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.
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.
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 was thinking of a few things when writing this one. First, it’s a clear “Get Pumped” song in the vein of “Dare” or “The Touch,” both excellent bangers from the 1986 animated Transformers film. But underneath the surface layer of “Be awesome, use your power for good, prevail in any fight,” I was thinking of a couple other things. One is about my first grader, who is becoming quite adept at video games, which I wanted to celebrate in the corniest way possible. The second thing I was thinking about was generations younger than my own, who seem to be a bit more accepting and diverse than older cohorts, which gives me a little shred of hope about the future, which otherwise has looked pretty bleak to me. Musically, I was playing around with sus chords. The intro is built around an Ebsus2 to Cm vamp, but with a uke playing it there’s a bit of harmonic ambiguity on that first chord. Since ukes have a small range their chords don’t tend to be “properly” constructed with the root note in the bass, like on a guitar where the lowest note in an open chord is also the root note (for chords in root position, obviously). In a major key, the Isus2 and the Vsus4 chords share the same notes but are spelled differently — Eb, F, and Bb vs. Bb, Eb, and F, respectively. So your bass note choice here could lead to the chord being perceived differently. Adam Neely has a video about this which he talk about as the power of the bass to re-frame harmony.
This one has tenor uke and Hohner acoustic guitar recorded via the XY condensers on the Zoom recorder. The rest of the instruments are electric ones recorded using the BOSS interface (except the drum, which as always are arranged, this time the Blasting Room kit). Vocals were captured using an SM-58 into the Zoom. I spent entirely too much time recording the guitar parts and mixing them. Creating big, multitracked, power chord-filled choruses is just so addictive! I also enjoyed playing the “filler” Given more time, I think I would definitely add some snyths to this, as well as a powerful piano. And a full-size, steel-string guitar. Since Eb is a rough uke key, I played this one in C with capo on the third fret, and it made fretting chords a bit of a pain. I had originally written this one in C as well, but the verse vocals parts were a bit low for my liking.
This song is about direct action. Extremists want to harm people for characteristics that are either social constructs or immutable, and we must all stand up to protect anyone they target. In the U.S. there’s a lot of hemming and hawing from the ‘left’ (true Liberals in the global sense of the word) about whether or not the use of violence to prevent greater violence is morally justifiable. Was the Battle of Cable Street morally justifiable? Was the Allied response to Nazi Germany justifiable? The only redeeming feature of fascism is that it is not an intrinsic trait. At any point, you can choose to stop being a fascist. Unfortunately, they get support-by-default in many Liberal democracies. This brings to mind the old adage: “If there is a table with nine people listening to a Nazi, then there are ten Nazis at the table.”
This was recorded with the Zoom recorder. My mandolin makes an appearance, but I think it needs some setup work because it was buzzing a bit. The microphones are not clipping and I didn’t add distortin in post; it just has some loose components that were rattling.
