You're In My Songs
You're In My Room

I just this moment got back from a show on Seabright Beach. And I'm inspired. I don't know if its been the shows that I choose to go to or the shows that other people choose for me to go to, but these last months these shows have been 100% brilliant.

The performers on the beach this evening were Spencer Owen, Amigos, Fletcher Tucker (As "Bird by Snow") and a fellow named Matt. I'll work backwards.

Matt played some cold-fingered stride guitar that was nice but constantly interrupted by his protestations regarding the smoke getting into his eyes and hair from the bonfire. It was dark by this time (roughly 9:40-10:30) and a bonfire was necessary to keep the attending parties from freezing to death. Before each song he would announce that it was a cover by some band that nobody had heard of. The Groundhogs? Fake, fake, fake. But they were nice and he was a better guitar player than probably anybody on the beach.

Fletcher Tucker played third as Bird By Snow. He almost did not play as he had sustained a wood-in-eye injury as he valiantly gathered wood to keep the fire afloat just a few minutes prior to performing. He sang in a resonating Kermit the Frog affectation and had some really good lyrics and Spencer Owen was drumming and background singing and melodica-ing along and it was a good combination. The forms of the songs were good and the guitar was nice and almost inaudible. He had a good presence. At one point he sang a song about life being easy for everybody and how if they closed their eyes or kept them open they'd start to think about their molecules and he started to stomp the fire as the song ended but he didn't go all the way, lest he be burnt into blacker molecules.

Amigos played second. I missed the first part of their song because Spencer, Fletcher and I had gone to fetch some drums for Spencer's involvement in the Bird By Snow songs. They strummed some guitars and plunked a kalimba and there was no sax but there was a really tiny distorted guitar amp that you could only hear when none of the other guitars were playing. Their drummer (also named Spencer, but not Owen) is really good - and he drums on a toy drum kit! The first time I saw the Amigos was with John Garmon and Jen Weisberg in a house by the Highway 1 and they were only two people playing drums, kalimba and computer manipulations of the two. But now they have blossomed to a band of anybody that wants to participate in and they do. There were probably seven members tonight. When they finished people asked for more but their boss, Chris, said that there was only one Amigos song a day. Somebody asked what the title of the song was and he said "May 28, 2006... or *mumble* Girl Scout *mumble mumble*" - and everybody was appeased.

Spencer Owen played first. The fire was just getting started at this point and as he gracelessly lost control of his body during vocal and broken tambourine histrionics (the best kind,) the squirted firestarter on newspaper and beachwood became the pyrotechnics to his one man rock show. His backing poured out through blown speakers and a cd deck that Jamie and Libby are trying to donate to the Salvation Army. He was a bit quieter in his singing than the music was in it's bumping (the backing tracks are full and stupendous) but that was kind of the charm. He was, after all, just singing on the beach.

The best part was how the beach reacted to his song. Boats flew by in the background and he was the admiral to Her Majesty's Ocean Local Fishing Industry and Recreation Boating. Waves crashed as he held the broken two parts of a tambourine above his head like the first man who had discovered percussion - and then destroyed it. The tambourine was thrown into the fire and the jangles scattered across the beach. The most audible parts of his set were when he did his high-pitched 'ooo--oooh---oooohs' in the bridge/outros of each song. His perfect pitch voice flew above the speakers (turned up to 13!) and sailed over our heads out to sea. When he did his final song, a goofy calypso cover of a song "Annie I'm Not Your Daddy" a couple dressed in yellow and white about a hundred feet behind him and to the left began swaying to the music. They had been sitting there the entire time we had been there prior to the first notes, for about an hour and a half together, which is very hard to do. They must have been in love.

When you are performing outside, the show isn't interrupted by anybodys rudeness. Some people had shown up earlier before the music but left for things more fashionable or accessible; they left with the wind. When you are at a show outside there are no shutting doors or clanking glasses to interrupt the music, they just get smaller and disappear.

Some Things I'm Feeling About Some Things I've Heard

Islands - Return to the Sea
I liked this album enough on initial hears to actually purchase it. The songs "Rough Gem" and "If" grew on me enough that I obsessed about them a little, you know when you are just repeating a part over and over (kind of like "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is running through my head nonstop right now), I listened to it in a variety of settings including while driving around at work. Somebody compared it to James Rabbit stuff. I said 'no, James Rabbit stuff isn't as well orchestrated and some of these lyrics are just great!'. I played it for Conner and he said "There just isn't any energy!" and I started to say something... but yeah, the drums are kind of one-dimensional, and the singing is really just melodic talking without any emotion, he was right. And that kind of put the album to bed.

Bill Fay Group - Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow
I was going through a really strange and tough period (and probably am still) and this was an album that very succinctly summarized the profound finality of everything. It is put together beautifully and the band plays with such confidence that they feel like a single entity. I associate this album now with such a particular mood that it is relived whenever I listen to it, and I listen to it often, which is rare for me.

Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds
This is another one of these well-orchestrated, good lyrics albums that I really liked a few of the songs on ("This Lamb Sells Condos", "Song Song Song"). A lot of the other material kind of falls apart, sounding like soft string backgrounds and I know the words are acerbic and there's nice away-from-the-mike shouting, but it just isn't enough to hold ten songs together, especially the amorphous ones. The soft songs aren't relaxing enough and the strong songs aren't numerous enough.

Charlie Haden - Liberation Music Orchestra
I really love track two on this, "Song of the United Front" the first time I heard it. This is my favorite kind of jazz, where there's a melody at first and then you stop paying attention and things start to unravel gradually and then all of a sudden you're listening to the piano being played from the inside and two competing trumpets and drums all over the place, but not necessarily the right parts. And Charlie Haden is a really nimble bassist, writing parts for himself that echo under the belly of the band like a great sea beast while moving towards the point. There's a few parts where its just solo Charlie and he does a really capitol job. The album is decorated like the day of the dead, grave and bold with tons of humor.

Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
There were a few compelling tracks on this one, but it seems really formulaic after a few spins. Fake opera singing and ukelele and then minor key trumpet part and then minor key trumpet part harmonies that are all nice and quavery, but the voice and the lack of backing substance really puts a damper on everything. As much Eastern Bloc sadness as the trumpets vibrato, the voice reeks of precocious pedantry and that isn't really something I want to hear. I like "After the Curtain" a lot. It seems like the kind of song that somebody would write just to get somebody to like it and I wish that more of these mp3 bands would do that.

Carla Bley - Tropical Appetites
Carla Bley is so overwhelming sometimes, the absolute shreiks she conjures the conjurers to conjure out of saxes are like the equivalent of getting a tattoo, everybody that walks by has an opinion, and so when I'm listening to her music I feel like I've got to cover it up. This album is a little bit more restrained than its predecessor "Escalator Over the Hill" but there's certainly mad moments of mania that threaten your friends to leave you or your mom to skip to track seven. A favorite among friends is the track "Funnybird Song" where Julie Driscoll, Bley's daughter Karen and tuba player Howard Johnson trade off lines about Kid Icarus and each of them has their own charm. Driscoll a certain polish appropriate to the song, Mantler an innocense appropriate to the character and Johnson a clumsy smuttiness appropriate to nothing. It is one minute and twenty seconds long and lives with all of us like a precious child.

So the new crap slides back on down the line and the old prize shines like brass guitars in traffic.

I Like to Fly ... Hmm ... A Lot!

Antarctica Takes It played a show on Saturday afternoon in my friend Jen Weisberg's apartment with Zak Salazar, Amigos and Red Pony Clock. I was super excited to see Red Pony Clock because I hold John and Gabriel from the band in high regard and they always put on a chaotic show. There are nine members in the band (though fourteen are listed in the credits of their album) and during a show most of the members switch instruments between songs.

Zak showed up late and played probably four more of his songs than the audience wanted to stomach. His songs are among some of my favorite troubador tunes in Santa Cruz, partially because they are written about a romantic situation full of hilarious drama that we all know about and are all tired about so when he's singing his wishes for a girl in the song to choke we all know that its about somebody there, sitting next to that boy, with whom she sleeps in his garage. It's a fun kind of tension that he brings up and it never gets old. Zak was accompanied by a banjo player that played the exact same thing as he. The (unintentional?) comedic high point was when Zak said 'Take it away!' and then he, himself, took it away on the harmonica.

Antarctica Takes It, a band that I'm in played next. We hadn't played seriously live in a month or more and this was an adequate return to the living rooms. Its a combination of the other half of the band being not that interested and being involved in having to do art projects and drive to the classier Bay Area every weekend. We played two new songs and they went pretty well; we rehearsed them probably twenty times each this last week. Our set was brief, which maybe wasn't a good thing as the audience seemed more frustrated than wanting more.

Amigos played next and I really liked them. They were six or seven dressed up kids that I'd seen around town fashionably sporting bikes below them and they did a good job at making noises along with a tape recording of a chord being flanged or filtered or some other term. They played on a toy drum set which was really nice sounding and had some wind chimes of both metal and wooden flavors perched above it and made some of the best sounds. They had a sax player, two guitars, a kalimba, a little mini harp, a singing saw, bongos and another tape player which they artfully made love to with a claw hammer at the end of the set. I had hoped they would have thrown it out the window into traffic, but that would have been too exciting.

Red Pony Clock tried to stall for time as their keyboard player was driving up at that minute from Los Angeles and so they practiced two songs for a show in San Francisco later that night: a version of the "Happy Birthday Song" in a threatening and funeral minor key and "Your Kiss is On My List" which John Garmon sang with believable emotion. Red Pony Clock would be a great band if Gabriel would sing louder (the people without mikes were doing a louder job with their harmonies) and if they horn players would play the right notes. I know that everybody is from a different town all across California, but they had a very low ratio of successful notes. When you couple these things with the swaying that Gabriel makes with his hips as he sings and plays guitar, Red Pony Clock are quite the spectacle.

The horns (especially Gabriel's) were regal when they were on-key and the changes in the songs were well-rehearsed. My favorite part of the show and the band is Gabriel himself, he and his songs are such fully formed realizations of himself. Nothing in the act comes across as fake, the banter about his girlfriend being upset with his moustache seemed like they would be having that conversation at a party with a third person, except in this sense the third person was the twenty or forty of us crowded into the upstairs apartment, it was very endearing and something that I love about the band.

I bought a CD (pretty badly recorded) and blubbered to John and Gabriel and left and bought an accordion. Its huge.

It's Trying------
I Go Signifying

I just finished listening to a James Rabbit album from about two years ago now called Artillery. It's strange thinking about how much things have changed for me as a "musician" (with fingers-in-air quotations) since then and before then. It's strange and unrealistically depressing and kind of glorious.

If you have a copy of Artillery put it on right now. If you don't, then I'm sorry, you're missing out on something that's a big part of me. I'm going to give you some un-called for background.

When I first started doing music in 1996, it was as an outlet for needing to get abstract, funny thought out of my head, writing lyrics in the seats of the Veteran's Auditorioum as a reaction for having to memorize lines that I hated for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it was hard memorizing that crap and I wanted something else to be at least partially in my brain, something that was mine. I made a tape later that year which consisted of me singing into my mom's boombox with no musical accompaniment, save for the 'Waves' preset of my Yamaha Portasound PSS-270 in the hidden track, called "Welcome To Supreme". I probably stole about half the songs from different radio places or things my friends had said at recess, I had no idea how the radio or television worked at the age of 12, so I probably thought that I had written all of the songs myself.

Later, my friend Alex Warkentin taught me about chords over the phone and it was a revelation, and like Charley in Flowers for Algernon first learning punctuation for the first time I wrote songs for a good while with every chord in it that I could think of, nevermind any melodic presence, C D B A minor F Bb diminished, it was a great thing to put lyrics to. My friend Grayson and I spent most of a summer writing songs about the funniest things we could think of and then not being able to sing them, he with no melodic ability and me with no talent to put words to chords.

And then somewhere along the line came a gift, I could write something resembling a melody, at least something where the words could pass through the music without being a nuisance. Lyrics and music became a thing that I was obsessed with placing together for the next six years, I had a recording group with my friend Dan Frank called Ultra Secret where I used the same three chords over and over in every key with most of the keyboard's drum presets and when I got a computer of my own I started the same project with a different name, James Rabbit. In high school and junior college I thought I was the shit, making album after album in my back room by myself and in my head inflating each of them to be bigger and better than the last. "Turbulent Turbulent" was light years ahead of "Sea of Tranquility" and when "James Rabbit Versus the Strings" came out, watch out! Because that was the one that proved that I could actually compose multiple melodies at the same time! But "Archeological Bloopers!" What a triumph of stream-of-consciousness narrative, UNTIL we got a new microphone for christmas 2000 and "Between Sidewalk and Stars" shone like a constellation of the entire sky lit up like the holidays.

I did a trilogy of albums in 13th grade where I wrote songs that were loosely associated with Pablo Picasso in that I would write some lyrics about crime or terrorism or something that I was afraid of and then name it "Surviving the Blue" and it would be about Picasso. And when I had done this for three albums those albums became "Picasso", "Surviving the Blue" and "The Cubist" and I was a genius! To myself, probably, only.

Various things happened in my live, some sort of Pythagoras' Love Triangle (as I had so cleverly written about/predicted in "James Rabbit Versus the Strings"), I did some surviving of the blue and all of a sudden there was the last James Rabbit 1 album. It was called "Distracted" and it was about a girl I had a crush on at the time and the kind of subconscious theme of the album was my head being locked on her without really thinking about why I was locked onto her, just kind of needing something to be interested in and it showed in the songs and the songs were terrible and all keyboards and no energy.

Then something happened where I kind of found a reason to write songs about and I started writing these songs that were vaguely about exactly what was going on at the time. This was during a particulary turbulent turbulent romantic (Love for the first time!) period in my life and I had begun somewhere deep in those lyrics to mean what I was singing about. This is also the beginning of James Rabbit 2, in which my brother began drumming with me. He had appeared briefly playing drums in earlier songs either intentionally or I couldn't get him to stop drumming in his room, but now we were planning out the parts together.

And this album coincided with some of the biggest changes in my life, I gave it away to people that thought it was about them and I gave it to people whom I'd written it for unintentionally, and people who I'd written it for on purpose and it seemed like it had an effect on all of this, made some friendships better, some worse- it may not actually have, but in my mind, I had created a piece of art that moved the world around me.

More important than all the girls was the relationship between my brother and I, we had been pretty much enemies up until this point (his incessant listening to of Green Day and Weezer was always at odds with my occasional listening of They Might Be Giants), but working on this album together we realized that each had something that the other didn't have. Songs and drums. Our growing friendship is best exemplified by the hidden track of "Heart of Gold" where an answering machine message, having accidentally recorded a conversation he and I had, plays out. I sound like I'm drunk or stoned, but really I'd just gone to sleep maybe two hours prior to the phone call and you can hear the kindness in his voice as he deals with a stupified Tyler, he asks if I'd been up all night and then asks if I want to get a soda, I reply "I don't know" probably because I can't figure out what the words are that he's saying. But when he says "I'll buy" I immediately come to: "Okay."

"Trauma Season", with its grittier take on recording of instruments paved the way for "Le Fou" which was long agonized over (the Continental of '03) and took me all the way until I had to start school in Santa Cruz to finish. It is where the title of this website comes from and is written about in the begining of the website, if you check the archives. I moved to Santa Cruz and immediately began planning the penultimate James Rabbit album = Love Drums.

It was going to be a mix of where Conner and I had been taking his drum ability and where I felt that I could really soar with my songwriting talents and we would become world famous. College didn't really have anything to offer me in the way of meaning and so I was trying to find it through tons and tons of mix cds that I made for myself to contemplate the current (Static) state of affairs with my life. Through this period I found out about Electric Light Orchestra and Paul Maccartney and learned all of the Queen singles by heart and heard my favorite Bow Wow Wow singles and fixated on specific parts of them the whole time. When I came home for winter break, my brother and I recorded an EP called "The Heart that Ate New York" which was full of energy and innovation and spontenaity and I love it dearly.

The beginning of summer found me scrambling around town to borrow instruments, hanging out at parties to the point where people had begun drinking the Nyquil to follow up leads on where bass amp heads could maybe be so the next morning I could walk in on adult situations and then maybe the next week come back for the cab and when the work on the album finally begun we had signed on a third member, Sterling Cook, to videotape us as we went. (Conner didn't know Sterling was a part of the ensemble for about thirty minutes of videotape, where Sterling is filming us through the window on the morning of the first day). Every morning we would start out with me ranting about how we were going to change the world and then kind of piecing a song together.

None of the songs had any names or aims, I had three songs that I had in mind to become singles, but they were ideas, with the exception of the song "Cuba", where I had a chorus in mind = "Cuba... coudn't... Break. My. Heart.", so we kind of went into it very militantly where I would bark idealistic anthems at my brother and he would try his best to imitate what I did in drum form and then he would be demanding of me (perhaps not vocally enough) to play good bass parts and we would rehearse it and maybe get two or three songs' rhythm parts recorded in a week.

This was the first time that we had written the songs together, and the first time that I had no idea with what to do with the rhythm tracks, I had no lyrics and I had no idea how to play the chords and on what? Le Fou presented similar problems, but at least those recorded tracks belonged to some songs, with Artillery it was the other way around. We had weird snakey drum and bass parts that escaped my mind with exactly how to transmute them into something listenable, and so parts I threw up in the air of people that I would not have considered part of the art previously, Grayson came in for a few guitar parts and though it took a while, he ended up contributing some lines that I would not have been able to come up with. Sterling provided valuable insight into the song "Speed Dogs" both with his enthusiasm and his suggestion (and performance) of the 'yip yip'. My cousins Grace and Taylor came over and mewed like kittens for "C.A.D." My friend Sandra gave me some suggestions on how to write the lyrics to "Cactuses", things came together in a weird communal way where people I would not have associated with my music helped it along.

At one point in "Regime Change", one of our more appreciated songs, I'm overdubbing a guitar part and somebody shows up in my back window, which was once a pretty common occurence, I stop the guitar part and let out a startled 'AH!', as I am wont to do when in high concentration situations. That's kind of the moment where Artillery stopped being mine and started being everybodies. For the first time when I released it I gave it out to people and actually thanked them for their involvement, and they were looking forward to it, people were the same kind of excited with hearing the CD version of "Cactuses" as they would have been had they seen it performed live, seeing as they had contributed to its creation.

It contains some of my best technical writing and playing, all the rollicking basslines and different time signatures and semi-soaring guitar parts and most interesting ideas for overdubs, I think. "In Motion" is all the aforementioned PSS-270 and it is one of my favorite compositions. "Maraschino Dub" was really exciting to me that we were doing something in a reggae vein but way off. The piled on overdubs of nothing in particular still sound really exciting to me, and we have this part at the end where the bass and drums get 'stuck' on the note they are playing for too many beats and this guitar is soloing over it and I'm really happy that we wrote that part.

Artillery was a failed attempt at the Love Drums album, and we realized that pretty early on in the recording process where "Speed Dogs", though interesting and energetic never seemed like it would be a crossover hit, from my back room to any ears outside of there, but maybe it didn't matter. All the lyrics, everything, maybe for the first time was about the music, and the music was about everything, when I sang "All of my friends, all of my friends are dead! DEAD!" I meant it. I was enraged with a lot of my peers at the time, as also evidenced in "I'm Not Breathing" which was a satire (that had no humor or actual connection to reality) about a Fresno band with high expectations for themselves. I sing about the mix of instruments and the miking of the drums in "Wide", "Concane" is about someone moving into the house down the street temporarily because their house was being fumigated. "Thunder" contains the disclaimer "Album's all shouts, Speakers blow out". It was the first time where everything musically and lyrically seemed to be working together in tandem and where all of my ideas came out pure and fresh.

We opened up the floodgates after that and tried to get everybody we knew into the band and the result was an excessive joywonder called "The Drop". That one's good too.

I'm doing a lot of looking into myself for how I write songs. This summer is going to be the start of something great, everybody will be in the same place since "Le Fou" and I want to have songs that will inspire the same kind of brilliance-as-we-go. We might have enough people in this band to play live, and I don't want to blow it. I had returned to closely writing songs out with the album "Continental" and I'm not sure how that works out, because it takes away a lot of the spur of the moment sense, as well as most of Conner's role as songwriter. We did "Cavalier" the same way (which is probably not being finished in Fresno as I type this). I've written "Colossuses" mostly out, but maybe I'll try splitting it half and half, with the pop ones written out and the more experimental tracks just being hoofed as we go. I'm excited for the future, almost as I'm excited about the past.

As for the present, work is working out really really well and taking me in unexpected directions!