The Fiery Furnaces April 29th At the Great American Music Hall San Fransisco California

They were spectacular. The openers were mediocre. Bunky was like a new Save Ferris minus the "Come On Eileen" and the other band was like every band in Fresno, chord chord chord slow slow slow, bass part, chord chord chord, four chords for seven minutes etc. The audience was visibly angry at this- shit may get tolerated in Bakersfield, but won't fly here- but nobody moved because we'd miss our places (front and to the left, right by Toshi).

The Furnaces were so elegant and fiercely militant about their set, there was one flub when Eleanor bumbled a line in "Bow Wow" I think, oh, another where she couldn't figure out how to turn on an amp, but that's fine, no worries. They alternated between fast fast dance versions of twenty seconds of each song and fast versions of two minutes of each song. They played three encores, one with just Matt and Eleanor and two with the band. They played "Police Sweater Blood Vow" and "Waiting to Know You" as well as "Rehearsing My Choir" as far as new material goes.

The Furnaces were very robotic. Robotic sounding, like there was a sick desperation to get it all out there, this po-mo-prog-disco 'splosion. I was very impressed by how tight they had all of these cutup versions done, they seem to be different from show to show, I wonder how they do it. Like do they just sing it all through together in the van? I mean, its simple enough. Matt's got his thing going on, and as long as Toshi plays something near him, Andy can thwack away and Eleanor has the lyrics down, dang down. Even if the melodys aren't so strong and the voice feels like a lecture sometimes, it is very impressive.

After the show I got everybody but Eleanor to sign my copy of Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, Matt signed it "MAYBE READ RUSKIN INSTEAD".

Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

I'll be listening to this more in the future, though I think its a desolate over-produced sounding album. Over-produced in that things have been robbed of their natural sounds in a very 'indie' way, like some recording engineer who speaks at Tape Op conferences has found the exact knob configuration to remove 'nuance' from performance and replace it with 'vibrant sheen', as I'm sure everybody wrote down on their sticker-laden notepads. Oh, its spreading like the plague.

Anyway, the boring banjo stuff I'd heard of Stevens' before is here, but so are these insane Reich and Cage aping pop songs and nice little choirs (though don't I wish I could hear more than explicitly what is there, FUCK MODERN PRODUCTION). And of course, yes Mike, Sufjan Stevens isn't the greatest or most expressive or most listenable singer but I always get excited when there's thinking outside the box, at least attempting something, even if it is a failure. 6/10

So the albums we do this summer are going to sound not like seperate instruments and -HEY, that's definitely a guitar, no mistaking THAT, now THERES the punctum for you, Yeah, distortion ROCK-, they are going to sound like every band in the sixties got in a room together and got really excited and forgot to tell their engineer to seperate their instruments in the mix and did a song a lot like Louie Louie (only a song thats less of a sixties music cliche). Did I mention I once made a gin and tonic for the guy that wrote "Gloria"? Because there's my garage-rock cred for you.

To say to your guitar:

Guitar, you represent so much that I am against, and so much that I am for.
You have six strings and I have ten fingers. You are outnumbered.
My ten fingers could be used for more important things.
I could be programming a computer or driving a bus or giving a massage.
But I made the conscious decision to take time out from programming and driving and massaging and spend it with you. Me being here is my choice.
I have more going for me, (list your qualifications or read your resume), you are just wood plastic and wires. I'm flesh and blood and passion. You are blessed with my presence.
Three hundred years of the guitar cannot compete with two million years of human existence. We have ideas that are infinitely beyond your reach, you are lucky that we choose to touch you. I am in control of you, so don't give me a hard time.

I wrote this a year ago for Sterling.

WE'RE A PAIR OF HOT SNAKES SLITHERIN DOWN COLD STREETS AND I WANT YOU BETWEEN THE SHEETS

Nicky and the Dreamers played a show last night. We're now a four-piece, me switching between guitar and keyboard, nick switching between bass and keyboard, mike switching between guitar and drums and thor switching between bass and drums. Thor learned all the songs in less time than it takes to play them, which is a necessary quality if you are going to hang with the Dreamers. We played with a few other dance-like bands and blew them out of the water, to be modest.

I don't know how I feel about live performance. James Rabbit doesn't really play live, because I can't get along with any guitarists and bass drums and keyboard is a surefire formula for failure. So I've got these other things together that play in the meantime. With 'side bands' like Nicky and the Dreamers and Sex Funeral, I don't have the same dedication that I do to the James Rabbit cause, and consequently I give less. I mean everybody gives less, because we're a 'side band' for everybody. Grayson and Ian thought that Bel and the Dragon were better than Sex Funeral, and Mike and Nick think that Freedom is better than Nicky and the Dreamers, so we're all apparently wasting our time in these jokey little fun bands that get together every once in a while to embarass ourselves in front of cigarettes and cowboy boots. And I'm the lead joke. Well, embarassing as we may be, people liked us. Or at least random people who I don't know and couldn't explicitly tie a sneer-during-performance to came up to me and said things like 'great show' and 'you are a wonderful lyricist'. I don't know how I feel about this.

Isn't playing live supposed to build you some sort of fan base, in hopes of things like record contracts and future shows showing up easier than if you had just stayed home and made thirty records? Playing shows are fun, I guess. Maybe I'm a bad musician because I only want to play for a select few. Carol Warkentin told me this because I stopped playing piano whenever she walked into the room. I think Julia told me this also, but she was probably joking. I mean, I'd rather play for a group of old folks that will get up and move their lower bodies in hopes of a dance and when we're done they give us rolls of pennies and cookies that might as well just admit to being biscuits. Instead, we're playing to stone-faced crowds of kids hellbent on keeping their coolness together. Seriously, it feels like we're in the hall of heads from Return to OZ, ambling slowly along near walls of indistinct faces -eyes blearily open, just waiting for the inevitable scare.

That being said, we're going to put together a set of James Rabbit songs to practice playing once we get a permanent guitarist for the band. Maybe we'll get someone new and mould them. Brainwashing sessions and instrument time = so necessary.

My throat and my ears and my nose are weirdly shot from sickness and loudness and shouting, so that's where I'm at physically for now, at least. Downtown depression tours etc are taking care of medicating this. I'm doing things like taking walks and riding busses to get more time to write in notebooks. The problem is though, like usual, that the notebooks don't work outside of a purely mental situation. I can't just go over to the keyboard and put the two together in any workable way. After having successfully demoed the Continental album, I've just kind of been putting sketches of songs together, like I know that "Heart like a Car" is going to be weird engine sounds and electric piano, I just don't know how the rest of it goes. Or I know that "Build it Up" is going to just be one big buildup, but I can't picture how the instruments are actually going to sound. And I'm doing a lot of twenty second riffs for the rock album. And I guess somewhere in there schoolwork is getting done.

Conversation with Julia:

Tyler: "man. I'm trying to like the rolling stones but they are the wrong image for me"
"there's no way I'm attaining that kind of sublime musical sexiness"
"I need something more achievable, like the cars, but what ric ocasek was shooting for when he missed and came up with new wave"

Fuck the stones, I'm listening to the Andrews Sisters.

Rock Bloc
or
Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Keyboard Place
or
The Perils of Writing Rock Songs on a Keyboard

Yesterday during a long walk taken to compose riffs in my head I realized that I cannot succeed at rock. Its the look. You can't have glasses and be a rock star. Sure, Buddy Holly had glasses, but he was more of a pop star. When I say rock star I mean posters up unironically in kids rooms, headbanging in the back of cars rock star. I don't want to be any sort of icon, but I want to make this kind of music.

I'm thinking of a kind of rock music that doesn't really exist. Something that's like between ELO and Zeppelin, like really positive but with a lot of weird extra sounds in there. The test is going to be whether or not neighborhood kids gather around in droves to bob their heads and hold skateboards in clumsy ways as we practice. I'm pretty sure we'll just sound weird and amateurish, but not if we have big amps. We'll find big amps somewhere.

What I want to do is recreate the wonder you get from bands like Zeppelin when they're playing that part in "Black Dog", I think, where they're playing all this off-time stuff and you're thinking 'what the holy hell!? where did this come from and how are they getting away with this in the presence of my ears!?' And kids all want to memorize the complicated beats so they don't feel left out when their friends bob bob skip bob bob bob skip bob bob skip bob bob bob bob skip their heads. Man, we're going to tour so hard.

The Parable of James Rabbit in Radio Land

Hey everybody who is coming here from fluxblog and the clap clap blog. Thank you so much, Matthew. If you want to hear any of my music the best way is probably through a certain soul-seeking downloading program on which my username is churchclothes and a lot of my albums are on there.

Let me get you up to speed: I'm a student who writes and records a lot of albums (I was going to do a post today about how I finished the backing track demos for album number thirty one) and doesn't get along well with other musicians. I'd like to write more about icy stares and how I had a dream that I punched my guitarist in the face last night, but we're not Fleetwood Mac. Oh, how I wish we were Fleetwood Mac. The album the blog is named after, Le Fou, was going to be my crowining achievement, and kind of was, but only four of us knew about it. I don't know, I'm really bad at promotion, I don't want to be that band that has stickers up all over the place. I figure if we ever stumble upon a brilliant sound or album that it will get itself out there. I would place the quality of our albums in the upper quartile of recordings, but I'm going to wait until they are in the top 99th percentile. I don't want to bore your ears with something you'll only love a little. The album that we're working towards is called Love Drums, that's going to be our first masterpiece, its a wonderful hypothetical album that exists in my head in slight flashes.

Here are a few posts I've made relevant to the situation:
Talking about the album Artillery failing as a masterpiece
Origin of the album The Drop
Giving up on the press
Self-evaluation of summer
Listening habits, writing habits
Thinking realistically.

Yeah, and if you want to hear more, I'm all about standing in line at the post office. numberdestroyer@hotmail.com

Continental 1

I've been writing songs for this sucka like crazy. Sitting over the keyboard in room, box of Wheat Thins by my side, a few hours every day for the past few days. Apparently 'impressionistic/minimalist' means 30 chords per song. Let me give you an idea of what this looks like on the paper:

F B7 C Bb :|
Gm F#dim Bb C ~ F (e d c)
Gm F#dim Bb C ~ F (e f g a g)
Am F C Dm (Dm/Bb) :|
D Gm F#dim7 Bb C7 F
A7/G F#m6 D9 C7 :|
Dm Dm7 F F/Bb:
F, Fsus4 ~ Gm Edim ~ C7 --- F

The songs have a lot of motion in them, basically. I think I have eight or nine songs 'demoed' so far, meaning most of them are just the piano and bass parts and drum parts in a few cases (I have no idea how drum parts sound so I'm doing my best) and there aren't any vocals yet with one exception. I'd like to get as much of this writing done as possible so I don't waste any time when I'm back in Fresno.

I'm kind of paranoid as to how I'm going to get all of these sounds in my head out into the world. We'll have to find a piano somewhere and get an electric piano also somewhere. Thor tells me that good electric pianos are only about five hundred dollars. See, if I had five hundred dollars I would get one, but I'm afraid that there wouldn't be enough tonal difference between each song if we used the same keyboard for twelve or fourteen songs, you know? I also considered sneaking a laptop into Guitar Center or Piano World or World Center and quickly and flawlessly laying down all the keyboard tracks. This would be difficult though, and impossible without being noticed. Basically, its time for me to become a piano salesman.

See, that's where everybody says 'Yeah, oh Tyler, you'd have such a good time at that!" But here I am saying 'Hey! Listen! I can't play the piano! I know chords with my right hand and I know how to play one bass note with my index finger on my left hand! Sometimes this comes off as me playing notes on the piano, but you bet your sweet bippy that I can't read sheet music or play things with melodies or even play with dynamics, okay? I'm no Rachmaninov and I'm no Ed from Piano World, let's get that straight.' There is a wedding going on outside my window, the DJ put in one of the Dynamite compilations and they danced to "Bam Bam" by Sister Nancy. I wouldn't include that on my wedding playlist, but I like it on others.

As far as future professions go, I'm thinking maybe mailman in San Fran. It would be fun and very dangerous to navigate those streets in a wacky car and shorts. I could also go to Antarctica for a year and clean dishes. Or the Amazon and give guided tours on the river, I'd just have to go once before everybody got there.

Jen and I are playing a show at the Beehive on Wednesday night. The Blow is playing there also, who you'd rather see.

Easy Harmonic Solutions to Difficult Melodic Problems

The quarter against classes. Baby, I've got friends in class this time and instead of me writing down lyrics to songs I'll never use, I'm drawing picture after satirical picture of communist teachers that get comments like "Cookie" and "These pictures make less and less sense as they go, just like his lecture". The past has taught me nothing and the past is currently teaching me nothing.

Basically Continental is going to be based on the Fresno Police Station. Or at least how I remember the design the one time I was there. I'm looking for pictures and artists that do a lot of pastel squares arranged. I'm going to see if I can find any pictures of the police station online. No, couldn't. I'm probably just imagining it and should probably just continue imagining it. I thought about taking some crayons into class today just so I could get some work done.

Here's a list of things that's only going to grow: Claves, Tremelo.

The things I'm responding to most right now are A) random bouts of angst B) Sparks guitar parts and C) that moment every Monday Wednesday and Friday at about eleven fifty five when I get back in the office from soda break and have to hold the excitement in or else things will get misfiled. I'm also thinking very carefully about people who I want to work with and people that I can work with. I'm also thinking very very carefully about every song I hear and what the problems are with it.

I feel like I'm writing songs, no matter how I write them, in the wrong state of mind. Like I'll hear another song, and I'll think 'oh, what a simple part, so good and so obvious!' but then I'll try to apply it to how I write songs and think, 'wait, I'm getting a red flag, either its the plagiarism flag or this device is too weak for me'. Or the songs I write are too selfish to include others.

I had this dream last nite where a blue Steve Martin opened a flower shop with Steve McQueen.

Summer of the Seed

Today I got too too excited about Sparks. "At Home At Work At Play" and "Achoo". These are the songs that get me in trouble. Tokyo Drifter I'm going to rip off for lyrics and titles to new James Rabbit songs. Also, we performed a medley of medleys at the Shop Show. The new order for my favorite albums of the year are: 1. Hold Steady 2. Of Montreal 3. Fiery Furnaces. Petra Haden would be on the list somewhere but I can't count it as modern, you know? I think there's another album that I like a lot this year but apparently I don't like it enough to remember at this moment.

Am Am-Dm Am-G G-C
Spring slowdown for the summer gear-up

So I've been writing these songs non-stop today, mostly for the quieter album. Piano and church organ setttings and key changes. I figure we need to all be together to do the hard rock things (though I can write rockin riffs with just my voice and tape recorder), and I figure I kind of know how to write the wacky angry disjointed kinds of songs and most of that album is going to be looking for our brand-new sounds, you know. I'm going to try and write songs I'm proud of rather than songs that I think passable or even excellent. It seems a lot more productive to work with things you love rather than things you just have around to work with.

Instrument time I'm going to work on writing about, its going to be kind of on the new age side, like the instrumentalist and I will take their instrument out into the desert and just hang out with it for a while and then do some zen exercises. I'll say 'Max, play the needles off those trees' and he'll say 'Tyler, I can't do that' and I'll say, 'okay, I can wait, I've got the thermos, you- you've only got about three days to live without water'. Max says 'Tyler, what you are doing is impossible', I say 'fine, then play yourself a thermos full of gatorade' and I walk off leaving him chained to the desert piano. Now to think of the logistics of getting a piano into the desert.

Oh, and no more fake sounds. The keyboard will help out with organ and synth tones and such, but I'd like to spend as much of my money as possible buying things to make the album sound better. Bongos and a wah pedal. Those are on the list. Another exercise of ours is to make a song only playing all new instruments, maybe we could switch instruments, like I'll play the drums, Max will play bass, conner will play guitar and our guitarist will play keyboards. Or maybe we'll just make new instruments. I'll write a really generic song and we'll play it with made-up instruments.

I had this dream last night that Mike and Nick and I were in a convenience store that happened to sell Little Caesars pizza and we all really wanted some so we ordered three pizzas and three orders of crazy bread. The guy behind the counter took the money and said we made a big mistake because he was the only one working there and wasn't about to stop what he was doing to make us three pizzas (two vegan). So we sat around for a while and left to do other things. As we did other things we saw TWO Little Caesars in the immediate vicinity. Fools! We could have just waited one minute and received our pizzas so many times faster! So we returned to the convenient store and the guy was moving tables around out front. We asked him if there was anything we could do to help him get to cooking our pizzas faster and he said we could help him move the tables so we did. And I woke up. This is some sort of time-stealing analogy and I know what its supposed to mean, but its complicated on a couple of levels.