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.

Some Thoughts On My Own Approach To Music

Some interesting discussion creeped into last Friday’s performance tangentially. We were talking about a specific kind of ending to a performance, and the musical merits therein—something I misunderstood at the time. A larger more interesting idea had to do with musical relativism, which we didnt talk about too explicitly. I suppose I would call myself a musical relativist. I’m generally accepting of most things as art, and believe people should do whatever they want to do in music. I feel in no place to say what music “is” and where to set its boundaries. I said, with a bit of derision, that  ”most things have merits”. I hate Party In The USA. It’s boring to me. Millions of people like it. It’s doing something. That thing isn’t very intelligent and doesn’t have artistic merit, but it has entertainment merit and financial merit to boot.

Punk rock is rarely merited as artistic. I think much of this has to do with ignorance of what kind bands are in the punk rock scene right now. A Wilhelm Scream is more technically skilled and impressive than almost any indie experimental band I’ve heard in the past three years. A purist would hardly call power chords and double bass beats art, but I would. And even if a skinhead doesn’t bother to call it art, it really doesn’t matter. Good music isn’t necessitated by the tortured artist in the boiler room trying to rethink music from its foundations. There are some basic punk rock bands, who follow typical chord progressions, never change time, harmonize strictly in thirds, and so on. And it’s fantastic music that serves its function. It brings people together.

In class, Dean Bergeron suggested I take a more intimate approach to my performance quality. The idea is that by yelling out my singing, I don’t allow the audience to take part in my experience on stage. This is a valid thought, but I still hold that its a technique of a certain kind of music. In punk rock, more often than not, your stage presence should be energetic and out there and the louder and faster you are, the more people actually feel included. The venue turns into this giant inclusive atmosphere. At a Celine Dion concert you have people holding cell phones up. At A Wilhelm Scream, you have people with their fists up, arms around the next guy or girl in camaraderie., throwing beer on each other and loving it, spitting at the crowd, people being carried by the crowd. If someone falls, you lend a hand and you pick them up. It’s an undeniable feeling of community. Everyone there is your friend. Human connection is made more poignantly than any other kind of show I’ve been to. Certainly more than William Fitzsimmons and Jenny Owens Young, two folk musicians who I love and saw in Houston, Texas. But everyone at the venue seemed inside themselves and unwilling to talk to a human being they didn’t know. It was thoroughly sad.

I know right now I sing because I’m trying to get something out–so I’m going to scream it out because that’s the best way I know how to say what I mean with honesty. And, as cheesy as that can sound, it’s true. And it’s work. I comment on as much in Tribute: A Beautiful Table For Beautiful People. It works. As I write about my own experiences, a distance is created from them. It’s very cathartic in that I’ve taken these sometimes complex and almost always troublesome emotions and turn them into this work outside of myself. Nabokov said he used to write not for psychological or social or political reasons, but because he had to get rid of his ideas. And writing these songs helps me get rid of the emotions, in a way. In time, I might get over my sense of self importance and start writing about other things. I enjoy writing about other things. But for now, I’m trying to do something very personal.

On that note, why the often punk rock approach? Why cuss in my songs? Why do I neglect to use my vocabulary? It seems true that my personal lexicon has whithered slightly since high school. I decided somewhere along the line that elegance and ostentation wasn’t what my writing should be about. That was something these kids at Brown were doing. Adjectives, adverbs, rhymes. Okay. I want to do something different. These metaphors and symbols aren’t getting to the heart of what they’re talking about (this is actually not in reference to my songwriter friends at Brown but to student writing I was exposed to my freshman year at Brown). It’s roundabout. It’s reserved. It’s timid. Where’s the raw, Bukowski-esque grit of truth? I’m talking sandpaper, ripped jeans, a punch in the face. Why not say what I mean? Directly. That’s an artistic approach worth exploring. And so that’s what I’m doing. Not necessarily because other styles are worse, but because they’re not what I’m always interested in doing, and it’s an approach I’m representing because I find it under-represent. And this is an artistic tendency of mine—to try to offer something that isn’t quite being offered around me. Indeed, if I were in a class with punk rock musicians, I would be doing more obviously mellow things, maybe talking in metaphor. Who knows. I don’t know. I’m considering writing in a way that experiments with my more literary background in one of my future projects. Maybe even this Friday.

In defense of cussing, it is meant to disturb, to connect with a certain approach and outlook on life. I can certainly use other words. I never used to cuss in middle school because I thought it showed a lack of a wide and creative enough vocabulary. But cussing is a folk language, a language that belongs to the people, to everyone, no matter what class. There are reasons why I write how I write.

Artistic merit is something that permeates some of my screenwriting concerns as well. My screenwriting professor loved my screenplay, Half Hearted, because in her opinion it really penetrated the small, but poignant experience of crippling anxiety in not being able to talk to someone you don’t know and to whom you are attracted. The next week, I wrote a screenplay written around the small but complex idea that two friends who text each other frequently start dating and, after realizing that they can only be honest via texting, decide to text each other under different names. The identities become confused and metaphysical hilarity ensues. She thought it was funny. But, it didn’t penetrate to the core of the human condition. I was fine with that. (and to be fair, so was she—she loved the action screenplay we read). Normally I would try to penetrate that core of subjective experience through the lens of my life, but I wanted to have a little fun and I think that’s important. There are merits to both screenplays.
And there are merits to everything. If I don’t like it, someone probably does. If no one likes it, that’s a kind of merit. There are plenty of things I don’t like, but I realize that there are certain things that people can find attractive them. Doesn’t mean I won’t shudder anytime I see someone’s music interest as Creed, Staind, Disturbed, and Nickelback. I’ll never understand that.

And I will never forgive this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLmHua3O4g0

David Bazan Review

This past week has been all kinds of weird. Last Tuesday I up and left to Boston on a half-whim to see David Bazan perform live at TT The Bear’s, and also to see a girl I was interested in at Harvard. I’ll make the latter story short: it’s a story of rash, 5am dashes across Harvard campus and, ultimately, unrequited infatuation. Mark another tally under that category of experience.

David Bazan was great. I had tried to get into his new album, Curse Your Branches, a few weeks back, but I was too consumed with Frank Turner to really give him the time of day. So, on the amtrak to Boston (I would’ve taken commuter rail but I would have missed the show!), I gave the album a first, full listen. I had already heard “Curse Your Branches” the song, which is what convinced me to accrue the rest of the CD, which, as I’ll talk about briefly, is mostly great.

The story of Dave Bazan is that he used to be with a band called Pedro The Lion, a band that talked a lot about God—doubts involved, but still believing him. These guys aren’t your bible-thumping hallelujah praise jesus Christian band. It was often about the struggle of faith, rather than the celebration of it. Recently, I don’t really know when, he kind of decided to become an agnostic. So now all of his music expresses the darker side of doubt. He questions his “creator”, and in fact, in the title track, writes that “all fallen leaves should curse their branches/for not letting them decide to fall/and not letting them refuse to fall at all.” Powerful stuff.

I should start by saying that if you liked Pedro The Lion for any other reason besides the fact that they talked about believing in God a lot, you’ll like Curse Your Branches. There are certain vocal patterns that cross over blatantly from Pedro The Lion songs. Yet, I don’t mind that at all. It’s what I love about Dave Bazan. The first song is arguably more powerful that the title track. It’s called “Hard To Be”, and the chorus lyrics are “it’s hard to be/hard to be/hard to be a decent human being.” This is spoken in relation to the story of Adam and Eve. The simplicity and directness of the lyrics are what I love about it. Sometimes, damn it, it’s just hard to be a decent human being. We don’t know why exactly, but it’s just sometimes hard to be good, whatever that means.

Songs like “Bless This Mess”, “Please, Baby, Please”, “When We Fell”, and “Bearing Witness” aren’t as stupendous for me, probably because they’re not cripplingly pensive and sad. “Since I’m getting tired of this sad attempt of a review, I’ll also mention the final song, In Stitches. It’s heavy bass, nauseatingly slow tempo, and trance-inducing background effects leave one feeling eerie, somewhat off kilter, almost malaisic. It’s a pretty long song at around five minutes, and I feel like its personal inexplicable didn’t really align with me until I heard it on a a dim Boston green line crossing over the Charles at night, when I saw the reflection of city lights at about 2:35 into the song. It hit again when I visited the downtown Boston cemetery, headphones on, in the middle of a windy, overcast Wednesday.

All right, I’m getting tired of writing and this was mostly my playing around for a -Post review I want to write on the album. I also plan to review The Swellers- Ups and Downsizing, and maybe talk about the A Wilhelm Scream show, if they let me…

A Wilhelm Scream NOVEMBER 7- COME WITH ME!!!! My friend from Cornell is flying in just to see this show with me. It’s gonna be the most kickass experience ever. Now, of course, a few of my best friends are in Gainesville, Florida right now seeing pretty much all of the best punk rock bands in the nation play at Fest. I think next year I’ll go. I imagine that would be the most kickass experience ever. But this is close. Nothing like friends and a good punk rock song to throw yourself into. Post-show food usually adds to the glory.