I suppose for all my fucking up, Trio is a very true thing. For example, last week i made it through two songs perfectly, and then turned in a fun but flawed version of a third song. My playing is obviously not always up to concert quality, and by posting the first live take that i make it through i show some of the thoughts (musical and actual) behind the songs. Sure, i might have messed up all three songs tonight, but wasn’t listening to it more fun, in a way, than listening to some glistening album cut? Maybe that’s just my love of Ani and Tori showing through, and maybe that’s a bit strange for someone who’s a fan of good music, but i love outtakes. And, rest assured, Trio is heavy on those.
best of
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Some people are committed to excellence. We’ve all had teachers, co-workers, and friends who have gone above and beyond the call of their duty to make sure their interests are protected. These people will live on in the memories of those whose lives they affected long after the actual effect has worn away. It seems like you more wind up a person committed to excellence than decide to be one; it just can’t be faked.
However, sometimes a committment to excellence is led astray. Sometime you simply wind up with a perfectionist on your hands who can’t be pleased by anything that you do. Then there is the nitpicker, who is so concerned with the details of a situation that the whole of it is ignored. But, the most dangerous way to stray is that of matyrdom. A martyr is more concerned with holding the world on his or her shoulders than making sure a task gets done, and no matter what happens they’ll take the blame for something. Who would want to just go down for their cause when instead they could don the crown of thorns, strp a cross to their back, and get the Jews to kill them?
The sad thing about martyrs is, they’re not all a Jesus. Some of them are just Apostles who got stoned to death to save them from obscurity. More still barely arrived in sainthood after enduring even worse torture. The rest? They aren’t martyrs. They took the plunge, bit the bullet, went down with their ship, but instead of the Titanic it turned out that they were floating away on the S.S. Minow. And, anyway, even Leo wound up a popsicle, so i think we’d all be better off sticking to the lifeboats.
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There’s this one song on the Trouble with Poets that’s called “Check Me Out (hey hey hey).” Depsite the impression you might get from the title, it’s one of the most verbose songs that Peter Mulvey has ever written. Aside from the obvious guitar pyrotechnics, he is definitely one of the most literary songwriters i know of. There are not only his detailed narratives, but his witty side references that take you months to pick up on but add layers of personal depth to his songs.
I’ve seen Peter perform quite a few times within the last year, and on many of those occasions he performed and spoke about “Check Me Out.” As it turns out, the song is written from the perspective of a girl who can fly. I didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was talking about the first time he mentioned that fact, but then he sang the song and it all made sense. “Check Me Out” conveys the excitement of staying up later than everyone else so that you can sneak out and fly without ever actually mentioning “flight.” The idea is perfectly conveyed by every detail of the song without mentioning it (as is the fact that the song is told from the perspective of a young girl, which i had never stopped to think about). What else could the song be about?, i think to myself now. I loved the song when i first heard it, but now i crush on it heavily. Do you listen a songwrite that can grab your attention with a very literally narrative song that you feel describes something perfectly? Will you still feel the same way if you find the song is much more than you thought it was? Is the artist capable of providing that sort of revelation? I can’t think of anyone else who can. Obviously, Peter Mulvey is extraordinary.
Trio: Season 1, #1
What’s going on with the layout, you ask? Why have i been idle for over an hour, you wonder? Let me tell you why!
As of this instant i have added a new weekly feature affectionately dubbed trio. Basically, once every weekend i will sit down in front of my computer and play a continuous live take of three songs to RealProducer, and then upload them as a 28k RealAudio stream to the site. A trio concert will only be up for a single week, when it’ll be overwritten by the next one. This week’s selections and performance was rather tame, but in coming weeks look for me to debut brand new songs and a few covers as well. And, unless i change the name of the feature, i’ll always play a trio of songs – no more and no less. This might lead to some creative rearranging on my part, but i guess we’ll have to see.
In this week’s trio streaming concert you can HEAR “Never Say Goodbye, “Bridge,” and “Under My Skin.” Send any requests to me and i’ll see what i can do. I have been known to do Tori Amos and Madonna covers by order in the past.
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Sometimes i think of the title for a song and just need to write “that” song. Writing towards a title is harder than writing from a line or a chord progression, because you have nothing and still need to go in a certain direction. For a long time i wanted to write a song called “As If,” because i felt like it was a great title. When i finally managed to cobble together something that ended its choruses in those words i wasn’t impressed: the song just didn’t live up to the name i had imagined for it.
Earlier this summer i got sunburnt very badly on the bottoms of my arms, and it annoyed me to death. While spending several uncomfortable days waiting for my skin to heal, i thought that i might like to write a song called “Burn.” I never did anything about it, but i suppose the word was floating somewhere in the back of my mind ready to be included in any son in progress.
Last night i wrote “Burn.” The lines started coming to me and i opened up blogger and started to write, figuring it was more trustworthy then my email program, and that it would be on the page today for me to practice. I finished it in under five minutes; it just flowed out like water through a dam. I pressed “post & publish.”
And i’ll never see those words again. Sure, i managed to reconstruct the bare bones of what i was writing, but several turns of phrase were lost forever to the infinite wasteland of the internet. I went through my cache, checking every file written to in the 20 minutes surrounding the disaster, but found nothing.
Impermanence frightens me. Maybe i need to become a more deliberate and organized person, but there’s always that chance that disaster will strike as you hit the save button. And every time it does i lose a piece of my life’s story. Hopefully this one’ll go through.