Category: Music
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Master and sequencer
Another milestone! I’m listening to digital masters for the album and thinking about the gaps, the little breathers between the end of one song and the start of the next. We should have those fine details sorted by next week, after which the files go off the Crooked Cove (to manufacture the CDs) and CD…
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Wooosh
A good friend of mine talks about that feeling of creative flow in which it gets easier to make your ideas real. It comes and goes on its own but you can certainly invite and you can definitely chase it way. You can at the very least leave the door open and cultivate the habit…
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More punk than you
Reading sadly of David Thomas’s death at 71 of kidney failure it appears, the legendary founder of Pere Ubu. Remembering how my hipper than thou postpunk mentor and now-famous game pundit Jeff Green told me about first seeing him before a show and wondering something like who the fat guy in the used car salesman…
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First impressions
I’m back in the product business. As we get closer to the scheduled June release of No One Does It Solo Only, I have to think about packing, merchandising, distribution, website, and so on. I mean, I like thinking about things like that. I liked it when I was in book publishing, I like it…
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Record store day!
Drove up to Oakland this morning to meet my pals in Rockridge to check out some new vinyl releases for this spring’s record store day at Open Mind Music (and, it turns out, Stranded up the street). After a scare with a lost phone and some very good samaritans we each headed home with our…
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New sounds of silence
I’ve recently been following this artist on Soundcloud, Sarah Walker, whose specialty is freely reinterpreting standards of the past (many of them from my own formative years) in what I might say is a more contemporary style, reminiscent of popular singer-songwriters of the moment (think Tay Tay, et al.). The premise seems to be imagine…
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A funny thing happened on the way to the charger
Last night I saw a hot damn show up in Sebastopol at a brewpub called the Hopmonk. The main act, Pokey LaFarge (and band), and the opener, Cicada Rhythm, were both a hoot. It felt like a walk through the 20th century, from hot jazz to jump blues to texas swing to jumping jive to…
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We spent divine nights
Lyrics by Peter K. Hirsch, music by me. (This one recorded September 12, 2024.)
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No one does it solo only
Then on September 11, I posted this live take of “All I Know (Finn’s Song)“:
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Before I ever wrote a real song
A live take of “Sham Song” from September 9:
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The show must go on
For the first time since starting this recording project back in February of 2023, we were not able to schedule at least one session last September. Around the same time, Cecil and I got together to play a little and I struggled to find my hands on my own tune, “The Long Haired Kings.” This…
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Down to the studio
This record recording process started a year ago in February and for twelve months through January of this year we recorded one song a month, getting the basic tracks down. Since then we’ve been working on the arrangements and recording overdubs. I feel like we’re building momentum here toward the finish. In the meantime, I’ve…
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Building the sound
In May, after a couple of grueling weeks at work, we got back into Goody Sound for a nice long session overdubbing four of the songs for my album. (As always, these are sneak peeks of rough mixes, works in progress.) Carnegie Hill Jeremy Goody is a fantastic engineer with razor-sharp ears, and Megasonic Sound…
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Dirty ol’ tune
In that same spirit of catching my breath toward the end of the year I find I never did share any of the rough mixes of the third song we recorded this year, which must have been back in April. This one benefited a lot from having John Hanes on drums, and I feel he…
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Nobody called it that
At least in my day, nobody called our neighborhood on the upper east side “Carnegie Hill,” although that’s what they call it today and maybe some folks, like realtors, even called it that back then. A bunch of things converged in 2020. I was getting a bit more intentional about songwriting. I read the wonderful…
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A.I. Green sings
Fatal error, my core can’t detect / Discarding sectors of uncertain prospect
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Never been to Narnia
One sign of how busy I’ve been lately is it’s taken me weeks to share the latest rough mix from my “Pleasant Valley sessions,” something called “Finn’s Song” informally and “Stand Up, Mixer!” inexplicably:
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Trust the wooosh
Not sure why but I still seem to have beginner’s mind when it comes to writing songs and even having a set of ten that I feel are ready for my first album has not shut down the ongoing process of discovering and writing songs, with this newest work in progress coming over the weekend:
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Second one in the can
Went back to Megasonic Sound yesterday to record basic tracks for a second song for my album and came out with another rough mix that’s making me smile.
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Down to the Mountain (Please Set Me Free)
Seems like the chorus has a mind of its own and has settled out into something like: Let me beSet me freeLet me be me, oh please, pleasePlease, set me free though we’ll see what happens once the Kincaid get their greasy mitts on it.
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Down to the Mountain
Set me free