Dennis came by again yesterday and this time he brought Mike!
A most welcome gathering of consummate professionals and outstanding individuals overall!
Although they appear to be looking for dropped Cheetos on the carpet or something during the intro.
If you're new here, you can download the original recording of this song here.
Posted January 31, 2011
I've been working on a new music page that consolidates all my album tracks, demos, live tracks and other stuff into one big streaming pile o' tunes. There's a beta version up now for you to play with. It works best in Firefox and Safari -- there are a few layout bugs in IE8 which I intend to fix later.
My twin goals here are to 1) help new visitors better discover all the crazy stuff I have available, and 2) more quickly find the stuff they'd like the most. Plus: bigger buttons!
Your thoughts are of course appreciated. Is this useful? Am I on the right path? Gotta be a few opinionated webdev folks out there still reading this site...
Some technical notes after the jump, if you care. Otherwise, have at it!
I built this using Scott Schiller's excellent SoundManager2 audio library which has an excellent JavaScript API and really does use HTML5 audio where the browser (ahem, Safari) supports it.
I used jQuery for the sorting panel controls. With the exception of the tiny Flash component used by SM2, everything else is done with good ol' HTML, CSS2/3 and JavaScript.
TODOS:
Posted January 24, 2011
I'm writing this just a few hours after a show at the Tractor Tavern with Explone, so this might not actually be me but residual post-gig adrenaline in the driver's seat.
I want to note here that I'll very likely look back on 2010 as one of my most musically active years. Explone released a record; Kirby Krackle also released a record, wrote a commisioned song for Marvel and flew all over the place performing at comic-cons; I myself released two EPs and a bunch of instrumentals, and also began co-writing on that secret project that is still gaining momentum. I've been incredibly lucky to fall in with such a top-shelf crowd of artists and human beings.
Despite all that, something bugs me. I haven't played a live solo gig in ages. Since May 2009, in fact. And for better or for worse, I'm not feeling compelled to play live much anymore.
Let me unpack that: I like playing live. A lot. Explone and KK provide me plenty of stage time. What I'm liking less is all the overhead that goes along with gigging. The phone calls, the emails, the requisite begging and pleading to get a booking, and then the requisite begging and pleading to get people to put aside their Netflix and video games and child-rearing duties and come to the show.
Those parts have never been fun, but now there's a twist: I don't think I need it the way I used to. Maybe my ego doesn't require the validation of a live audience as it once did. Recently I've been much more content to simply write, record and release songs, and skip the playing out part.
After the release party for Save You From Yourself back in summer 2008, Dennis, Suzanne and I discussed the possibility of doing more shows together. But excitement for that idea dried up as time passed and I continued to Just. Not. Book. Shows. I still feel a bit terrible about that, but I think there was an additional factor in play: mentally, I had crossed a finish line. The record was done and had sold a bunch of copies. The show was a success and was now over.
I had set goals and achieved them. Yay! Now what? You can only spend so many Fridays crammed in a corner with a decrepit PA with missing cables, trying to be heard above the grind of the espresso machine, before you realize that maybe this isn't actually a path but an endless loop.
Ah, but live shows are where the money's at, right? Yes. I can tell you for certain that, in my experience, I have earned more cash as a musician performing live, than from selling CDs or MP3s. Orders-of-magnitude more. But still not enough to feel like I'm leaving money on the table when I'm not gigging.
I would "do music" even if there were no money in it. What I miss is the serendipity that comes from entertaining people.
I guess what I want to get across here is:
Overall, I guess it's a good thing, because I still get to make music more-or-less undistracted. But it's hard not to feel a little low and bewildered as I grapple with this idea that maybe I'm just not that guy anymore.
Posted January 20, 2011
Continuing with the series of instrumental mixes from Look Back On This And Laugh, here is "Love My Way."
[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - Love My Way (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]
It takes guts to take one of the most celebrated pieces of the post-punk/New Wave canon and render it as an oozy, golden-syrup acoustic pop ballad. Guts, I say. Well, that's what I said to myself, repeatedly, in the bathroom mirror, gripping the edges of the sink in terror, finally splashing some cold water on my face before marching resolutely to the laptop and clicking the Publish button.
FUN FACT! I reworked the drum machine intro at least three times because it kept sounding a little too much like "In The Air Tonight." The 80s: I kind of live there, in my head.
When I released the first mix of this song in late 2008, US licensing issues placed a restriction on the number of copies I could make available to listeners. Since then I've been trying out an online service called Limelight, which acts as a proxy between me and whomever holds the mechanical rights to the songs I want to cover. It's pretty much set-and-forget and I've been really impressed with the service so far. Anyway, the end result is it's much easier for me to offer near-infinite copies of cover songs, so long as I continue to foot the bill.
Here's the original, with vocals:
Posted January 19, 2011
Dennis came over last weekend and we recorded this:
You can find the MP3 for this song here.
Happy 2011!
(Aside: why does YouTube always automatically select the thumbnail that makes me look like a lunatic?)
Posted January 10, 2011
I am just so darn pleased to offer you these acoustic versions of tracks from Look Back On This And Laugh, collected in a handy digital EP format!
Um, it's probably inaccurate to call these "acoustic" since there are still plenty of electric guitars here. Some still have bass lines and drums left in, some have the drums replaced with congas, et al. And some tracks like "We Had A Good Thing" make no sense if you remove all the electric bits. Sort of a mixed bag. So think of them more as stripped-down alternate versions.
The download is a ZIP file of five 320K MP3s, and the whole thing is pay-what-you-like with a minimum of US$1 (that's one US dollar).
Here are the tracks for your listening pleasure:
Posted December 14, 2010
Is it uncool to admit that I was going for a big, epic Coldplay-esque sound?
[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - We Had A Good Thing (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]
(There's also an an acoustic demo of this song on the Demos page.)
For the remix, I pushed the drums further forward and added some snappy reverb. I also had to create a track just for vocal reverb, because the bit of delay you can hear during the choruses was automated in Cakewalk and I didn't want to have to recreate it again in REAPER. So I ended up exporting just the delay as a separate track, plopping it onto a USB stick and importing it into the new mix.
I dig the guitarsenal sound I managed to get and I'm especially pleased with bass lines. I'm less happy with my vocals -- I was pretty stressed out when it was time to record them and there are a few spots where I wish I would have done just one more take. I generally need to be more choosy with my vocal takes. But now, nah.
Fun fact: the electric guitars in the first verse originally had a reggae arrangement that sounded a lot like Roxanne, but the Police. So much so, so scarily so, that I ditched them and replaced them with the echoey guitars you hear now.
Here's the full track from Look Back On This And Laugh.
Posted December 9, 2010
Here's another instrumental track for you -- this time it's "Gold Star (Feel Like A Ghost)."
[audio:lbotal-mp3-instr/Scott Andrew - Gold Star (Feel Like A Ghost) (instrumental).mp3|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]
Some notes: I love the dry guitar sounds, but I wish they were louder. In retrospect, I think the drums are panned too wide and are getting in the way of those guitars. I was going for a Bob Mould roar, but I think the result was more Interpol.
The eerie swirling synth-like sounds during the third verse and outro are actually made by a FL Studio plugin effect called BeepMap, which generates sound from an image file. I think I used my Gravatar image to create the sound pattern, tuned it to match the song, then stretched it to the tempo. Ain't technology great?
I don't think I've ever played this song live! Too bad, it's a favorite of mine to play solo acoustic.
Below is the full track from Look Back On This And Laugh with vocals:
Posted November 16, 2010
I'm in the studio with Kirby Krackle today laying down some tracks for something we're calling "Project: MOONBASE."
Maybe to launch next week? We'll see.
Posted November 14, 2010
[audio:secret-2010/02.mp3|no_dl=1|no_twitter=1|no_fb=1]
The secret songwriting project I announced earlier this year is still rolling. We didn't get around to recording this summer as originally planned, but that's okay because there's still a lot of writing to do.
Sign up for updates as we get closer to our official launch.
Posted November 12, 2010