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Happy Belated Birthday Mr Lennon
12.09.11 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Happy Belated Birthday Mr Lennon
Merry Christmas (War is Over). I loved John Lennon growing up. He was my kind of rebel. I look at the Occupy movement and all the people with their heads still in the sand and I think that not much has changed since this song was written, which is a sad thing indeed.
As far as the song goes, I never proclaimed to be a drummer, so that is probably my low, my high point is incorporation of the organ. It takes me a while to write piano parts; I seem to have slow muscle memory with my wrists laid out flat… so I usually forgo and try to do things with strings rather than keys. So I enjoyed putting in a few minutes to do something, however simple with the keyboard. Maybe I will shake the rust out and bash out some organ rock… I would love to do some American Analog Set sorta stuff. Anyhoo… Merry Christmas the war is over (if you want it)!
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Jingle Bells!
12.08.11 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Jingle Bells!
We got the whole fam damily involved in this one! I can remember playing this one with Christy on piano and myself on guitar… or rather Christy on the Casio 800 for that truly 80’s Christmas experience [beep bloop beep bloop ].
Probably the most satisfying thing to put together because it was actually social rather than solo.
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Christmas! Baby, Please Come Home
12.07.11 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Christmas! Baby, Please Come Home
Looked through a list of eighties songs and thought I could do this one from U2’s ouevre. When I found some sheet music for it online, I started working off one version and saw that it was based on a live version by Death Cab for Cutie. Small world!
I had a blast making this one. It took me a while to stumble upon the hook though… i started out trying to get a good chugga chugga sort of thing going, thinking of The Pretenders and the Replacements or what-not. But then I did a doubling trick, recording the same lead riff two separate times and layering it and it had that Allman Brothers dual guitar thing and I was feeling like the cat that ate the cream. I dont have enough time to make it as perfect as I should, but it is a nice touch. I like listening to the guitar riff with headphones because you can really hear the seperation of the parts to the left and right channels respectively. If I were to work all the parts out I think it would be really fun.
Tamara rocks the baseline on this one and we sang the chorus a few times together in order to make us sound like a choir. My high point has to be the opening riff, and my big sticking point is that the vocal track overloads and fuzzes out a few times. Overall, I think this is the most solid of my little tunes so far.
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Holly Jolly Christmas
12.06.11 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Holly Jolly Christmas
This one went through a couple iterations… I tried it rockabilly style, tried it all strummy and sixties… I settled for an Everly Brothers meets Burl Ives sorta melange. Think I should have changed the key but it is what it is – fast and furious, apparently that is me! Have a holly jolly Christmas!
Click to play or right click to download it for playback with hot cocoa and a honkin candy cane melting down in it.
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Come Find Me!
12.05.11 | Permalink | | Comments Off on Come Find Me!
Jude got a big idea while I was dong laundry and wanted to play hide and seek. So from under this basket he instructed me to go off and count, then come back and find him. Then he added, “but don’t go RAWR!, OK daddy?”.So I dutifully counted and I didn’t say “RAWR!”, even though I really wanted to.
