Ten years ago (less 24 days) I was a freshman in college, and I wrote a song called “Icy Cold.”
It was an odd one – very oblique lyrics in one of my more unusual alternate tunings (at the time) made it a challenge to sing and play. I left it off my 2000 demo CD Other Plans and, curiously, also did not consider it for my 2001 studio disc Relief. It remained bound to my apartment, where it factored in to a few of my favorite Trio recordings.
Around the same time I wrote “Icy Cold” – 86th in a rapidly-expanding list of songs – I decided that it was time for me to start playing shows.
Being rather ignorant as to what that entailed, I assumed that I would just phone up a local, mostly-acoustic venue where people I liked frequently played and explain that I wrote tons of awesome songs, and then they would invite me to play. (Later, after my initial flush of success, I could upgrade to playing the TLA or the Electric Factory).
The Tin Angel being the only local mostly-acoustic venue that I knew of at the time, I sussed out their booking information and rang them up.
That was the extent of my year-2000 booking experience at the Tin Angel. No follow-up. No booking. No flush of success.
To be fair, I would have been an utter disaster. I know somepeople so wonderful that their first ever show was at the Tin, but I was not that kind of wonderful in 2000. Sure, I had the awesome songs, but I could just barely sing, and I was playing a guitar that didn’t even especially stay in tune!
Over the course of the past ten years I’ve done a lot to rectify my singing and guitar-playing issues, and I’ve played in a lot of amazing Philly venues – including the Tin Angel, as part of a showcase with Arcati Crisis. Yet, I’ve never fulfilled that original goal of ten years ago – being featured solo on the bill at the Tin.
Well, that’s going to happen on Friday at 10:30 p.m., so when it came to choosing the first song to post in 2010 in this glorious new HD audio/video combo format it seemed natural to choose “Icy Cold” – especially given the slights it experienced in 2000 and 2001.
Plus, it’s really freaking cold out.
That’s my story.
PS: I owe the hugest possible shout-out to Tim Jahn for explaining Adobe Premiere Pro compression codecs to me via Twitter at the eleventh hour (literally) to make this beautiful video possible. Tim writes a blog of occasional, thought-provoking bulletins that I have been enjoying for months. You can also follow him on Twitter.
Song #77: Crashing (live demo) ["Save As" to download from that link] Last recorded for Blogathon 2002.
10 years ago this weekend I went to my first college party, still very much a purposefully-naive, dewy-eyed teen.
I came home having had my first vodka cranberry and my first inklings of adult romance, drifting to sleep wrapped in the blissful denouement of each.
The following Monday morning was a decidedly dreary day, and I found myself locked out my dorm room in my pajamas. Instead of heading to French 103 I sat down in our common room – five stories from the ground with a two-story windowed wall staring out into Center City Philadelphia.
I pulled out a pad and wrote “Crashing.”
Later that day, having been let back into my room, I recorded its first rough demo and transferred the lyrics to the first page of the crisp new book I bought for my collegiate songs. Up until then I wasn’t sure how I would know it was time to start using it, but I suddenly did.
“Crashing” made frequent appearances at parties and late night hangouts throughout my Freshmen year, resulting in the first complements on my voice I had ever heard. They came as a great shock to me, as they still do. Later that autumn I recorded it for my first full length demo, Other Plans – shakily, in the middle of the night, trying not to wake up my mother in the process.
As a dreary fall turned to winter I moved on to add other songs to my slim gray book – many of which I still play to this day. Yet, it was “Crashing” I would play between classes as I sat at the dinged, old upright piano in the theatre green room. I would hypnotize myself with the rolling two chord verse, learning how to play piano in increments (and maybe a little bit about what the song really meant, as well).
It took the entire intervening decade to learn how to play piano well enough to demo it that way, and it seems apropos that it wound up recorded just as shakily and late as its original demos were, respectively.
This is a meandering post about life and stuff. Content that’s all focused like a laser mounted on a deadly shark may or may not resume tomorrow.
This weekend E headed up the NNJ/NYC to play a show and help with some solstice cleaning along with the sibs at her mother’s house. I wanted to tag along to see her concert and reap the sib-time, but my life was in need of some cleaning up as well.
When I woke up on Saturday I felt like my to-do list was a litany of random drudgery. Organize this, scrub that, upload stuff to here. Even as I was crossing things off it didn’t feel very big picture. Typical: artist-, writer-, marketer-me trapped under a Sisyphisian list of uncreative to-dos. The only thing keeping me sane was my Twitter pipeline to the outside world.
As the day wore on I kept feeling like I was behind the boulder until I caught a social network update from my dear musical friend Vicky Spaeth, which read:
Simplify, simplify, simplify! I think we over-complicate our lives way too much.
I read that, then took another look at my list, and realized there was a big picture. It was all “simplify.” Organizing shelves and wires so my creative space is less cluttered, so I can create. Clean out the house so I don’t have a worry of other things to do nagging me when I want to create. Upload what I’ve created to as many places as will have it, so people can actually hear it.
I finally have the simplicity that provides one big picture. I have focus. Finally everything I’m doing points in the same direction.
I look back at the 2000 me. Within a two month span I started a blog, shot digital video of myself, and was the only songwriter on the whole internet uploading a concert every week. And it all came easy. But it was over-complicated. The technology was a tangle. The life was a tangle – pulling As and paying for my first apartment and squeezing in music beside theatre.
Maybe I was on the verge of conquering the world, but it wasn’t simple. There was no picture to focus on. Which was fine – I was in college! But that’s why we grow up. And hopefully get less complicated, instead of more.
It took the weekend and the twenty-seven years before it, but I am really almost there. Almost to the point that I can just flip a switch and empty my thoughts and songs directly onto the internet without a fussy mess of wires and files and wasted time.
And be worth watching.
It feels cool and satisfying, and I’m happy – happy sweating my ass off and mopping the floor, or putting away the umpteenth load of laundry, passing out on the couch while I wait for my wife to get home. Happy without any descriptors or mitigators, because there’s a point to it.
Sometime before autumn arrives I will begin to record my first full-length, multi-tracked, studio album since 2001′s Relief.
Wow. I knew that was true, but it’s pretty monumental to see it in print.
In 2001 I had 117 songs to choose from and two weeks of studio time to record and mix in Drexel’s tiny, single-room, analog recording studio. (They’ve vastly improved their resources since then.)
In 2009 I have 241 songs to choose from and an unlimited amount of studio time to record and mix in my own tiny, single-room, digital recording studio. (I’ve also vastly improved my resources since then.)
Of my 241 songs, 30 of them are in fierce competition for 13ish spots on the album. There’s also the other 211 songs, many of which are long overdue a fresh recording even though I’m not considering them for the album (and, maybe I would consider them if I had a fresh recording to listen to).
So, I’m planning to record live, single-take demos for each of my 30 top picks for the album, accompanying each one with a B-side from the other 211 songs. I’m sure I’ll toss a few covers in as well.
No matter how long it takes, it’ll be a chance for me (and you) to hear 60 of my songs in crisp, multi-tracked audio – and that should be enough new stuff to hold us over through however interminably long it takes me to record an actual album in my present state of dotage.
E and I got the word last week that the Drexel Treblemakers were putting out a last call for arrangements for this year’s repertoire, which meant several all-nighters between the two of us.
The TMs are a contemporary acappella group, which E used to sing-for and music-direct when she was at Drexel. “Contemporary acappella” means that they recreate modern pop hits with just their voices.
When I say “arrangement,” I mean just that – an arrangement of notes that make up the composite song that comes out of the group. Acappella songs don’t happen out of thin air. Unless you’re in a group of the finest doo-wop singers around (each equipped with pitch-perfect ear and all egalitarian when it comes to choosing what instrument to sing) it takes some specifics to turn a pop song into an all vocal jam.
It’s the job of an arrangement to replicate the song for voices in the form of sheet music. As an arranger, you might take the approach of transcribing each specific instrument individually for voice, or you might prefer to address the overall tonality of the song instead. Either way, it’s hard work – especially if you’re doing it by ear rather than from print music for the song.
“By ear” means you sit down and pluck out every note that’s being made in the song, transcribing its pitch, rhythm, and dynamics, until you’ve got an entire song. An average 100-bar rock song in 4/4 with six voice parts offers circa 3000 notes to transcribe.
It’s even harder when arranging for an all-female group, because you have less dynamic range to work with. With a bisexual group you have men to sing the lowest of the lows – you can duplicate a guitar easily, and cover most bass parts (or create the illusion of them by maintaining the divide between the lowest note and the next highest note).
Even an all-guy group has a massive range – as a baritone I can reliable produce soprano Ds and higher, which means a group of 12 of me would only be half-an-octave shy of the highs of a girl group … but with an entire extra octave on the bottom (and that assumes all girl-groups will be able to sing down to a Baritone D, which most cannot. TMs has always been special in that regard).
Female groups have a reduced range, which makes it harder to arrange well for them. Thrashy rock songs rely on a lot of low Ds and Es, and most girl groups don’t have them. And, girl groups largely wuss out when it comes to vocal percussion.
Luckily, the TMs have never had those two problems, and have stretched to crazy lengths to accommodate my arrangements. I had my good buddy Sara singing low C#s on “Stay,” and our maid of honor Amanda doing sub-woofer rattling kick drums on “I Think I’m Paranoid.”
Both of us used to arrange like mad for the TMs when we were in school – we arranged two-thirds of their first CD (That page has sound-clips, and The TrebleMakers on MySpace has whole songs. Listen to “I Think I’m Paranoid” on the former, and “Rhiannon” on the latter – one of the best all-female acappella arrangements I’ve ever heard (not surprisingly, by my wife)).
Since we’ve graduated we always have a glut of songs we want to do for the TMs, and this year we actually finished two – the most we’ve done since 2006. I arranged Paramore’s “That’s What You Get,” and Erocked Ingrid Michaelson’s “Die Alone. Mine was good-but-wobbly when I first heard it; E’s sounds even better than the actual version.
We both wanted to do another song had been debating between Rilo Kiley’s “Portions for Foxes” and “Breakin’ Up.” The former – a guitar rocker – was more my speed, but the latter – a sparse, funky tune – was better for E.
When we got the word that the deadline was looming E forged ahead with “Breakin’ Up,” which left me songless. The group now includes singers born after the release of Like a Prayer, so digging out an old Madonna chestnut wasn’t necessarily the best option (and that means they were only ages 6-9 when most of my favorite female modern rock was on the radio – yikes).
In a pinch, I went to the path of least resistance: Kelly Clarkson.
I love her. TMs love her. Audiences know her stuff. Easy pick.
The lead single from her new disc All I Ever Wanted is “My Life Would Suck Without You,” which is a bit of a … hrm, how shall I phrase this … piece of tripe. It’s a straight-forward DDR stomper with an unsubtle melody and absolute crap lyrics.
The lyrics are a bit dishwatery, but the music is awesome – like KC fronting Fall Out Boy. Once I got past some of the lamer turns of phrase it was insta-love, listening to it ten times a day.
Last Thursdayish, on perhaps listen number six of the day and while contemplating if I could really arrange it for TMs due to the spread of notes in that main riff, I realized something major – the chorus is the same damn thing as “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down,” just a whole step higher. You can sing the melodies of each interchangeably.
Go ahead, try it.
Acappella groups love medleys, and I didn’t think the TMs could resist the next KC single combined with FOB’s biggest hit. My mind was made up. I walked home on Friday singing the bass notes of the song over and over, and began arranging as soon as I was in the door.
In crazy-record time – under 72 hours – I arranged the entire song by ear. That’s a big leap from the months it took my to do “Stay,” which started out as guitar tab on a cocktail napkin.
I started out sketching in as many of the bass notes as I could, skimping on rhythm unless it was important (which it is with the walks on the chorus), and then adding the vocals. I find that to be the easiest way to get started with a by-ear arrangement, as everything else has to fit between the two.
Afterward I went back to layer in the guitar riffs, heard mostly in the verses, before wrestling with chorus harmony Kelly notoriously stacks multiple harmony notes and auto-tunes them to sit tightly together, which makes it nearly impossible to pick them out. It’s more of a best guess situation, and I needed the guitars first so I’d have a litmus test for if I got the harmony wrong.
Finally, I fleshed out the interior chords of chorus and the remainder of bass rhythms, as well as brought the bridge to life. I spent the remainder of Sunday and Monday splitting instruments intro appropriate voice parts, fudging the riffs a bit where necessary to sound smoother for voice, and adding the “SWGD” medley to the bridge.
I finally gave in to sleep and needing to do other stuff, emailing the group my arrangement without all of the lyrics, syllables, and dynamics. I told them I’d go back and add them if they picked it.
TMs chose new tunes last night, and both “IDNHU w/SWGD” and “Breakin’ Up” were on their list. We’re still waiting to hear if either of our tunes made it in to the repertoire.
And that’s where I was through Monday night. Next up: open mics, impromptu press kits, twitter addictions, and impending broadway auditions.
I ran into one of my favorite professors today on the subway, trundling to work in this non-event of a snowstorm.
We briefly caught up (me, married! him, reconstructing his house! my band, awesome!), and the conversation then turned to my blogging proclivity and how I have yet to abandon it. Which, (a) hilarious that my senior project adviser still asks me about my blog five years after the fact, but (b) way to stick the personal “blogger / songwriter” branding so that it’s the first thing he thinks of, even five years after the fact.
(me, old!)
Anyhow, us being two massive communications nerds having a conversation about communications on the subway, I sketched out the situation. Longest running, blah blah, own a single topic of conversation, blah blah, more magazine style content. Hit tracking, publics, &c, &c. Minus points for not somehow mentioning Cultivation Theory to prove that I am actually as big a nerd as I represent myself to be.
And, you know, as I was being my hip nerdy self for sixty seconds of subway exposition, it occurred to me that I spend more time plotting about blogging than I actually spend blogging.
It’s not such a bad thing, really. Well, it’s a medium bad thing. It’s equally good and bad. I love planning and organizing things so much that sometimes I’d rather not ever do the actual thing.
(This is actually a running theme in my life. See also: song database but no new recordings, exercise plan but no new muscles. The only time it works in my faovir is when having a plan inherently leads to the plan being success, as with a budget.
Anywho…)
There is technically a column I was going to post today. Well, it being 11:35, I think maybe technically has edged into theoretically. But the fact of the matter is, after a non-stop weekend of alternating social engagements and hardcore freelance writing and editing, I am in no mood to write a column.
And that, my friends, is the difference between a blog and a magazine. I can own all the topics I want, but there will still be this inanity sandwiched between.
This Trio almost wound up being titled “Primer” because of the following three quotes:
On being primed:
If you’ve ever read an interview with a songwriter … you’ll hear a repeated theme: that you have to constantly be writing, and constantly be revising and playing. It seems sortof counter-intuitive, because at some point you’ve written a certain amount of material, and you feel like you should be playing or rehearsing that material. But … when you have a new idea it’s much more easy to capture that idea.
It’s funny that you can apply any kind of science to songwriting. You spend a lot of years as a songwriter thinking it’s just lightning that strikes you, but there are things you can do to make yourself more of a lightning rod.
All This Time
When the chorus came in my head I literally walked to the piano and played the entire song in one go and wrote the lyrics. It all happened in 30 minutes. … Effectively the whole song came at once. It was because I was primed. That’s the challenge, you know? You have to be working on songs to have other songs that work.
Will It Ever Come?
Much like “All This Time,” it came at this point that I was very primed, in the summer of 2000. I wrote a lot of what are still my favorite songs at that time … songs that I really still play very frequently. And this one was kindof in the middle, and it just got ignored. It was at the very beginning of Crushing Krisis and I blogged the lyrics. [Ed note: Literally; I wrote them out in nine minutes in the Blogger window. They were my 81st post.]
The next year when I went into the recording studio … I can honestly say I don’t know that ever played it before. And we did it in one take.
.
Lyrics and chords for “Time Is Running Out” are behind the cut. Read more…
Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its sixth season featuring my original music, recorded live and DIY in my bedroom. You can download this Trio, grab the single of “All This Time,” or listen to a previous Trio:
For a significant portion of my adult-shoe-sized life I consented to own only a single sort of sock. Gray Hanes socks.
My time, I reasoned at the tender age of fifteen, was too precious to be spent sorting and matching socks.
(Of course, at the time my mother was sorting and washing socks; I only did laundry when I wanted to work out something on guitar without anyone being able to hear me.)
And, socks were a utilitarian piece of clothing – their selection hardly factored into my fashion sense. Between boot legged jeans and tight vinyl pants no one would ever know or care what color socks I wore
(Around the same time I had deemed that all of my underwear be black, which seems contrary to the whole “utilitarian piece of clothing” argument. Except, nothing spoiled a good semi-goth outfit than a tiny peek of the angelic elastic of a pair of tighty-whities. Trust me.)
My single-sock philosophy developed a chink at Drexel, where our job-interview coaches put our impending job interviews in a plain and dire light: if your interviewer caught you wearing gym socks under your dress pants they would turn you out on your ear, having already seen for themselves your greatest on-the-job weakness and deemed you unworthy. And, if Drexel caught wind of it you could be expelled.
Or something like that.
I carefully shopped around for a black sock I could stick with, eventually settling on Dockers. Generic, easily bought in packs of three or nine. The perfect complement to the gray Hanes. With only two colors, sorting was still not an issue, which I appreciated much more now that doing my laundry involved sitting in molded plastic chairs and sorting on card tables.
I’ll spare you a sock-tinged journey through the remainder of my collegiate and professional career and just cut to the chase.
Friday morning I spent ten minutes rustling through my laundry basket seeking black socks. In the literal sense my quest was fulfilled – I came away from my hunt with eight socks. Yet, practically it was unfulfilled – none of them matched. I have designer black socks, gold-toed black socks, black socks with subtle patterns, and two subtly-different sorts of black Dockers socks.
What’s the moral of this tale? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps that all of those fussy teenaged whims usually have some sort of obstinately sound reasoning behind them, and if you don’t wind up as an entirely different person as an adult you might find yourself wishing you had never let down your guard.
Although, for the record, I still do not own any white underwear.
A few scant weeks prior to the birth of this blog in the summer of 2000 I had been working as an Orientation Leader for Drexel, helping to guide and socialize pre-freshman during their summer campus visit.
It’s nearly impossible to be a camp counselor to people who are only a few months younger than you, and by virtue of being an Orientation Leader you are a major geek in their eyes, so the only real solution to holding their attention and respect (for me, anyhow) was sheer, irrepressible, unavoidable, kinetic energy.
I had so much of that energy built up the evening before our first group of students arrived that I absolutely could not sleep (this was before the days of Benadryl w/vodka chaser, god bless my 18-yr-old soul). I remember the absolute hopelessness of it – the clock facing my dorm bed inexorably ticking closer to our 6:15 a.m. call time.
Around five I just gave up – sleep can’t be forced. I just enjoyed the lying still in my bed, counting down the minutes.
The intersection of insomnia and excitement worked. Spectacularly. I’ve always been of the manic, excitable persuasion, but that night was the catalyst to a major transformation: my metamorphosis from excitable boy to something akin to a walking cartoon – rabidly energetic, and afraid to stop moving because I might just pass out.
(Probably a contributing factor to my broken collarbone, but that’s neither here nor there. More Germain is that it was tangentially the template for my participation in Blogathon; I would have never dared to believe I could blog and sing and record for twenty fours hours if I hadn’t going through my insomniac-energy boot camp the summer before.)
I’ve been thinking about that all day because it has been one of those days. I put in a twelve-hour shift of mixing and recording last night, and if you consider when I usually get home from work you’ll realize that subsequently I wasn’t left with too much time for sleep between the end of that endeavor and the beginning of my new work day.
I usually dread getting up and out for work with less than four hours of sleep, but today I loved my barely-two. I was up and out of the house like a catapult, remembering all of my electronic accouterments, walking rather than taking the bus, at work and in constant motion.
The only detraction is that I can’t speak anything resembling English while trying to leave a voice mail, but that’s what the “do-over” button is for.
(Except when you call outside clients and bang the do-over button and then mutter “fuck” because you realize you can’t do-over on their system, and then you realize you just muttered “fuck” in a professional voice mail and the tape is still rolling.)
Today was an exception – I don’t do sleepless nights nearly as much (or, nearly as well) as I did back then – but it’s nice to pitch one in here and there to remind myself what it’s like to be not just unwilling, but unable, to stop.
As you may have noticed, it’s impossible for me to talk about any aspect of my life without mentioning my brilliantly talented and completely hilarious best friend and occasional co-songwriter Gina. We met at age twelve and have known each for just over twelve years (half our lives!). Appropriately, here are twelve of my favorite memories of Gina.
(Since Gina might not remember them the same way I do (if at all!) her rebuttal will be forthcoming)
In my new school in seventh grade I ate lunch with two other oversmart semi-outcast boys. Gina and her friends – all oversmart overtalented girls – sat at the table behind us. We met when the boys decided it would be funny to throw snack food (was it peanuts?) down the blouse of one of the girls. Soon thereafter our tables merged to spend lunch laughing and singing terrible pop music, at one point during which we were dubbed “Spockchild and the Lunchroom Cadets,” due to my bowl-cut and Vulcan-sized ears.
Gina was already a stage veteran at the time of my first audition, and I was appropriately intimidated by the idea of performing a monologue in front of my peers and teachers. To this day I have a perfect mental snapshot of Gina walking up the stage-right stairs wearing her distinctive purple velvet shirt, her long hair flowing all around a perfectly serene face. I remember thinking, “this theatre thing can’t be so hard.”
Gina has always been skeptical of people who pick up a guitar and want to be taught how to play, probably because no one follows through. Very early in my guitar playing she wrote the music to my lyrics “Falling Down,” and played it for me before a theatre rehearsal. Later that night I left a message on her answering machine of me slowly-but-surely picking out the same pattern on my guitar. Ever since she has taken my guitar playing a lot more seriously.
Both living in the same residence hall at Drexel I became the unofficial male roommate of her entire floor due to my frequent visits, always with guitar in hand. One day that winter I played Gina my brand new “Under My Skin,” and she started playing along. When we were done she said, “I like that one; let’s play it again.”
In line for Weezer at the TLA the summer after freshman year we ate our Chinese Food with makeshift spoons fashioned from fortune cookies because I forgot to get forks.
Stopping by my cluttered first apartment to keep me awake during the 24-hour Blogathon I heard one of Gina’s original songs for the first time – “Real End“. Also, we played everyone’s favorite U2 song, and barked like dogs while covering “Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long.” After my long wakeful night, she showed up with the sun the next morning, bearing decaffeinated coffee and cookies.
Stuck for Halloween costumes at the last minute, we had a twenty-minute shopping spree in K-Mart. Emerging with glitter and giant fairy wings, we hardly had costumes, but by raiding our vintage closets we emerged as the godparents of punk rock and disco, respectively. I kept yelling “Where’s James?!” and giggling.
After experiencing a rough few months in the middle of college we declared a personal day, and spent it shopping in Chinatown and drinking bottled smoothies, laughing all the while about the little insecurities we left behind in high school and all of the larger ones looming in their place. We realized that day that we had never once been in a fight, and resolved never to have one.
Gina’s mother, an amazing actor, operatic singer, and dancer, has always been slow to warm to Gina’s friends, and over the years I always had a difficult time discerning if she liked me at all. I took it as a great compliment when I was invited to cook and dine along with her family for Thanksgiving in 2003. Ever since then Gina’s mother has treated me like family.
Through a series of coincidental events, Gina moved into my awesome upperclassmen apartment, where our bedrooms faced each other across a vast, stuffy, attic living room we dubbed “The Grotto.” We decorated it with hanging lights and lanterns so that it would glow 24/7, hanging our fairy wings outside our respective doors. The first time we went out drinking together after she moved in we wound up crawling up all that last flight of stairs together, one step at a time.
I have always partied through the Fall Back time every October, except for one year, when Gina gave me a complex lesson in applications chemistry and I explained the finer points of copy protection. I don’t think we realized how long we had chatted until the next morning when we remembered to turn the clocks back.
In my first show after college, Happy Birthday, Wanda June, each night we made our final exit together, both having suffered an emotional breakdown in the preceding scene. One night we had both worked ourselves up into sobbing messes during the scene, and in our in-character emotional rush to exit the room we literally threw ourselves out of the stage door and tumbled down the backstage stairs.
We wound up at the foot of the stairs in a heap, our sobbing resolving to barely contained giggling while the final scene played out above our heads.
I suppose that last post bears some explanation of my secret rock star identity.
It is so secret that hardly anyone is aware of it. Hopefully that will soon change.
I started writing original music in high school as a hobby – not something I defined myself by. In college i was a part of a group of extremely talented actors, singers, and musicians. But, though i could rightfully identify myself in all three categories, i never felt as though what i was bringing to the stage was as valid as what other people did. After every audition or performance I was my own harshest critic, and as a result I slowly disappeared from performances, relegating myself to a off-stage role.
However, there was still one thing at which I was better – maybe best – than everyone I knew: writing songs.
It wasn’t a matter of pride or self-confidence – it was just something i knew. My best five or ten or twenty songs stood up against the songs of my friends, and even the songs on albums I bought every week. I could remain a performer as long as I had my songs, so I labeled myself a singer-songwriter. I played at parties. I recorded songs for my webpage. I walked from my apartment to campus, playing guitar and singing the whole way. As long as i had a song to stand behind i was fearless.
As college wore on, some of the more multi-talented friends in our extended group gained an amount of local notoriety as singer-songwriters fronting bands. I finally had people – peers – to compare myself to, and it was immediately clear that I didn’t sing as well, or play guitar as well, or record as well, or work the stage as well.
This was especially demoralizing because my songs were still great – it was just me that wasn’t good enough. I let it get to me – right down to the very core of me, and as a resultI graduated having not played an original front of people for over a year (with one exception – poorly received), and I had even stopped recording – frustrated that my voice never came out how I heard it in my head.
I decided that for my first year of professional life i was leaving my creative side behind – i had to focus on working hard, and on being a good boyfriend to Elise, because that’s what was important. Creativity, music especially, was a lark I could afford to ignore.
My resolve was strong, and even after the year was over and I starred in a successful bit of post-collegiate theatre i was still holding out on music. I still hadn’t performed anywhere, and even my once-prolific writing had ground to a halt.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when everything changed.
Last December I made my yearly appearance at the Shubin Theatre Holiday Revue. I appear not because of any great talent, but because I am friends of the Shubin family, which includes Gina, my sometimes co-writer. In 2005 I was performing on relatively short notice, and so instead of my typical cover or collaboration I decided to play an original – Seams – a song all about my imperfection, my lack of confidence, my reticence to perform anywhere outside of my own bedroom.
In that tiny theatre with forty or fifty people watching I rediscovered me as a musician. I was singing words I had written, words I still very much meant, and as they left my mouth I could feel – even see – them connecting with members of the audience. At the after party people asked where they could see or hear me perform and, slightly embarrassed, I told them that they couldn’t.
As I said it I realized the ridiculousness of it. I had these great songs – catchy songs, witty songs, meaningful songs – and here I was refusing to play them because I didn’t deem myself to be good enough. It seemed rational to me for years, but that night I realized how unfair it was to the songs.
I am no longer a part of that disproportionately talented college friends – I’m a part of the world at large. And, in that world I am unique in my ability to sing and play at all, let alone with some amount of skill, and I am unique in my ability and willingness to document my life through song.
In this much wider world I am done with hiding my songs in my bedroom, and with that newfound confidence i find that my singing, playing, and performing are suddenly not so bad as i thought they were. I can play in front of friends or strangers knowing i deserve their attention as much as anyone else, and sometimes i even win it.
Today, and tonight at The Sidecar Bar, I am a singer-songwriter. And, it’s not a secret anymore.
Packing always makes me feel like blogging, perhaps because my first week of blogging featured ongoing packing.
Packing for me is never just about putting things into boxes. It is about reviewing, reflecting, and reconsolidating. Boxing my CD collection goes fast (four boxes, now), desk stuff slightly slower. Slower still is looking through a box of “peter papers” to see if anything can be disposed of yet. Nothing can be, of course, but i take the opportunity to reread almost everything inside.
I was tempted to throw this paper out, as it was just a glorified diary, but something i say in the conclusion stopped me. Feeling as though all intrusive messaging had been flushed from me at the end of my media deprivation day, i apparently sat down to write a song.
Attached to the back of my paper, for Ron’s perusal, is what had to have been the first ever printed copy of “Under My Skin.” He might have even been the first person to read the lyrics.
Amazing. So, yeah, i’m keeping that paper, and all of Ron’s wry comments therein.
Somehow, this move feels as if it’s already over. Maybe that’s too much faith to have when my solution to every problem so far has just to throw money at things, but the idea of moving into an entire house where Elise and I rule every room and closet is just too tingly and wonderful to be diluted with any anxiety about the move itself.
I keep saying that we’re moving to a house, and i keep wishing that we were buying it instead of renting it. All in good time, though.
We’re moving on Friday. I’m not sure how many times I’ve moved that I can remember.
Moving out of 64th Street was a novelty – having never moved before in my conscious life, the idea of categorizing and packing things seemed fun.
Moving from Reed Street to college was a move of efficiency – the dorm room was only oh-so-big, and the hurricane was oh-so-bad. Two carloads would certainly be all that we could manage. I reminisced at length about it previously.
Moving from Kelly Hall to Calhoun hall was my first introduction to desperate, anxious, nerve-rending, nail-biting moving. The orientation leaders hoarded carts and monopolized elevators for each other. Where were my belongings supposed to live, if i was to be out by noon and in at… four? Five? We sat in the piano lounge on our collective piles of stuff and waited.
Ahh, now we come to moves i’ve documented on blogger.
Moving out of the dorm to my first apartment (with a half-week stopover back at Reed Street) was pure misery – i was sick, my future roommate was being less than helpful, and at one point i didn’t even have a lease to prove the apartment was mine. It was also the only time I’ve technically lived with my mother since 1999. A wonderful example of our uneasy alliance can be found here.
Next comes the move of legend: me from Spring Garden Street, and Lindsay and Erika from Race Street. This recap makes it sound rather pedestrian, but it still inspires only-slightly-hyperbolic stories from the five of us whenever anyone moves.
(in here i help Elise move from dorm to Melon’s to 3216 to Baring to here)
Moving from The Grotto to here was disproportionately easy, considering it involved more possessions and stress than ever. How i managed to get all the stuff from there to here, i’ll never know. The day was honestly a sleepless blur.
Six moves in seven years, and also in twenty-three (if you don’t count when i was three).
Jett Superior, one of my all-time favorite peddlers of snark, is back online with an astounding new layout. While she was on her extended hiatus, she asked her readers to put an old set of her lyrics to music, promising to post them upon her return. She hasn’t yet, but here’s my version.
Here at CK we don’t go on hiatus, we graduate, take long naps, try to buy cell phones that take pretty little pictures that we can display while not on an aforementioned non-existent hiatus, and play City of Heroes until 4am (thus necessitating longer naps). We pretty much being me, along with my omnipresent sidekick slash new roommate slash built-in fanclub Elise.
She finally met my dad the other week, he who owns a gun shop and a flock of plastic lawn flamingos, and makes “boop boop” noises when he pulls a U-ee in the middle of Market street. She has not met my cousin Cary, age seven, but the lass is nonetheless intrigued by the concept that my partner/roomie/stalker has “Chinese Eyes.” My aunt claims that this, though perhaps verging on offensive, is a reflection of unspeakable jealous curiosity, as said eyes are a particularly fashionable favorite of my cousin’s. In the car on the way back from the el Cary politely enquired if “Have you kissssssed her?,” to which i responded “Oh, a few times.”
Otherwise, life is similar to how life was last time i mentioned life, except for the piece of parchment with the shiny Magna Cum Laude sticker sitting on my mantel and what seems like eleventy-thousand people trying to make me feel anxious about whether or not i really have a job (don’t worry, it’s not working). I think Elise is appalled at how much time i spend a) listening to music, b) doing nothing but looking productive, & c) being so frighteningly productive that i cannot stop talking or moving, sometimes all at once. Still, things are fine, especially now that i unpacked my Ani DiFranco mugs.
I don’t like graduation ceremonies. I never have. Not since kindergarten, at least.
For me, the excitement of a thing comes when it’s really over. In high school, i had to go to two more days of class after my graduation ceremony; it wasn’t really over yet. I was sour at graduation, grimacing in pictures and grudgingly displaying my diploma case, which did not yet contain that immortal document.
I woke up later than i meant to today, though i wound up meaning to wake up late. The apartment looks like a war zone between IKEA and Home Depot, as last night Elise hung drapery brackets while i threaded her maddeningly complicated sexy blue sewing machine. The obsessive organization of our first week has given way to a more laissez-faire approach to apartment decorating, where we move things closer to their presumed destination incrementally in case they find some other suitable home on the way. It’s fun. I want to stay here and work on it.
I finished my last graduation requirement last Friday at 10:03AM. I went through all the emotions that day – the glee, the sudden sense of freedom, the irrational tears. Today is an afterthought; i am already apart from the Drexel family. I know the week was meant for getting your requirements in order and moving out, but i got my life in order and moved on. I don’t want to go back to that gym to sit and listen to Taki – i have earned the right to avoid it.
Fitting that my last week of college is pretty much going to be an unmitigated string of all-nighters (and, for that matter, all-dayers). I’ve been working my ass off to get things completed the past few weeks, but i fear that with graduation in sight i’ve become a little too detail oriented, a move that is absolutely killing my ability to get anything done in a respectable amount of time.
I have five half-finished papers sitting here half-finished, my floor is littered with small items that haven’t managed to be packed yet (and i’m due for truck-picking-up in about two hours), and the new site is being held together with a virtual duct-tape of on-the-fly PHP and code stolen from various bits of the CK archive (tell me if you find anything broken, okay?).
Not to mention the critical assessment i have due tomorrow, the Senior Project revisions i have due on Wednesday (did i mention i’m getting an A), the Senior Project presentation i have to do on Thursday, and the umpteen past-due articles for Ron’s class. Oh, and some exit-interview mumbo-jumbo.
This is the last weekend of my life as i have come to know it.
I have this way of always wanting to do the thing that stands three steps ahead of me rather than the one i have to do at the moment. In class i want to be playing guitar, playing guitar i want to be playing City of Heroes, and playing CoH i want to be working on The Mother-Daughter Dyad in Duras and Kincaid.
Just like turning cards in a game of solitaire, some things keep getting dealt past, flashing by as the next trio of cards are flipped. In solitaire, you desperately seek a home for the cards between you and your object. In my life, i desperately hurtle towards deadlines.
This week is a series of deadlines. By Friday, my life will have ended.
My room is teeming with boxes half-packed in anticipation of moving out of what was truly my “college apartment.” They need to be done by Monday morning. By Tuesday night i will have gone from from living relationally on my own to sharing each “good morning” and “good night” with another person.
I am frantically building a completely new website from scratch for the first time in years. It will be at once like and unlike this one. And orange. It is for a class — one of ten assignments pending in my four courses. At 3:20 PM on Thursday, i will attend the last class of my college career. If all of my assignments are in by Friday, i will qualify to graduate.
So, you see, my life is ending. When i wake up on Saturday i will be in my new apartment, in a different bed, in the strange sensations of being free from the pressure of college. I will be in a new life; finally an adult. Perhaps i had the opportunity to become one sometime before now, but i kept dealing past it.
Senior Project First draft is nearing completion. Ironically, i loaded Blogger.com to see if they were featuring any current articles i could cite in my project only to discover their first complete redesign in Blogger history.
It is terrible. The new Blogger.com interface is completely AOL-ized in its rounded-corner graphics and utter uselessness to the established user. What amuses me the most about this is that, in writing the academic portion of my project, it became increasingly apparent that Blogger’s ubiquity was the main reason it could compete with the simpler and more communal Live Journal and the the more complex high-end Moveable Type. This new template capitalizes on moving towards the LJ model of compartmentalized simplicity rather than the MT one of specified power, and i think it signals the death-knell of serious bloggers using the Blogger service to do anything.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a mass-exodus of big names in coming weeks. It seems as though Alison agrees.
I am still working towards my weekend 10,000-coherent-word goal, but i have made some progress into my Senior Year death march of assignments. Again, if you live in China or have friends from Brazil, allowing me to interview you could save my ass in a dramatic fashion.
The current snag that i am working through is that, because my narrative voice and style tends to be consistently distinctive, i find that i am unwittingly quoting content that i wrote for the Blogathon site last year in pieces of my Senior Project. If you unintentionally quote your own uncredited writing, do you have to make a citation to avoid accusations of plagiarism? Or, alternately, to prove that you aren’t surreptitiously mining your own previous work in order to avoid writing new content? Furthermore, do i have to cite the sources of statistics that i compiled myself last summer for the Blogathon? What if the sources don’t exist anymore? Do i just get to say “cause i said so?” If were to wrap myself in a white sheet as if i were preparing to be mummified and then subsequently roll off my back roof, would i be distinguishable from the creepy thing that looks like a dead body in my neighbor’s yard that Lindsay and i were always too afraid to investigate from a distance closer than her back window?
So, 3,000 or so words into today’s massive writing blitzkrieg, i finally realized why my senior project was a bad, bad, bad idea. I thought it would be amusing to tell you why, since i know that two of my project advisors read my website.
Hi Al and Ron. Boy did i fuck myself over good.
There are four elements to my approach to almost any communications project, which i will list here in order of preference and marked by the piece of punctuation that they current evoke.
Of course, i had the witless naivete to choose a project that stacks those preferences in almost exact reverse order, and now i am paying for it. Oh, how i am paying for it. I just spent two hours joyfully clacking away at bevy of documents only to realize that i had skipped directly to writing. This has been the story of the entire process – get stuck on planning, revert to writing. Because, shocker, i like the writing the best.
Stupid miserable me. My only consolation is that i chose a good cause to do this slave labor over, as it would have never been done otherwise. Still, there is part of me weeping and wishing I was unleashing some masterful, personal, novel-length essay. Or doing Aim’s project. Or some other thing that shouldn’t require footnotes of any kind.
Long, long ago i was an Entertainment staff writer for The Triangle, but i was continually unimpressed with their editorial oversight. Four years later, an opinionated editorial tone has permeated the entire paper. Combine this with a historical lack of informed journalistic research, and it’s impossible to take anything it says without a massive grain of salt. This is exemplified by the fact that the editorially-minded article in question was penned Editor-in-Chief Chris Duffy who, if past practice is any indication, takes part in writing the main ed-op in each issue.
In particular, the paper loves to lambast the administration of Drexel. Sometimes they have good reasons. However, whenever they focus on Admissions they invariable misrepresent the facts, making the department of hardworking people seem like typical administrative villains. This is not the case, and this week’s article finally motivated me to fire off a response
So, since Blogger will be on the back burner for a few days, here is my editorial in it’s full 1,070 word glory. I look forward to seeing if it has experienced any substantial edits when it hits the stands on Friday.
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In last week’s editorial “Excluded Students,” The Triangle stated, “the Office of Campus Activities should have been pushing [Accepted Students Day] just as hard as it was pushing Activities Unlimited.”
This editorial statement, along with your front-page article on the subject, exposed an uninformed view of the role of the Undergraduate Admissions Office. Though I agree with the spirit of your criticism, I feel obliged to amend the perspective that it offered.
(Before I comment, allow me to offer a disclaimer. I major in Global Journalism. I served as a student employee of the Undergraduate Admissions Office for more than three years. I have also been an Orientation Leader, a Dragon Leader, and a tour guide. Additionally, I served as the emcee for the opening remarks of the event in question in exchange for a small honorarium.)
It is impossible to discount the important role that campus activities play in recruiting new students to Drexel. I have witnessed the staff in Admissions strive to stay updated on the current slate of activities via their connections to the student body, which are represented by (but not limited to) the Student Ambassadors who work in the office. Academic departments regularly brief Admissions staff with up-to-date information and revised points of contact to be passed on to prospective students, and I cannot see why OCA would not be eager to do the same. I would hope that the two offices begin to build this relationship in the near future.
Your article briefly highlighted the limited student involvement in Accepted Students day via screening the Fashion Show, featuring student performance ensembles, and showing student-produced films. What it failed to note is that many of these options were pursued by Admissions based on suggestions and feedback gathered from current Drexel students. This practice leaves me convinced that any student group that made a reasonable request to be involved in an Admissions event would be gladly included.
In your criticism, you called the “lack of space” issue preventing an Activities Unlimited style of event “implausible,” offering the Quad as a possible staging ground. What you failed to address is that during the course of an open house, hundreds of families cross the Quad repeatedly as they move from session to session. Filling this space with students and tables during any large-scale admissions event would only serve to slow the overall schedule. The OCA might occupy another space during the event, but that would further aggravate the reservation of available facilities, a practice that you rightfully criticized.
Ultimately, the solution to the perceived injustice referenced in your coverage is not the combination of Accepted Students day with an OCA-sponsored event that attempts to feature representatives from all of the active groups on campus. Such an event would be a logistical nightmare that, most importantly, would be completely overwhelming to visiting families.
In short, it’s an “implausible” solution to a simple problem.
A logical solution, based upon a review of the Accepted Students day agenda, would be to for the OCA to become a more visible participant in the Activity Fair that is held in the North Gym prior to introductory remarks. The OCA, instead of occupying a single table, could arrange for student volunteers to staff a number of tables representing a wide variety of campus groups. Students would not act as recruiters for their specific groups, which would be inappropriate prior to our deadline for matriculation, but could speak to the vast array of cultural, service, and recreational opportunities on our campus. Prospective students could then follow up with multiple points of contact regarding their specific interests.
Out of dozens of on-campus Admissions events, only Accepted Students Day and Scholars Days offer attendance by invitation only. As a result, it is not widely publicized. Your editorial calls this reasoning “absolutely ludicrous.” “Why would someone waste the time and energy,” you rhetorically questioned, “when they weren’ accepted?”
In actuality, there are several “answers” that the staff in Admissions encounters regularly. Rejected students often come to plead their case without investigating the proper channels for an appeal. Students applying late come looking for basic information that the event is not geared to supply. The families of high school juniors see no problem in planning their trips around an inapplicable event that fits their schedule rather than the Junior Open House offered in May. Accepted Graduate students also conclude, incorrectly, that the event will be appropriate for their needs.
Based on my experience, I can attest to how frustrating it can be for a family to travel to our campus for an event is not geared to their specific needs. Accepted Students Day is a special occasion meant for students in the final stage of their college search process; it is by invitation only and should remain that way.
Drexel’s student body should definitely be made aware of the full schedule of recruitment events as they approach, especially when an event will alter the normal availability of university facilities. Drexel students could easily be forewarned of events and their effect on the campus via the Drexel Daily Digest. I would encourage the Admissions office to explore this method of communication in the future.
Drexel students love to vilify our Administration, often with good reason. However, the Office of Undergraduate Admissions is not, and has never been, a villainous presence on our campus. The office’s staff is competent, committed, caring, and responsive; they recruit students in good faith with a belief that they are building a better student body for our University. They are not interested in presenting an “approved” Drexel Experience so much as they attempt to frame the entirety of our University in a way that lets prospective students form their own opinions.
Ideally, The Triangle serves a similarly important role on the campus: that of an impartial watchdog. In this case, I humbly submit that your article was overly concerned with opinionated reaction, which was emphasized by the tone of your editorial. Many of your barbed editorial questions lacked a basis in fundamental journalistic research, and as a result were as “ludicrous” and “implausible” as the policies they targeted. In short: you did not provide balanced coverage.
As a former employee of the Admissions Office and as a former writer for The Triangle, I hope that in the future this publication can offer a fairer, better-informed perspective on the Admissions Office and the events that they plan.
So much to link to, so little time to spend not worrying about school. Yesterday got burnt desperately trying to catch up on academic reading while getting my panties into a knot over who would get kicked off American Idol. Good thing i have this misshapen b’twixt class break in which i can finish my daily blogging so i have time for both homework and a drunken karaoke celebration of my roommate’s birthday.
The Minor Fall, the Major Life is a pop-culture tracking log from someone who’s sardonic wit does a fairly good impression of my interior monologue. Which is to say, the writing ranges from laugh out loud funny to nonsensically cryptic, all while serving up the latest entertainment-related linkage. Perhaps worth keep an eye on? (Cribbed from Strident Harpy, who dishes a good bit of political news herself).
Perennial favorite blogger KevRock launches yet another one of his dazzling side-projects, Random Pixel. In this bit of mischief, Kevin hands off a disposable camera to some good ol’ regular folk who proceed to document a bit of their life.
When i asked Kevin why he didn’t aim for a more bombastically cool “one pic per person” cross-country trip for his darling cameras, he replied with math proving that he was more likely to get the cameras sent back to him with his current method.
Anyone who can use math to explain the methodology of a blog side project is already A-O-K in my book, but Kevin proceeded to tempt me with an invitation to get a g-mail account. If you haven’t heard about Google’s entry into the world of email, you should read up; watchdogs call it creepy, i call it fucking sexy. One gig of storage, people. One Gig. Of course, KevRock was playing the part of a cock-tease in a whore-house, getting me all worked up for something i was going to get anyhow, as hours later g-mail opened its pearly gates to a number of “very active” Blogger users (thanks to hao2lian for pointing this out, and for the gracious link the other day). Moral – Kevin is a god amongst bloggers. I wonder if the Big G is hiring in their communications department anytime soon…
Next, from the ever-informative Ask Metafilter: Why your shirts don’t fit. No, really … a cool little discussion on why size, width, length, and cut varies from brand to brand and store to store. File under “Things i always subconsciously suspected but never outright knew.”
That makes a lovely segueway to talking about Anastacia for just a second. I remember her coming in second on MTV’s proto-American-Idol hip-hop show, partially dreamed up by David Foster. And then she dropped off the face of the earth, as did the Lauryn Hill imitator who won. Except, she really only dropped off the face of the ignorant, flat, American-music-scene Earth, because it turns out she’s one of the biggest selling artists in all of the rest of the world. This despite only shipping in the hundreds of thousands in the US. Do we just have bad taste? Is the market so undersaturated over there that viral marketing is more successful? The communications geek in me would love to do a paper titled “From Robbie Williams to Kylie Minogue – Why Doesn’t America Get Them?” that examines the differences in communications and marketing strategies here and abroad to try to understand why so many pop acts never make the trip across the pond.
Yeah. Look for me to write that paper as soon as i finish the paralyzingly huge pile of work i have due next week. And graduate. And start a real job.
