trio

Songs start with something at their center – an experience, a feeling, a great line, or a snippet of melody. Yet, once they’re fully formed they wind up attached to other contexts and meanings.

From that perspective I can understand why some songwriters personify their songs; Tori Amos, for example, refers to them as her “girls,” and ascribes assertive opinions and stubborn tempers to each one.

I don’t know that “Lost” has ever talked back to me, but it’s certainly a character. It came to me in a single blast in the middle of a Journalism class in Randell hall on May 16 of my Freshmen year, scribbled straight through on a single sheet of lined paper.

The guitar arrangement came later, but in the same lightning bolt fashion – so perfect in my head that I recorded it four times in a row before I felt like I captured some part of it on tape.

Then I promptly forgot it.

Really it was a little more complicated than that. I was writing so many songs at the time that “Lost” didn’t really stick out, and then I broke my collarbone and was forced to go on a brief hiatus from playing. And, when I had healed enough to play again I had a backlog of lyrics waiting to transform into songs.

By the time I returned to “Lost” it was months after it was originally written, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to play its chorus. The chords sounded simple on my four recordings, but I couldn’t quite get the fingerings.

It took the better part of the year for me to suss out the secrets of my guitar part, and as soon as I did I recorded a quiet-but-determined take of “Lost” – exactly the way it had been playing in my head for half a year – in Trio Season 1, #11.

I adore that recording, but it’s not quite one of my favorite tracks.

Over the years “Lost” has stuck with me through ups and downs. Playing with cellos, in different keys, segueing into “Lucky Star,” and changing from 3/4 to 4/4. Recently I feel like maybe we’ve parted ways … at least for a little while.

Somewhere in the middle of that journey was another take as quintessential as its first Trio appearance – a recording that remains one of my all-time favorites over four years after the fact. It originally appeared on January 13, 2003, in Trio Season 3, #6.

I’m not known for having a knack for spot-on cover songs, especially when they involve any sort of specificity in guitar playing. I’m a much more approximate kind of guy.

I’m also not known for controlled use of vibrato, or willingness to commit my falsetto to record.

It’s the presence of all of those elements that make my relatively off-the-cuff cover of Hedwig and the Angry Inch‘s “Wicked Little Town” in Trio Season 4, #5 one of my favorite Trio performances, despite some quibbles re: flatness.

(I bet some of you Googlers would love to see some chords here. Unfortunately, I haven’t played this in three years and I have work in the morning. I do recall that I’m capoed relatively high – perhaps seventh fret? I’ll come back with a transcription as soon as I’m able.)

I often remark that I’m not much of a musical fan, but I freely admit that one of my lifelong dreams is to play Hedwig. That said, I’m actually a much better vocal fit for his other half, Tommy Gnosis, as voiced in the film by Hedwig co-originator Stephen Trask.

I’ve now exhausted my favorite tracks from Trio’s first two seasons – their lo-fi production values and still-developing vocals bar them from the apex of my favorites list.

Tonight’s selection is the first song of Season 3, and thus the first ever “hi-fi” Trio recorded (and preserved) as a high quality wav rather than a crummy real audio file.

The song in question is a raucous, improvisational, up-tempo take on “Will It Ever Come.”

After I built my top fifteen list I was a little puzzled at the placement of this track on the upper half … it’s not nearly as definitive as some of the songs that I’ve highlighted so far. Yet, every re-listen proves its place: I wish every Trio could stay faithful to the framework of a tune while remaining this carefree and spirited.

No matter how premeditated or rehearsed Trio has become over the years, it often yields surprising results – even in the control-freakish Season 5 I nailed a reinvention of “Other Plans” in single take.

When I had my tonsils removed in 2002 I had no way of knowing how it would impact my singing. I waited, impatiently for my throat to heal enough that I could sing.

As my first sans-tonsil week ended my voice started to return to normal. At first I sounded weird and too-open – like Bjork. Higher notes were less constrained, lower ones more boomy.

I decided that I had to document my altered vocals with a Trio, but with my singing handicapped my song choices were limited. As a result, on the few songs I could sing I spent more time rehearsing my guitar parts than vocals – my voice wouldn’t stand up to repeated tries at each song, so my fingers had to deliver their peak performance.

That’s how I arrived at this fantastic version of “Icy Cold,” from Trio Season 2, #15. The fingerstyle passages at the beginning and end were played exactly as arranged – I didn’t ad-lib at all (highly unusual for me when it comes to intricate guitar pieces).

At the time the addition seemed like a lark, but over the years it’s held up as one of the best all Trio performances – a one-time-only reinvention of one of my favorite original songs.

Trio can act as a snapshot, catching songs as they transform from one form to another. That’s certainly the case with this recording of “Typical,” from Trio Season 2, #13.

At the time the song was a year and a half old, and it still hadn’t truly found its niche, but as soon as I ad-libbed my first staccato between-verse riff while recording this Trio I knew I had found the way “Typical” was meant to be played.