Into It. Over It. New Blog Purpose.

I mean the solid truth is that I just don’t post on here anymore and won’t make any promises that I will. But this is mainly for me now, to keep record of cool things I come across, or to post ideas on the creative process and other stuff I do having to do with music. Let’s get it all down, right?!

I want a synth for Christmas, a micro korg ms1 I think it’s called.

http://www.soundaslanguage.com/2008/03/05/band-interview-into-it-over-it/

I’m way into this. Been into Passion Pit, Florence and the Machine. Sam Amidon again. But right now, into it. over it.

An Update On My Songwriting

Howdy world,

I’ve been very absent for a while and you deserve my apologies. Over break I wrote a few new songs with some friends back home, two of which are part of the punk rock project (“Nanos Tacos” and “If I Get Boring”), and two of which are for the acoustic project (“She Said No, No, No” and “Bone That Delicious Butt”). They’re being reviewed and edited by my brother Razzy, who’s currently at the Sam Francisco Conservatory of Music studying Classical Guitar.

He has some connections with some pretty legit labels who have said that if we can produce a decent demo and send it to them, they’d be willing to produce for us. Boasting point: Have I ever mentioned that my old band (Synergia, though it wasn’t “mine”) sent a demo to a producer at Capitol Records and they liked it? True story. We had a connection. Which proves that Capitol Records only produces crappy music! Jaykay, friendos, but I certainly wouldn’t have put any of those songs on repeat.

The friends/band back home underwent a lot of existential anxiety over break. Does Razzy really want to be a guitar professor for the rest of his life? Do Vivek and Joe really want to do accounting and work boring desk jobs? Is Salman really making the right move by taking a break and sorting his life out after having a shitty time at Cornell? And myself, well, life will never make sense for me. This is the stuff of youthful angst, and the perfect writing conditions for this music.

But we’ve all in some way or another resolved that we have to start a band and tour, for just once in our lives. I’m willing to take a year and a half out of my life to devote to music (and making money on the side–this Brown degree has got to do something for me!) so I can say I did it, that I tried to live the dream of touring in a punk rock band. We’d travel cheaply in some van, go round the country meeting people, experiencing the variety of human personalities and actions. If we don’t do it, we’ll always wonder what it would have been like. And I’ll use that life experience to write screenplays when I get to New York. That’s my plan anyway. A year and a half worth of admitted mistakes and a wasted degree, I can do that. For the indelible memories, I can do that.

That’s the update for now. Catch me at the open mics (I missed the Haiti one early this semester, but I’ll be back!). I love you all.

Roman

Final 3/4: Summary of My Body…of Work

LIST OF SONGS

(1) What Kind of Good A Summer With Wonderful Friends Can Do You*

(2) Natalie Imbruglia- Torn (Cover Assignment)*

(3) Rocking Chair (melodic profile assignment)*

(4) A Tribute: A Beautiful Table For Beautiful People (write a bridge w/Josh)*

(5) Chants From The Heart of Youth (Bring a song we’re working on)

(6) Ten Flaws of Me or You (Write a song in 3/4 with word restrictions—i failed at this)^^

(7) Good St. George (based off a narrative)**

(8) In The Middle of The Winter, In The Dead of Night (collaborate with Josh)

(9) A Shitty Emorock Song (billboard 100)^^

(10) Hotline, Again! An Irresolute Resolution (song analysis of “Hotline”)**

* These songs can be heard at myspace.com/thecabinetsmusic

**These songs will soon be on myspace.com/thecabinetsmusic

^^These songs will never be played again because they suck a lot

I really would like to record “In The Middle of the Winter, In The Dead of Night”. It was a fun song to play, and adequately contrasted the writing and music of Josh and me. Josh, the second time we played it, added the most punk rock harmonica solo ever.

REFLECTIONS

I started out wanting to do some things that were going to be blatantly and unabashedly influenced by my desire to write punk rock songs. I was listening to a lot of Frank Turner and thought, I can do this! How do I capture this rawness, this directness, and this poignancy in lyrics? And the songs are all so simple, but they’re fantastic! But my desires are always changing. My mind gets tugged this way and that. I think I had made a deeper decision to kind of experiment with lyrics and songwriting this semester, and to that end I’d consider it a very successful semester. All of my songs on one cd might sound very odd together. Perhaps In The Middle of The Winter… could go with What Kind of Good…. Hotline Part 1 and 2, though different, could go on the same album. And maybe we could throw St. George on there too.

It’s much easier to write songs on deadline, and to be forced to write a lot of songs. Writing on my own, in any situation, I tend to find myself a perfectionist from the beginning to end. I’m very meticulous and invested. But when you know you’re going to be writing ten songs, you can say, okay, I can write about this topic I’ve been really invested in next week and this week I’ll go with this new idea I have. What’s important is that you have a song. Then you can go back, edit it, change the lyrics (which I’ve done to many of my songs), and make them better songs. But once you finish a song you have an object out there in the world to look at from all sides and evaluate. When you haven’t finished it (in terms of the draft), then it’s hard to see the big picture of the song.

Lyrically, I started out very direct and personal. Unabashedly so. What Kind of Good… was personal but still written in a broad enough way to appeal to a general audience. Rocking Chair was less general, more specific, and a lot of words. Then Tribute was the kind of capstone on my songs directly about my past relationship. It’s not that I’m done, necessarily. There are still a lot of interesting ideas. But I took a few very important, broad themes of the relationship and came out with three different songs that all have three very different attitudes, all of which I occupied at one time or another. There’s still a lot of writing to be done about the whole thing. But I’ve got some of what I needed to get out, well, out.

St. George was proof that I could write non-direct, interesting lyrics. Or re-proof. I had done so with Hotline. I tried to take an interesting angle on the story of St. George, and am happy with the outcome. It’s still not clear even to me what everything means, but there seems to be a theme of doubt weaving in and out of all of the characters in the story.

You should know this about me. Half of what I do, I’m not entirely sure of why I do it. I just do it. My actions are almost made in resignation, which I think is interesting. I act, then I look back, play the observer, and try to figure out why I did what I did. The truth is this isn’t a fact about me, but of most people, of how desire works, of how people work. We act and look back to try and make sense of ourselves. The relevance of this comes in my creative process. For a script I wrote this semester, I decided to throw a giant cat in a business suit into the script. I wasn’t sure why. It came to me and so I said “why the hell not?” and did. For songs and lyrics it often follows the same pattern. But it’s not entirely meaningless absurdity (even though it is). I look back and find the meaning in the absurdity that I created. Which doesn’t necessarily give it meaning, but provides an interesting example of how we can find meaning in anything, even when there was no meaning put into the thing onto which we project our meaning.

The Cover. Natalie Imbruglia. A kind-of band I’m in back home is going to try to play this full band. I like the cover. It’s just more fun to play that way. Chant From The Heart of Youth came into my performance incomplete and is still incomplete. I’m currently working on it with the band. They enjoy (and im probably expressing this wrong) the 6/4, 7/4 timed chorus, with the 5/4 verses and 9/4 bridge. The lyrics were kind of crumby and standard, but I’m working on those as well. It probably won’t go very literary. I like it as a direct kind of song, but maybe I’ll find a band who’s lyrics I like (like Transit or Strung Out) , and find out what they do and how they can manage to create really interesting lyrics in the scope of a punk song.

Ten Flaws sucked. I was having a lot of trouble with the word limitations (one syllable per measure of 3/4 for the verse). You just CAN’T say anything meaningful like that. The lyrics were written in a style I’m not sure of, but it was pretty direct. I was just bored with all the girls who I had once had a half-assed romantic interest in. And my interest in girls at Brown has never exceeded a half-assed effort, mostly because I end up seeing all the incongruities and all the things I don’t want to deal with. Other people can be a hassle. Most girls want some kind of commitment. Anyway, I wrote a song about it, and it closes about by noting how judgmental I am by thinking all of this stuff, and how I was ready to sort of enter into something I knew would fail just so I could fail. Failing would be better than staying bored. And I thought that was the interesting feeling that was worth writing a song about. But I didn’t do so hot a job.

The Billboard 100 song was just a piece of crap, but designed to be such. It was written like a Dashboard Confessional/Taking Back Sunday Song. And it was the only love song I wrote. Well, it was just whining about a girl not liking the writer back. Common theme that can be done well and done poorly. This was done poorly. And I’ve covered all other songs in previous posts. My favorite songs? Hotline, (Again?!?!), St. George, and In The Middle of The Winter, In The Dead of Night. So I feel like I have progressed, and that my best work came at the end, minus the billboard 100.

I did have one through-composed song that I liked quite a bit that I wanted to play, though I didn’t finish lyrics. Beyond that, there were a lot of songs I had mostly prepared that I didn’t get to show the class. I guess that means I’ll have to finish them and play them around open mics next semester…

Roman

Final 2/4: Song Analysis and Composition “Hotline” meets “Hotline, (Again?!?!)”

One of our assignment was to take a song, analyze it, and build a song off of elements that we gathered from our technical evaluation of the song we just analyzed. I couldn’t decide. I would have liked to have done something really intricate and complicated, something by Anathallo, perhaps. But then I would have liked to do a punk rock song, maybe something by A Wilhelm Scream again, or Transit. These are technically very interesting too. But then I would have liked to do something simpler, like analyze a Nothington song. But that’s too boring. Not just that, but how much do I take? How much is stealing?

It was a big mess, so I decided to choose my own song: Hotline, aka “The Tragical Carousel Highway Accident To Come That People Will Stop And Stare At Which Made Me Think About Deep Things”. This is probably narcissistic, but that’s okay.  I had been wanting to do a follow-up to Hotline pretty much ever since I wrote it. I still really love the visual of a giant carousel speeding down a highway with some very mysterious individual with unclear motives spinning round on it and then, getting in an accident and dying. You should also know that I (1) have a fear of death, and (2) think that I’ll probably die in a car accident. This is just a general feeling. I’m probably subconsciously drawn to the idea because Camus died in a car accident and thought dying in a car accident was the most absurd way to die.

In any case, I use the exact same two chords that comprise the bulk of hotline, but one step down (meaning, anyone?). I forget what the names of the chords are. In any case, same two basic chords the whole time, but I add some, well, not embellishments, but change the chords slightly. But same fundamental chords are there. I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Whereas Hotline took place just before the Tragic Carousel Highway Accident, Hotline, (Again?!?!) takes place just after the accident. It serves as a bunch of different things. There are, just as in Hotline, a LOT of things going on emotionally and intellectually. Which is fitting for the state that I was in writing both of these songs, and fitting for Mr. Hotline and the ideas behind the songs as well.

So I basically took the chords and the lyrical themes, and advanced the song. So in addition to a very technical taking of the chords and concept, I didn’t just take the essence, I drove the plot of the essence forward, which, if I do say so myself, I think is pretty cool. Hotline, (Again?!?!) is in 3/4 or 6/8 most of the time. I’m not sure. I add a 7th beat on particular parts. Ian Fields accompanied me on Cello with this song, and all cello genius goes to him, but I’ll talk more about him and the performance in the final concert review. Hotline, (Again?!?!) is a much darker and more macabre song than Hotline, but still retains a little bit of humor. A good deal of it is told from the perspective of “the townfolk” who witnessed the accident, are around his scattered body parts, and are immediately commenting on it in a vicious immediate funeral procession.

Of note, the structure and vocal melody of Hotline, (Again?!?!)  have aberrated considerably from Hotline.

The recording of Hotline, (Again?!?!) will be available very soon.

Final 1/4: Reaction to Midterm Concert

It might seem kind of awkward to look at the mid-term concert in terms of reaction. I wonder if I could sum up my reaction in an emotional category. Perhaps, frightened? Or, effervescent? Or, offended? Or, jolly? Or what about in terms of reactions. What was my reaction? I clapped. Or maybe I cried. Or maybe I went out and bought a big mac. In truth–for all my jesting–, for something as  vast a project as the midterm concert, my reaction can best be encapsulated on a number scale. My reaction to my own performance was about a 5 or 6. My reaction to the performances of everyone else was a general 8.

I performed two songs: Rocking Chair and Tribute: A Beautiful Table For Beautiful People. Both songs with the topic of my ex-girlfriend. Though this is a long standing tradition in songwriting, I feel the need to defend myself by saying that it was the beginning of the semester, these are some of the first songs I’ve written, and I just had a lot of, well, emotions that I needed to get out. There, I said it.

I was cripplingly nervous the week before the show. The rehearsals were iffy, and the looks of some of my peers during performance made me wonder if they knew something I didn’t—a recurring insecurity in my compositional career that I’m working on getting over.  Least of all did I want to play Tribute. I’d decided to change the ending to just vocals at mostly that last minute, and again, reservations. These reservations were a bit more justified and obvious—I just didn’t give a shit about time whenever I started singing those ending notes. And when you have people accompanying you, it helps to have some structure. This song, as is evident in the lyrics, is a very blatantly personal song. There are no metaphors or symbolic representations, I just tell a story.

ROCKING CHAIR

Switching gears for a moment, Rocking Chair was written for an assignment which asked us to model part of our song after the melodic contour of another song, so I modeled it after part of a Frank Turner song. I had decided before I went up there to the stage (I was the first song, I think), that I’d go up and take my glasses off. And if you ever see me do this, it’s because, as you might expect,  when I take my glasses off the whole world gets pretty blurry and I can’t see my audience (or their faces—a face can automatically make me read into someone’s psychology and reaction). So it’s a big comforting feeling. Besides the faces, the slight disorientation I get is pleasurable when I’m about to enter a world of emotional exposition. For others, It’s like a drink before going on. I just mess up my vision and gain a little freedom and temerity.

That said, I wasn’t nervous at all, I didn’t freeze at all. I just keep playing, even when I messed up the words and knew it. It’s a performance necessity I’ve known my whole life. I didn’t even care so much how I sounded. But there I went. And I think I’d give that performance a 5 or 6, matching with my overall feelings on the performance. I did forget words, I did mess up, it did sound rushed, I did walk away from the mic in the outro accidentally.  A lot of little scratches on the performance. I’m all right with it, but just all right. I also think my b may have been out of tune. Not sure. But it’s a fun song to play, particularly the ending. And that’s what matters.

TRIBUTE

I was happier with the outcome of Tribute. Again, I couldn’t see my audience. But I was happy with my introduction to the song. I was feeling good, and I do feed a little bit off the fact that I’m speaking and everyone is paying attention. It’s when I’m performing and not everyone’s paying attention (say, at my first open mic—oh, the harsh realities of them) that I really start to crumble. It’s self absorbed, self important, yadda yadda. But I think everyone feels this way, at least starting off.

But people were listening. And they laughed at my jokes. And laughter brings people together! In the middle of a rough semester, I had confirmation that I wasn’t a crazy, weird, alien kind of individual who was incredibly difficult to get along with. Here I was, entertaining some folks, and we were having a good time.

So the song starts and I realize the b string (though I’m a step down, so technically it’s the a) is out of tune, but ah whatever.  I go through the story reading the words off the paper (have you SEEN those lyrics?). If you haven’t heard it, listen to it at myspace.com/thecabinetsmusic. Anyway, the story goes fine. As expected, I make it difficult for the backup singers (Kathertine “Da Dean” Bergeron, Jonathan Leibovic, and Josh Garcia) to stay latched on. But they do! Which was great. Those woahs at the ends of both songs really just give me an excuse to yell as loud as I can, and lots of times I look at singing as this opportunity to yell in front of people and it be all right. It’s a very personal thing, to perform, to sing. And I like trying to make that connection.

EVERYONE ELSE

It’s hard to talk about other people’s songs because I don’t know the detail of their experience. There’s not one song I didn’t like something about. I will say that Jenny and the Ghost was stuck in my head the week before the show. And of course I’m a fan of Josh’s last song because I’m vain and he mentions me in it —in addition, of course, to it being funny and fun. I still would have really liked to play second guitar to Astrocompanion. I’m just not sure how to meaningfully talk about everyone’s performances concisely. You’re all wonderful!

List of Songs from this Semester

This is a list of songs I’ve written this semester. The titles keep changing.

(1) What Kind of Good A Summer With Wonderful Friends Can Do You

(2) Natalie Imbruglia- Torn

(3) Rocking Chair (melodic profile assignment)

(4) A Tribute: A Beautiful Table For Beautiful People (write a bridge w/Josh)

(5) Chants From The Heart of Youth (Bring a song we’re working on)

(6) Ten Flaws of Me or You (Write a song in 3/4 with word restrictions—i failed at this)

(7) Good St. George (based off a narrative)

(8) In The Middle of The Winter, In The Dead of Night (collaborate with Josh)

(9) A Shitty Emorock Song (billboard 100)

(10) Hotline, Again! An Irresolute Resolution (song analysis of “Hotline”)

(11) [Through-composed song--not yet written]

The Cabinets MySpace

Created a music myspace. It’ll be good to figure out how this stuff works, and I’ll probably spend some time over Christmas break looking into it. Here it is:

http://www.myspace.com/thecabinetsmusic

Lyrics and Reflections on Rocking Chair

PREFACE

So unfortunately I’ve come to find that in order to put my songs on the WordPress platform I need to pay $25 a year or something for a space upgrade. It’s not a whole lot, but I don’t have the money right now.But here are the lyrics and analysis to the songs from the live show, post by post.

TENTATIVELY CALLED “ROCKING CHAIR” FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, KIND OF LIKE “HOTLINE” (Rocking Chair)

I don’t remember details

Of what they told us at the park

But if I remember clearly

You were wearing your pink shirt

All the things we said were lies in the morning on the stairs

They were true

Please help me understand

We swept the world with angst and passion

In our glory days of heart

We brought ourselves out of depression

But brought ourselves back to the start

I was the best of all good persons, and you the best of all the girls

Now we’re not

Please help me, leave this land

Then we fall, we fall asleep

And who’s counting the mistakes we’ve made

A dark place, I’m sure

Distant and cold

Spend time with me, dear friend,

I will teach you how to be a rocking chair

In April, in your apartment, we both succumbed to lust

I woke up scared shit and frightened, as you put that silver band back on

As we were eating cold store sushi, I loved you for a moment there, or I think I did

Please help me, be my man

I can’t control all my conflicting inspirations and desires

Can’t explain why I got bored, or why we both got tired

But you’re speaking in hollow phrases, saying thing that you don’t mean

And we both know:

NO ONE ELSE UNDERSTANDS

NO ONE ELSE UNDERSTANDS

NO ONE ELSE UNDERSTANDS

And we fall, we fall asleep

And who’s counting the mistakes we’ve made

Yea we fall, we fall so deep

And who’s counting the mistakes we’re paying for

Ever since then

I’ve weighed my regrets

Spend time with me, dear friend,

I will teach you how to be a rocking chair

We’re far too young

To feel we’ve gotten so damn old

Spend time with me, dear friend

I will teach you how to be a rocking chair

REFLECTION

The song was written for the assignment: take the melodic contour of a song and use part of it in your song. I took cues from Frank Turner’s “I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous” in the verses. This song was written at 11pm the night before the assignment was due.

Originally I just liked the altered F chord I was playing, and the ease of going to C directly afterward. The rhythm for the first part of the verse isn’t necessarily taken from, but is the same as the beginning of A Wilhelm Scream- Dreaming of Throwing Up. They’re quite clearly very different songs. But I enjoyed the abruptness of starting this song with an aggressive rhythm and lyrics coming at you directly.

The chorus of sorts came through a bunch of messing around. For some reason the lyrics “I will teach you how to be a rocking chair” came into mind and I kept it. It found its own zen kind of meaning in the song.

The song is about, as were most of my songs in the beginning (and probably a few more to come), my past two year relationship. About 90% of it is true. The other 10% seemed to fit but didn’t map onto a specific memory. I’m more or less a very autobiographical writer, you’ll find. But it’s also about needing a friend, having nobody for the first time in a while, entering a very dismal place in life.

Most of these songs offer a unique scope to the relationship. The first song I wrote this semester, What Kind Of Good A Summer With Wonderful People Can Do You, is aggressive, resentful, and is moved on, more or less. Rocking Chair is a pretty fair look at some of the events and emotions I was dealing with intellectually in the ten month aftermath of our breakup. Of course, this is a light representation. The actual intellectual hardship was much deeper and darker. But the idea is that we make mistakes, sometimes we even want to make mistakes, a high degree of moral complexity enters the picture, it’s a huge shift in emotional disposition, it’s just an intense emotional time–the breakup of your first love, so to speak. People get crazy, absolutely crazy, in relationships. Unfair emotions are projected, drastic actions seem reasonable, and often there’s a refusal to cut off emotional access. And little pissed me off more in the whole aftermath than outsiders who thought they understood the complexity of the intellectual and emotional situation I was in, tangled up for over two years, thinking that they had the anecdote for happiness. It just alienated me more and made me feel less like I had the right friends. And though songs like What Kind Of Good get past all of the mucky stuff, Rocking Chair meditates on it. It really is a kind of fascinating state to be in and watch at the same time. I do a lot of thinking about it.

In the live performance itself, I flub up the words a few times. Which sucks because one of my favorite and most close-to-heart lines was “I was the best of all good persons/and you the best of all the girls/now we’re not”. But it was a lot of words to memorize! Also when I go into the outro, I kind of got into it and walked away from the recording mic, realized I was being recorded, then promptly got back to the mic. It created a kind of cool building up effect, as Rosalind noted.

Feel free to ask me questions about the lyrics. It would be difficult and somewhat unfair to go line by line and tell everyone. Keep some ambiguity and personal meaning for people. I hope, in some ways, that people can see themselves in my stories.

I say this in A Beautiful Table For Beautiful People, that as I write these things, I get further from them. Which is a really interesting phenomena. I have all these bottled up emotions, ideas, things I feel need to be said or expressed for my sake, and then I encapsulate all those things into a song in the form of a tangible products, and I’m in some form released from them. So a lot of my songs have to do with my former relationship because I feel this deep need to get these songs out of my system. Not to mention that I think the emotions and moral complexity of my whole relationship is extremely interesting. There are some feelings I just couldn’t explain if I tried. That’s where the music comes in.

I’m not sure what she’d think if she heard these songs, which I gather will make it her way sometime, possibly soon.  As a writer, I can’t really concern myself with that.

Hopefully she wouldn’t think the singing was too too bad.

The Live Recording of “Rocking Chair” and “A Beautiful Table For Beautiful People” Now Available

I’ll post lyrics (some of which I forgot in the show) and thoughts on the songs soon. For now, take a listen to my two songs and the songs of my fellow very talented classmates. Leave love if you have it.

http://www.soundidea.org/music450/gisp.html

Roman

The Short of the A Wilhelm Scream Show.

I am straight soaked in beer, spit, and the sweat of other people. I punched several girls in the face tonight. I helped them back up. They weren’t angry. I was kicked in the face several times tonight, by guys and girls. I sang Dreaming Of Throwing Up with a pretty blonde girl I didn’t know in my arms the whole time. I dropped my glasses and someone picked them up for me in the middle of the song. I told them I loved them. The encore (one hour ago from the minute I write this) was We Built This City On Debts And Booze, the song I wrote a 10 page analysis on for Music450 last year. I jumped on stage halfway through the song, put my arms around all the bands (which were now all on stage), then hugged Nuno (the singer), and screamed the last verses of We Built This City to the crowd into the mic with him, throwing my fist, holding their hands. I helped the bassist up from the floor at the end of the song.

I.love.punk.rock.