The City Veins

We are a band. We’re making moves. We had a couple good concerts last weekend. Now we’re shifting our focus to recording a new EP of unspecified length. I think we are all agreed that we need a few more quality songs in order to put together a great EP, and of course that’s what we’re looking for. Now if we can just get Spencer to stop his Obama rant. I love Obama and I voted for the guy on Tuesday, but Spencer has become the Obama Girl without the breasts. There is the low buzz of MSNBC present for nearly every one of Spencer’s waking hours, and thus mine as well. The note on “twitter” that Spencer is praying for Obama to come back in New Hampshire is not out-dated; he has not given up hope. I just want the candlelight vigil to end before he sets fire to the house; though it was nice when our heat went out the other night (do you know how expensive oil heat is? It should have been an alternate cause of death on The Oregon Trail to dysentery and gout). My point is we need to wait for the fire in Spencer’s loins– burning brightly for Obama—to subside before we can start writing new stuff.

We all really like the new song we’ve written, even though it was met with mixed reactions by all of the people outside of the band who have heard it. But we are becoming more infatuated with odd time signatures, which I think could benefit us in a good many ways. First of all, it forces us to think about transitions and parts in a way that we normally do not. When a song is in a constant time you don’t really have to consider the movement from one section to the next; everything is naturally smooth. But “naturally smooth” often becomes “boring and derivative”, so switching things up to force genuinely new thought is really a good idea.

The primary goal of effective songwriting (in my opinion) it to put yourself into the music while getting yourself out of the lyrics. I hate pronouns in songs, unless the person is play-acting. If I use an “I” or “me” or “you” in a song, it’s likely that I’m trying to play the part of someone I find abhorrent. I like to create characters, mostly psychotic or evil in some way. Martin Scorsese once said that whether or not he chooses a film to direct was dependant upon the main character’s approach towards both evil and exceptionality. Every man has evil in him—even the most moral—because without knowing evil you cannot know morality. So I like our songs to serve as surveys of morality through the microscope of a fully examined immorality.

Photo by Flickr user John Joe Crimmings Photography.