Music.

YUM!

Music is one of the tastiest parts of life I've been privileged to partake of.  I started taking classical piano lessons when I was 8 and took them for 4 years.  And I'm SOOO glad I did!!!

Piano is like the latin of music.  If you learn it, it makes learning almost every other instrument a breeze!!  I started playing bass when I was 16, and guitar a year later.  I now own one bass, one electric, one acoustic, one ukelele, a keyboard/synthesizer, a recorder, a ocarina, and a hand drum.  I love them all.  All the wonderful sounds they make, it's like having a sixth sense when you listen to a song and you can pick out each instrument, and just KNOW exactly where they're going!

I started composing music when I was 15 and haven't stopped since.  6 years later, I feel like I still have a ocean of shit to learn.  I set up a makeshift studio in my walk in closet this summer.  My first real attempt at recording my songs.  Equipment is just so damn expensive! I'm chipping away at it peice by peice.  I've probably spent a cool grand on stuff this summer alone.  I bought my first 8-track and two semi-pro mics (the same ones found on the presidents podium I discovered),  I need to buy a pre-amp still, and a decent effects processor with some nice reverb.

La la la!  My lyrics are coming along.  I used to write mostly punk themed shit.  Like anarchist tendencies, friends and partying, the opposite sex, and of course: little debby fudge rounds.

These days I'm writing more introspective lyrics.  Like who we are, why we are, what we are, and some grander more cosmic stuff.  Meh, I could care less, lyrics are almost a side note in my songs.  I'm a music man, and its the music that drives me.  I could listen to the same lines in every song, as long as music grabs me and doesn't let go.  I want to try my hand at the newer genres of electronic music, especially trance and ambient.  Oh and happy hardcore would be fun too.

I've been in a couple bands, but nothing ever really came out of them except a great song about fudge rounds.  In an earlier post I showed you my first draft of a song I'm working on right now called "The Death Of Johnny Appleseed".  I had been reading up on him this spring and found out that the myth was a far cry from the real man.  I decided to write a song to reveal who he really was: a shrewd business man who, besides being a bit eccentric, was also a sort of preacher who read from the bible and spoke of the philosophies of Emanuel Swedenborg, which was a kind of nature worship in the guise of Christianity.  (He believed that everything on Earth corresponded to something in the afterlife.)

Anywho, I don't think I quite captured what I was going for in my first draft, so it will be rewritten and rewritten and eventually music will begin to form around those words....

I can't wait!!

So heres a couple albums I've been playing a lot and would like to share with you, you will not hear these groups on the radio, or on tv, and you may even have a hard time finding them in your local music store.... This makes me sad:

Belle And Sebastian - Tigermilk

Mr. Bungle - California

Shpongle - Nothing Lasts... Nothing Is Lost

3 Steps Ahead - Junkie (4 Life)

Infected Mushroom - Converting Vegetarians

Also, a little more well known:

Gorillaz - Gorillaz  (I include this album, the first, because I think its greatly underappreciated.  Anyone who listened to radio when it came out heard their single Clint Eastwood, but the rest of the album is brilliant, much better then Demon Days)

Heres my fav song off Tigermilk, called Electronic Renaissance:

Play a game with your electronics
Take a step to the discotheque, and people
Go outside where there's someone watching cars go by
And the city tall with steeples

Hand in hand with the Electronic Renaissance Is the way to go
Hand in hand with the Electronic Renaissance is the way to go, boy
Hand in hand with the Electronic Renaissance is the way to go
You're learning, soon you will do the things you wanted
Since you were wearing glitter badges

If you work for much very longer
You'll be known as the boy who's always working
If you dance for much very longer
You'll be known as the boy who's always dancing

Monochrome in the 1990's
You go disco and I'll go my way
Monochrome in the 1990's
You go disco and I'll go my way
Monochrome in the 1990's
You go disco and I'll go Funkadelic, man
Is the way to go
So drop a pill and then say hello