Category: Jamuary 2023

Songs written during the month of January 2023 as part of Jamuary.

I’ve created a standalone page that has a table and player with every Jamuary 2023 song, including some information about some of my favorites.

For ease of choice, here is a selection of five of my favorite tunes from the challenge, across a broad range of genres, in no particular order:

Pop Culture Nightmare — a ska song about remembering silly stuff like quotes from movies or gum jingles, instead of important stuff like the phone numbers of your loved ones.

 

King of the Imposters — a folky power-pop song about faking it, even if you truly are making it.

 

Let’s Play Music — an uptempo number about the sheer joy of making music and/or noise with friends.

 

My Sad Beard — an old-timey, music-hall style number about hiding one’s feelings behind a beard. A great big, bushy beard!

 

Reasons to Smile — an indie-pop number about focusing on the positive, even if you’re not very good at it.

 

I’ve taken some time to recover and focus on some important work stuff, but I’d like to write one or more posts as a sort of post-mortem. Hopefully I can get around to that soon.

 

A painting of a yellow smiley face on a blue-ish background. The smiley face has some character.

On this final day, I mulled a couple of options before deciding to go with something positive to close out the month. This is a song about actively trying to re-frame your thoughts and focus on the positive. It’s very easy to to dwell on things that make you anxious or angry or worried, and it takes effort to think about what makes you happy. This song uses a different mode — A mixolydian — and with the two modes that are closest to major/Ionian (Lydian and Mixolydian) I always struggle to keep the tonal center locked on the root note. Here, I think there’s not much danger of your ear hearing the song in D, though.

This one was recorded with the Zoom Recorder to capture the acoustic guitars (there are two of them), using the XY pair, the SM-57, and the guitar’s pickup to blend a good mix. Similarly, the vocals are via the SM-58 into the Zoom recorder. The electric guitars and bass are from the BOSS interface. The drums are Superior Drummer. The piano is the Grandeur piano library, but I only sequenced it instead of playing it on my keyboard.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 31: “Reasons to Smile”” →

A mosh pit in a parking lot outside a build that is or once was a Pizza Hut.

I wrote this song about a legendary moment from my youth. In high school, I was in a punk band called Killing the Hare. We had played a couple of shows at this venue called the Energy Plant, which was an all-ages juice bar. We had a show scheduled for the weekend, playing with another band called Horseshoes and Handgrenades. Unfortunately, the week of our show the owner of the venue got into some legal trouble and the venue closed down. One of the H&H members knew the night manager at the local Pizza Hut, and they gave their okay to play our show in the parking lot. What followed was a formative moment in my life, as described in the song.

This was recorded with the Zoom recorder on the Hohner guitar, an SM-58 for the vocals, the BOSS interface for the guitar solo, and my mini keyboard for the piano parts.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 30: “Bitterroot Hardcore”” →

An abstract, plastic white humanoid looking concernedly at a wall of televisions looming over him.

This song is about all the stuff we involuntarily commit to memory, like random lines from TV and movies, or some of the super-catchy jingles we see in ads. Since I haven’t even done one ska song yet (which is a huge oversight on my part), I also made it a ska-punk song. I never thought I’d write a song that references a talking butt gag from a Jim Carrey movie, but here we are.

The drums are Blasting Room synthesized. The horns are the Session Horns Pro library by Native Instruments. I spent a good chunk of the day on this, but I left sequencing the horns until the end so they’re sparse (only appearing in the two instrumental sections). The guitars and bass came from the DI on the BOSS recorder, and the vocals are done via an SM-58 into the Zoom Recorder.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2023 Day 29: “Pop Culture Nightmare”” →

A photorealistic image of a human head in profile, showing the brain, and the brain is melded with a circuit board.

This song is about a recurring thought I have. Sometimes, I think about the fact that the key to improving my mental health and well-being isn’t tied to “fixing” something in the physical sense, but really it’s about changing your thinking. In this train of thought, the brain is like hardware and our thoughts are like software. Sometimes I imagine an alternate universe where I’m never seriously anxious or depressed because my brain is wired differently. Starting with this thought, I then considered whether our society follows the same model, and could be “rewritten” if we simply changed our way of thinking.

Since the arrangement is a punk tune, all the instruments are captured via the BOSS interface. The vocals are courtesy of the Zoom recorder.

Lyrics

I think about the ways that my mind works
How I’ve programmed myself for pressure and pain
Then I think about how somebody else
Could turn out different even with the same brain
In some other plane there’s no reason to vent
Straight line happiness, not steadily bent
There I’d have no real reason to complain
My days in the same brain, perfectly content

‘Cause I am of two minds, yeah
I am of two minds
One of them is real, the other I can’t find
‘Cause I am of two minds

I think about the ways our society’s run
How we have all the riches we could possibly need
The inertia drags us lower everyday
All fulfill the contract, we’ve never agreed
All we have to change is the way we think
To stop the spiral, step away from the brink
We’d have to say goodbye to the coldness and greed
If we don’t want our prospects to constantly sink

And I am of two minds…

See the identical canvas and frame
Different art though they started the same

I am of two minds…