Category: music and video

i got home tonight and picked up the strat. six point five hours later, 4:30 AM, many recorded tracks later, i am listening to a really good song (or at least i *think*. check it out in its roughest state, and listen through to the bridge please). the time flew by, as it always does when all cylinders are firing on music. it’s my form of meditation. now my head is completely clear. or maybe it’s just super late.

speaking of tunes, check out the theme song jane and i did for the 1up show. the extended party mix will come out in a week or so.

i took another pass at the mixes on a couple of recent songs. actually, i should probably be tracking vocals for real this time, and not just tinkering with the mixes, but here they are so give them a listen.

15 minutes on a train
stellar profile
diner in the city
someone else’s dream

ok it’s 6:30 AM. how did that happen?

there is something fairly cinematic about looking around a train at night in a thunderstorm with headphones on. especially when you are sitting next to some pretty stranger. i have been listening to quadrophenia lately again, and this is something of a response to the alienation and insanity of jimmy on the 5:15. so check it out. (i’m really not done with it, but for a night’s worth of work i think it shaped into something sort of cool. cool enough to put on the intarweb at least).

i have now been to three airshows for fleet week in san francsico. the first two times (i can only find one post…) on the boate, and then yesterday on the land. i went over there with my mom, phil, jim and carol. i will say this: it’s not as easy as you would think to shoot these things steadily with a small sony dv cam handheld. but i think that my years of videogame sniper training helps…

i went over and joined about 500 people on the corner of solano and the alameda to protest the war in iraq. my brother sent me a couple of pictures from the one he went to down in venice. mom is still out there in ojai i imagine. here is a short video. next time i will bring properly charged batteries.

i went up to point richmond yesterday to pick up my mainsail, which was in for repairs, and i took along the video camera and shot a little rambling piece about all the building that’s going on up there. this is the first one i have edited with final cut. i tried to keep it pretty rough, this is NOT intended to be hard-hitting comentary, just some obsevations about the place, told stream-of consciousness style.

seems like the overcoat/train platform/cigarette mood has already struck here in berkeley, and it’s still only august. here’s a rough mix of it.

it was my brother’s birthday yesterday. bret is the best brother that anyone could have. he should play bass more often though. here he is in action, playing some sick wah bass on the track “dystopia” from the record he made possible, “full range”. pete finestone on drums. (FUCK! where’s my wikipedia page?)

i was in trader joe’s on tuesday, thinking about how i’ve read that supermarkets are the new singles meeting places. they certainly have always been a bit of a scene where i grew up, in hollywood. plenty of hot dudes and chicks strolling the aisles looking to be “discovered”. here in berkeley you don’t get much of that, but you more than occasionally will see someone who looks like they dressed to stalk panties rather than stock the pantry. or catch a man rather than buy a ham. you know the ones, leering over the tops of their mirrored sunglasses at the charmin. this song, supers are the new meat market, is for those people.
if you hadn’t heard, mundane is the new punk.

i keep sitting down to make a tune completely out of loops, and each time i fire up the keyboard or a guitar and start playing along. i really dig the hammond and wurlitzer sounds in logic (as well as the bad ass rhodes). come to think of it, all the synths are purely tasteful as well. here is a little snippet of what i worked on tonight. it is two separate worlds slapping against each other, but somehow i think it works, at least for a quickie little session on a hot night, the first of june.

i was playing around with the upgraded logic tonight and started a tune. i told myself that i was ONLY going to use loops for a change, as an experiment in composing, but before i knew it i was knee deep in cables, guitars, keyboards, and microphones. i went to see the documentary about haskell wexler last night, and there was a trailer for a steve mcqueen bio before it, and for some reason this tune sounds like a mcqueen/clint eastwood score to me. pump it through some speakers or headphones.

i finished some stuff i was working on this afternoon and decided i would try strumming something for the cam. i heard this radiohead song on the radio when i was in LA last week, and i remembered listening to it and getting all misty on at least one occasion years ago, so i thought i would play and sing it to see if i could get to the bottom of why it was so moving back then. i might need to use external microphones, the vocals didn’t really cut through the guitar. i just had a listen on headphones and the stereo separation sounds pretty cool.

it looked like it was going to be a beautiful day on the water when phil and i left my apartment. by the time we reached the marina about eight minutes later, a different story was unfolding. the fog was pushing in fast, wind was high, and the swellls looked formidable. so instead, i shot some vid from the safety of the berkeley pier.

yesterday phil kin and i decided that, having successfully reached hump day, we should spend the afternoon sailing (vid). we tied up at angel island and had sandwiches, then cruised over to tiburon and tied up there and had coffee. we were going to have a drink at sam’s on their deck looking over the dock where the boate was tied, but the waiter told us that we would have to sit elsewhere, as they were only serving dinner on the deck. (there were 30 empty tables). i think, but am not sure, this may have had something to do with my “drink and ditch” joke moments earlier. it would have been pretty tough for the waiter to catch us if we escaped on the boate, parked about 15 yards away from the table we wanted. but it was pure stupidity to shut down three thirsty boaters, in my opinion.
there was ONE other person on angel island that was not a park ranger. it was extra cool.

i was trying to figure out why some of citizen x‘s videos of the band massengil aren’t playing on internet archive just now, and i ran across this clip of me playing on the boate a couple weeks back that i thought had vanished into the ether.

i have uploaded the video of yesterday’s sail to angel island. it also turns into an interesting comparison of compression formats, at least if you have the latest version of quicktime. if you are on a mac and have QT 7 installed, you can watch the vastly superior and smaller file-sized(7.5MB) H.264 version. if you are on a windows machine and have the latest version of QT for windows (6.5 as of this writing) you can check out the larger file-sized (8.6MB), smaller screen image MPEG-4 version. the music is a clip from a song i am working on. best listened to on HEADPHONES.

finally got out on the water today with mj, chris, and glenda. it was an awesome day and many photos were taken and i shot a video.

yeah, that word is lame. but i went down to emeryville this afternoon and bought a sony dv cam. i think this may give me someplace to put songs while i am working on them: in the soundtracks of my video.
i put this one up on ourmedia, but it doesn’t seem to be live yet. so i put it up here in the meantime.
UPDATE: ourmedia published it quick! nice work!

joi and i were IMing today, he’s been messing around in garageband, and we decided to make a track together. we were talking about how to go about it, and i said “why don’t you start the car, and i’ll jump in,” something i heard bob dylan say to tom petty on a tape of them drunkenly playing the lounge of a holiday inn one night when they were on tour together.
joi came up with some tracks in garageband, with some lessig soundbites, then flew the track over to my computer, and i loaded it into logic and added some stuff and did a little compressing and EQ. it’s quite different than the acoustic guitar stuff i’ve been working on, and it was a lot of fun. i think we’re going to do more. further info will be at the “permission granted” information clearinghouse (the name for the project).

click here to hear another rough mix coming out of the workshop over here in berkeley. still very rough, but i’m kicking it out the door for now. the lead vocal is a quick pass. i just wanted to get it recorded and live with it a while.

two nights ago i was im’ing late night with mj, and i sent her an mp3 of what i was working on at 2:30 a.m. she did a little free association typing while she was listening to it, and i liked her idea of sitting across from someone in a diner and feeling like a king. so i went with that idea. you may be thinking, what the fuck? nobody dies in this song, nothing blows up, and it’s kind of soft. don’t worry, the rockers are coming up.

“diner in the city”

so many dreams so many desktop themes
the open windows are overwhelming
so many places so many things
so many people to be
let’s call in sick and sell all our shit
and move to a tropical island
imagination running wild
but it doesn’t get better than this

with you
in this booth, in this diner, in this city
it’s the only place on earth for me

so many hours of so many days
i’m just driven to distraction
thinking ahead or looking back
taking me out of the action
tonight i’m not thinking about anything else
except how lucky i am
maybe just a little, a little about the future
because i’d sure like to it again

in this booth, in this diner, in this city
with you
it’s the only place on earth for me