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I
haven't been recording much in the home studio since summer 2005, as
I've taken the best of these songs and recorded them for real at the
Butcher Shop in Chicago with a fire-breathing band that features my two
brothers. I'm hoping to have a finished CD sometime in 2006.
December 2005:
Andy Is a Sexy Man This song emerged from some online smack talk with Mr. Henry Hormann, an old Minnesota pal. It's safe to say this song absolutely baffled him, though Ben Connelly says his kids like it a whole bunch.
October 2005:
You Say You Wanna Boogie? Recorded in a few hours with the incomparable Alex Nyhan providing the salsa sizzle. Another GarageBand trifle, but this one has a certain Santana-meets-Kraftwerk charm.
August 2005:
Boogie Down!!! This was a test-run of the GarageBand software that came with my new Mac iBook. As I found, it's alarmingly easy to make an inconsequential piece of music.
June 2005:
Trust Me, Pt. 1 (You Can't Have a Product Without a Producer) The idea here is to kick it Neil Young-style with two different versions of the same song, like "Rockin' in the Free World." Except I wrote two entirely different songs that have nothing but this one phrase in common. It's quite a phrase, though: anybody who has to say "trust me" probably isn't trustworty, is he?
Rock N Roll I read some time ago about how bomber pilots in Gulf War One listened to Anthrax and Metallica to get pumped for their 12-hour missions. It struck me as odd at the time, but I guess it's no different than the Scots cranking up those bagpipes before they took the field of battle.
Wait Meg got mad at me when I recorded the scratchy synthesizers on this one, as she thought I was ruining a nice pretty melody. She obviously hadn't heard the lyrics, which I'd like to think are my most paranoid yet.
April 2005:
Trust Me, Pt. 2 (They Watch Down from Satellites) This is a doozie: a six-and-a-half minute piano ballad with not one but two righteous guitar solos. Let the eagle soar!
White Van Exposing the heretofore unknown connection between the Beltway Sniper and ChoicePoint.The extended dance remix features verses about Freemasonry, the Trilateral Commission and flouridated drinking water, but I don't think the world is ready for the complete, unvarnished truth just yet.
March 2005:
The Internet is Changing Everything I'm getting a jump on late-1990s nostalgia. Sing along now: Alan Greenspan! Alan Greenspan! Alan Greenspan! Alan Greenspan! Alan Greenspan! Alan Greenspan! Alan Greenspan! Alan! That's Meg in the third verse.
Moonlight Maze An instrumental. I don't know what else to say about it -- maybe that's why all those classical composers came up with titles like "Divertimento in A minor, Op. 367."
February 2005:
When I'm Gone This is my world debut on the lap steel, a sort of simplified slide guitar. It was a challenge to play, and this song was a challenge to write: I had to rip off Mississippi John Hurt, Elmore James, and Led Zeppelin all at once.
Three-Wheeled Bike My friend Yanne Van Kline is a movie editor. He was working on a film a year ago that wanted to use some unreleased Weezer demos on the soundtrack, but they didn't think Weezer would play ball. So Yanne got me to write some songs that sounded like Weezer demos. This one ended up sounding more like Camper Van Beethoven, not that there's anything wrong with that. Anyhow, Weezer ended up playing ball, I think -- in any event they didn't use my songs.
I Can't Hold it Down Another song from the movie demo series. I never could find words to fit this melody, so here it is as an instrumental. I think it sounds sort of like P-9, that great Soul Asylum song about striking Hormel workers. The workers got screwed in the end, as did Soul Asylum.
January 2005:
The
Invisible Man I've spent the past six months fussing over the way
the crash cybals should sound in this song. I still don't think I have
it right but if I don't post it now I'll never stop fiddling with it.
June 2004:
Could U B Mine? was a pretty straight attempt to mine the "Dirty Mind" vein yet again, but ended up sounding more like Queen or something. I had the kernel of the chorus rattling around in my head for a decade or so, and once I got around to fleshing it out it took about half an hour.
May 2004:
New Transmissions I remember the first time I heard "Good Times Roll" by the Cars on WBLM ("the Rock 'n Roll Blimp") in the back of somebody's mom's Volvo in South Portland, Maine. When that sweet keyboard line hit right after the first verse, I felt like Columbus stumbling on a new continent. That's the feeling I tried to capture in this song, right down to the sweet keyboard line.
February 2004:
Jenni Comes Alive is a tribute to the performing arts and the wonderful things you can accomplish if you follow your dreams. I was suprised how cheap it was to hire the original Guns N' Roses rhythm section -- those guys evidently don't have much to do these days.
They Keep Coming, We Keep on Knocking Them Down is sort of a cross between World War One and Space Invaders. Perhaps it can join Toby Keith's "The Angry American" and Neil Young's "Let's Roll" on juke boxes outside of Marine bases. Except it probably sounds too French, what with those drum machines and sythesizers and everything.
Tear the Roof Down As a teenage lad getting in touch with his delinquent side in a fast-growing, affluent suburb, I flirted with monkey-wrench ideology and regarded developers as a life form slightly below lawyers. Now that I'm a DC yuppie all my friends are lawyers and I eagerly welcome the creeping tendrils of gentrification in my crusty neighborhood. But it's important to keep in touch with that teenage moral absolutism, if only to get a good head of steam going when need be. Check out the gnarly lead-guitar tone.
Eat More Animals My wife Meg came up with this song in her sleep in December 2000, when we were painting the dining room blood red and listening to all six CDs of the "American Anthology of Folk Music" over and over. The recording, therefore, doesn't make any sense and sounds like it was cut in 1928.
January 2004:
Hungry is a story about a very bad man. The arrangment strives for "Dirty Mind"-era Prince but has ended up more like the backing music they play when they announce a sale on boys' tube socks at K-Mart.
Wheels is another story about a bad man, inspired by the great D.C. crime novels of George P. Pelecanos. The narrator is driving somewhere to do something mysterious, but bad. Badass guitars urge him on.
Gabriel, Blow Your Horn owes more to Tim O'Brien, specifically a short story he wrote about a teenage kid hanging around rural Minnesota before he gets shipped off to Vietnam. I forget the name of it, but Becky Bowman tells me it's called "On the Rainy River." Thanks Becky.
And Clear Channel DJs across the country have already pegged that The Minnesota Polka (Chargogagogmanchogagogcharbunagungamog) as the feel-good dance hit of summer 2k4. The long word is a lake in western Massachusetts.