Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Creative

My Secret Rock Star Life

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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.

Out of Sleeping In

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It is Sunday at 2pm and for all intents and purposes i have just now truly become awake.

If this is not your first visit you may have noticed that i’ve put a logo of sorts at the top of the page. I typically eschew such fancy graphic affairs, but i’m rationalizing it because there are honest to goodness strangers arriving here for the first time and i need some sort of branding to greet them. The wonderfully messy font is called chic decay, and it is free. I had to do some major kerning and minor undecaying in photoshop to get it to my liking.

If this is your first visit: hello. I made a logo just for you!

In less than seven hours I am due to make my monthly appearance at The Sidecar Bar for their monthly open mic night, hosted by the Sidecar All-Stars, an affable jazz trio that plays between sets.

After my meant-to-be-one-but-turned-out-to-be-two year hiatus from playing original music, an outing to the Sidebar open mic over the summer was the first time i played in front of anyone but a captive audience of friends. Much to my shock, the crowd wound up liking me a bit. Subsequently, i’ve been trying to attend every month.

Seven hours doesn’t feel like enough time between barely awake me and rocking the mic me, especially since I am completely unclear on what i’ll be playing. That’s what i get for sleeping in.

Trio: Season Five, Suite #1!

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Trio: Season Five, Suite #1:
Songs on the Topic of Identity:
Hyperbole, Apart, Seams

Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its fifth season featuring my own DIY music. This season each trio of songs will have a loose topic to connect them, which will often correspond to a recent post.

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Re: Trio
It started out with me in my bedroom with a shitty guitar and this tiny little pinprick of a microphone on the top of my computer monitor. … It’s still very do-it-yourself … it’s no science. The sounds that come out are the sounds that come out.

Hyperbole
What you can’t know from just hearing it is that song was written with and always performed with my often-times co-writer Gina Martinelli. It’s a song that holds a lot of meaning for me, and for a while I had given up doing it by myself. … I discovered in the same way that I can cover a song by The Supremes, I can do a song that’s a me-and-gina song and just own it, and fill in those spaces (or not fill in those spaces) with something that’s uniquely me.

Apart
It illustrates … that sometimes I just can’t help but let in the opinions of other people, and for a long time I didn’t really know what to do about that.

Seams
It’s very different from my other songs, and I feel like it really actually says something about me.

You can download the entire Trio , or download the single of “Seams.”

Candy Says

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Cool moment of personal achievement:

Listening to random underplayed songs at work I thought I was listening to a heretofore unheard live track of one of my favorite songs, but it was actually me singing it! I didn’t even realize until I picked up my iPod and saw my face on the album cover.

Alright, alright, if you insist: It was Candy Says, from Blogathon 2003. A little buzzy at full volume, but played quietly on work speakers it’s perfect.

In and out on this same path that I followed for years

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Lately I have been spending a lot of my free time perched in my chair, pouring over old poetry notebooks, tracking down lost songs.

Ever the archivist, when I built my first “artist” website back on Geocities I made it a point to unflinchingly catalog all of my songs – from the very first – noting the birth date of each one. That list eventually became a virtual discography that numbered each song sequentially running through the writing of “Under My Skin” during freshman year at Drexel.

Half a decade of intervening years has erased my memory of all but the “greatest hits” of those early songs. In some cases I can still recall a melody, or a few chords, but in others I’m surprised that I even wrote a song by that name. My longtime undercounting of my catalog at 140 songs was a result of this – fully sixty songs has been discarded or forgotten.

As I build my new MYSQL song database I have been slowly reconstructing and archiving those songs – their lyrics and chords, but also the stories behind them. In some cases its easy. A few days ago I unearthed one forgotten oldie from its original notebook, complete with lyrics, chord diagrams, and even some guitar tab. It held up remarkably well when i played it. Other songs are much more obscure – existing only as scraps of notebook paper – scribbled lyrics littered with strikeouts and arrows. Or, worse, just a single 8-bit recording, my tenative voice floating in from somewhere in the 90s to remind me I wasn’t always this loud.

Of course, even the most well preserved of these songs are still seven or eight years old, and my compositional abilities at seventeen are a strange match for my performance abilities at twenty-five. While some sound miraculously intact, others are fragments of some wholer emotion I couldn’t refine enough at the time.

On Tori Amos’s recent boxed set she reached back to the masters from Little Earthquakes to pluck a song – “Take Me With You” – that was only partially finished out of obscurity. Building from the original piano composition, she reconstructed the lyrics:

The truth is, there was a vocal on the 1990 take, and the lyrics to the chorus are the same. I’ve retained the chorus and parts of the bridge and used it as a skeleton. Then I worked around what was just humming in the verses. But the bridge was close to being there and the choruses were intact, so I haven’t changed a word. – Record Collector, Nov 2006

Tori’s idea is a seductive one – that of mining old material for new material, subtly updating a fragmented song to make it complete. Should I play the part of Tori to these unrefined tunes, shoring up the tentative framework of existing lyrics or layering in additional passing chords where once they were only implied? What if the identity of those songs is intrinsically linked to their naivite? Says Tori, “First of all you have to be able to think that you can almost channel yourself as you were then, and yet still be you now.” Is it worth it to interfere?

Just as alluring, there are two songs that seem to be entirely unfindable, even after pouring through every notebook, every folder of scraps. Interestingly, in both cases I remember exactly what the song was about. In one case I even remember the general shape and sound of the tune, and even the color of ink I wrote it with, but none of the specific lyrics or chords. If I were to reconstruct either of these song would they be something new, even though it uses the original idea as a touchtone? Are they better left lost?

I’m never sure why it’s so important to me to manage my catalog of songs so carefully, never letting one slip into obscurity. It reminds me of my childhood, how i would pour over the liner notes to every new cassette, memorizing credits, sourly disappointed if lyrics weren’t included. Even as I painstakingly transcribed lyrics from faded paper and chords from lo-fi recordings I find myself pausing to examine snippets of songs that were never finished enough to be included on the discography, wondering if they could be refurbished into something new and complete.

I suppose the correct answer is, “Yes, if it makes a good song.” But, I’m not really searching for good songs. I just want my catalog to be entirely performable, and listenable. If that requires some minor reconditioning, so be it. But, if I write in entire new verses by my 2006 self, can I rightfully call the song the same thing I did in 1998?