Filed under Gigs, Music, Writing by Charles | 0 comments
In an effort to get you all out to the Rock and Roll Hotel tomorrow night we have put two rough mixes of new songs for our EP on MySpace. W
e are going on at 8:30, so get there early.
Aaron and I worked on the lyrics for “The Boy Makes Good” online through Google Docs. It is a fascinating document, much more interesting than the song. It has Aaron and I typing back and forth, using different colors to connoted different things It is something like 4,000 words long, and mostly crazy. I would link to it, but then people might come to lock us up.
Photo by Flickr user Augapfel.
Filed under Music by Aaron | 0 comments
Anyone who has been paying attention to this blog for the last few weeks knows we’re working on our album (Long EP or short LP), and apparently it’s making us a bunch of whiny bitches. It’s no-ones fault, and none of us are free from that particular criticism.
The current argument is over what–if anything–we should cut from the EP. We recorded 7 songs for an EP, primarily so we would have options. Now arguments range from the integral to the mundane. We have had discussions regarding the semantic difference between EP and LP, and what qualifies a piece of work as full-length or abbreviated (For me, that is the mundane). We have discussed whether or not to turn a song that we have played live many times into an instrumental for the album (the integral). Not one of us is fully in sinc with the other two, though some differences are more stark than others.
For me, the most interesting element of these conversations has been how each of us views these songs in drastically different ways. I don’t think it improper to disclose a bit of one of Spencer’s recent e-mails:
If anything got cut, I’d say either 5/4 or 9/8 (sort of similar, though I think 9/8 is the better song) and The Verse.
It was at this moment that I realized that we are a band that has no idea what its collective strengths and weaknesses are. My opinion is exactly the opposite of Spencer’s as to what are our good and bad (or less good) songs. I like both 5/4 and 9/8, but I think 5/4 has a much better feel and melody. Like, it’s not even close. Furthermore, of all of our songs, I think the Verse sounds the best recorded. In fact, Mike (our engineer-guy) has only really ever exclaimed anything positive about that song as an entire entity (he has spoken about bit-pieces of other songs).
But this is not intended to enter into evidence proof that Spencer is wrong. It’s just to point out that we all hear different things within the songs. The most difficult thing is to predict what other people will find compelling. But that’s where we’re at.
