Sneak Preview - Copernicus and Me

Each Monday until our second full-length album Come For the Peaks, Stay For the Valleys is released in late-November, I'll be posting a song off the record on our myspace page for you to preview and enjoy and talking a little bit about each song on this here blog.

Week three: "Copernicus and Me."

This was the last song I wrote for the album and once we all learned the song and played it a few times, I thought it would be shoved towards the back of the album and rarely make an appearance in our live set. It's dynamically static which is unusual for my songwriting, but after we got mixes of the songs on the record, it really stood out and was oddly catchy for having so many timing trip-ups in it. It's now one of my top two favorite songs on the record.

I didn't do as much screwing around with weird guitar noises on this album as I did our first, but one thing I messed with was the pitch shifter function on my Boss PS-5. I scooped up two individual notes in stereo right before the chorus. I also played around with slide noises on the intro and mid-song breakdown, parts of the song where I finally channeled me some motherflippin' Shannon Wright. Fun!

I guess there's not technically a chorus in this song, but the line, "With whom did you wake up?" was one of the only recycled bits from songwriting past on this album, except when I originally wrote the line it was, "Who did you wake up with?" It bugged me that I ended a line with the word, "with" but hopefully it doesn't sound too pretentious to start a line with the words, "With whom." Sometimes I hate writing lyrics. But the pretentiousness fits the meaning of the song. The lyrics are actually a big confession about how much of a jerk I am, and how much of a jerk I was to someone I had already hurt in the past. "With whom did you wake up?" isn't a line sung out of jealousy, but out of arrogance. I'm a dick and nobody should EVER date me*. Seriously.

And not to be all self-congratulatory, but this song has one my favorite phrases I've ever written, "Sing my credo of orchestrated tales / flip my wrist / direct clandestine wails / we relate within the walls." Here's the whole song:

I am the sun
I am the light
I am the atoms that you excite
It’s about me
It’s not about you
Stop being all talk
Tell me something new

Black is the new black
And I’m back to the start
Of burning bridges
And breaking hearts
It’s about me
It’s not about you
Stop being all talk
Tell me something new
Tell me something

With whom did you wake up?

I am the cause
I am the effect
I have no misconceptions about
how I made this mess
It’s about me
It’s not about you
Stop being all talk
Tell me something new
Tell me something

I am the dark
I am the moon
I am enclosed in a
Foul, dank cocoon
It’s about me
It’s not about you
Equivocate by blaming you
Oh déjà vu

It’s not what happens in the room
It’s what contained within the walls

Sing my credo of orchestrated tales
Flip my wrist, direct clandestine wails
We relate within the walls
I’ll take what I can get
Once again you take the fall
Do I push or do you fall?

So, there you go. Thanks to everyone who came out to my solo show at the Mars Bar last Thursday! I can't believe our next show is going to be our secret show with our new drummer, Weston. IT'S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME WE PLAY A SHOW AS A BAND.

*With one giant king cobra exception.

Happy Birthday, H Is for Hellgate Blog!

I just realized that the end of September marks the birth of this here blog. I've been telling the world about my dumb band crap for two years now. The blog feels old. Feed me bourbon.

Sneak Preview - Dual Sunrise Over Magrathea

Week two of the Come For the Peaks, Stay For the Valleys Sneak Preview series, a weekly event in which we are posting a song off of our upcoming album, brings us to the opening track of the album, "Dual Sunrise Over Magrathea." Check it out at our myspace page. Listen now because next Monday there will be a whole new song!

The story behind this song. Hmmm. Well, the title comes from Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy when the fictional ancient planet of Magrathea is being introduced. The planet rotates around twin suns, so the sun rises twice. How badass is that!? I like the idea of binaries - dichotomies, polar opposites keeping each other balanced, the gravitational pull of two stars keeping each other in orbit, etc.

The song was kind of compiled from three different things: the title (because I thought the phrase "dual sunrise over Magrathea" was neat), some astronomy-centered lyrics, and a few parts to a spacey sounding song I had sitting around. The album as a whole as a lot to do with loss because, as I like to say, I got my ass handed to me in 2007. The lyrics (posted below) are pretty self-explanatory. Part of dealing with my loss was trying to keep my relationship balanced with a person who was really opposite from me. Two stars wanting to spin off on their own, but being pulled back in by gravity. Or some shit like that.

Musically, it's a fun song to play because it's all over the place, changing metres between the intro and the rest of the song and that squirreliness before the space jam at the end. For anyone who stalks me and my music past, you might recognize that I ripped off a chord progression from myself - the chord changes during the space jam at the end are the same as the end of "Cold Love, Hot War" from my first solo album released, like, 80 years ago.

Dual Sunrise Over Magrathea

You leapt off the terra firma
I’ve got a star map and telescope
I’m going to find you
And when I do, I won’t let go

The red shift that tells me where you are going
Says that you are already gone
An event horizon crossed
And I can’t believe what I’ve lost

On the other side
I will find you

I have no light, I have no heat
The burst, it was so bittersweet
It was just another star to expand and explode
So long

Enjoy! As an added bonus, here's video of us performing the song at the Crocodile last year with me wearing a ridiculous sparkly shirt!

P.S. Come see me play solo acoustic style this Thursday, September 25th at the lovely and charming Mars Bar. In fact, arrive early and have some mac & cheese from Cafe Venus before the show. I play at 8:30 PM.

Sneak Preview - Quid Pro Quo

Starting now until our album is released in late November, I'm going to post songs from the album, Come For the Peaks, Stay For the Valleys, on our myspace page and tell the story behind each song on this here blog. Or, I'll just lie and say something fantastical like, "This song has about fourteen layers of meaning, most of which are derived from the peyote vision quest the band endured while being stranded in the Arizona desert one August night. Long story short - I am the king cobra." Or something.

First up: Quid Pro Quo.

Okay, here's the thing about how I write music: The music usually comes from one place and the lyrics/intended meaning come from another. Such was the case for this song. When writing the album, I really wanted a 10 + minute multi-movement instrumental song. I kind of failed. I kind of realized I was destroying the song by trying to make it longer than it needed to be. I kind of realized that I'm not John MacLaughlin or Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.

QPQ is about 8 minutes and 30 seconds pieced together mostly from some old riffs I wrote in 2003 peppered with some new Mars Volta-inspired riffs. When I was constructing the song, my life was at the height of its turbulence...at least it's the most turbulence I've experienced so far in life. Loss, more loss, compromise, giving and not receiving, struggle, anger, loss. It started to feel like all the ebbs and flows in the song were analogous to the highs and lows of the Fall of 2007, so I named the song "Quid Pro Quo" because, from what I recalled from the dusty part of my brain that got that Criminology B.A., it's a term used in the legal system when bartering for criminal charges to be lessened or for a more lenient sentencing. It means "this for that." The criminal pleas guilty to some charges and the other charges are dropped.

The fact that the song is so meandering and almost loses focus perfectly outlines what this song means to me - I was doing so much compromising that I nearly lost sight of myself and what I wanted...or rather, what I deserved.

On the music dork side, my favorite part of this song is at about 5:32 when the band is playing in 7/8 and my guitar riff is in 4/4. Eventually the two parts merge. That's so flipping fun to play live.

So, that's what this song means to me. Again, you can check it out at our myspace page for the next week or so...until I get my next whim to change the featured new album song.

Rebellion in 4/4 - free B-side mp3 for you!

I'm really bored with the music on our myspace page. Our album release is still a ways off (November 21st, yo) so it's a little too early to make public the actual goods on the album, but I decided to post a tasty track that didn't make it onto the album to tide you over.

Rebellion in 4/4 didn't make it onto the album because it stood out as being a lot more upbeat and poppy than the rest of the songs, but I believe it's still enjoyable on its own. Hopefully you'll agree.

Download away. Put it on a playlist for your next workout at the gym. Make it your ringtone. Air drum to it. It's all for you, punk.

Also, check out this hot photo Chrysti from Hungry Pines took of me last week at the High Dive. I'm saying, "Mmmmm, girl..." (Blogs without photos are lame.)