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.

Aaron was supposed to write this post on Monday, it’s now Wednesday and so being tired of waiting, here’s my recap of Sunday night.

On Saturday, we had an amazing practice.  We came up with a great new setlist and blistered through it with a ton of energy and musical virtuosity.  There was only 2 problems: 1) we were in our basement and no one was watching and 2) in this band, having a great practice is almost certainly a jinx for a live show.  Every time we’ve had our best live shows, we’ve had awful practices before them.  I think it’s because we get the “suck” out of our system.   So needless to say, we felt Saturday might have been a bad omen.

The good news is that, from a performance standpoint, we played really well Sunday night.  We were right in fearing the omen, however.  With the exception of the microphone, almost every piece of our equipment broke in some way.  For the first 3 songs, the guitar amp was alternately nowhere near loud enough or was screeched horrificly in obnoxious feedback.  I’m not sure it was ever loud enough all night.  At another point in the show, the bass cut out completely for about half a song.  And not one to be outdone, my snare drum malfunctioned 2 songs in , leaving me to work around that the rest of the set.

As odd it sounds, it’s good to have nights like that once in a while.  It both keeps you focused, and teaches you how to work around issues and still put on a good show.  That being said, I look forward to a month of totally kick-ass shows now that the music gods have exacted their revenge on us for that practice.

Thanks to all who came out to Galaxy Hut on Sunday, we love and appreciate your support and we promise a whole lot less stuff will break next time.

Remember when I told you all that The Wire was the best show on television, and that you owed it to yourself to watch it? Well, it turns out that I was wrong. That show is terrible. Do NOT watch the season premier on Sunday. Okay?

As a little thank you for saving your evening, why don’t you consider coming out to see us play at the Galaxy Hut. We are on first, so probably sometime around 9-9:30.

Photo by flickr user joelogon.