would inspire kids to take up drums. I think that says plenty.
I'm sad to see Josh leave town, but also really happy for him and his wife Katherine, because awesome people deserve to have things like careers that pay bills. I'll miss his drumming, but I'll miss his jokes and stories even more. Treat them well, Colorado! Or else.
As to the fate of Explone? Read Patrick's post for those details. Safe travels, big guy.
"Well guys, looks like we are awesome." -- Josh Williams
"Like most things on the planet, thinking about doing it is a lot
worse than simply sitting down and doing it. The writing wasn’t hard
to do, you just need to plant ass in seat and go from there."
Sci-fi author John Scalzi, declaring the completion of his first novel to a newsgroup in 1997. Reminds me of the the songwriting advice I got from Pat DiNizio years ago: "No. Nope. Ass in chair. That's the only way."
