Clothes Make the Man, Moths Eat the Clothes, Etc...

I have this idea that I'm now part of the way into doing.

So I've written before about having listened to the same CD (usually compilations) on the same route and having conflicting moods because if you are walking at a different speed the songs will trigger certain moments in your brain at different physical points along your route. So lets say you are listening to the first disc of the white album and descending a staircase as the "that Georgia's always on my my my my my my... mind" part comes up and you go down the stairs in tandem with the my my's, but the next time you do it you stop a second after leaving your door to check to see if anybody left a note for you under your doormat, because you thought your friend was going to stop by but you were in the shower and couldn't hear their knock, and anyway when you are going down the stairs and jumping down them in tandem with the 'my my's the stairs this time end before the mys and you find yourself stomping on the flat ground and because of that second you have sprained your knee.

Or maybe your knee isn't sprained, maybe you caught yourself at the last second,anyway, I wanted to take this idea a step further and instead of listening to the same cd everyday on a walk I would MAKE a CD to accompany a SPECIFIC walk. And not a compilation, I'm going to make an album to accompany the different parts of a walk.

So what I just finished doing was recording myself (on my super helpful mp3 voice recorder) going on about a seventy minute walk and talking about it every step of the way, the color of the sky, the people passing by, counting the number of steps it takes to cross the street, the quality of the sidewalk, the types of plants on either side of me, the sounds birds are making, where the sun is hitting in my eye depending on which way I'm turned, and I'm planning on interpreting each of these things as different musical elements, the panning on the recording will match up with my perspective. If I decide to use a synth sound to replicate cars passing me I will put it on the side of the speaker that corresponds to the ear that heard it most. Representing things like the different colors of trims on houses that I've noted will be tough, but that's what I'm going to buy a notebook for.

The idea is that the CD will be something you have to do, I mean you could listen to it in your car, but it is preferred that you will actually have to walk the same route and look at the same things (I mean you won't know what to look at, although the honking on the right side of the record will probably mean 'look out for that car!') and it will be different for every time that it happens, though you will always end up on my doorstep.

Got To Get The Ghost Out!!!!

Writing for the new album went really well yesterday. Previously when I had a problem with the structure of a song or a lyric it would just remain a problem, burn through the following pages like a hot poker until it remained at the end, a hole through the last sentence of the book. Yesterday I took the songs that I had problems with and rewrote the problem sections. It took SO long! Actually yesterday I finished, I'd been obsessing over it/them for days. I'm writing so much of this album in my head, taking long walks and thinking 'okay, by the end of these four miles I'll have a melody and some words', and by the end I will have repeated the song in my head (and out loud if I'm in an isolated-ish area) so many times that writing it down is unneccessary.

The way James Rabbit used to work would be that I would finish an album and then immediately start recording on the second one. There would be no writing anything out beforehand, that all came in the middle of the process. "The Drop", for example, began recording three days after "Artillery" was finished, we recorded the rhythm parts in the morning, put music to it in the afternoon and evening and I wrote lyrics at two am. If I was writing lyrics and wanted to put some more in between the first chorus and the second verse, I was screwed and the song was flawed because of it.

Last year, starting with "Continental", I would write the whole album out and demo it and then record it, this was okay, but the demo process gave me kind of a biased persepective, I'd hear "United States.WAV" and think, 'no, this is the way it should go, we can only hope to improve upon this keyboard-sequenced version', the finished version (at least of the original version of Continental) came out sounding like a downbeats-only trainwreck because my heart held so fast to the drumbeats that panicked out of me in the final moments before my roommate at the time had to go to sleep, programming them with stuck index fingers, knees on the ground, Anna Karenina in the corner open to page one.

So now the plan is to write the album, I'm giving myself until June to finish it (so far I have about five songs 'done'), June being the date that hopefully Conner moves to Santa Cruz and we begin recording it. We'll hopefully have a band by then, I'll get my closest friends to see the light my way and we can start obsessing together over pop history. I'll play them the frames of the songs as I've written them on guitar, ukelele, keyboard and they'll say 'what a good start, I've got a nice bass part' and voila! there was something I hadn't previously thought about. We might be able to perform too! At shows! And then at better shows! But let's take one thing at a time!

So I'm going through the songs and rewriting them and making sure they say what I want them to say and not just any old blather, because I want to start meaning something to people besides myself. I already know James Rabbit is great, now you've got to know.

James Rabbit Live In Santa Cruz?

So Conner and his band might move to Santa Cruz which means that James Rabbit might be a band for once. He and his band will live downtown or in the hills (the hills would afford for more constant drumming) and then albums will happen constantly, over the summer and during the school year because now we know how to play instruments. And then we'll play big shows in San Francisco that agents will come to and want to put us on record labels but we'll say 'fuck no, record labels only take your money, we could get a cd burner and make cds ourselves and sell them at our shows and on the internet and keep all of the money and we don't need your promotion or other shitty bands dragging us down. We're pure man, pure like freshly fallen rocky mountain snow.'

But really, we can't actually play in San Francisco because we all look like dorks and not the fashionable kind. Instead we'll just make albums all the time and hopefully one of them will catch on, hopefully we'll hit some sort of 'oh, this is how it works' stride and people will want us to play live and we'll say "yeah, we can play live, but we look so bad and dont have a guitarist still, you might as well not come and just keep us on your car stereo". I don't know, what does one want out of a band?

Is fame what I'm supposed to want? Because, really, when I think I've done something good, as I do think sometimes, its good enough. I don't need other people telling me that I'm worthwhile, and when they do it just makes things confusing. I used to use music as a social thing, being in bands and stuff to get people to like me, but trust me, you don't want those kinds of people (the ones that would like you for being in bands) to like you, you are better off with the friends that know you are a geek and a nerd. This way you don't have to pretend all the time. It gets exhausting and you don't have that kind of spare energy, you've hopefully got a job.

I just got back from Paris which was spectacular and all sorts of inspiring and I wrote some songs on a train and I'm all sorts of eager to finish writing them and record them - you see I've got at least four albums in my mind all written and waiting for Conner Max and I to put some energy into them and then they be mostly ignored by everybody we send them to (and loved by a few who are totally correct to love them) and then me be all sorts of broken up that I put everything I had into recording them and then thinking that, no, I'm just not good enough yet, if I had done it correctly then EVERYBODY would love it and then thinking that I'll never have it, that doing music is just one of those things that you are born good at and can't just waltz your way into it.

But we shall continue the waltz! At the pace of maybe an album every three months or so? Because why not, I've got it in me and I'm pretty proud of what I've done so far, and it doesn't matter if anybody else likes it, they don't count.

Now if we could only get Max to move up here. Max, I can't offer you a job in music or any gigs anywhere but I can offer you beautiful sunsets, really good Mexican food and beach smell everywhere.