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Showing posts from February, 2012

First Saturday Night Off

I'm spending my first Saturday night free at home, working on songs. I'm playing electric guitar over top of things I've done in the past, trying to learn lessons about how to play with other people. It's like traveling back in time. Since the summer of 2009 I have recorded over 50 hours of improvised sessions. This exercise tonight is strictly an exercise. I've never really tried my hand at overdubbing before, so this is definitely the sort of thing I do when I'm not pouring my energy into something else. My main issue tonight is trying to get the guitar to be much quieter in the mix. It's dominating the older stuff, and I'm trying to remember how to do live mixes of things. Suddenly, I have time for this little hobby of mine and this blog will likely document the journey. My immediate goal is to find people to play with, people to collaborate with. I want to take on new challenges. The first one is seeing if anything can be harvested, and how can

Seeing They Might Be Giants

For months, I've been looking forward to last night's show by They Might Be Giants. For days, I dread actually going to the show because I had hoped so much to take a particular someone. That fizzled, and I didn't really want to go alone. I remember I bought my first They Might Be Giants tape, "Lincoln," from the Record Bar at the River Ridge Mall in Lynchburg. I bought it the same day of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. I was vaguely aware of the sadness as I unwrapped the casette deck and played in the basement office of my parent's house in Lynchburg. The album made me incredibly happy, despite the sadness I felt about all those people who died on a flight home from England. For whatever reason, those two events are linked together. I carry with me a lot of sadness. It's bound to happen, given what's happened in my life. Music has powered me forward and They Might Be Giants played a big role the early foundation of my adulthood. Don't