Lately it’s been extremely frustrating trying to get new song material out there. It’s a good frustration though if there’s such a thing. Late last year I rejoined my old band, Page 22. This is good frustration number one. Songs needed to be learned and relearned and practiced over and over. This takes a lot of time because each show we play is a minimum 40 songs and each show is different. I forgot to mention that I rejoined as a guitar player just as I was the last time in this band.
Fast forward to the present and good frustration number two. Certain situations have been brewing that the band needed a new bass player. For some reason it was difficult finding one in this area. After a couple failed attempts, I decided to switch to the bass so we could get another guitar player instead. I’ve been playing the bass over the past few years on my own songs and enjoy it tremendously. It’s one of the parts in my songs that I look forward to when it’s time to record it.
Long story short. It worked! We have a great guitar player and I fell in love with playing the bass. This is what I should have been doing and never realized it till now. The past two to three weeks, I’ve been doing what I did when I rejoined the band last year, and that’s learning all the songs AGAIN, this time on the bass. It seems to come more natural to me and isn’t taking as long as I thought. We’ve already had a band practice that sounded great and we’ll be having another one tonight. I feel like I’m almost up to speed playing bass which means I’ll be able to resume the songwriting process and start coming out with new songs like I planned. We’ll be playing on St. Patricks Day. If anyone is in the area, stop on by! Here’s the website. More dates will be added soon.
SpinTunes 4 has officially begun. 34 songs submitted. Round 1 Listening Party long long over. There’s a lot of work and sorting out for the judges to do. Never an easy task with this many songs. The popular vote is going on now where you can vote for your top 5 favorites. First listen to all the songs here, then you vote over here. If you feel the need to download any of the songs (you know you do), PLEASE download the ENTIRE album. There are only so many free downloads available and downloading the album is the same as downloading an individual song. So once you download the album you can keep what you want and chuck away whatever you don’t want.
My song, Alone, is about a recurring nightmare I used to have as a kid where I would be abandoned on the streets of some indistinct city. When the dreams start I would be with someone who I was comfortable being with, probably one of my parents. And in the blink of an eye, they’d be gone. I’d be alone and scared in this city not knowing what to do. When i would try to scream, there would be no sound and my legs would move excruciatingly slow when I tried to run. That’s the general gist of the thing and would go on for quite some time. Nowadays my reoccurring nightmares deal with the usual surviving nuclear holocaust type dreams. Oh yeah…I was super sick when I was recording this and there’s a couple moments that need to be redone because my sick ears didn’t pick up on it. So as usual there we be a newer version coming soon.
Round 1 Results
Its that time again. Another round of SpinTunes madness. Profiles have just been published. Go check it out and see for yourself if you don’t believe me. See?!?!? I told you its true. Lots of new faces and lot’s of old ones too. Yes I’m one of the old ones now. If you haven’t entered, you can still contribute music as a shadow song and you’ll become part of the SpinTunes world. I may have a collaborator or 2 for this time through. We’ll see how that goes. Good luck to all. Bring on the fun!
Every time this New Years thing happens we all start to think about what we’d like to accomplish throughout the year. Do I ever follow through with these goals/resolution type things? No! Not at all. Why start now? I’m one of the worst at it. I’ve become an expert at starting a lot of things and leaving them incomplete. What I’m hoping to do this year is complete the things I started before I pile on another unfinished product. Unfortunately this extends beyond the realm of music and goes into other aspects of my life as well.
I know I’ve said it before, but look out for more songs this year. The past year my songwriting productivity plummeted and this needs to change. I do have a valid excuse for this happening. I rejoined my old band in the second part of last year and a lot of my time. Did I say a lot? I meant, A LOT OF MY TIME was spent learning songs since it’s a cover band. They’re all very good friends of mine and its good to be playing music with others again instead of just being locked away in the studio by myself. So if you’re in New Jersey stop on by. The band is called Page22 and here is the website. New shows are always being added. Maybe one day I’ll have a new song or two with them.
One of the first things I’ll be finishing up early this year is wrapping up the album I have in Bandcamp with my dog on the cover. This one. I have 4 completed songs that I still need to put on it and I also need to change the cover. That will by done by the end of the week. The instrumental versions of the songs are being worked on and will be finished sometime this month.
The last 2 things things that I still would like to accomplish is to revamp the website and start off the year with my first song which will be a cover of Today’s The Day by Inverse T. Clown which I’ve already begun. Oh and I almost forgot. I was going to do a song every couple weeks last year but got sidetracked with the band thing. Look for that to start up as well. Once the Today’s The Day song is complete, then the 2 week song project will have officially begun. If anybody wants to accompany me on a song just email/Tweet/Facebook/Google+ me. It’s always more fun when collaborating with others.
Have a happy and fun year and stay out of trouble.
I was made aware of something really cool yesterday. I should say really really cool because it is THAT cool! The Geeky Pleasures Radio Show Theme Song now has a video to go along with it. You can check it out below now that I finally figured out how to embed videos! Small victory. Thanks to Andrew Edgar for putting this awesomeness together. And of course thanks to Jules for using this as her theme song.
You can follow both Andrew and Jules on Twitter by clicking on their names.
The Geeky Pleasures Radio Show airs every Friday evening at 10:00PM EST on The Look 247. Mark your calendars. You can get to it here at http://thelook247.com
Bonus! The video has been made the Geek Of The Week over at Geeky Pleasures. Go check it out!
***I’m the dork that poses with wax figures after the picture of Jonathan Coulton in the video.
