beautiful, funny, sad & true

The Indigo Girls were interviewed on NPR this morning.  Naturally, they also took the opportunity to play a couple of songs, one of which was “Closer to Fine” and the other was this one. . .

. . .called “Sugar Tongue.”  Loveitloveitloveitloveit.

It was just the two women and their guitars, and it was absolutely stellar.  This version has the electric piano, too, which is okay and all, but I found this acoustic version much more compelling than the ‘rock’ version from the CD (with the drums and everything), but discussing why I feel that way is actually a huge story in itself, all about music production, and the way I think about instrumentation and creating parts and textures, and all that kind of stuff.

That would be much too long a discussion, especially for a simple little entry saying that I love this song and that I want to share it with you.

IrishBand has been doing an incredible amount of recording lately at my place.  Drummer works early in the morning and is done by noon, so he’s been coming over here around one o’clock, where I have my drums and microphones set up.  It works surprisingly well, and sounds surprisingly good too.

A couple of weeks ago, we got an offer that we couldn’t refuse.  One of our musician friends, El Jefe, is in an audio recording program at the local community college.  Apparently it’s a really good program, and they sometimes ask bands to volunteer a day of their time so that the students can practice with a real group in real situations.  In return, the band gets a free demo of some of their songs.  El Jefe (in the black shirt and glasses) immediately thought of us, so we went in bright and early on Saturday morning.

We all had a grand time, and got two really good recordings out of the deal.  I can’t wait to hear how the final mixes come out.  The class will be working on them over the rest of the length of the semester or term or whatever.

Oh yeah. . .I forgot (which is to say, I remembered) to add some pictures of us too.

Irish flags tend to be pretty scarce around most recording studios, so we took the liberty of bringing our own.  Notice that we even put one in the room with Violinist, which I think looks really cool.  No pictures of me in this bunch, unfortunately (fortunately?), because these are from my camera, and I was the one shooting.  So.  When I see the pictures that the other guys took, I might post some here, but I’ll definitely post links to our recordings once we have some to share.

I also want to extend a huge thank you to El Jefe and the recording crew at the school.  They did a really great job, individually and together, and were total professionals.  Best of all, everyone left with a big smile on his or her face at the end of the day, which is always the most telling sign of a successful recording session.

Friday, after spending the day playing and recording drum tracks for my own version of one of Breanna’s songs from her previous band, I walked to the store to get ingredients for dinner.  Walking back up my street, arms full of groceries, I found that the police had all of the streets blocked off, and there were people standing on the sidewalk watching, all the way up the street.  I asked someone what was going on, and she said that it was drug-related, and that they were trying to get into the house of a person who was both selling and using drugs.  I continued walking on MyStreet, and a cop stopped me and told me that I wouldn’t be able to get through on MyStreet for a while.  I asked which way he’d recommend I go to get home, and he said I could walk up NextStreet and be out of harm’s way.  I thanked him and took the opportunity to quickly survey MyStreet in the process.  There were officers with rifles, and a SWAT team with an armored vehicle of some sort parked a block from my building, on the other side of the street.  I walked home quickly and grabbed my camera.

The neighbor lady across the street saw me and called laughingly to her husband, “Hey, he’s taking photographs!”  Someone walked over and asked the plainclothes policeman what was up, and according to NeighborSusan, “Apparently it was actually shooting-related. They located, or at least thought they’d located, a suspect for a shooting that occurred elsewhere at some previous time.”  The cop was telling people to stay inside for about half an hour.  I did, and listened with my window open.  I heard no gun shots, and the multitude of cars drove away half an hour later, so I’m assuming that means the incident ended well enough.

I guess you could say the jury’s still out on what really happened, (I’m gonna go with the shooting scenario rather than the drug scenario; drug busts don’t usually involve that many big guns and vehicles, unless it was a huge operation) but that was certainly not something you see every day in this neighborhood.

Love it.

For those of you who either don’t love or haven’t seen many 80’s movies, this picture is a parody of the classic scene from the movie Say Anything, in which John Cusack holds his boom box (back then, however, it would’ve been called a ‘ghetto blaster’) aloft and blasts the song In Your Eyes into the window of his sleeping ex-girlfriend, with the intention of waking her up and winning her back.  Great movie, by the way.  It may look a bit dated by now, but the story is excellent.

In the interest of full disclosure, you can buy the ‘Jesus loves you’ T-shirt here, but be warned.  Most of the shirts on the site are much more R-rated, as well as being less funny and more crass than this particular one is.

So there’s this whole series of videos on [read the following with a Cockney accent] TubeWhatBelongsToYou [okay, now you can go back to your normal voice] called Shreds, and the videos are pure genius.  The person who makes them takes existing videos of a famous musician or band and they overdub the various instruments and vocals based on what’s happening on the screen,  making it sound as crappy and as funny as possible.

Warning:  the videos are highly addictive.

Here’s my personal favorite, which is a Kiss video from the 1970’s.  The real song is “I Was Made For Loving You” (click here to watch the original, but definitely don’t until after you’ve watched the ‘shred’ video).

‘I can’t say philanto-papa. . .Pikachu!’

I could watch these all day, and I know I can, actually, because that’s what a good part of yesterday consisted of; that and then a longish recording session in the evening for IrishBand.