Lookin like a Million in my WARdrobe

Today Conner, Max and I recorded another single. We'll finish it up tonight and then it will be ready for sending out along with our other non-Continental-related single. I'm still mired in mire about finishing the rest of the Continental B-sides, but it will get done eventually. We'll open the file in November and say "why didn't we finish this? this is gold!" Like today Max was asking me about the song where he sang a bunch of people's names in the background of the song and I was like 'oh yeah! "Goodbye Greatness"!'

So with these few singles (rhythm tracked in the secret hours of the day before Conner goes to work) it appears that we'll be able to be somewhat productive in the down time (aka School) and maybe I'll quit and get a job or something come winter because that's the only way that I can move out of this town and begin struggling to find people to make music with.

Fiery Furnaces

Rehearsing My Choir. I'm so jazzed, so thrilled. My first experience with this was kind of like driving in the passenger's side of your friend's car, as he gets that call that his wife is giving birth and doesn't have time to drop you off so you have to drive with him at like sixty miles an hour through the slow parts and way faster through the fast parts. The sounds that come out of your mouth in these situations are Woah! Ohh! Yikes! Woahhh!!! And he rounds bends and you maybe see some street market that you'd never seen before and its like 'oh hey, wow, I'll have to remember this for the next time that I'm not going to the hospital'. And then there's some waiting and you get to see the baby and your friend apologizes and thanks you for sticking in there with him and promises to buy you lunch someday. Maybe a few lunches. But that's after the album's finished.

Although folks are saying it isn't as melodic as Blueberry Boat, I'm finding this not true. There's more pleasant repetition (zap zap zapped by the zombie in the two-door dodge) and there's more pleasant melodies (compare the floating-just-above-the-ground organ in "Seven Silver Curses" to the nauseous nautical organs in "Blueberry Boat") and the shifts are more jarring and the grandma's voice I love. I expected her voice to be more strident, kind of like a wiser-but-louder Eleanor. I'm really happy they continued this direction of no particular direction. I'm also happy they aren't using that many drums, which kind of felt tacked-on in Blueberry Boat (In "Chris Michaels" my biggest problem was that the drums felt added on, all those fills that fell in made me feel like I was watching an adult help a kid crayon in the lines, it really wrecked the wrock feel).

So rather than being a strident sulk-fest, like I'd feared it, its more lovely labyrinthine lavender lust. And there's lots of humor and sentimentality, at least a yard and a half more affecting than Blueberry Boat's, hidden in all these nooks and crannies of chronology. Olga's voice has the necessary feeling and cadence in it and Eleanor's voice has the sass and pretension in it, its like we're getting a lesson along with the band on how Eleanor's got to do it if Eleanor's ever going to do it right. So what if there's no explicitly arena rocking concert sing-alongs? Why don't you just go sit in the corner and wait until prime time?

Of course the album and its six-songs-per-song feels formless, but if you listen to anything long enough you will appreciate its form; you will live in it and dwell in it like it is your first home. Of course you won't be able to play it for any of your friends, but that's only because your friends are squares who can't bow before the obvious New Poetic Lords. What do your friends do anyway? They're butcher-shop clean-up boys? Well, give them a break. They've seen so much killing in their time. And by the way, listening to this album is like watching your child self eat some sort of magical blender that cuts you up in the most wonderous ways and you have to put yourself back together but you keep on getting distracted and so you have to try again. So, try again. Oh, how close you Furnaces come to perfection! 9/10

What's the Worst that Could Happen?

Even though its midnight here, its late for me. I've re-enrolled in community college and am taking a lot of architecture and computer courses and a film making course. I don't know what any of this is going to accomplish. Same as a lit degree: Bupkis. Maybe it'll make me more hirable. I've applied for a few jobs, but what can one do but sit back and wait? (And do orthographic projections)Conner and I are considering scrapping Continental and re-doing it. I'm not feeling very good or talkative about anything regarding music or my involvement with it.

I feel like I missed some crucial moment about four years ago when I secretly had the opportunity to run away with a band of misfits or gypsies and either chose not to or didn't know what was going on. I could be at burning man right now or getting ready for burning man or something. What a free spirit I would make!

There's other music out there right now, too:

Deerhoof: I really like the first half of their new album "The Runners Four". If you haven't heard it yet, it is another radical departure, soft music, entire songs without drums, ridiculously good melodies and lyrics. They approach things as if they were a really good alternative rock band from the nineties trying out guitar sounds from the sixties and once they've used them once in their songs, moving along to something new. This album has some heavy Blueberry Boat overtones, not only because they are both loosely about pirates, some of the guitar work recalls Matthew F's picking style and there's a certain unorganizational way about them both that just boggles/impresses. They still move through music-space like some wonderful four-headed beast, its just in a different way. 7/10.

Silver Jews: For a few moments at a time David Berman is the greatest genius that will ever live and the Silver Jews are the songs that he does when he's just goofin around. "I love you to the max" makes me feel all sorts of goofy inside. There's a lot of noodly riffy stuff, but I suppose thats what makes a band a band and here they're a band. 7/10.

Animal Collective: Animal Collective will probably never make an album I throroughly enjoy. This one, though, sounds like what the Walkmen sound like if I'm not remembering them correctly. That submarine-piano sound is all over this album like stink on a monkey, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Their best songs will always have the 'oh! but if only I could unpack those time signatures!' draw concerning your mind, and their worst songs will always have the 'oh! here's another nine minutes of people whispering harmonies and forest sounds' quality, and here they are together. The first two songs are really good and from there it gets sketchier. 6/10.

New Pornographers: More oblique and less accessible than Electric Version. The highs aren't as high and the lows are lower. This album must be really great in Carl Newman's mind, what's he thinking "Oh, boy, NOBODY will get these lyrics!". Yeah, that doesn't win you any contests, Carl Newman. There's a lot of hooks still and the other day as I was thinking about how little I enjoyed this album one of the hooks came into my head, so they've got that going for them. 4/10.

I'm sitting here drumming on desktops waiting for the Strokes and Fiery Furnaces albums. Alas.

Let's Turn This Evening into an Afterthought:

The Bourbon single is now available. Email me for a copy. The album itself is done but we're going to wait a little while, there's problems with the booklet etc. We'll probably release it at the same time or a little bit after we release the second single, "The Pain The Shame The Heartbreak".

The Band Stopped Playing, Cause the Party Got Shut Down

We played a show last night to some attractive and uninterested kids. It went pretty well. We maybe played for too long and we were maybe too loud. My voice did not give out entirely, so thumbs up for that one. Maybe tonight I'll get the Continental Booklets printed out.

The Perils Of Solipsistic Success

At around two am this morning, James Rabbit did their last overdubs for "Continental". At around noon this morning, James Rabbit did their actual last overdubs for "Continental". Conner wakes me up, home from his break from work and says "Tyler, we've made a masterpiece". I say, "actually, no" and give him a list of the problems. We record the cymbal sound we like, I turn down a few keyboard parts, draw a few volume envelopes and let it simmer. Now, we mixdown, we master, we ponder.

There is a bit of time between now and when we can begin to do Cavalier. Conner is starting school in about a week and will no longer have any time to do any recording. Here and there, maybe, we'll be able to eke out a rhythm track or two, but we won't have the semi-free schedule that we had during the past two and a half months until December. August, September, October, November, December, Depressing. What to do until then?

We sit and we think, what next. Max says 'play shows, distribute CDs'. I think that'll have to do. We can be a three-piece, that worked out okay (except the whole losing the voice thing for a week). I've got this plan where I find a protege who has no technical musical talent, but great musical ideas, and I'll produce albums for them and teach them how to play guitar. And then that person can be our guitarist. We'll be patient and we have a lot of time, kind of. But what if I don't want to spend all of my time with six strings and a prayer? What then? I mean, eventually we'll have to spend some time with a guitarist. I will have to sit down and look at a guitarist and say 'okay, this is what I want played'.

I'm tired of the whole solo-artist with a band behind him bit, I want to have a band-band, but I don't want to be in control of it. I want to just be second banana for once. I don't want to have the responsibility of being in charge of every single sound and every single note and every single phrase. I'm pretty good with our ideology, but ideology isn't enough to sell records. And what good does sticking to our ideology give us? I mean, the punks would respect that, if the punks liked our music.

What good does it do for you to be content with yourself? I walked around the house beaming all weekend; even as we nearly lost the entire song "Shootin Star" and had to reconstruct it over a harrowing four hours, I beamed. We set out to record an album that I had visualized entirely in my head, an album that I had sketched out over the first few weeks of Spring Quarter and pencilled in the rest of the way, and we did and it sounds good and it will only sound better from this point on.

There was this moment last night where Max came over, having been really busy with his play for the last few weeks, to do some final harmony overdubs. I said the song name and told him at the end to "Boop bap bee dap boo bat dat dee doo" and then I left the room to burn him a cd and when I came back he and Conner had created this wonderful mischevious harmony part that made me grin from ear to ear. At that moment I was so damn happy, but what does this mean to the rest of the world?

Sometimes I get these big feelings of accomplishment, but I don't know if they are worth anything. I took this programming class my last semester at City College and it was so frustrating because if you put the wrong capitalization or the wrong number in the slight wrong place, upon testing the program it would come back with a message saying "41 Errors 55 Typos" even though you swore you had done it perfectly the first six times you tried it, tested it, swore at it, and fixed it. When I'd finally figure it out, though, and things would work it was like a wave of contentment would wash over my body.

At that moment, when my program for the computation of taxes by state was complete, I wasn't just myself, I was Tyler in his seat in Business Lab 20, the feather of a bird flying by thirty feet above me, a grain of sand in the Sahara desert that had never heard a human being speak, the sulfur igniting on a 7 year old's birthday cake in Stockton, it was this massive feeling of success. But what did it translate to? I got a B on the project and was happy to get it, my having taken the programming class didn't count for anything, quantitatively that is, because I ended up being a literature major and I'd already satisfied the computers general education requirement. Just like James Rabbit doesn't count for anything.

But what bands DO count for anything? Deerhoof? What does it mean for a band to change their sound and method semi-radically for every release? Its important to some of us because we listen to them as valid artists and listen to their music as a valid insight into the artistic process. We have to listen to them as art because none of their songs are good enough yet. The Killers? Do they count for anything? I mean they've got two hit songs! That's got to count for something. When you have a hit song, people know your lyrics and guitar parts. But if having a hit means that snotty teenagers hum the tune as they begrudgingly do the dishes, do I really want that? Of course I might.

So to us, James Rabbit, Conner, Max and I, James Rabbit counts for a lot. Chasing around those elusive moments of clarity, in whatever shape or form they take, this means everything to me. Its when these moments become large enough to share with the rest of the world that you become great. The point of a work of art is to affect, and if your art affects you, that's fine and dandy, but if it only affects you, no museum will have you. You will not see James Rabbit in a museum, yet.

For our ten (or twenty) fans, James Rabbit counts for something. We are their friends, and when we give them a CD, they listen to it and think 'hey, this is something that my friend made, and its actually pretty good'. So what if James Rabbit doesn't mean as much to them as Dexy's Midnight Runners means to me? They've got their own selves to take care of, and a pretty good band like James Rabbit isn't about to knock a band like Led Zeppelin, or even Modest Mouse off of their record shelves.

For the masses, we don't mean anything yet. But when Cavalier drops, so will they. To their knees. (How convenient it is for the next album to always be the good one. If Cavalier doesn't work out, the album after that is going to be killer. I promise)

Mixing, Re-Mixing

Today Conner and I made some large steps forward in the mixing process. There's these things called Studio Monitors that give us a better picture of what we sound like. Normal speakers always have some bias, like they make things over-bassy or over-trebly, but monitors make things all the way in the middle, making our previous mixes sound really awful and over-eager. So we spent the morning redoing the first three songs, making them sound really good and then decided to test out the monitors worth.

We made a mixdown of the first three songs on the album (and a re-mixdown of the "Bourbon" single) and took it around town to various stereo stores to see what it sounds like on them. It sounds good. Way better than it did earlier. Good. Man, I'm so happy about this. Now, its an issue about how I did all of the parts and me complaining constantly that I want to re-do every li'l thing. Conner says 'no, it sounds fine' and then I secretly go and re-do it anyway and he doesn't say anything, even though there's no way that he won't notice.

And to think that I was about to send out copies of the "Bourbon" single. How embarassing would that have been? I mean, not that embarassing, but given what we know now, the old version of the single sounded awful. So, thanks to us not having a printer and kinkos being prohibitively far away, and also me not knowing exactly how to do the booklets in a more professional way, the album is going to sound better. Thank you, booklet, for being so hard for me to approach.

Too Loud For the In Crowd Again, Some More

We finished the rhythm section recordings. It took two straight days and a lot of breaks between recording songs for me to write the next song. The song that we originally "wrote" with Sam, I rewrote a bit so it doesn't include the part he wrote, this way I don't feel bad about playing the song without him. Unfortunately the part that replaced his was way harder and it took me about two hours of practice to kind of nail it. To celebrate, we got healty sandwiches and watched Dr. Strangelove for the sixth time.

The songs for Too Loud are all very good, up there with some of the best bass and drum parts we've ever written. And as my hoarse voice chirped the melodies along as we played, the tunes are also pretty decent. Damn decent. There's 'prechoruses' and 'choruses' and in our eight minute epic there's even a 'choir part'. You won't even know that Too Loud is a rock album, because you'll be too busy liking it. Or holding your ears, if you belong to that infamous 'in crowd' that we're singing against.

Conner and I are closing in on Continental. Really, we are. There's but a few vocal parts that need to be rerecorded and I hear phantom percussion over everything that there isn't actually yet, but there should be. Phantom percussion phantom percussion. Max is still heavily involved in one or two plays, so he isn't able to bring to life all of my harmonic fantasies or clapping fantasies. We're scarily close though, I don't know if I'm ready to part from it. I had a whole notebook full of things that we had to do, a whole chart with little empty circles where things were needed, and just as I felt triumphant filling in the bubble located on the axis of "Sick Days/Rhythm Guitar" I feel a little bit sad looking at there being only a few R's, standing for 're-do'. All the bubbles are filled in. I think some of the songs sound really good, surprisingly good, and you are all in for a treat, but some of the songs are kind of disappointments, to me at least. I won't tell you which ones they are because I'd like you to think that they are all great and so then you'll say, for example, that you loved "Bourbon" and I'll say, "Oh, that ol' thing, why I hate how that sounds and can't stand how we couldn't get a decent backing sound behind the vocals" and you'll say "Now that you think of it, the backing sound is lacking" and I'll say "I told you you shouldn't appreciate my work!"

Today when putting the guitar part to our almost-great "San Francisco Drifter" the D string broke. This is what I get for branching out to the lesser used strings. So tomorrow we venture to Guitar Center and I embarassedly ask how to change a guitar string. What kind of guitar? They ask. Oh, its blue, and it's my brother's bandmate's, Vincents. They play punk music with it, if that's any help. The reason we borrowed the guitar from him in the first place was because the D string on my guitar was broken, but I suspect that there is some sort of evil knot in the fretboard, because the D string breaks on it with about four times the frequency of even the hardest strummed string. Hmm, I know I've got to use pliers, everytime Grayson does it he asks for pliers. There's little holes in the top and on the bottom of the thing and I think they come out of one of those. The beaded things at the end of the string, that is.

Conner and (Maybe) Max and (Maybe, Gulp) I start school pretty soon. Maybe I'll get my architecture credential or maybe something of less importance, like a computer certificate. This means that we won't be starting on Cavalier for at least a little while. I'm thinking about producing it myself. Conner has done a brilliant job with Continental, but Cavalier wants a more complicated approach. Cavalier wants to get specific drums sounds. Cavalier wants you to only be able to distinguish the snare and the vocals in songs where clearly more than snare and vocals are happening in the songs. Cavalier wants way too many harmony vocals over everything. I'll have to learn about knobs and headphone amps and cords and chords. Maybe I'll take a class.

Too Loud For the In Crowd Recording! Surprise!

Today we began recording for "Too Loud For the In Crowd" and got about halfway through the rhythm tracks for the album. Tomorrow we do 'the fast one' 'the ELO one' and maybe 'the Sam one', or if not, we'll do 'the all choruses one' and then we have all day Thursday for working out the album closer. I've got all of the other parts planned out in my head. I just have to write lyrics for the choruses and we'll be set.

We're finishing up stuff for the "Bourbon" single, it should be releasable and sent-out any day now. In the meantime we're closing in on finishing "Continental", and will release the album's second single "The Pain, The Shame, The Heartache" at the same time. Our brains and bodies are going batty and I'm having really long and really weird dreams. Last night I fought giant plastic snakes emerging from the coin pool in the rainforest exhibit at the Fresno zoo. When I returned from my battle, everybody had aged dramatically, but their clothes were the same.

Final overdubs for "Continental" have been fun. It'll be like Max and I huddled in the 104 degree studio area trying to decide on whether or not the harmony we just recorded is too high-pitched and then Max says "Hey I've got another idea!" and I'm like the engineer from the original Star Trek and I say "I don't think she can take much more!" but we do anyway and then have a bunch of Orangina.

Conner and I have been to Guitar Center numerous times these past seven days, each time to pick up something immensely important at the moment, like a cord that connects three things together, or a pair of shakers, or today we got a triangle. These albums are fiestas that will never quit.

Also, we played a show for one of Max's friends birthday parties and it went well. I lost my voice and probably a pound of sweat.