I sorta learned to speak by listening to Ani DiFranco; you can hear me hem and haw and um and ahh my way through my sentences complete with lil’ folksinger giggles and breathlessly ended phrases. This isn’t an all-the-time thing, but you can certainly hear the influence whenever i forget who i am and start talking about my music. But, Ani’s not the only person who’s had an unintentional effect on my speech patterns: i pepper my campus tours with twangy southern “y’alls” and attach “ya knows” to the tails of my statements in an unmistakenly Fargo fashion. In the cases of the latter two affectations, i’m not entire sure how i picked them up, but generally anyone i listen to often has an effect on how others hear me – and the surest way to tell is to ask me to talk about music and proffer me a bemused smile as my sarcastically directed patterns take a left-hand turn and suddenly i’m saying “Well, ahh, this song… this song was, um, not the easiest song. Not the easiest song to write… but it wrote itself, i suppose.”
Oh, did i mention i picked up some loopiness from Tori?
Tori Amos
I keep putting off my initial trip into the studio, but as a result i have forced myself to commit to a roster of 40 songs to make my attempts from. It’s just too damned hot. Of course, the more i procrastinate the more this is going to involve sick days and barricaded studio doors, so i should probably be producing some sounds this week. The first cover for the project has been confirmed, but it might only wind up a beeside. 25 songs + beesides… i’m turning into Tori Amos. All of my friends have heard about this and they seem generally unimpressed, which just goes to show that i am so musically omnipresent that they just assume recording two albums in one month must be old hat for me by now. Ha!
lazy summer heat is slowly seeping into my pores because it always distributes evenly to where things are cool because that’s how science works. i am listless with heat, waking up abruptly from crucial points in my technicolor-bright dreams to glittering sun bathing my entire bed in gilded rays. last night there were three story double homes with bay windows in the third floor bedroom and i remember hugging someone very tightly to me and something strange lurking in the basement that i knew all about as a narrator but nothing about as a character. and then i was flying, weaving inbetween buildings and up and over and out into sky and that’s about as much as i recall about that.
today i really do have work to do, but the page was looking sort of lonely. read that last post, if you haven’t already. but, anyway i just realized today that i haven’t played “under my skin” since i played it for rabi or at the bar and i think i somehow got past it or something and that scares me, because that song was all about everything. have you been paying much attention to the new songs? they’re conspiring against me and my album and i think they might have kidnapped “relief” because i haven’t heard anything from it for a while. i think “splinter” is in charge of the whole conspiracy even though it doesn’t show up too much, because it’s very jealous about not getting on the album and it knows that gina really likes it and oh god now i’m talking about my songs like they’re people just like tori amos does but i always just explain that away with the fact that she did too many low-quality l.a. drugs in the 80’s but i’ve never even been to nebraska so i’m obviously just crazy to begin with.
the songs are sortof like people though. after you play something enough you begin to develop a relationship with it; some days you dress it up special and some days it barely rolls out of bed and some days it just doesn’t want to have it’s picture taken and it’s holding its hands up in front of its face and complaining. the scary thing is that the new songs are doing this now, as they’re written. that last one flaunted its independence right at me saying “you can’t end me unless i want to be ended, so keep on writing” and i did and it takes up way more pages in my little grey book than any of the other songs do but now that it made me write it all down it doesn’t really seem to want to be played, which confuses me to no end. i don’t think i really realized that all of my songs are relationship songs until gina pointed it, and now i seem to be able to write everything else but it’s like hitting a new note for the first time because i can’t tell if they’re strong or if they just seem very nice because i’ve never heard them before.
if you were wondering, this is just how my head is working lately. i wrote a 2300 word email last night without even really intending to. it’s like when i open up my head things just come pouring out until it’s empty again. but, anyway, this post is just a post for the sake of being here in this little box, so i again defer to the intelligence of the last post and wish you all have a nice day.
#14 is true. Come on, people, i’m a record addict. After reading the War Against Silence entries concerning the ordering of records and reading Hi Fidelity cover to cover in a matter of hours, i decided i needed an eclectic but fun way to organize my albums so that i always had a decent selection to pick from on any shelf. So, i took all the discs down from the shelf and started messing around with ten random discs that i had been listening to a lot recently. After a little idle experimentation (well, this whole ordeal is rather idle, isn’t it?) i decided ordering albums by the predominant color of their spines would be fun. However, once i had my 50 most played discs on the shelf i realized that Tori Amos was going to occupy the first, last, and middle spots of my collection, and that the plan was entirely unfeasible because if just three of her discs were already spread out that far then the addition of her twenty-some singles would cause me to have a heart attack trying to find all the beesides to make mix tapes with. The plan was thusly abandoned.
Last night rocked. I got sidetracked from coming home when i ran into my Battle of the Bands cohort Kathe, and instead of just grabbing a bite to eat we went out to dinner, and then back to her place to listen to music for hours. We listening to some of her cds, we listened to the three-song mixdown of my demo, and then we listened to tracks from 20 of my recent favourite cds, 10 of which she really liked. I love my success ratio! Afterwards we got drunk and sang along really well to Tori, and then we watched Chasing Amy. I had forgotten how incredibly fucking miserable the movie makes me, and you’ll all have to make sure i never watch it again. Yeah. No rewards for the viewer. Well… except for when Ben Affleck lays one on Jason Lee. That was rewarding…