The Paperboy Always Dies Twice

Morel.

*****

Wall-of-effects guitars, echoing keyboards, and laconically urgent vocals over rock/disco beats that range from the laid-back to the moderately uptempo: not for nothing is one of the remix tracks for Morel's recent album The Death of the Paperboy retitled "Shoegazer Disco." Something about the vocals on this album keeps reminding me of the Soup Dragons’ cover of “I’m Free,” but the instrumentation and arrangements probably owe more to The Stone Roses and others of that ilk … and that’s a compliment. A lot of what was awesome about the early 1990s’ collision of rock and dance music is on display here, suitably refurbished for 2009. It’s extremely tasty stuff.

I think what really grabs me, though, is the sense of something going on in the lyrics that is a bit more than the sum of the parts.

The title track isn’t the only one to muse obliquely on some strange intersection of adolescence, death (of children or of parents), and sexual awakening, as if Morel were in a gayer version of Springsteen’s old territory. There are a lot of “kids” on this album, sometimes in groups …

“kids from nowhere, born to run, disco drugs and lots of fun” (“Still Born”--told you about the Springsteen feel)

… sometimes just one kid, maybe the same one each time …

“put your arms around me, one more time for the kid” (“Flawed”)

… whose loss seems to be somehow transcendentally significant

“the kid of the universe dies to dig a direction” (“The Death of the Paperboy”)

Losses and the risk of loss pile up: an unjustly ignored lover, a paperboy struck by a car on the roadside, a friend’s mother. And perhaps one’s own innocence, or a past that might not have been as great as one remembers it as, but that can’t and shouldn’t be forgotten. There’s also a fair amount of unrequited emotion here:

“No makes me lonely … yes it hurts, but I’m not in love …” (No Makes Me Lonely”)

“There’s danger in here between us, but most is on my side. You walk around in stardust while I hide.” (“My Side”)

At the album’s close, we get a hint that some of this might have something to do with one of those canonical gay teen romances with a straight friend who likes us, but not that way (“that way” not, of course, having been discussed):

“If we drive forever and a minute I won’t mind, you say there’ll be lots of girls and lots of beer, and you don’t even notice as I start to unwind … your leg brushes against my skin, and you don’t even notice my grin.” (“Nova”—more gay-Springsteen feel here: the Nova is a Chevy and the song’s protagonist is driving to “the Cape” with his friend).

For me the centerpiece is “Anymore, Anymore,” a gorgeous ballad whose narrator, singing against a backdrop of gentle piano chords, slowly-accumulating distorted guitars, and the repeating sound of a single drop of water, wishes he could “be the drug that brings you down” for some friend (unnamed, though other boys in their circle are cited by name) and claims that he doesn’t mind “the falling out” though it’s also what “makes me sad” (for that “I’m okay, really I’m okay, no matter how often you ask me I’ll insist I’m okay” feeling). Ultimately, there’s a near-coming-out:

“We could go for a walk and talk about the things that let you down. Like heaven and martinis, and boys who hang around. If I told you my biggest secret, would you promise me you’d stay? It isn’t what you’re thinking; it’s simple, in a way.”

But if this is a coming out, about what is it coming—because whatever you’re thinking, it isn’t that. There’s a sense of more going on than just sexuality here, or at least a sense that sexuality involves much more than sex.

The best thing about all this heavy implication is how completely unschematic it is, how much room there is for interpretation … which is also to say, alas, how much room there is for things to remain painfully unspoken until years later. It’s more in the manner of transcripts from memories that demand their hearing now and then, or the dreams the old experiences sometimes force on us.

If you’re smart, you’ll plunk for the two-disc set, with both Disc 1 (the rockier take on all of this) and Disc-O, the remix album on which the “Death of the Paperboy” track becomes an uptempo rave with a spoken-word break about transformative moments and hopes for the mutuality of memory.

Rocking on the surface, subtly stunning underneath, and highly recommended.

Symmetry

Ever plug someone's name or user-handle for one of your social-networking sites into a searchable email system (let's say, gmail) and confirm your impression that the relationship is grossly one-sided?

Perhaps it's you who never talks to them. Maybe you aren't really that invested. Maybe they're doing all the work.

Or maybe you have become someone's social-networking pal because your mutual friends all sing their praises, but it turns out that for all that you've quipped in their blog when they were quippy, or offered a shoulder to cry on when they needed one .... and when they've even thanked you for that ... they have never once commented on anything you've written in your own blog, never once initiated contact.

Accountability

There's been a lot of discussion lately about problems with the leadership of gay communities, particularly following the No On 8 campaigns. There's a lot of talk about holding the leadership more accountable in the future. I want to take a step back from that and talk about some questions I think are critical in seeking that kind of accountability.

• How well does a community serve its majority membership?
  
• How well does a community serve its most vulnerable members?
  
• How does a community deal with internal disagreement or dissent?
  
• How does a community present a united front when it encompasses a diversity of people or opinions?
  
• How do leaders respond to critique from the rank and file?
  
• How do community organizations change tactics when portions of the communities they serve report that the current tactics are serving them poorly or harming them outright?
  

*****

My experience of gay community organizing is that we've been stuck for years mostly focusing on the first question. We take the temperature of the overall gay community and we hear what most people want and we start organizing on that basis. In the 1970s there was a high focus on encouraging people to come out and be gay, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was the response to AIDS, in the last several years it's been marriage, both in the sense of social recognition and in the sense of the legal and economic protections it affords those who have a marriageable partner. All of these have been important issues, on their own face, as well as because of the number of people in the community who care passionately about them.

But if the Proposition 8 loss has reminded us of anything, it's that the will of the majority should never be the only important factor. (Any of you who were reading along and curious, or uncomfortable, merely because I kept talking about the "gay" community, rather than some other mushy but more nuanced thing: gold star. The gay majority (however you want to define it) IS important, but the minorities within the community count too. Just as the gay minority counts within the larger heterosexual world.)

So we have these other questions we ought to consider.

How well does a community serve its most vulnerable members?

Example: gay teens, or transgender people. How do we do here? Looking around the people I know personally, what I see is general agreement that our vulnerable community members are important too, and frequent action to make that sentiment count. I would argue that, wonderful as that really is, it's not nearly as prevalent a sentiment as it could be, and often ONLY a sentiment. Actions still speak louder than words; problem is, the vulnerable parts of our community could use a LOT of action on their behalf.

How does a community deal with internal disagreement or dissent?

There are all kinds of possible answers to this question. "Deal with" does not have to mean "agree that everyone's views are equally valid." There are people with all kinds of odd ideas out there, some of which they hold passionately, but not all of those ideas are going to work for significant numbers of us. Moreover, many of these ideas don't point to anything a community should try to act on. So "dealing with" disagreement needn't mean "trying to address all points of view equally." But it probably should NOT mean routinely telling people who hold certain viewpoints that they are wrong, or that they should shut up or wait 'their turn', while insisting that the community cares about them, or shaming them that they are letting the community down if they walk away from it while it steadfastly refuses to hear them out. There should at least be mechanisms for supporting members of the community whose concerns are not being addressed as quickly as others' are, and for finding ways of reiterating the community's commitment to everyone it claims to embrace, even if some are moving ahead faster than others, and even if it's GOOD that some are moving ahead faster than others.

How does a community present a united front when it encompasses a diversity of people or opinions?

This is a legitimately tricky one; it's almost impossible to be perfect about it, and in the US we have a strong tendency to dismiss imperfect solutions as wholly worthless, an attitude that often blinds us to possibilities for partial progress.

My impression is that the gay/etcetera communities have tended to handle this by insisting that we should sweep our differences under a rug--the classic move of a victim protecting itself. I think that has sometimes proven effective in the short term, but as long-term policy it seems likely to produce larger fractures within the community. One still hears pronouncements, routinely, that "everyone" in the community needs to be "on board" with Idea X or Action Y "or else". This is handling diversity by insisting we're not diverse. Also known as preaching to the choir. I think that gets trickier all the time, the more that the "choir" is embedded in much larger crowds, in which so many of us can overhear each other all the time, via modern communications. What I notice the last several years is a great deal of free-floating frustration amongst people who are tired of being preached to as if they're members of the choir when they've already declared that they're not. And what I also notice is that MOST of us are choir members or non-members in many different ways.

How do leaders respond to critique?

How do community organizations change tactics when portions of the communities they serve report that the current tactics are serving them poorly or harming them outright?

These last two are especially important in cases where the tactics happen to satisfy a significant majority of the community while heightening the vulnerability of some other portion. It can require creative thinking to change tactics or strategies that continue to meet the needs of the majority while potentially being LESS damaging to some internal minority(s).

*****

So here's what I have to say about the community leadership in the wake of Proposition 8. Many of the problems people are noting now have been present for years. And there have been people speaking up about that for just as long.

Here's the rub: prior to the Prop 8 debacle, the people who were speaking up about the problems of the leadership tended to be members of internal minorities, and/or people who were looking at accountability on ALL of these points, not just the first one.

What's changed now is that the problems of the leadership have come to the attention of the gay majority, because the leadership's problems resulted in something that hurts the majority.

There's a prominent leader from the LA area whose name has come up several times recently in articles or discussions friends have pointed at. I worked briefly with this person several years ago. Accountability to the rank and file was important to this person, as far as I could tell, mostly in a "firefighting" sense: if the rank and file had a concern, the leader was smart enough to have a sit-down with the upset people and talk it over and try to defuse it long enough to carry on as usual.

What was lacking was real attention to the substance of internal disagreements, and substantive change on the basis of what the rank and file was saying. This was particularly true in terms of organizational tactics, when the majority was being served by the tactics, but an internal minority ... or two, or three ... was feeling hung out to dry. The leader in question clearly felt that as long as the majority was being served well enough, seeking even better solutions that would have the side effect of not hanging internal minorities out to dry was a waste of time.

Problem is: any member of the rank-and-file, any *group* within the rank-and-file, can be dismissed as a disgruntled minority. And in communities as complex as ours, that's a mindset that the leadership gets a lot of practice at. Remember: this is a community in which we have a long history of calling each other "drama queens," rather than listening seriously to each other.

As the No On 8 campaign went forward, clearly there was a lot of concern among the rank and file. But the leadership has gotten a lot of practice at ignoring bitching from the rank and file .... and I would argue that the rank and file has sometimes collaborated with that tendency, by shouting down dissent.

So now the majority is awake to what some of the community was saying all along. It's not just that we don't hold our leaders accountable enough ... it's that our entire accountability model needs rethinking.

The questions above are only part of it. Other factors include things like: checking the actual results of tactics against the original goals, and figuring out what really works, versus what we hope or believe will work. Or: ponying up either money or time in at least as much quantity as criticism.

I'll come clean with my own stake in this: there's a part of me that's rather gleeful at seeing certain people I didn't get on with get their comeuppance.

If I stop making it about me, though, I worry that I'm not hearing much in the way of holding future leaders accountable in a smarter way. Indeed, I don't think I'm hearing much "accountability," so much as a lot of expression of frustration.

Long term, I don't think the community gets it that expressing frustration is not the same as a) activism or b) holding leadership accountable.

The current mindset in the community is precisely the kind of situation I would not want to become an activist in. I hope some of these kids organizing on Facebook don't wind up getting held accountable to the same overly-simplistic, frustration-without-action standards that have often applied in the past.

Aha--There's The Black Dog

Someone I know online slightly was talking recently about how he practices optimism and how it has helped him not be prone to things like depression or guilt over past mistakes.

I volunteered a response about how I'm the same way.

But let's be honest. I wish I didn't have to practice optimism so hard, sometimes.

I'm feeling fairly unloved this morning. I've been having weird stomach distress the last few days, not sure what it's about, so that's not helping. Creatively, I feel blocked. Rehearsal on some new music is not going well, I'm VERY conscious of my low skill level compared to what's going to be needed eventually, and I'm not doing a very good job of reminding myself that practice will bring more skill in time.

It's hard not to notice that while a few of my friends will move mountains to spend time with me, or to stay involved in my life, most people only want to interact when I make it convenient for them. My recent show keeps feeling like an example of that .... Matt came all across the country to see me, one other friend took time out of his schedule (and as far as I know, he's not a big fan of rock music so that was especially meaningful, as I see it) ... and most other people just SAY they'll show up and then don't. Actions speak louder than words.

I'm even being kept waiting by someone who I made time for in my schedule today when what I really wanted to do was focus on myself.

Most of this is transient feelings that will resolve on their own, but I don't think it pays to ignore them. I have to practice optimism in the face of them.

Late Afternoon Light

I wonder if I should bring my little point and shoot camera with me to work more often. The late afternoon light is gorgeous right now as it paints the red brick of Memorial Hall in orange tones, gray/blue sky behind it. I'm seeing it partly through the purplish sheers they use as curtains in much of this building.

It's late fall light, no question about it, I don't think this shade of orange really obtains in summer with the higher angles of the sun. As much as I am given to lamenting the shortness of days at this season (as much as that really does seem to affect me), there's real beauty at this time of year.

Probably not the easiest thing to capture photographically, but then that would be part of the challenge. ;-)

EDIT: Ten minutes later. Memorial Hall is fading, but the white marble or concrete of the William James Hall tower is stunning.

The Noise Is Restful

I don't remember which of my friends I must have seen toting Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise a few months back, but it looked "craveable" (in the words of Whorange style maven Tula Jeng). So I picked it up on its recent softcover release and dove into it.

Ross makes 20th century "classical" or "made by composers" music accessible by re-embedding it in the historical times it was made in and the personal lives of the people who made it. And as a sometime maker of music in a popular idiom, with tangential forays into stranger stuff, I have a certain interest in how other people have done things.

Not to mention the fact that a great deal of the popular music I enjoy has either been influenced by composers, or has influenced composers. Some of what seemed striking or strange about 20th century high-art music is now so taken for granted that we're all soaking in it anyway.

At the moment I'm listening to Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians, and some of the echoes (whichever direction you think they go in) with Eno, or Talking Heads, or Sigur Ros, are easy to hear. On the subway this morning I took in Olivier Messiaen's Quartet For the End Of Time. Last night it was The Rite Of Spring, and sure, I'm aware that my catching up with the Rite marks me as someone VERY late to this party, but what the heck.

Ross is totally engaging about why any of these things might be interesting, at least in terms of intellectual or musical history ... and his enthusiasm is compelling enough to make trips to the music store worth it. Indeed, there's a substantial audio area on his web site where one can listen to clips of many of the things he talks about in the book or venture further afield to Napster or wherever. He makes playlists and recommends things to download and all kinds of good stuff.

Plus he's totally gay and now he's my fantasy musical boyfriend.

Paisley Prick

There's a certain kind of queer man, whether queer in gender traits or in sexual object choice, who finds it confusing and difficult to make sense of his queerness and retreats to one of the sterner religious dogmas in an attempt to, if not sort himself out, then hold himself down.

The gay community is chock full of people who, even if they didn't grow up in a religious family, found themselves turning to religion as a means of dealing (or not dealing, which is a form of dealing) with being gay or differently gendered.

Some of them are good friends of mine .... though usually, we became friends many years after they came out of the closet and, often as not, out of religion as well.

Since this temptation to use religion against oneself is common enough among gay-as-in-totally-gay men, how much more tempting it must be for men who might actually feel themselves drawn to women as well as to men (assuming, for the rest of this post, that their queerness is at all about object choice, rather than gender identity).

It's not uncommon to find Kinsey 1ish or 2ish men who are scared shitless of their interest in men, not JUST because they're dealing with internalized homophobia, but ALSO because they perceive (not always inaccurately, it has to be said) that nobody, particularly chicks, will believe that they really go both ways. Supposing they want the hole 9 times out of 10, their motivation for dealing with the pole issue isn't all that obvious.

You meet one of these guys who's actually checked his own head about it, rather than run from it, and you've usually met someone with a fair amount of personal ethics and courage. Not to mention, often a good lay, in the sense that chucking one's self-repressions tends to do wonders for performance in the sack.

But many of them are so afraid to open Pandora's Cock that their clinging to dogma is all the stronger for having an actual crack in the armor. Nobody who starts out with a shred of possible heterosexuality knows whether he's going to keep liking pussy once he's tried dick, and it's not necessarily even helpful to point to openly bisexual men one might know who have a devoted following of hot chicks following them around, turned on by the fact that these guys know their way around cocks and vaginas, because a) most people don't take the time to find out that there are such guys, and b) it's easy enough to disbelieve in fairies no matter how many of them you meet--particularly if they're a kind of fairy the other fairies say is just a myth.

The middle ground is an unpopular place to be, and plenty of people who genuinely fall into it torture themselves about it, with the full approval of the world at large. The self-torture gets read as "commitment" and "principle" rather than "OMG get over it, it's not so bad." It's similar to the way that some of the most strident "you have to make up your mind and commit to your gay identity, bisexuality is a cop-out" gays are Kinsey 5's who "experimented" plenty with girls and probably yen to keep doing it. Scratch a fundamentalist, religious or sexuo-political, find someone with more issues than National Geographic.

Catch someone like this out in the real world, and maybe you can point him at a support group for safely exploring sexuality or gender identity. You take his sacred-holy-text thumping for the poor clingy life-saver it is and you smile and nod and hope they do some therapy.

You don't take it seriously ... or too personally.

If you catch someone like this and he's a rich pop star, then he might be named Prince, and you might enjoy his music. You still don't take his homophobia seriously.

Or too personally.

After all, this is someone who thinks he "owns" video rights to his cover of someone's else's song.

We're not talking about psychologically well-adjusted here.

Metablogging about Blogging

When I started blogging nearly six years ago, I didn't understand how important it would become in my life. My first LiveJournal entry notes my uncertainty about what I was going to do with a blog (in slightly dismissive terms that always make me chuckle in retrospect). If I recall correctly, I signed on mostly because I had a couple of friends who had blogs, and I had a vague idea that as a system administrator, I should keep abreast of some of these technologies the way end-users experience them.

It's fair to say that my social circle expanded by about 500% within my first year on that service. I wasn't unaware of the rather large population of potential "people I might have something in common with" out there; I just had lacked a medium in which I could make connections that mattered to me. IM and hookup sites and various other things hadn't really called to me; even Usenet had palled after about six months. Suddenly I was hooked, but more than hooked: the connections really did go both ways.

Like a lot of queer men (though not just queer men) the blog environment did become a dating service as well as a venue for other social interactions. As many of us have noted, though, blogging put dating (and sex) into a more comfortable zone than cruising on more traditional hookup sites. By the time I slept with someone I knew from LJ, I usually knew them fairly well. Sex, while still fun as "just" sex, usually wasn't "just" sex, but friendship by other means.

I was always as prone as anyone to online drama. Maybe more so. I learned a great deal, in my first couple of years on LiveJournal, about my own propensity to get sucked into other people's excesses of feeling, and my own capacity for generating more heat than light. The number of occasions on which I felt overwhelmed and pondered dropping out was large; once a month wouldn't be a bad guess. But for a long time I was aware that hanging in was forcing me to confront some of my difficulties dealing with my own feelings, let alone others'. Growth wasn't always easy or pleasurable, but it was growth.

Somewhere in 2005 and 2006 I suppose I hit my stride. Early 2006 was the last major time I smacked myself with acting out my "issues" on line and losing a friendship over it.

In retrospect, it seems likely that my personal trajectory mirrored larger community trends.

Other web communities (MySpace, Facebook) or technologies (Twitter) began coming to the fore. Those of us who had moved into blogging during 2003-05 began to move elsewhere. Sometimes it was a matter of finding something that worked better for each individual than blogging; sometimes it was a matter of having wrung everything out of the blog experience; sometimes people left under a cloud, whether one they created themselves, or one generated by others that felt too suffocating.

I hung on through these changes, regretting the absence of many people I'd enjoyed interacting with easily and quickly in blogspace--even if I kept up with them via other means--but still deriving benefit from the relationships that remained.

About a year ago things started to change. Maybe it was just my own personal growth; having one more pointlessly negative interaction with someone I was misunderstanding, or who was misunderstanding me, no longer felt like a growth experience.

But I suspect there was a broader change going on as well. Blog interactions, at least on LiveJournal, are capable of all the intellectual and emotional depth one could hope for, but that was never the majority of the interactions. Some of it was just fun ... and some of it was, always, just kind of annoying or poisonous.

Many of the more thoughtful, calmer people moved on a long time ago.

I've been hanging on because the rush of discovering how many people might enjoy interacting with me, back at the outset, was so powerful. I'd *never* felt that connected to so many people .... even at times when the connections were difficult.

These days, I have more trust in the idea that I can establish close connections, but I notice that many of my blog connections are *not* particularly nourishing. Some of that is my doing: I don't have as much time to invest as I used to.

But some of it just is what it is.

Kubler-Ross's grief stages would be appropriate here. I would say that I am getting to "acceptance."

Clearly, LiveJournal is not the only "blog" venue out there, as a post here indicates. For a long time, it did have a feeling of community that I haven't turned up elsewhere .... and yeah, I've gone looking.

Part of the process of accepting that some of what was there is gone and won't return, though, is the realization that some of it, I don't need or want any more. At least, not enough to put up with some of the downsides, even if those were always there too.

No On 8 Rally

About 25 minutes of video from this past Saturday's "No On 8/Marriage Equality" rally at Boston City Hall.

Speakers in the video clips include Sue Hyde of NGLTF, US Congressman Mike Capuano, US Congressman Niki Tsongas, and trans activist Gunner Scott.

Plus a lot of crowd scenes and captures of interesting protest signs.

Bright Lights Dissolve

like sugar deep inside you now ...

Such A Fool

I'm still quite proud of our first live performance a couple of weeks ago, so here's one of the clips from it.

No On 8 Rally

An article in the Tufts Daily about the rally I attended last weekend. Good stuff.

Recent Happenings

Last weekend, I attended a rally protesting the passage of Proposition 8 in California.

Some video I took:

Forgive Me, For I Have Not Posted

Things are busy, in a good way. Band rehearsals are ramping up a bit. This is the first time we've gone weekly, rather than every other week. The momentum has been sufficiently in the "forward" direction to make it seem useful to press on a little faster.

Gotta take a look at my expenses ... the rehearsal studio time is NOT cheap and weeklies may be more than I can afford. Then again, for now, I can do it.

Even though we're using the larger rooms with the better PAs to give Eric and I *some* prayer of hearing our vocals over the din.

I'm trying to decide whether to spring some new material on them tonight, even without song charts .... or see whether I thought to draft any song charts over the last couple of weeks. I'm itching to get on with it, though to be honest, having gotten as far as we have with only three or maybe four full-band rehearsals, to be getting this far along on 6-8 songs, is nothing to sneeze at.

I'm just itching to do even more. ;-)

Vocal Rehearsal

One thing that came out of last week's full band rehearsal is that Eric's upper range was working for him a lot better than lower down. This seems to be a bit of a rule of thumb for singers anyway: that a lot of people start off feeling "more comfortable" in the lower part of their range but SOUND better higher up. If you're not Johnny Cash or Stephin Merritt, don't go too low. I've had to learn the same thing myself. My first solo show featured several low-baritone songs as warmups and EVERYONE who commented on my singing said I was better later in the show.

So we took some time last night to work out some more vocal arrangements for Eric, so that he can do harmonies in a part of his range that works better for him and sounds better overall. And that came together quite well.

In fact, a couple of songs in which I consciously chose not to write too many lyrics for the choruses, concentrating on holding long notes and vowels, had been suffering from a bit of tedium with just my voice. With just one harmony, the choruses start to pop again. This is very yay.

There's another song in which the second verse is twice the length of the first and third, and what I've been trying to do is go up an octave in the second half of the verse, for dramatic effect. Problem is, my falsetto isn't robust enough to be reliable. I'm okay in rehearsals if it's one of the first things I sing, but if I've overextended myself at all, forget it. Well, guess who can sing the part? Indeed, he'd been thinking of suggesting to me that he take it, even as it had been occurring to me to pass it to him. If I can work on my chops to the point of getting up there myself, maybe we'll double. If not, I'll stay in the original octave and we'll harmonize. WIN.

Doug was going to try to make it later on but didn't show. No problem ... however, I happen to have heard Doug sing and I'm pretty sure he will add something very good when he gets the drum parts down and joins in vocally as well.

Audio Hardware

I posted a somewhat giddy note in my LiveJournal yesterday about the really nice rehearsal I had with a full band a couple of nights ago. The material works well in that setting and I'm looking forward to rehearsing them more.

THIS post is just a quick note that I ordered a piece of useful audio hardware the other day, and it arrived in the mail last night.

An old buddy of mine pointed out that some of my mixes suffer from being done on headphones; he noted that you get a false image of the stereo field that way. Thing is, my iMac outputs on a stereo 1/8 port (female) and the mixer I drive my monitors with take 1/4 or XLR inputs, mono. Guess what was hard to find in the shops? A cable with a 1/8" stereo male end that splits to two 1/4" outputs, male or female.

I'd have preferred a longish cable with two 1/4" male ends but settled for a short cable with 1/4" female ports to which I can plug standard cables. Haven't tested it out yet, but got TWO of them. Figure next time I mix, I can do an even better job.

Continuing MIDI Geekery

My comment to Alan this morning was "the simpler they make the software tools, the MORE enticing it is to spend entire days composing and arranging."

I forced myself to get out of the house yesterday and catch a film ("Iron Man," for future reference--enjoyed it) just so I wouldn't keep fiddling with new tracks that benefit from the new controller.

Besides the "Cuddleslut" song (which got a thumbs up from a buddy) I've been working on a backing track for the DE track "Land Line", which I've been promising both Eric and Ryan I would hash out better. That was yesterday's big effort.

This morning I've been working on a version of Book of Love's "Boy". Eric and I have both been wanting to cover that, and Eric may actually sing lead on it, to give me a break in the set.

Late last week, though, I was actually working on Numan's "Airlane," which is one of the close inspirations for "Cuddleslut."

That's four, count 'em four, pieces in the works in the last few days. None of which I worked on at the office. I've been busy enough with real work, there.

I keep meaning to get back to "Good Men" so I can give Ryan more ideas for lead riffs, too. He's been out of town the last few days and has said he probably won't have more parts worked out for this coming Tuesday. That's okay because we'll probably be breaking in a drummer ... but I feel as if I'm not getting enough done for my sidemen.

Yeah, even though I've worked out a full backing track and have a cover song half-tracked for my bass player. ;-)

The sun is shining and I am feeling noshy, so I think I will get myself OUT the house.

Because I'm spinning ABBA's The Visitors and the drum pattern for "Soldiers" is caaaaallllling me, begging to be stolen. MUST. RESIST.

Numanoid

I referred to my new little synthpop ditty as "shit" the other day, but it was in the sense of "shit like that is easier to write with the new keyboard controller."

In fact, it's not shit at all. It is very simple, but that's what I was going for.

So many of my favorite pop songs are built on very simple foundations. I'm attracted to muso stuff where there's fifteen bazillion chord changes and modulations and whatnot, or a little bit of modal play, but then I go back to the Hunters and Collectors catalogue, or early synthpop, and hear how much musicality people can cram into a I-V progression.

I am loving this little piece. Mostly I-V, a little vi-IV. Not only could Gary Numan have written it, it's got those long drawn-out held synth notes a la early Icehouse, where I'm just playing with letting the timbres have at your ears. I wasn't deliberately going for a "Great Southern Land" vibe, but I got there. (YES all my references and touchstones are from 1977-1983). (Except Hunnas!)

After Themes For A Defunct Leather Bar I wasn't sure Dirigible Ego was going to do a lot more instrumentals (I have another project for experiments and instrumentals) but this is definitely a Dirigible Ego song. An instrumental. Maybe I should just have at least one an album, no matter what, kind of like Simple Minds in the early days.

Gotta work on the drum kit ... especially the snare sounds, which are a little too uniform and wimpy.

But overall, wow. I have surprised myself again. Can't stop listening to the damn thing.

Working title has been "Numanoid" but I think I will rename it "Cuddleslut." It just has a happy vibe like that.

MIDI Controller

In all this time (about two years now) that I've been playing with GarageBand, I've never really used a regular piano-style keyboard to input musical notes. The little "piano" graphic window you can use the mouse with in GB is fundamentally useless, but the "musical typing" window is just useful enough that I went with it.

I'm pretty sure I could use my fancy, expensive Roland keyboard as a MIDI trigger source instead, but I don't think I ever have. The instruction manual for that thing is endless, even after three years I find it a bit daunting. When I want to use the Roland, I run it in as an *audio* source, not a *MIDI* source. I just don't want to have to keep another USB connector around and figure out which device to turn on first and all that crap. (My brain is oddly Luddite about such things.)

What I've wanted for a long time is a MIDI input keyboard. I saw one at about the same time that one of my professional colleagues gave me my first introduction to GarageBand (he raved about how good it was; I'd been assuming it must be a toy).

But every time I looked at the price tag on a MIDI keyboard, versus what I thought I needed to accomplish, I kept convincing myself it wasn't really going to be worth it. I could hack along with the "musical typing" function and then drag the notes around in the program window if the timing was off. Which it always is, I'm far from a great keyboard player.

A recent conversation with Shannon Grady convinced me to give the M-Audio product line another look. What could be simpler than walking into an Apple Store and just getting a two-octave MIDI keyboard?

I really really should have done this long ago. My compositions just took another little quantum jump.

Here's the thing. I've gotten much more fluid about using looping to rehearse draft ideas for songs and then lay them down. But although the Roland can loop, if the major part of the song is in GB and then I have to attach the Roland to start practicing keyboard parts on top of that ... too many steps for my Luddite brain.

I mean, frankly, the programming interface on the Roland is just clunky. Compared to a full fledged GUI like GarageBand. I know there are GUI tools for the Roland (I've even loaded them, once, in the distant past, despite being a Luddite) but my dim recollection is that GB is still superior.

So here I am with my new toy and it makes it EVER so much easier to rehearse keyboard lines and then record them RIGHT into the program when basically satisfied. The only drawback (and it is a real one) is that I can only trigger the sounds native to GB. The Roland does have 768 nice sounds, about 150 of which I think I actually LIKE. So there is more to do with the interface.

But the M-Audio unit has semi-weighted keys (which the Roland does NOT), and it collects genuine MIDI attack and aftertouch information (which the Roland does, but then it dumps it to that little information window which is SO difficult to use fluidly).

I got a great deal more done just yesterday than I have in a while.

******

Now it may be time for a little more discipline.

Part of the reason I'm doing all this composing at home is that rehearsing a band is time consuming. When we go into the studio, it quickly becomes apparent that even *I* don't recall all the chord changes and melody lines for my songs perfectly, and I live with the things much more fully than my sidemen do. It takes time to get everyone rehearsed, work things out, make choices about parts, and so on.

Meanwhile, although my creative burst from circa late March and April has been tailing off a little, the juices are still flowing. So I keep coming up with new song bits.

In addition to the two songs I blogged about last week and the week before (which now carry the titles "Monday Morning" and "Sun Breaks Through") I've got a couple more things in the crucible .... another one generated out of looping some fumbly acoustic guitar arpeggiating, like "MM" and "SBT"--and that one has some draft lyrics--and then a pure, simple synthpop song in a vaguely Gary Numan tradition, which is 100% an artifact of this new MIDI keyboard, which allows me to compose that kind of shit EVEN faster than before.

Thing is, I could speed up the process of band rehearsals if I didn't spend QUITE so much time hacking at new songs.

Ryan has come up with some great ideas for lead guitar parts, but that said, it's obviously a bit of a slog for him at times, and I think it's partly because I'm not giving enough guidance. He came up with a descending figure in the verses of "Good Men" that made me wet myself with glee. I think he also repeats it basically the same each time he hauls it out. Perhaps, as the composer, it's up to me to step in and say "here are some variations I want you to make on your brilliant riff."

What I *ought* to do with this new MIDI controller is work on some of those ideas.

Same with Eric's bass lines. He's pulling out some GREAT stuff. It's also clear that I need to give him more time to rehearse, and a better beat to play with. Our rehearsal last week featured NO drummer--because I still haven't talked to Doug--and NO beat track--because I forgot my Nano with the beat tracks at home, heading out to the studio in a rush.

This is my gig. I have to be more prepared. Hacking away on new material is fabulous and great, but not if I set things up so that my sidemen don't get enough attention from my for the stuff I'm asking them to do.

So there's a bit of planning and preparation remaining to do.

Rehearsal

Note to self: when putting your guitar on, don't whack yourself in the face with it. Emulating the "look" of the kid on the cover of War is dumb.

Don't exactly remember how or why I did that, toward the start of rehearsal; perhaps I was about to whack the mike stand with the guitar and pulled it back a little too hastily. In any case, ow, split lip. But rehearsal (which was just starting) carried on fine, once I got the bleeding stopped.

Rehearsed in a rather large, nicely appointed room at JamSpot tonight. Expensive room, it was all that was available, but it worked nicely. There was a floor monitor right by my mike ... no need, nor even a temptation, to oversing to be heard over the instruments. So my voice is fine.

Eric and Ryan are learning the material nicely and adding good things to it. A couple of these songs are going to kick ass when we've got more time and practice under our belts. Next step, I think, is to see if Doug will come in and do some drums.

Won't listen to the rehearsal CD until tomorrow at the earliest. I know there were plenty of flubs, many of them mine ... but let's leave this as a memory of a really strong rehearsal for now. Time enough to critique tomorrow.