The City Veins

Part 1: What We’re Doing

It’s already mid-January, and we have done very little of consequence as a band this year. We’ve managed to play a shitty show, but that wasn’t really our fault, unless you fault us for being too poor to afford working equipment. We also tried to practice, but alas, one needs working equipment to do that as well. Charles and I worked on Saturday to put some new material together. In our collective estimation, we are in desperate need of about 3 more quality songs. We dropped a few when Bayes left the band and haven’t found strong replacements that allow us to embrace a 3-piece rock sound.

During our Saturday session, Charles and I experienced the entire gambit of emotions towards the creative process. We are trying to write hard, quick, rock songs. The fact is that Charles and I are not built to do that task. Charles and I treat writing as an extremely cerebral process; we deconstruct chord progressions that we find interesting, use some of the typical rock progressions only to invert them (1-5-6-4, in which I walk around on the bass and flirt with the root of the chords while Charles plays on ascending root-3rd-5th-and 7th’s). I wish we were comfortable playing a good classic rock progression in the same way it’s been played from 1964-2008, but we’re really not. So we spent 2 hours trying to write a simple song before we became too frustrated. Then, Charles plucked away at 3 chords from a Billie Holliday tune. We sped it up, added some bounce and 2 extra chords for the turn-around, and we had something. Changed directions for the chorus (slightly slower and lower in pitch), and we had something good. And, as I’ve always stated, the best answer came about as a result of thinking.

Part 2: The Hold Steady

I can’t remember whether or not Charles has ever written about the brilliance of the Hold Steady on this site, but if so, I feel now is a good time to reiterate just how great they are. They write wonderful and simple songs, with drippingly infectious tunes. They do what I cannot. And the reason that it all works is Craig Finn’s voice and lyrics. I’ve thought about this for a while, and now I realize that his voice is perfectly flawed. If Finn sounded pristine the whole thing would crumble. What some fail to grasp is that perfection sounds in-genuine. (Bayes pathologically hates bands that have imperfect lead singers). And genuine observation of unique cultural experience is certainly one of the Hold Steady’s strengths.

Either way, they’re good at something that I can’t do, and that I respect.

So, if you’re keeping up, we can’t write certain songs because we’re too smart and my voice is too good. Eh?

Photo by Flickr user forklift.