Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

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Listening to 25/24 on loop for the last two days whenever i’ve been in my apartment, and real music at work today seems positively surreal. You mean, there are cds that exist that i wasn’t on CntrlRm-Out headphones for? Totally a shock.

My life is totally a shock sometimes. I raised just shy of $300 for Planned Parenthood, and i’ll probably write a check for the difference; i figure this probably breaks me even for all of the training i got from them for free when i was a Peer Counselor in High School. Leaving the ‘thon page up seems halfways like bronzing a baby’s shoe and half stuffing a dead pet. Did that just make any sense at all? In a way i feel as though it’s memorializing the first step in what will (hopefully) be years of high quality recordings from me, but in another way i feel like i should be getting back to normal.


It doesn’t feel normal right now, i don’t feel normal. To go from a week of all anticipation to a week all of denouement is jarring, and i just feel like i’m standing in a shadow. I had an honest to goodness panic attack last night, which isn’t exactly a common occurrence around these parts, and to this point i’m not sure why. Lindsay has become fairly convinced by this point that i really was locked in my room in a gibbering mess rather than fooling around with my girlfriend, but i feel like everyone else is looking at me strangely sideways. Not that i went around advertising it, you know, billboard: “Total headcase here, please pull around.” But, i like to be able to talk about things once i’ve got them on my chest, lest i suffocate.

I’m not sure how long this layout will remain or what will follow it. I think it’s simple and pretty and white, and i don’t mind that being my virtual impression right now. But, until i figure out what will be happening after it’s gone i definitely feel like a guest on my own blog.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85296632/

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I don’t know when i stopped just writing songs as a hobby and started occasionally referring to myself as a singer-songwriter. How can i really draw a line there? How does someone go from doodling to being an artist? I doodled for a long time, writing good songs that never left my own bedroom – akin to sketches in the margins of a notebook. Now i take myself seriously, constantly revising and re-recording each song until i feel as though it has reached its end point – and even then occasionally pulling it off the shelf to be aired.

I cannot pinpoint the day that i began to take myself serious enough to say so out loud, but i can promise you it had to do with my next song. Earlier this evening i told someone via IM that practicing songs was like sanding down a chunk of wood until it becomes a perfectly smooth sphere, and that i only had one or two songs out of over a hundred that had reached that point. This song, if no other, has gone there… to the point where i can get lost in the nuances of one silly little riff and then forget the lyrics entirely. I have played it so many times, in so many different ways, that it’s as if i have come back around to it being new again and i am now discovering it for the first time.


It takes a big song to fill that void, and it didn’t start out big. It still isn’t, actually: just three chords, three verses, and what was once just some fortuitous ad-libbing. When i sing it, i feel famous. It makes me sweat because i move to it underneath my guitar as my fingers dance back and forth across the riffs i have unearthed, there shape and arrangement changing on every beat. It makes me frustrated when it will not sound out correctly, and it makes me glow when i change something about it only to make it more interesting to perform.


It’s late, and a lot of bloggers are getting a little weepy, but this is how i always feel about song 25/24. Earlier tonight i tried my best to open up a new side of it for you to see, and i encourage you to click through to older audio of it through its lyrics file so that you can hear the differences i am talking about. I’m under no illusion that, as a result, you will take me any more seriously as a musician. But, maybe you’ll just be able to understand how i can feel like this about something so simple that anyone who has performed on it has irrevocably altered.


Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, and goodnight.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85290647/

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Well, i’ve taken my first cold shower of the Blogathon, but not because i was tired: i was soaked to the skin from playing guitar and doing various performance aerobics in my fourth floor attic bedroom and when i went to take a shower someone downstairs flushed the toilet or something. So, cold and wet, and definitely very awake.


Gina just left, and while she was here we basically recorded an entire EP of her, which includes the absolutely stunning Say It Ain’t So – the first time she’s ever sang the song with me. Also, note Lindsay’s first ever recorded guitar performance on the picked open-chord acoustic. I’ll be peppering the rest of the night with some Gina tunes, especially an amazing one she did with Dante (yes, another musician) accompanying her on the talking drum. And then all the gals sans Kate came up here to record a little surprise, and so now i’m left with twenty minutes to decide what (that i haven’t recorded already) i would like Dante to lend some of his multi-instrumental talents to. And then i think Jack still wants to record some Bowie. And then i have to do requests.


So, for those of you keeping score, YES, i am actually recording almost all twenty four songs in a single twenty four hour period. Beat that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85289565/

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Ten thirty in the morning and already re-re-recording had begun, as i decided that i was less than satisfied with the next two songs i had scheduled. Part of the today’s challenge for me is not only getting a song up every hour, but making sure that i don’t use up all of my voice too early in the day. As such, the next two songs find me comfortably singing Bass parts rather than Baritone, which is my preferred solo voice part.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85288138/

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I am the sort of person that, once i have something fixed in my head, it overwhelms everything else in my life. That’s what happens when i ‘crush’, so to speak. I can safely reveal to you that this sort of attention is rarely paid to anything resembling work. When i’m at work i can become so focused on something that i’ll skip lunch breaks and leave later than expected, and i have been known to grow so engrossed in writing a paper that i forget to sleep or use the bathroom. However, the way crushing works is that it subverts other intended activities — and getting the records organized at work never crosses my mind when i’m working on a decent logic puzzle in the same way that writing a paper usually doesn’t distract me from writing a song.

Having spent all that time setting up what doesn’t usually distract me to no end, now let me (predictably) contradict myself: in the past week an official job i have has superseded everything else i could possibly be doing: working, sleeping, eating, spending time with Elise, and even getting near Blogger. The job, as it were, is to arrange Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” a cappella for eight or more women’s voices so that everything about the song – guitars, drums, harmony, et al – is represented in full by the singers.


It was not easy. In fact, looking back over the last week i would say i’ve easily spent upwards of fifteen hours on this barely three minute song with its half-octave of lead vocal notes and its five essential chords. Fifteen hours in front of my computer playing back the same collections of three and four measures back over and over as i first change a sixteenth note to an eighth note, and then from a major fourth to a major third of harmony.

Almost a solid day’s worth of arranging later and i have suddenly realized that Drexel had managed to teach me something, because i couldn’t do any of this three years ago – or even two. Possibly not even one. I haven’t mentioned it lately, but i’m currently in choir. Yes, choir. Singing in a group of over twenty people, some of whom are very highly distinguished singers who have been in such groups for well over a decade. I, by contrast, have been in such a group for going on five weeks. I start each session frazzled and rigid and end each one relieved and smiling and ready to belt out just about anything.

Conclusion? Some things do change, but the most basic of things always wind up the same.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85252415/