No, I haven’t given up on Jamuary. I had to take some time off in order to fully recover from a lingering cold, and some weird form of writer’s block. This also had the side benefit of resetting my sleep schedule, which Jamuary had been shifting more and more out-of-whack. Even though the calendar month is over, I’ll be finishing that last six days’ worth, then going back to make up the four songs I missed earlier in the month.

This song came from an idea I had a couple of year ago, when meeting somebody professionally for the first time. One of my recurring anxieties is that I make a good first impression, but as somebody truly gets to know me, the façade crumbles and they see the true, disappointing me. This isn’t fair to myself, so if you have a problem with that, give Anxiety a call and ask it to please be more reasonable; I’m sure that’ll help. Anyway, this song is an examination of: what if that fear were true, and there were a person like that?

Continue reading “Jamuary 2024 Day 25: “From First Impression to Worst Impression”” →

I’ve been playing a lot of Mario Kart with my kid recently, and the Blue Shell is the bane of my existence (the only item in the game that is worse is the Lightning, which is too OP. It kills your momentum, shrinks you, and — crucially — takes away your items, leaving you defenseless. Often, a 1-2 punch from one opponent’s Lightning and another opponent’s Blue Shell almost seems coordinated). We recently discovered that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has a “Vs. Mode” that lets you customize items, and I’ve found that disabling Lightning and Boos allows you to have a fighting chance in first place, if you also disable Coins (they seem to have a 1:1 probability, and if you are good at collecting them from the course then they become a detriment, since they take up an item box roulette roll and potentially leave you defenseless against the second-place AI’s nearly-inevitable Red Shell). I was playing around with some minor chords and suffered from some writer’s block for the lyrics, so I asked my wife for an idea and she suggested Blue Shells.

Let’s deal with some pedantry. Yes, I know that there are ways to deal with a Blue Shell — sometimes you can decelerate and let someone pass you to be targeted instead, and you can also get close to your competitors so the explosion will take them out too, and one time I hit a Lightning-ejected mushroom on the course at the second the shell was going to hit, and I somehow avoided it — so let’s just call that line poetic license. I also know that this song is not a 12-bar blues, but I gave it its title nonetheless.

This was a fun one to compose. It’s in G Dorian, with some non-Dorian touches coming from the V7 chord, and the borrowing of flat-II from G’s Phrygian mode. And then it felt like the ending needed a little something extra, so I decided to land it with a Picardy third.

This is a live performance, captured with my phone.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2024 Day 24: “Blue Shell Blues”” →

This song is about two things: those who would seek to divide us, and those who would seek to undermine the notion of what truth is. There are certain talking heads and other pundits who delight in making people angry, in cultivating bellicose tendencies in their audience, and refining that anger into hatred for their neighbors. This song is a plea to think about who might benefit from such bloviation, and what their ultimate goal likely is.

Musically, the songs is fairly diatonic. I can see the chorus as either a quick trip to the relative minor (C minor), or as staying in the original Eb major key and just being pulled in a minor direction.

This was a live recording, using my Zoom H6 and its X/Y pair on the ukulele, and a Shure SM-57 on my vocals. The only overdubs are the harmony vocals.

Continue reading “Jamuary 2024 Day 23: “Villains”” →

This was a product of a few factors. I wanted to create a song based on an acoustic guitar pattern I had been playing with, with fairly slow-moving harmony. The vibe of the loop was “chill,” so I wanted to keep that vibe going with the drumbeat and instrumentation. While I was writing the trumpet part, I was thinking of my younger, pre-parent days. I had some fond memories of late nights spent at the old 13 Coins location near the Seattle Times offices (I believe that the pandemic shuttered that site permanently), enjoying fries, Old Fashioneds and crème brûlées into the early morning, sometimes with an actual jazz trio performing in the lounge. It’s instrumental, because I’ve been fighting either a cold or a secondary infection from a cold for about two weeks now, so it’s tougher than usual to incorporate singing into these compositions.

The acoustic guitar loop, which is the basis for the song, is a fairly slow progression through a C Lydian chord pattern, starting with the C Lydian chord (Cmajor7#11), going to Em9, then a pattern based on Am7 with various suspensions, before a ii-V-I turnaround on D6, G major, then C major, before starting over again. Part of the trouble with a loop like this is enforcing the “home base” of C, as it’s very easy for certain harmonic or melodic moves to create a “pull” toward either G major or E minor. I tried to use the pull toward E minor for the benefit of the song, as I wanted to keep those chill / downbeat vibes. I let one very short G7 sneak into one of the turnarounds at the very end, to help tonicize the C at that point.

The acoustic guitar is a live take in my studio, using an X/Y condenser microphone pair and a Shure SM-7B to capture some of the rounder frequencies, and I built the rest of the song around that.