21 BODY [052809]

Back on track, back on time.

Download 21_Body_[052809].mp3

Download 21_Body_RADIO_[052809].mp3

ID3 tags will have to wait.

This section is not about ID3 tags, really. It's about the Cleveland Cavaliers, who seem poised to break my heart like so many other Cleveland teams of the past. This will be the first time that they have really crushed me in earnest; usually that job belongs to the Indians, who as recently as '07 toyed with my heart like a barroom-tale she-devil, but recently have lost their luster due to what can only have been a steady diet of cigarettes and methamphetamine. The Cavs (and LBJ... wait... okay) dutifully stepped in to take their place, but right now their regular season success, and my high hopes for the first Cleveland sports championship of my lifetime (I don't take credit for suffering pre-1980. Boston fans who "waited" 86 years, take note) seems like a distant memory. I don't hold up much hope for the Browns, partly because they are very bad, and other-partly because I'm a bit turned off by football, because it makes me think about concussions.

Long story short, I have been watching a lot of sporting events on TV, and they are the kind of sporting events that make me feel too depressed to worry about organizing an iTunes library.

And this is why I need an intern.

I got blogged.

Hopefully this will be happening with greater frequency. Lord knows I'm working on it. Check my mini-bio at Boston-based music blog The Stu Reid Experiment. I stole their interpretive illustration, which I think looks exactly like me:



Song details:

I came up with this song a long while back while I was playing in The Indefinite Article with Rick (now Richard James). It existed on my computer as a cheap-drums-and-Rhodes mockup for a few years, made a brief appearance on the list of songs that might make it onto the album, and finally took its final form a few weeks ago when I decided to dust it off an get working on it. The lyrics are old, too. They're a lot busier than anything that I write nowadays. Back then I had aims of being a fast-rapper in the vein of Aesop Rock. Recently I have come to the conclusion that it is better to be understood than to not.

Having the song form gave me a solid amount of time to fiddle with the Rhodes sounds. I spent a lot of time running them through a little tube-powered band-pass filter on loan from Nick, my mastering engineer. This was particularly useful for the Rhodes sound in the third verse, which was a pretty cheap-sounding patch from one of Rick's Yamaha keyboards (we recorded Rick's parts in two separate sessions and only used the real Rhodes for the first session).

Overall, I think it's a pretty effective song. The chorus could use something else to create more separation between it and the rest of the song. I changed up the drum pattern a bit for the chorus, but I think that's barely noticeable. I like the sparse arrangement. If you already have your copy of the album, you'll notice that I'm not often convinced that my arrangements are sufficiently full. (if not...) If anything, this project is helping me to achieve more with less: the more powerful my drums, the more interesting my sounds, the less parts I need to add to feel like a song is interesting.

Got some good tunes coming in the next two weeks, including my first ever song with another MC. Need to try to tune out the distractions and fill up the idea bin a little more. It's getting kind of low.

Links:

24 Hours of Le Mons. Endurance race for cars costing $500 or less. I want to do this.

That's all. Sorry. Got the itis.

Song credits:

Rhodes by Richard James. Guitar by Evan Anderson. Cheerleader vox by Cassandra Gibbs. Mixed by Phil Gorey. Mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East, Cambridge MA.