Continental, Day Two

Conner and I spent all day today practicing and laying down six rhythm tracks for the first three songs on Continental and a few B-Sides. This has been the most fulfilling day so far. Previously, we'd had a few 'let's record this and see how it sounds' sessions with some of the "Too Loud" songs, but everything just clicked today. Before we knew it it was two pm and time for lunch and then before we knew it again it was seven pm and we were experiencing chest pains and dehydration, so then it was eight thirty and we still had two songs to record and I could sense the neighbors fingers inching ever closer to the speed-dial button labled 'noise complaint' and somehow there was a minor miracle and Conner was really into all of the songs.

I'm pretty thrilled and very tired. We worked for about six hours straight twice today, tomorrow Max and I will probably record some keyboard tracks to go over this stuff. If we can continue on rhythm-tracking about six songs a day two or three times a week and overdubbing during the time that Conner is not around, we can have this album and its extras recorded in two-three weeks. I'm very thrilled. Thrilled as pie.

Fortitude Man 2 Day Three

Max and I wrote a few more songs today (yesterday). Maybe it was just one. Yeah, lets say it was one and a bonus bassline we came up with. I wrote a few b-sides for Continental and Conner and I ran "United States Breakdown" a few times. Tomorrow (today) we'll record the rhythm tracks for that one and maybe get around to mapping out "Zen Masterpiece". Maybe we can do a few more. Hell, maybe we'll get all of Continental rhythm tracked tomorrow. Who can say? Its an easy enough album.

I thought about joining the National Geographic Society again, but I'd like to have a permanent address before doing so. Fresno seems so transient right now.

Fortitude Man 2 Day One
Continental Day One

Max and I spent a few hours today dreaming up and writing songs for the pending Fortitude Man project. We discussed the way things are going to go, we'll arrange these songs we've written for a band consisting of some of Max's friends (Conner and I are not going to be playing any of the instruments) and Conner and I (mostly Conner) will record it. This will of course be scheduled around James Rabbit time, except for the recording. I'm excited for this project to get off the ground, it'll get us all worked up on working in different roles.

This morning Conner and I decided that we would begin on the rhythm tracks for Continental. With some of the stuff that I wrote at school I was kind of worried that Conner would think the material was weak or too uninteresting. He kind of scoffed at the chorus to "United States Cooldown", but he has yet to realize its true colors.

Sometimes when projects don't get off to as flying-kick of a start as I would have hoped, I tend to get kind of depressed. Me depressed is trying various heroic amounts of food/drink and regretting it the rest of the day. Today I regret nothing.

What lies at the end of this endless summer remains a mystery. There is no revenue coming in from any place. Currently the plans, assuming that money materializes from nowhere, are to move near the Bay Area because it seems like that's where all of the jobs and the pleasant ex-revolutionaries end up.

Fortitude Man Two

Tomorrow, in addition to practicing once more for the album, Max, Conner and I are going to begin work on an album for Max. I will produce, Conner will record, Max will perform along with his musician friends. This will help us focus our energies elsewhere while we wait for our errant guitarist. I figure the writing/practice part of "Too Loud" will go for about two more weeks, if we can get three written this week and three written next week, we'll be in fine shape. It'll hopefully only take a week to record and then another week of overdubs and clean-up work and then we'll be on to the rest of the summer.

"Too Loud For the In Crowd" Day Four

Today was day four of practice for Too Loud. Sam was again a no-show. We ran through what we had so far, roughly a third of the album, and Max and I wrote a really dark riff. We've been painting my room this week, so there hasn't been a lot of action on the music front. I recorded another solo ukelele album.

Day Three of "Too Loud For the In Crowd"

Yesterday was day three of our practice/writing sessions for Too Loud. It was Max, Conner and I, as Sam did not show up. We wrote a very solid song and sketched an outline for another song. Later on in the day I recorded an album in my room while Conner and Dying Within were practicing in the backroom. Its called "Bold 'n' Brassy Blues" and there are only five copies.

Too Loud For the In Crowd, Day Two

Yesterday was day two of our practice/writing sessions for the album. Max, Conner and I worked on "Lions in the Amazon" for a few hours before Sam showed up and started ROCKING EVERYTHING. We did very well for ourselves. After mastering that song (and wrecking my middle finger on my left hand) we moved on to a song that we feel heavily channels prime-period Boston.

We've also been practicing songs for live performance. "Cuba" seems to be looking pretty good, most of the others we're just kind of running through the parts we already know. We're going to set aside some time for re-learning the old songs, thinking about using ten or twelve for our set.

Endless Summer of a Dozen Albums

Today was our first day working on the album "Too Loud For the In Crowd". Conner and I woke up at seven am and took a mile-or-so jog and had a healthy breakfast. We started struggling with a song and Max came over around nine or ten and helped us struggle until we figured it out.

Sample Conversation:

Tyler- Conner, that drum part is too normal.
Conner- Tyler, it has to rock.
Tyler- I would go to prison before I let you drum like that.
Conner- Okay fine then, let's just play this part in 13/16
Max- Yeah, lets do that!

Sam came over later in the day to pick up a bass and I formally invited him into the band and he accepted. We have one song most of the way done. Now begins rehearsal and obsession over the recording process.

Rum Killed My Baby At The Boardwalk

This will likely be my last post from Santa Cruz. Graduating from the ol' college on Saturday. I'll have to change the title of this blog again. I've got some good ideas, like 'Endless summer of a dozen albums', 'Goofups: the life and times of a kinko's office employee' or 'Sam, join James Rabbit'. We'll be recording and practicing for possible shows and such, I'll let you know how that goes.

The past few days have been kind of alienating between me and the rest of the town. Understandably there's a lot of 'spend time with girlfriend', but there's a lot of lone walks, exercises to get ready for a long summer of staying up late by myself trying to get vocal take #263 right. Things like choosing new routes to get to far away places or ridiculous stoic attempts at paying attention to the task at hand, not allowing myself to be distracted by any little creative impulse. By the way, it takes 21,763 steps to get to Capitola from my room.

I hope to keep in contact with friends over the summer by inviting them to contribute to the recording sessions. As previously mentioned, Thor will be adding guitar and recording expertise and I'm going to ask Dylan if he can do some percussion and guitar tracks for us. Max apparently has a bunch of really talented musician friends, they're in too. I have no qualms about having everybody but me play on these albums, it can only improve things.

This year has been tremendously rewarding, both academically and personally. I hope the songs that I have been writing these past few months turn out as well as they sound in my head. I hope we can defy all music-industry logic of having to have a scene to succeed, and succeed on our own; through our own merits and talent. We're all pretty decent musicians and I've got a whole pile of songs, something's got to click somewhere in there. I'd hate to have to start selling out.

Love,
Nokia Presents Tyler.

Anarchy 4 Me

John Cale's song "Fear is a Man's Best Friend" has the world's best outro. "SAY! FEARS! A MANS BEST FRIEND!" he snorts punker than anybody ever could before or since. The chorus that he is repeating is a simple cutting guitar part and a really simple and good sounding drum part and him bursting out the seams about his best fear friend. Life and death are just something you do when you're bored, Frank Black.

There's a few houses in a row down on Western drive. If you are ever on a walk down there you will notice that these three houses have the most desirable backyards ever, small little porches and expansive gardens. One of the houses has a little collection of orange flowers in it, but the flowers don't stop down the garden, they continue growing out of the gates and off on down the hill, which extends further than you can see down without going to the very edge.

When the bass guitar is sputtering down into oblivion and refreshing itself in the outro, it is like these orange flowers spilling out of the backyard: ridiculous and perfect anarchy.

The rest of the album is brilliant as well.

I'm trying something new.

Click here to download 'Spring Breakdown'

Click here to download 'Wine On Weekends'

Both of these songs are from The Wanderer, available at fine Sam Goody stores in your outlet mall or if they are out by emailing me.

The Last Shop Show

This is how it went:

I got there pretty early because I was on one of my walks and was in the nearby vicinity. Rachel and Julia were putting up their polaroids. I pointed out the ones I wanted to steal and they hung those ones a little higher. The kitchen smelled like Thanksgiving (which turned out to be oatmeal cookies and spaghetti sauce). There were only four videos: one in which a man had to fight four shopping carts, a music video of Thors, a clip from Casino Royale dubbed four times onto a videocassette, and a dream that Jamie had and made into a movie. All of these videos were brief, to the point and most importantly hilarious.

John Acquadro and Spencer Owen played solid sets (John made the audience cookies in his set). An ensemble consisting of Tori playing violin, a girl playing the bassoon and I playing wine glasses with water in them performed Jamie's composition of 'Balloon Music' where the audience let balloons up in the air and we looked at a projection of a musical staff and played notes corresponding to the location of the balloons on the staff. Jamie announced that 'the shop show is everywhere!' and then we had a parade over to another house where the shop show was to continue. There were about fifty of us, goofy with reverie and excited about what was to come. We were very disrespectful of the motorists (mostly friends), causing many an auto-car dismay with a large pink blanket that covered the streets with awkwardness and flowiness. There was a large line for the bathroom. Max S., Vanessa and I took advantage of this audience to play an energetic rendition of "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover", Vanessa on keyboard, Max playing a purple storage bin and I standing above the crowd on the kitchen counter insisting that I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free.

Nick and Zak and Moishe and possibly somebody else played their ramblin' man songs and everybody sang along and took pictures and were very excited. Em and Katie got up and sang an acapella rendition of "Tonight You Belong to Me". After this Mike and I performed "Fabulous" which was receieved very well. Jamie stood up on a pedestal with an electric guitar and said "this next song is called 'I love each and every one of you and will continue to do so until the day I die'". He then cut the end of a string off of the guitar and cut open a ballpoint pen and had everybody in the room give him a single dot of a tattoo, pressing in the guitar sting until it broke the skin. Mine was about two centimeters to the upper right of his right nipple.

Thor played a song from Sesame Street about not wanting to go to the moon. 1,028 Exclamation points (Jen and I) played a set that was received very well. Even though we are more of a sit-down band, everybody decided that it was an okay thing to start dancing really excitedly. They got in a circle and started dancing around the room, as if we were in the middle of a Greek wedding. Even though we were only going to play two songs, Nick requested 'I Love You For Your Money' and they danced excitedly to that one also. When we finished 'The Future is Today' the crowd was still dancing, so we kept up the song and I wrecked a few fingers. Our set ended with me holding the guitar up in the air and screaming "America!!!"

The night split up, some of us going to a high school to swim in the pool, some of us toddling off to other parties, some of us going off to wait an hour just for the water to get there in a certain local all-night diner, some of us stuck as designated drivers, none of us going to sleep.

Pancakes and Tetanus in Memphis

Conner= I'm sick of fidelity. People don't give a fuck what our individual drums sound like. People don't want to be explained how music works in a systematic tom-by-tom dissection of their hopes and dreams. They want random stabs of carefully planned impulse. They want to be moved in ways they aren't aware of yet. They want the mystery rumblings of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" or the ridiculousness of The Honeycombs where some drum sounds can't have possibly come from drums.

We need to move through the musical stratosphere not like flecks of bacteria whose actual biological life is debatable, but as astronauts inside a powerful spacecraft braving through the complexities of space and changing everything about how the people and bands that come after us do things. I want some kid in a punk band in Boise to take a James Rabbit CD to band practice and demand of his band that they CREATE, not just follow.

This kind of seperation is disrespectful to the unity of the sound. We don't need to listen to Tape Op* or Tape Op bands to succeed at recording music. We don't need guitars to explain to the masses what we're here for, we've got our own voices and we've got our own ideas, we don't need to blend in with the rest of the sounds out there. No modern apologies, brother.



*Betrayed by Tape Op: When we first started getting this magazine it was a really exciting thing for me, I was like 'oh man, this magazine is going to give me so many ideas'. But then it was like 'oh, there's just a bunch of colorful ads and some less colorful ads masquerading as articles'. And every once in a while they'd interview Miles Kurosky or Robert Schneider or someone I was interested in and they would proceed to tear apart the albums of theirs that I loved. The cool guitar-as-sitar sounds? Oh, no, that wasn't magic, that's just a heavily compressed gibson strat microphoned through with a KOBLER 320 Loudmouth. Drums? Yeah, we did that with sixteen microphones on each head, had to get that STUDIO sound. Recorded it all on Fostex 19-track and bumped it up to magnetic tape, baby. Cause we're fucking sweet.

WE DONT NEED THIS.

This is how the 1960s Ended:

(I wake up)
Chris: ...that was at Santa Barbara except it was exactly the same as it is today... you know, So Cal. You looked down the street and saw about two thousand cop cars coming towards you. There were about two and a half thousand cops there, and there were like three or four thousand students and it was total war. The cops had their clubs and the hitting and all that, and the students would just push flaming dumpsters towards their phalanxes. It was kind of a game also, because nobody was really dying, just a lot of violence happening. (mumbled) I was one of those kids pushing the flaming dumpsters... And I ran because they would chase you if the dumpster didn't hit them and I ran to the (mumbled) building. That's where they had the african-american studies. And I enter the building and there's blood covering everything, all over the floors and walls, the blacks got hit the hardest. After that, there were a few things like civil rights uprisings, but that was pretty much it. And that's the end of the sixties.

...silence...

And now Sean's going to talk about that fucking boring song 'What's going on' because some stupid hippies thought that it was a better song than 'Stand!' or 'Time of the Season' and he's going to eat up the time I was going to use on my proper end-lecture for the class and I'm eventually going to get up and tell him to stop talking because he's just some pretentious grad kid who thinks he can figure out all there is to know about soul from the All Music Guide (www.allmusic.com).

'First black concept album?' ever hear of a guy named Charles Mingus??? Come on, Sean, he's only a few clicks away, just keep hitting 'similar artists' it makes great coffee conversation.

May We Always Stay Stay Gentle

Tonight more affirmation from Of Montreal. Porter dining hall. Opening bands were terrible of course. I asked Thor how we could avoid sounding that amateur. He told me not to worry and not to play out of practice amps.

Of Montreal played a lot of stuff from their new album which I really really liked anyway, but a live treatment made it all seem more relevant. The moments at the end of the songs where they would not really jam and not really just vamp out were really transcendental. Nothing in particular was going on, it was just like Kevin wanted to write some songs that let the band pause for scenery at the end of the song, with little guitar motions to go along with it. There were a lot of parts where the band members (all switching between instruments) would just go over and dance with other band members, briefly though before returning to bass or trumpet or percussion or whatever.

There were quite a few songs that had two basses playing at the same time which was endlessly thrilling to me. They used a lot of echo effects also, which was hilarious to me each time. Not hilarious necessary, I would just laugh out loud in amazement. There were costume changes again this time, but not as wild as last times. They performed "Oslo in the Summertime" as a rap song with Kevin wearing a light blue beanie and a see-through green jacket with a rollerskate stencilled on the back. Pretty much every song from the new album you'd want them to play they played. They played the last one which I thought they wouldn't do because the harmonies sound hard to duplicate, but they got it pretty spot-on. They played a few from Satanic Panic in the Attic, but not the ones I'd hoped they'd play. Anyway. A zillion thumbs up. There were a few superb moments.