Jun. 03, 2003 - 11:01 p.m.
Dear Meghan:
The last few days have been either a tornado of activity or a toilet flush of activity – the end result remains to be seen, but rest assured there was much circular motion. Since renting the space for the new Suspicious Clowns comic opus, I arranged dinner with Jeb, Lauren and Terri through a series of mad e-mails, all of which had the subject line of ‘Sunday, June 1’. After setting it up and getting confirmation from all, Sunday rolled around. Jeb and Terri arrived. Lauren forgot.
I’ve also been in a mad dash around mixing down and uploading a bunch of songs of mine – the ones I wrote during the Christmas break and have since tinkered with – so I can put together an ‘album’. I put quotes around ‘album’ as I’m quite sure it will come as close to (or as far from) being declared GOLD as my earlier ventures. But, of course, that’s not why I put them online. It’s not for the fame! It’s not for the fortune! It is, because I’m a Leo, merely to see my name online somewhere other than my own personal site.
Upon uploading them, I realized I had some more tinkering yet to do. Vocal harmony is not my strong suit, as critics of my music – including myself – often suggest. When a song consists of me and a guitar, then it’s fine. Me, guitar, keyboard, fine. Me, guitar, keyboard, bass, drum programming, percussion, sound effects, fine. The second I throw another ‘me’ in there, though, the odds of me hitting the correct notes seem as likely as Fox News being accused of a liberal bias. As such, I generally avoid harmony. It is not actually because I cannot hit the notes, per se, as I have no trouble hitting them for the main vocal tracks; I think that once I know the notes I’m supposed to hit when it’s time for the harmony track, I must screw with them. Screwing with the proper order and structure of things is how I write songs, anyway, and my attempts at harmony benefit – or rather suffer – from the same fate. So a few songs have been deleted and re-uploaded more than once.
I’m sure the harmony issue, not to mention my own blasé attitude toward marketing my music, would be intensified if I had a bit more tangible competition. Certainly writing sketch comedy with the Clowns has made me a sharper writer. But of all the people I know or have known that are making music, it is the sort of stuff that Hallmark would pass on. Horrible, clichéd lyrics surfing on top of horrible, derivative music. That’s the Chicago music scene in a nutshell and it’s why I tend to avoid it with a passion. Any music that goes well with beer and self-conscious penis-compensating yelps of “whooooo!” is not music in my eyes.
I could go into genres that tend to shrivel both beer usage and penis-compensation – jazz, for instance – but I find that too much of the same thing. As the saying goes, if you make a mistake in music once, it’s a mistake; if you do it twice, it’s jazz. Like I do in most social situations, I fall into the category of intellectual buffoon or stupid genius – no single element of music is the shit, but many are simply shit.
A cleaning spree has also come into being, though its source eludes me. Many old videos which I’ve kept forever, despite their gradually decaying audio tracks – ‘Good Morning Vietnam’, the original ‘Blade Runner’ – have all been tossed. CDs as well. Well, how much did I really listen to Sheena Easton’s album of standards anyway? Perhaps it has something to do with not writing vociferously; usually a trend that has no place in my world creeps up to fill the void, like a distant cousin no one wants to know showing up at the door for a visit.
The neighborhood is oddly silent tonight. Makes me wonder what’s going on.
Vrooooom,
Vincent
what they said - what they will say
